Petrified Giant is the latest project from Internet personalities Lyle Rath (OneyPlays) and Dave McElfatrick (Cyanide and Happiness) Lamestream Lydia sat down with them to talk about the release of their brand new EP, Godless Sky. RAMzine is privileged to be among the first to speak to them about their most aggressive and articulate heavy metal project yet.
Check out the interview below but beware of holes…
RAMzine: This is Lamestream Lydia here for RAMzine. We’re talking to Dave McElfatrick and Lyle Rath. Two-thirds of what make up Petrified Giant. How’s it going?
Lyle Rath: Good, man.
David McElfatrick: Excited to talk about the frickin music that we put out!
RAMzine: Yeah, you guys did a thing today.
Lyle: We sure did. Yeah, we released our first EP, Godless Sky, available now wherever music is available.
RAMzine: You guys are kind of a mismatched pair. How did you guys get together?
McElfatrick: I’ve been plugging away at music for years, I’ve been playing guitar for over twenty years and I’ve always loved metal and being a metal kid… a couple of years ago, I actually scraped an album together by myself under a thing called We’ve Got Hostiles. For the second album, I was thinking, “I don’t want to write leads anymore. I don’t want to write all the leads.” So I knew Lyle, GuitarmasterX7 here, shredded guitar and I asked him if he wanted to join and showed him the songs. I think the songs were strong enough that he said yes to lending a few solos to me. But as we started working on stuff, Lyle started making more great suggestions and riffs, and just kind of like restructuring songs and they worked better. Kind of adding his own really brilliant creative approach to all this. Before you know it we were like “hey Lyle, this is your pain as much as mine man.” Like, let’s rename it. Let’s find a great singer instead of me. And so that’s kind of where the Petrified Giant train started.
RAMzine: You came across Mardy of Dragoncorpse. He’s your lead singer for Petrified Giant as well?
Lyle: Yeah, Mardy Leith from Dragoncorpse he’s in a bunch of bands. He’s in Dragoncorpse, Russian Novel, he’s got a list. If you look him up, Marty Leith, he’s really good.
We actually went through a couple of vocalists. The one before him was a guy that was way more busy than he was. So he was actually a recommendation from that guy. And we’re really happy with where we landed. Because there was a little bit of a Goldilocks situation. We went through a couple that didn’t quite fit the level of professional commitment or lack thereof or just the vibe. That’s kind of the biggest thing for me and Dave since we both do the YouTube thing and we have other gigs. This band is kind of like a bowling league to us where it’s like, okay, on weekends, we do make time for it, we get together and we write some f*cking cool ass riffs.
But, you know, we’re chillin, we have a group chat and we like it if someone can hang with us and kind of just bounce ideas around whenever casually and it’s not a high pressure “these are my time slots” or “this is my thing” or it just never gets worked on kind of deal. So he kind of struck a balance both that and he’s f*cking amazing. We’re glad that we got to him before Pantera is like “hey, we need a singer” or something and also, he’s just a good fit for us dudes, us guys. And he’s got a different accent from us. So if we ever do an audio interview like this, everybody’s easily distinguishable from each other. [The audio clip of this interview is coming to RAMzine soon].
RAMzine: It’s important to balance that goofball nature with being serious musicians.
David: As Lyle said, this is our work away from work. It’s our passion project. And it’s something we’re thrilled to do. We are not internet nepo babies. We are very serious about this project and if we wanted to do it for a quick following or to make a quick buck, we’d go the pop music route, right? We’d make the simplest, most catchy pop music but we’re playing what we absolutely love. We’re playing something that we think is challenging and enjoyable to metal listeners, they’re our people man. We want to be made men, you know?
Lyle: Yeah, we’re taking the music very seriously. We’re not writing songs about dicks and balls and holes and stuff like that. Which is a good contrast to what we usually do, which is usually a lot more hole oriented. It’s kind of an interesting project for me because I’ve never done anything that hasn’t had at least a little shred of… nudge, wink wink. Like I’ve done metal music and stuff for videos way back but it’s always been either ridiculous or comedic or just over the top. But this is probably the first time that I’ve been like, “Okay, let’s, let’s knuckle down and actually get serious.” And it’s interesting because if it sucks, there’s no defence. So you gotta try to make it good, cool and sound sick. I think we did that.
David: Yeah, for me, it’s kind of like the opposite of what I do at Cyanide and Happiness where I’m creating something that’s not necessarily so much about the art, but it is about a good joke that you can just kind of throw over your shoulder and move on to the next one. With this, it’s like “hey, here’s, here’s the performance, here’s what we can play and here’s us playing it”. It’s sincere, it allows us to be a little extensional, and it allows us to explore sort of the darker side of ourselves.
