Steel Prophet Versus The God Machine

Steel Prophet Versus The God Machine

The legendary Los Angeles metal band Steel Prophet has just unleashed The God Machine, their latest and greatest magnum opus upon the world at large. Featuring the participation of Mystic Prophecy mastermind R.D. Liapakis on lead vocals, The God Machine is a massive sonic adventure that metal fans from all over the planet will want to seek out. Highwire Daze recently caught up Steel Prophet guitarist Steve Kachinsky to find out a whole lot more about this amazing new album!

What do you think of the Los Angeles music scene and how does Steel Prophet fit into all of this mayhem?
The music scene here is really good. You’ve got a million things happening each and every night. I’ve got so many friends and they’re playing – like 5 other bands are playing Friday and Saturday nights. And they’re good too! There’s never a shortage of good bands to go out and see at gigs. And then you’ve got your major gigs – Iron Maiden, Priest, Slayer – you name it and they’re always coming through here. There’s jazz – there’s symphonies at the Hollywood Bowl – there’s everything going here. It’s really great. If anything, there’s too much music. And Steel Prophet – in a lot of ways I don’t really consider up part of this music scene because our albums sell in Europe, Japan, and not that much in the United States. We haven’t even done an LA gig since 2013.

Is there any overall story or concept behind The God Machine?
I was thinking what’s a good title for this new Steel Prophet album, and it just kind of popped into my head – The God Machine. And I thought about it and I thought “Wow, that could mean a lot of different things.” So I went to some friends and I said “Hey, when I say The God Machine, what do you think of?” And everybody I asked, they had one or two ideas about what they think it meant – sometimes similar to what I was thinking and sometimes completely different. I talked to like 20 different people and they all had these different ideas, and I thought, “Wow, this is a good idea because it could be interpreted in so many different ways.” And so that’s kind of the story behind it – like how the songs all relate to each other around this theme that could mean just about anything.

Select two songs from The God Machine and what inspired the lyrics.
There’s a song called Buried and Broken which is kind of a ballady type tune – it gets heavy at the second half of the song but it’s kind of mellow at the beginning. And that song is just about loss. Almost everybody has experienced loss of some sort – whether they’ve lost a parent or friend or pet – or they lost out on a big job or they lost out on a great gig. A lot of things that kind of haunt you for a while and it’s hard to shake it sometimes. I thought that everybody would be able to relate to the lyrics that I wrote there.

There’s a song called Thrashed Relentlessly. And that one is really just about going for your goals and not taking no for an answer. No matter what you do, you always try to get better and keep going. You improve yourself and you don’t know the meaning of the word stop. When you focus on the goal – you want it – and you do whatever it takes to meet it. And that’s kind of what that song is about.

How did R.D. Liapakis of the great Mystic Prophecy become involved as the new lead vocalist of Steel Prophet?
It’s been great!! I mean they don’t come much better than him. And the way we got together was, he mixed our previous album with our old singer. And I was talking to him about our new songs on this album that he’s actually singing on, and what happened is he was giving me some advice about some harmony stuff and this and that. And he said make sure your new guy is going to do a lot of harmonies here. He said “you know, I could do some of the harmonies. And if you like them, you could keep them and if not, you could just delete them.” And so a little while later, the singer we had, he was too busy and he wasn’t working out. So it was like, “Hey Lia, instead of just doing some harmonies and stuff on here, how about doing the lead vocals too?” And he thought that was funny – he laughed – and he said “Nah, I can’t do that.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” Then we were talking about the songs because I sent him the demos of some of the songs. And I just asked him again, after he was talking about do this and do that with the mix. And finally I guess he got tired of saying no. He just said, “You know what? I’m going to do it!” And I was like “Alright!” And it worked out great!

(Interview by Ken Morton)

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