The Possession of Christian Mistress

The seeds for Christian Mistress’s second album were planted before they were even a solidified band, through a chance encounter with sweet Swedish doom metal at soon-to-be vocalist Christine Davis’ home. “We were friends but we didn’t hang out that often,” recounts guitarist Oscar Sparbel, “and we decided to go see a show in Portland one time so me and Ryan [McLain, guitars] caught a ride with Christine. We walked in the door and were like, ‘What’s this band?'”

The band was Faith [http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Faith/19930], and the song was “Possession”, the B-side to the obscure quartet’s even more obscure “Hymn of the Sinner” single.

“It was one of the songs that I put on a mix CD for Oscar when I first started playing music with him four years ago as a gift”, recalls Davis.

That gift—lovingly plucked from Aesop Dekker’s Cosmic Hearse blog (where else?)—turned into an obsession. “He got really into it and tried to transcribe it because they play in a totally different tuning”, says Davis.

Sparbel in turn transferred his addiction to his bandmates. “All of us love that EP”. he says. “So when we were talking about it we were like, ‘We’re going to have to cover this one day'”.

Fast forward through the band’s rough ‘n’ ready Agony & Opium debut on hometown Olympia, Washington label 20 Buck Spin; accolades from trad metal junkies, journalists and black metal luminaries alike; the forging of a notoriously reckless live reputation; courting from several indie heavy hitters, including eventual winners Relapse; and “Possession” is not only on the band’s sophomore record, it’s the title track and crux of the album’s loose theme. One way or another, according to Sparbel, the band just went with it. “I wasn’t disagreeing with the decision because I thought it fit”, he says. “I felt like you kind of had that vibe in ‘All Abandon’. Like you kind of get taken over by certain things on the record”.

Taken over, consumed, utterly addicted. Choose whatever phrase for “I can’t stop listening to this” you’d like, point is Possession is every bit as impossible to put down for lovers of the Riff as its title track was for every member of Christian Mistress. It’s a sophomore effort for the ages, the kind of album where “mature” seems like an understatement and “darker” would be cliché if it weren’t for a bit of serendipity from Sweden’s biggest black metal export since Bathory.

“On a bender, I was having a little too much fun and came up with some of the ideas and just wrote them on acoustic”, says Sparbel. “Christine just saw Watain and got to hang out with them backstage and it was just like this end of the world, dark party. That set this real heavy tone for ‘All Abandon'”.

With its galloping verse, myriad tempo changes and chasm-spanning chorus belted by Davis with every syllable dripping in drama, “All Abandon” in turn set the tone for the rest of Possession. From there the band’s songwriting system kicked in, with Sparbel and McClain bringing in riffs and Davis, drummer Reuben Storey, and bassist Johnny Wulf shooting them down or letting it ride. “We’re pretty open to tell someone if something sucks, and we’ll be mad for a day or two and then realize they’re probably right”, says Davis drolly.

Christian Mistress’ feedback process is so cordial, in fact, that one of the most arresting tracks on Possession almost became a casualty to the majority veto. “We almost swept ‘Black to Gold’ under the rug and moved on”, says Davis. “That’s how we operate as a band. We spend so much time rehearsing and over-analyzing songs and thinking, ‘We didn’t play that song very well, maybe let’s not play it for awhile'”.

According to Sparbel, had it not been for a second look from McClain and some melodic wizardry from Davis, Possession—and the metal cosmos as a whole—would have missed the unrelenting hookery and rollicking, backyard brawl chorus of “Black to Gold”. “It started when me and Christine were first talking about playing music together in a band format and the idea kind of laid around”, he says. “I don’t think she got it at first because I just sent her a four track recording, and it was hard to hear. So we kind of just let it go and Ryan was like, ‘That song’s good. We should start working on it again’, after Agony & Opium. He kind of suckered me into it and all the parts came together. And Christine wrote this awesome vocal melody for the verse and we were like, ‘Fuck yeah, let’s use it'”.

“I think that song in particular got a little more attention in the long run than some of our other songs, which is maybe why it ended up coming out so well”, admits Davis. “Maybe we had more intent with trying to play it right because we took it on tour in 2010 and half of us were like, ‘That’s song’s rad’, and the other half would be like, ‘That song’s terrible, we’re never playing it again’. So there was actually a lot of turmoil with us over whether we should use it or not”.

Maybe it’s because “Black to Gold” actually displays all out jamming, a rarity for Christian Mistress as most of the songs are completely written—solos and all—before the band rehearses them in their entirety. “The middle section on that song is us jamming in between the guitar solos and Ryan and me wrote those guitar parts separately”, explains Sparbel, “but the majority of the songs we have plans for. Sometimes they get altered or sometimes we do some grammar checks between us…me and Ryan will be like, ‘That voicing is kind of weird, maybe we should do it this way’. But it’s usually very minimal”.