Lyle: All comedians are evil inside. We have evil tendencies, we have dark thoughts and it’s that or alcoholism. So we write angry f*cking metal and it’s cool.
David: Yeah, we don’t pull your pants down in front of women. We play metal instead.
RAMzine: From early expectations. I first heard about you guys on Moist Critikal’s podcast and wasn’t really sure what to expect immediately. The middle ground between Voivod and The Faceless wasn’t exactly in mind going into it.
Lyle: Hell yeah, I like both those bands actually. I used The Faceless guitar tone plugin for a very f*cking long time. This is like a casual practice thing. Do we want to list off some influences? I’ve definitely got sh*t that’s just embedded in me no matter what I do.
David: Yeah, I do want to talk about that a little.
Lyle: Like probably Children of Bodom, Dethklok, old In Flames kind of shit. Like very embedded in me the sort of melodeath kind of playing. And then, you know, there’s the obvious… in high school was a lot of Judas Priest and Metallica and Megadeth and sh*t like that. I’ve got a lot of the thrashy old-school heavy metal influences.
David: I’m definitely a slave to the thrash riff from deeper stuff like Forced Entry who are a band I really rate. I think ‘Flesh’ for example, it’s kind of like there’s a lot of things in the pot, there’s a little melodeath in there. There’s a little groove metal, thrash metal. Basically, that song kind of throws shit at the wall and we hope it all sticks. There’s a little death metal in there as well like technical death metal.
Lyle: That’s not even touching on Mardy, I think he’s got like a little bit of a different touchstone where he’s a little bit more into the deathcore stuff and obviously Dragoncorpse is power metal. Power metal/death metal kind of stuff. So we’re a pretty eclectic mix of stuff and I think it’s cool that it’s all on the table that we can kind of pull from anywhere if we want.
David: I think a lot of people labelled us power metal because of Mardy’s amazing voice. But I think that’s mostly on ‘Flesh’. There is a little power metal influence on ‘Flesh’. But wait ‘till you hear our other songs. I think they’re thrash numbers at their core, they’re just big bruisers.
Lyle: I just kind of say we’re heavy metal when I pitch us to people. I don’t really say much else.
David: Yeah, Lyle doesn’t care.
Lyle: I have a hard time classifying it anyway. Because where the f*ck are the lines? I don’t know if even half the people who think they know… know.
David: I’m really anal-retentive about sub genres so I’m like “we’re not power metal”.
RAMzine: That’s a really modern problem. The categorization of music has become excessively specific. As a fellow guitar player, I can relate to the desire for variety and evolution in one’s playing rather than repeating the same thing over and over again. It’s important to keep things fresh and dynamic.
Lyle: Yeah, that’s the thing. If you say you’re power metal maybe that’s almost more power metal or death metal exclusive but like, if you say your power metal, you’ve got to be power metal all the way. Whereas if you’re just metal, you can kind of do whatever.
David: Yeah, we have so many other flavours as well, even from the three songs that you can go listen to right now, nine-minute winding instrumentals that go kind of nutty. And there’s cleans, there’s orchestral stuff in the middle of all that. There’s freaking crushing riffs that just carry you somewhere like a tornado. But you know, that’s all to say I know I’m short on my attention span. So I’m like, I need new riff every two bars instead of four. That was my problem with the new Metallica album that was like, “hey, you’re taking 90 seconds to just get to the riff you want to get to”. It’s like, come on, why are you spending four slow bars on this same riff? I want to go to something straight away to something else. And if I’m not careful, it turns into riff soup. That’s where Lyle comes in.
Lyle: Honestly, half my job is telling Dave “take this out, put it’s somewhere else.”
David: We’ve created two new songs from doing that out of what was originally one single song.
Lyle: Yeah, ‘Flesh’ is one of those songs that came out of another song that was much, much busier. I wouldn’t say there is one singular mission statement for Petrified Giant. It’s that I want it to be an entry point band, we are grabbing a lot of people that are fans of internet cartoons, and not necessarily heavy metal, or maybe they’re giving it a chance because they know who we are because of internet cartoons or something like that. I want to take it seriously and I want it to be f*cking sick. But also in that feeling of you’re in the deep end of the pool. I want them to feel like it’s still listable or like, “oh, I kind of get into this even though it’s not usually what I listen to”. Because I feel like metal has kind of strayed a very long way from its roots and people almost now over-obsess like “oh, has this riff been played before? Is this too similar to an Exodus riff or a Pantera riff or whatever the f*ck?” There’s something beautiful about something that a 15-year-old can bang their head to and maybe even learn how to play if they dedicate a couple of weeks to slamming their head against the wall. I don’t necessarily want to make the fastest, most technical music for musicians that I can, I want it to be something that’s f*cking cool.
