Like many contemporary music genres—and worst than most—heavy metal has suffered from excessive subdivision. There’s stoner metal, sludge metal, groove metal, glam metal, speed metal and thrash metal—just to name a few. Black metal fans and death metal fans bicker over which is more extreme. And then there are the unholy hybrids: funk metal, metalcore and rap metal. And on and on and on.
So it’s great to encounter a band like Envirusment, what some might call a true metal band. It’s heavy metal—straight up, no chaser. Drummer John Shafer fires off shots like an automatic weapon wielded by an accurate assassin—heavy and relentless, but precise. Guitarist Wes Deputy and bassist Don Woods gallop ahead with monster riffage like a stampede of wild horses. And lead guitarist Jeff Stewart takes squealing, thrilling solos in the grand classical-inspired shredder tradition of Randy Rhoads.
“And we don’t have the same trendy, typical vocals as most bands,” says singer Steven Morris, referring to the barking Cookie Monster vocal style. “I call ’em punch vocals. They have their place.”
Morris is able to convey those growling, punchy low notes, but he’s also able to hit the high notes with a full-throat projectile voice, when most male vocalists would only be able to squeak ’em out with a whispered falsetto. Morris’ versatility with the high notes means the group is able to pull off convincingly faithful covers of songs like Iron Maiden’s “Wrathchild” and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”—complete with banshee howls. Envirusment’s Led Zep cover takes one of the prototypical early metal songs and amps up the heaviosity a few notches.
“We wanted to make it a faithful cover, but also more metal,” says Morris.
The group also practices in one of the most metal places imaginable: in a room above a paintball gun facility in Panther Valley. They’re one of a dozen or so bands that practice there—Morris calls it a heavy metal dormitory. And to complete the metal picture, the band’s original tunes have titles like “Parasitic Prophesy” and “Inner Terrorism.”
Morris is also the vocalist for the band Demension 13, which he describes as “more organic” than Envirusment, which he describes as “ravenous, like a pack of wolves.”
“Our goal is to destroy, professionally, every band before us and after us,” he says. “We want everyone to leave talking about us.”
“It’s like in boxing,” says Woods. “There’s no animosity toward the other fighter. But once you step into the ring, it’s on, and you’re vicious. And then afterward you shake hands and tell each other good job.”
The band is able to perform a lot of variations of heavy, relentless music. They write songs with open-ended structures not hindered by pop considerations, and use key changes, tempo shifts and volume dynamics. And Stewart’s solos explore musical ideas a bit more complex than the major pentatonic scale.
“Modern metal is the modern classical music,” says Woods.
“There’s no right or wrong,” says Morris, of the group’s unpredictable approach to songwriting.
The metal alloy that Envirusment probably falls closest to is the thrash metal variety—and they cite Testament, with whom they’ll be playing at the Knitting Factory on Feb. 18 as an influence. But there are a lot of shards in there—they maintain grooves, the vocals soar and rumble, the guitars speed up and slow down, the drums rock and roll—so, overall, what kind of metal is Envirusment?
The heavy kind.