Their practice of hashing out even the most minute details of each track is just half the reason why Possession is the tightest and most focused Christian Mistress recording yet. Before heading down to Tim Green’s Louder Studios in lovely Grass Valley, California, the band headed back to the same musty confines where they laid down Agony & Opium almost two years prior. “We just did a quick, rough demo in our friend’s basement”, says Sparbel. “It’s something we wanted to do to before this release just so we could get a better grasp of how it was going to sound and to troubleshoot any problems we’d have while recording it because you have a lot of planning, especially if you want to do more guitar layers, more vocals layers. We didn’t want to overproduce it, but we definitely wanted to do more than what were capable of doing on Agony & Opium“.

The ambition paid off, as nearly every track was finalized and ready for the band to play back when the time came to track the real thing. In fact, the only uncertainty surrounding the final recording of Possession was whether Davis would actually make it to sing her parts, including the still unfinished vocals for “Haunted Hunted”.

“I’m a botanist for the National Park Service. I took a seasonal job out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for six months, but three months into it we recorded so I hiked out to record and then hiked back in”, says Davis casually.

Sparbel’s reaction is more, erm, “natural”. “That was kind of insane. We were glad she made it and didn’t get eaten by a bear”, he says with audible relief. “Once she showed up, we were all really stoked like, ‘OK, cool, the record’s going to happen’! We were there for 7 days or so before it was her time to record-just doing the basic tracking so she could come in there and do her magic”.

That magic—Davis’s and the band’s before she arrived at the studio—was captured live to 24-inch tape by Green. The producer and former guitarist for Bay Area instrumetallers The Fucking Champs provided a few suggestions, hit “record” and let the dudes and dudette do what they do best. By all accounts, his most prominent contribution to Possession was the comforting environment his scenic studio offered the band.

“He set it up so that there are windows in there so you actually have light to see what you’re doing if you’re tracking during the day”,enthuses Sparbel. “He’s got a downstairs area for bands to hang out in and he has a pool and a dog who’s blind in its left eye that runs around in circles. We were able to have the most ideal environment possible- just chilling in California away from everything we knew in Washington. No cell phone reception; just focus on recording the record”.

Davis was just relieved the band had more room to play within the recording. “The 24-track was a big step for us because we did a four-track recording for Agony & Opium“, she says. “The only reason we recorded it that way was because we had $500 amongst us and that’s how much it cost to record it. People think we’re trying to do this underground thing, and it’s not true at all. We just actually don’t have any money”.

Make that “didn’t”. With the option to use the label’s hefty budget to ensconce themselves in a pristine, Pro Tools-equipped studio, what did Relapse think of Christian Mistress’ decision to emblazon the nine sweet, soulful tracks of Possession on reels of analog streamer?

“They understood what type of band we are”, shrugs Sparbel, “and we told them we wanted to record analog. We like putting out vinyl; we’re a vinyl band, that’s our style. They totally understood, and said, ‘We have your first record’, so they were really cool with it”.

As for their insistence on recording live, for a band with as fierce a stage reputation as they command, Christian Mistress wouldn’t have it any other way. To Sparbel, the mere thought of kicking his feet up on a recording console, funneling leads into a state-of-the-art digital rig, and manipulating the tracks to his liking on a glowing monitor is enough to send him clamoring for a dusty copy of Lovedrive. “I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of honor in it for myself”, he posits. “I play guitar; I practice it because it’s a real thing that I do. I want people to have the same experience when they listen. It’s real people playing music, not robots. That’s how rock bands recorded in the past and it sounded good. The Scorpions were amazing and they didn’t have Pro Tools”.

“I don’t understand how bands can record separately”, agrees Davis. “In a way that just seems harder to me. I would never want to do that. For me it doesn’t sound natural. Can you imagine sitting there with headphones on trying to get the vibe”?

It’s safe to assert that, headphones or no, Christian Mistress did indeed get the vibe on Possession From the hair-scorching leadwork that sets off opener “Over and Over” (“It’s supposed to smack you in the side of the face”, grins Sparbel), to the first-person, belief-challenging narrative “There Is Nowhere” (“A lot of it has to do with a simple realization that a lot of effort in this life is put towards something that would be rewarded later”, says Davis) to bell-bottomed boogie rocker “The Way Beyond”, the Mistress have the vibe, the attitude, the chutzpah to transcend the maligned “retro metal” tag and bring to the masses what those of us with our ears to the ground are already enjoying: honest, blue-collar heavy metal, tongue most certainly not in cheek.

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