I mean even then the song ‘Traitorous’, there’s a solo near the end of that I purposely played worse. So that it kind of sounds really organic and mushy and frantic and I really think it gave it a lot of texture. Just to have these little shreddy passages that are just kind of like smashing your fingers against the fretboard. I think there’s like a beauty to that.
David: I think a lot of bands these days turn it their songs into such pissing contests that you just forget the heart of the riff. Sometimes the simpler the riff, the more crushing it is you don’t have to like, pepper it with a shit tonne of you know, kick drum and kind of like triplets and shit.
Lyle: To be fair, I listen to that shit and I f*cking love it but I’m also a guitarist and a musician. I forget who said this to me. It was an actual musician who knows what they’re talking about and it kind of stuck with me; to a normal person, if you’re playing like ‘Sweet Child o Mine’ or ‘Freebird’ or something, you’re shredding a ten out of ten, you’re like the fastest guitar player in the world. A normal person who’s not a guitarist can’t really distinguish ‘Freebird’ from Jason Richardson unless they listen to them back to back, they’re gonna say both those guys are ten out of ten guitar players. Once you cross that line, you do have to start thinking about what actually sounds good? And what fits here? You know, do I need to do it? And if I do, is it cool? I mean, I’ve been thinking about it because we might play this sh*t live. So there’s guitar that I can play if I’m recording bar by bar and never have to think about how it works logistically. And there’s a guitar that I can play if I actually have to lay this thing out in a live setting. So I’ve made it a point also to make sure all my solos and stuff are playable by a human being or rather by me, and I think that that limitation has also made them a lot more melodic.
David: Yeah, I think Mardy’s sense of melody is so strong and what doing musically kind of goes everywhere to the point where it’s still got that harder edge and it’s still hyper aggressive, but it’s got that… what’s the term I’m looking for? Just kind of set some melody that’s going to bring in people that appreciate notes in their music, if you will, as opposed to like grinding E and F and *cookie monster vocals*. That’s the least technical way I could have put that but I think you get my drift.
RAMzine: Yeah, in a roundabout way. I’m pretty sure that was more vivid than an actual description.
Lyle: Like Shakespeare said, let’s open up this f*cking pit.
David: You know when there’s a word right in front of you and your brain is like “hey, here it is” but you can’t quite see it. There was a word that was very apt for what I was trying to describe. But instead I took the long way around.
Lyle: You’re the lyricist by the way, Dave writes our lyrics.
David: Yeah, that’s right. Lyrics are really very dummy good.
RAMzine: That’s how I write the articles as well. I start out with “the sound was very good, but muddy, but also a little bit cleaner” and then it just loops around to “yeah, sounds good”.
Lyle: Aggressive and articulate the perfect balance between an active and passive pickup.
RAMzine: Aggressive and articulate is a good description of your music as well.
David: Thank you, know that’s a high compliment and I appreciate that.
RAMzine: Even from a production standpoint. Everyone who’s a bedroom producer now, not that you guys are bedroom producers…
David: We are actually, I did all of this in my my office. I self produced the whole thing.
RAMzine: You did a great job, it sounds fantastic.
Lyle: You know when you see those movies, where it’s like, some dude will come in wearing like a jeans jacket and he’ll walk into the Nerdosphere with his f*cking giant sunglasses and it’ll f*cking blow them all away. That’s Dave with mixing, I’d be like “can you cut this frequency?” And he’s like “what is that?” And I’m like, “how are you making better mixes than I’ve ever made in my entire life?”
David: I don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing half the time. It’s kind of like “Lyle can you show me how to do that in Ableton? Because I have no freaking clue.” But there’s a template I’ve been working off that I’ve been building for years to just sound great. And so it’s just been the result of a lot of late nights learning and kind of figuring shit out and just listening. A lot of listening to figure out what sounds good. I like to think that Petrified Giant sounds good in a shitty car speaker just as much as it does in a massive sound system.
Lyle: I think it’s unique too. If we threw this at like a PRODUCER producer, there’s a lot of bands that we probably could sound exactly like. I think that now even if we do that down the line, we have a sound to be like “this is this is the starting point.” I’m really happy with it.
David: I’m stoked on it. I feel like a lot of bands kind of have that slipperiness to their guitar tone, where it doesn’t really sound like you’re picking so much as it sounds like you’re just going *flat noise* whenever you’re doing alternate picking or whatever. Or like the drums are really clicky or something. Me, I love a little bit of reverb. I’m old school. I love a little bit of reverb. I love soundscapes, I love songs that tell a story through the sound. That’s kind of what we’re going for.
