Inside the Mad, Mad World of Metal's Rising Stars The Callous Daoboys
Tuesday, 06 September 2022
Written by Matt Mills
Skim the track listing of The Callous Daoboys’ new album and you’ll feel like you’re reading the scrawlings of a lunatic. There are songs on ‘Celebrity Therapist’ called The Elephant Man in the Room and What is Delicious? Who Swarms?. It doesn’t have a title track, but it does have a song dubbed Title Track.
“I think I’m better at titling songs than I am at writing them,” laughs the Atlanta band’s singer and composer, Carson Pace. The frontman’s speaking with Stereoboard from the back of their van somewhere between Louisville, Kentucky, and Fargo, North Dakota, during a tour with metal institutions Light the Torch and Avatar. “I usually come up with the title before I start writing the song. I think it’s, like, diet synesthesia: I come up with a sentence and I’m like, ‘I know what that sounds like!’”
So, what do songs christened Beautiful Dude Missile and A Brief Article Regarding Time Loops sound like? The answer is: batshit. The Callous Daoboys use a seven-piece lineup, violins, spoken word and an onslaught of samples to construct some of the zaniest mathcore to ever come from the States.
Opening cut Violent Astrology commences as jagged hardcore, guitars squealing underneath Carson’s screams. Then there’s a jazz bass lick for some reason. Then you hear those stabbing violin notes from Psycho, followed by metal chords and a spoken-word rant. And that’s just the first minute of the first song.
Beautiful Dude Missile dabbles in glitch music with its electrified intro, then interrupts its own extreme metal riffs with snippets of delectable post-rock. Title Track embraces baroque pop and demonstrates Carson’s crooning, flecked with the odd funk guitar line. That’s all before the finale, Star Baby, juxtaposes happy-go-lucky rock ’n’ roll drumming with the most hellish guitar tone you’ve ever heard. If you don’t get it, congratulations. That means you get it.
“We have to keep figuring out how crazy we can get,” Carson says. “At the same time, the last thing I want is for five minutes to go by and you’re like, ‘When does this shit end?’ We try and make sure that something gets repeated so that it’s not just this giant stew of garbage. I’m trying to make sure that something reprises, especially if the song is chaotic and long. The last thing I want us to be is a riff soup band.”
Also tethering ‘Celebrity Therapist’ together is its lyrical theme. It’s about cults. Carson explains: “All of the tracks have some kind of cult thinking element to them, whether that be the cult of evangelical Christianity, or QAnon, or the military, or neoliberal politics.”
Although he is hesitant to delve into specifics, he reveals that both The Elephant Man in the Room and Violent Astrology wrestle with the American alt-right. “You’re not John Wick, you larping fuck! You want your ‘Die Hard’, but the trigger’s stuck!” he yells on the latter in an anti-gun-violence tirade.
Meanwhile, the title is a reference to Scientology. Carson came up with it after making up the image of Tom Cruise, who infamously lambasted psychiatry in interviews, trying to go to counselling and finding it “funny”. “Scientology was always very goofy to me, but so intriguing, because it’s ridiculous,” he says. “It was created by a science fiction author who was crazy and likely on speed. I know a lot of Scientology lore and about L. Ron Hubbard, and ‘Celebrity Therapist’ is a title that’s always stuck with us. There’s something so funny about it.”
Sadly, the singer has firsthand experience of cults. He was born into a Christian sect called the Church of Christ, which both his parents and their family before them were members of. The church developed in the late 19th century, believing Christians should follow the Bible to the letter and reject all other creeds. It also disallows the use of musical instruments in worship.
“They’re one of those sects of evangelical Christianity that believes that they’re the only ones going to Heaven,” Carson explains. “It was very dogmatic and there was lots of pressure growing up in that environment. No musical instruments were allowed in the church, and there was a lot of talking down and fear-mongering.”
Despite the oppressive environment, Carson was encouraged by his dad to listen to music in private. The singer left the church when he was 12 years old, but stops short of revealing how: “That’s not my story to tell. It’s not really something I’d like to repeat.” Later, he started a high school pop-punk band called Sunnycide with his classmate and future Callous Daoboys guitarist Maddie Caffrey.
“Maddie and I are really big fans of The Mars Volta, At the Drive-In, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and stuff like that,” he continues. “Heavy music was sort of an afterthought. It was like, ‘That’s awesome, but I’m not supposed to be the one that makes it.’ Then at one point we just needed screams on a song for that band in high school. I did it and it sounded awesome! I was like, ‘Shit!’”
Carson realising he could scream planted the idea of starting a metal band in his and Maddie’s minds. So, when Sunnycide broke up due to stagnating momentum and a lack of interest from the other members, they formed what would become The Callous Daoboys.
The band quickly had the polar opposite experience to what came before. They played their first show after just two rehearsals and, in the space of three months, were booking studio time for their first EP, 2017’s ingeniously titled ‘My Dixie Wrecked’. Within the next two years they made two albums, ‘Animal Tetris’ and ‘Die on Mars’, the second of which garnered critical acclaim and made the band underground darlings of the mathcore circuit.
“It was just this endless search for finding what I hear in my head,” Carson summarises. “‘Die on Mars’ and ‘Celebrity Therapist’ are the closest I’ve ever gotten. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there entirely. I think I’m just going to have this benchmark of ‘This is what I want it to be,’ and then chase it until I die.”
The Callous Daoboys may never reach Carson’s definition of perfection, but his quest to manifest the music in his brain is by no means slowing down. The band are already working on their fourth album, which their frontman calls “very melodic and not quite as batshit”. “It’s still us, but we just wrote a song with three choruses,” he laughs. “For us, that’s crazy.”
The Callous Daoboys' 'Celebrity Therapist' is out now via MNRK Heavy.
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