Murder by Death

The members of the band Murder by Death like movies. Scary ones. They even got their name from one, a 1976 murder-mystery by Robert Moore. Their second record, Who Will Survive And What Will Be Left of Them?, released in October on Eyeball Records, is a concept album that follows something like a horror movie climax in the middle of an old western with a heavy nod to the apocalypse. The soundtrack to this story is a series of dynamic, sweeping orchestral arrangements featuring the sounds of bass, drums, guitars, keyboard and cello which has earned the band comparisons to the music of The Blackheart Procession, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Cursive's The Ugly Organ. The band's members - Adam Turla (vocals), Matt Armstrong (bass), Vincent Edwards (piano), Alex Schrodt (drums) and Sarah Balliet (cello) - all met as students at the University of Indiana and put out their first album under the name Little Joe Gould about a year ago. They have been touring almost nonstop since, taking a break only to record, and will begin their first major headlining tour in December, making a stop at the Intersection on Dec. 20. Recoil caught up with Balliet while on the road somewhere in Wisconsin to talk about the new album and their upcoming tour.

Recoil: Where did the new album's concept come from?
Sarah Balliet: The concept came from an idea Adam had. It's pretty much just a 'good versus evil' sort of thing. If you read the lyrics at all, you know the Devil comes to a small town in Mexico, he gets shot in a bar fight in the back, and so he gets pissed off and he comes to take his vengeance on small-town America. I think it comes from the fact that we watch a lot of movies. We're really interested in darker themes. It was something interesting for Adam to write because he's into writing fiction. It was just a story that sparked his interest, and we were all really excited to write the music for that sort of thing.

R: So you had the theme in mind before you started making any of the music?
SB: I think we wrote "Killbot 2000" first, and then just a couple other songs came out and we realized that there was a definite theme there and we turned it into a full-blown story and did the rest of the album accordingly.

R: People seem to have a hard time describing your band's sound. Do you have a way that you like to describe it and could you say a little bit about how you have developed that sound?
SB: ...Just kind of horror movie soundtracks is what we usually say, because that's sort of what we're going for. I think we developed our style… because none of us agree on music. I'd say we all have different tastes or styles. This is kind of the only thing we can do as a group of people that satisfies everyone's ideas about what sounds good. It kind of had to be this way.

R: This is your first major headlining tour, is that true?
SB: The one in December, yeah, it is. I guess you could call other tours we've done 'headlining tours' just because we were playing last and we were the only band on tour at the time that we played. That was mostly the basis of our tours up until recently. I would say as a major headlining tour, definitely it's our first and we're all really excited about it.

R: You're bringing a lot of things with you. You have films that you want to play and costumes that on previous tours you wouldn't normally wear. With this album and you saying that you have a thing for soundtrack music, did you intentionally want to do something more theatrical, this album being like a soundtrack?
SB: Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to splice together horror movies and have them playing behind us. We're going to do that all around. When we're playing shows as an opening band, we don't feel it's our place to really go all out - we don't want to take over the show or anything. Now that we've been informed that these are really, for real, our shows, we feel like it's okay if we kind of override the mood of the whole show by taking over and making it our own and going all out.

R: On a tour not too long ago you had a bunch of equipment stolen. How did you guys come back from that?
SB: Well, by the grace of Eyeball Records we overcame that. The owner of our record label, Alex Saavedra, he loaned us his credit card and we just went to Guitar World and had a heyday. Yeah, we just bought it all back and now we're in a lot of debt. Which is fine, because at least we're playing shows and we're able to still be doing what we do, so, it's alright, you know, the money will come back, slowly but surely.

R: Any plans for future albums?
SB: We have talked about a third album. We don't really have any concrete ideas yet, but we're really excited to do another album, just, we don't want to make the same album again. It's hard to say, we're just touring so much right now we haven't started writing yet and once we start writing something will just come from that and we're just not there quite yet, but we're really excited to get back to that part of being a band, because touring is great and we enjoy it, but the creative process is something that we also really enjoy, and so we'll be happy to get back to that, but I can't tell you exactly what it's going to be, because we don't really know.

R: Are you all still students?
SB: We were students. We kind of put our student status on hold to be touring and doing this band thing. It's so time consuming. We had been kind of wishy-washy, back and forth like, "Oh, we're going to go back for a semester and then we'll do more touring," and it's just become so demanding that we've decided to put it on hold until this runs its course. We're looking into options - correspondence courses, summer classes, things that we can keep up with somewhat of an intellectual life while we're on the road. But as far as going back full-time, it doesn't look like any time soon.

December 2003