RAMzine: That’s a big part of the prog sound, trying to be as vivid as possible.
Lyle: Yeah, with bedroom production, you can get it clean. You have no issues getting your thing to sound tight and clean and clicky but to maintain the organic feel of it and make it kind of big and loud and nasty, that’s what we want.
Dave: Yeah, big and nasty.
RAMzine: It does sound big and nasty.
David: We’re currently working on our first album, we’ve got a lot of songs written already. We’re really really happy with where it’s going. We think each song should kind of stand on its own in a way. I know that. That kind of sounds like a no brainer, but so many bands kind of forget that. We want each song to be the one you go “oh, it’s that one” within a couple of seconds of listening to it. We got a couple of ballads, we got some really dark shit going on. We got a couple of epics that are like maybe eight minutes long and they kind of wind to go everywhere in this proggy style.
Mardy is so far reaching in his capabilities that he can tackle nearly any kind of sound that we want to throw at him and say “hey, complement this” or we want this to be a complement to what he’s doing. But with one of our previous vocalists it was like “hey, this guy sounds exactly like Phil from Pantera.” And that’s f*cking dope. But it does limit our song writing a little and now we kind of have an open field to just play what we want. I’ve got cleaner numbers that might have a little bit of piano in them and whatnot as well. I think if you want to cast a wide net, do that in your first album, that way you don’t pull a Metallica and people get upset at you for having acoustic guitar on your second album, which is kinda crazy thinking about it.
RAMzine: So based on all that, this is the closest I’ll get to my dream of having a Cyanide and Happiness cover of ‘Octavarium’.
David: Yep, pretty much. Yeah.
RAMzine: That’s amazing. So there probably isn’t a timeline for the first record, considering ‘Godless Sky’ just dropped. But, how far into it are you guys?
Lyle: These three songs are the most recent ones that we’ve written. Before these three we had two and we have two more that we’re in the process of tightening and finishing the arrangement on right now. I think our soft goal is maybe by the end of the year, but don’t don’t quote me on that.
David: Do not quote him on that.
Lyle: Don’t make that the title of the article. Don’t talk about my holes. So that’s kind of what we’re doing. The EP is tracks from the album. Just because we had those first album growing pains and we were just sitting on this music for like, a year. And we’re just like, “f*ck, let’s just get something out there”. See if people even like this sh*t. But the response has been really, really positive so far, which gives me some confidence that we’re on the right track. These songs will be on the album. So we’ve already got three down and out. But yeah, like I think the end of the year is doable if not by then, probably not super long after that.
David: We have about five or six strong ideas for songs that have been laid down and demoed to an extent. So it’s mostly going to be refining those and some of that stuff Mardy has never heard of or touched before. So it’s gonna be nice to turn around and say, “Mardy, go ahead. work your magic on this song”. And we get to see what that sounds like.
Lyle: Yeah, exactly. All the songs we put out so far were written before Mardy joined the band. So we’re actually excited to get his input on stuff too and see how he contributes to that.
David: Yeah, we also just have a sort of structure for the album laid out already. We’ve got maybe eleven slots, and we’re filling in where we think songs would feed best into each other. So I think you’ll find it’ll probably sound a little proggy when it does come out. I think the songs are gonna feed into each other really well.
RAMzine: With any luck you’ll commit to doing live shows, and maybe you’ll end up over in the UK?
Lyle: I would f*cking love that. I think like playing live at least once is a bucket list thing for me. But if there’s demand for it, and if that becomes a thing that would be f*cking sick. I would love to do that.
David: The idea does frigthen me, I don’t have stage fright. I tend to have a lot of anxiety until I go on stage. And then it’s just, you know, f*cking game on let’s go. But you’re right. No, that feels a little far off. But I guess we haven’t practised in the same room yet. So I think that would change very quickly.
RAMzine: Hopefully you guys come across with all of the success you guys deserve. You put in a lot of hard work and from a listener standpoint, it’s really paid off. It’s a fantastic little collection of songs and we’re really looking forward to the record.
David: Thank you so much.
RAMzine: All right. This has been Lamestream Lydia, we’ve been talking to Lyle Rath from OneyPlays, Sanity Not Included. He’s the guy with the hole.
David: Yeah, I don’t have a hole.
Lyle: Yeah, Dave is homeless like Kim Jong Un.
RAMzine: Dave has no holes, but he has Cyanide and Happiness.
David: Yes!
RAMzine: That’s that’s gonna be the headline.
David: Nowhere to put that Cyanide pill, unfortunately, due to my lack of orifices.
RAMzine: Thank you so much, guys. Have a good day.
Lyle: You too, man.
David: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
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