Metalwani.com

Powerline recently had a chat with former Pantera and current Down frontman Philip Anselmo. A couple of excerpts from the interview follow below —

Powerline: To me, the music on [Philip H. Anselmo & The Illegals debut], ‘Walk Through Exits Only’ seems to be influenced by the New York hardcore scene.

Phil Anselmo: I love New York City hardcore. … Lyrically, I would agree a lot. Truthfully, bands like Agnostic Front — specifically Agnostic Front — with their huge hooks and whatnot, I can agree with you.

Powerline: And there are a lot of lead guitar accents and soundscapes throughout each song — they’re brief and almost industrial sounding. It leaves a mark that you can’t forget. It makes you want to go back to the song and listen to it again. Are those parts from guitarist Marzi Montazeri?

Phil Anselmo: Yeah, but as far as basic riff structure and a maybe a lot of atonal notes that you’re hearing, that’s pretty much my stuff, man. Marzi has his strengths that I knew he had coming in. He has always been a great guitar player and I gave him absolute free rein on leads. Some of the soundscape stuff that he does is very unique and he always had that as part of his repertoire since I’ve known him and we always wanted to utilize it. Maybe it’s a little bit of both — me writing to his strengths. It’s a long time coming record for Marzi and I. We’ve been talking about doing this for quite a while.

Powerline: Maybe it is you writing to his strengths. That’s a good way of putting it. On the song “Music Media Is My Whore”, there’s such a nice accent to the leads.

Phil Anselmo: Absolutely. And that’s another strength of his layering of guitars. He is a very creative and interesting layerer of different levels and frequencies which make this big wall eventually. So he’s damn good at what he does.

Powerline: That layering is very important on ‘Walk Through Exits Only’. Is that easy to replicate live? Do you get another guitarist on tour?

Phil Anselmo: No, that’s the thing. Marzi’s the type of guy to where he wants to be a perfectionist, even live. So this is something that has worked in his favor for a long time. It’s something he can pull off. Marzi is a special talent. For the life of me, he’s the type of guy that’s been in Houston, Texas and he’s well-known around Houston as a blues player. He’s the type of guy that can play just about anything in the world. I’m somewhat of a task master where I can say to Marzi, “Look, here is the path we are going down,” and he can adapt which is an incredible thing, and a luxury, really. You now, once he’s on assignment and he gets what’s in front of him, then he takes off in this insane direction. Which I did not want to suppress at all. I wanted to enhance, for sure.

Powerline: And the last song on the album [“Irrelevant Walls and Computer Screens”], Marzi does some leads that are like Tom Morello meets Kerry King.

Phil Anselmo: Yeah, well, he’s probably a little more in key than the ‘ol Slayer boys, but I’ll say that the last song in particular — with the outro — that is something that he’s had for a very long time, really in one shape or form. You know, the long, slow, scraping outro — and that’s always been something I wanted to incorporate into something we were doing. And I’m glad — very glad — that we had that opportunity.