Forbidden – Craig Locicero

During the 80’s Forbidden were one of many thrash metal bands standing tall along side heavyweights of the Bay Area thrash scene. The band quickly grew to fame in a short period, thanks to their unique technical thrash metal. During the late 90’s however, the band parted ways due to an inconsistent record label and personal differences.

After 13 long years the band are finally back together with a new line-up, a new label and a kick ass new album. Metal Obsession had the pleasure to speak with guitarist, Craig Locicero about the band’s newest album, Omega Wave. We discuss the current status of America and how the new album portrays the band’s vision of a doomed future for all, albeit still salvageable, if we decide to wake up.

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Metal Obsession: It’s been roughly 13 years since Forbidden released their previous album, ‘Green’. During that time did you continually write or work on music for Forbidden’s future, or was ‘Omega Wave’ written in only a small time frame?

Craig Locicero: When we stopped being a band back in 97′ there was no Forbidden, anything! Personally, I moved on and started doing other genre’s of music and didn’t really stay in that kind of ‘thrash metal’ mind set at all. I completely just forgot about it and started playing rock and a couple of the guys from the band came with me. We started a band called Manmade God, it was very experimental. From that time til now, there wasn’t much talk of writing a Forbidden song until half way through our 2008 comeback tour of Europe and I thought to myself “I liked to do this again”.

I was inspired by the situation of the world and for me, Forbidden has to be real. It can’t just be an exercise in playing music. There has to be something behind it to motivate me. That whole process didn’t begin until we were already gigging and doing shows and then I finally realised that I was going to start writing and doing it again. Not one song or riff was written until the end of 2008.

MO: How are you finding being on a “major label”. Do you find it easier dealing with a label like Nuclear Blast?

CL: They’re a great metal label is what they are. The thing with Nuclear Blast, or the reason why we went with them was…well, there were a few different good companies offering deals to us and money and blah, blah, blah.  I think Nuclear Blast are just a fantastic bunch of people. Major, minor, indie…it doesn’t matter. If you have the product, they will make you a career. I’m pretty happy with Nuclear Blast. They have given us the complete freedom to do what we want on this album. I’m pretty happy. We’re all pretty happy!

MO: I noticed that the new album showcases artwork from artist, Kent Mathieu who worked on Forbidden’s previous album covers “Twist in Form” and “Forbidden Evil” . Were there other ideas thrown around beforehand choosing this final design?

CL: There were other distracting and more elaborate ideas. People like different things for albums covers. For us however, we wanted something to symbolise our past, future and right now, the present. What we are going through which is a human condition as a human race. So there is a lot a symbolise there. It’s not just a few skulls. It means a helluva lot more than that!

The album is called ‘Omega Wave’ and those skulls represent the Omega itself. This whole man racing, or humankind should I say, racing towards it’s own extinction right now. It’s a very interesting time we are living in now, so that’s why that concept went out. It’s very simple, very identifiable and relates to everything on the record. It’s the most simplistic and easy to look at, but a lot of people aren’t going to get the symbolism right off the bat, which is cool though.

MO: In a sense the skulls represent good and evil?

CL: It does. It’s the crystal skull of Belize . If you don’t know anything about that skulls, you should look it up. You will see that there have been tests on that skull which was found in the early 20th century in one of the pyramids of Belize. It’s actually a two part skull, but when they did tests on this skull in the early 70’s. they realised the thing couldn’t be made with our technology. We have no way to make it because it would cut against the grain or it would shatter.

The temperature of the skull would never change and it would act like a giant microchip which intertwined with the 13 other skulls which we don’t have, supposedly. I got to thinking, “If they think that strongly about something so pivotal. Is there something within the skulls which holds our past or our future”. Maybe even the key to saving our own ass if we had a little more knowledge about ourselves that wasn’t so hidden, to which it all represents the Omega Wave. It’s the feeling of impending doom which seems to be hanging over everyone at the moment. It’s really sad because I believe its manifested or self manifested in a sense. Surrendering to it because they think its time.

If people snapped out of it all together, it wouldn’t be that way.

MO: It seems like a social conditioning. They believe whatever they are given via television or controlled media without questioning it.

CL: That’s what it’s really about. How do you deal with these kinds of situations and information which is thrown at you, regurgitated, you know. Billions of opinions and billions of ways we’re going to die. It seems like a kind of weird sickness which is engulfing everybody.

MO: I’d like to continue talking about that later, but first I’d like to promote the album a little further. Now that the album is finished and will be released in under a week. Would you say you’re satisfied with the outcome of the album. Do you believe its your best work to date?

CL: Well, whatever we think will be entirely different to whatever everyone else thinks, which is what I said about opinions right? We feel that we couldn’t have done any better on this record.

Being away from metal gave me a really great perspective of to write the best metal record I possibly could. [laughs] Everyone contributed of course, but I really came into it with a fresh palette and essentially “surrendered to metal”. It was great, it all came naturally. I do think its our strongest record, most cohesive record. It wasn’t rushed to have been written and it didn’t take forever to come out like ‘Distortion’. It was kind of the perfect marriage of everything coming together, just the way it should have. So I hope everyone else sees it that way.

The reviews have been…really, really favorable so far, but with many good, your going to get many people who hate it as well.

MO: Apart from the new album and a new record label, Forbidden have acquired new band members. How has it been working with, Mark Hernandez and Steve Smyth compared to some of the previous members of Forbidden?

CL: Everyone had there place in Forbidden, you know. At the core of it all its always been Russ, myself and Matt. Russ and I are the main song writers, so it’s always been there. But, you know I’d say these new guys are great students of Forbidden and maybe knew more about…well, there was a period when we even brought Glen back, just recently about 2 years ago. Even Forbidden from 1987 to 1988, to get Forbidden Evil together was hard. Glen was new to metal at that time. He’s obviously been playing metal since then with thrash metal and his moment in Testament, but he wasn’t really a student of what we do, you know? He had his own way of thinking and wasn’t really what we were all about, so that didn’t work out to well.

We needed to get a new guy and Steve Smyth is just a really respected guy. I’ve known him forever and he’s a great friend. He’s someone that has loved everything we have done, each chapter we have done, he get it at least. He understood it, he studied it already, he was a fan. It was wonderful to finally get in someone who got it. More like Tim Calvert when we first started playing, but  like all of us Tim got kinda burnt out. He came from a different school too, he was more of a Queensryche, little more dramatic…more “metal” while we were just simply, “thrash metal”. But, that worked for a long time too.

I dunno. Something about these guys…Mark Hernandez is just fucking fantastic drummer. Any bit as good as Paul, who’s got the pedigree and Steve Jacobs who is amazing too. He’s had numerous shoulder issues to battle with, but he’s on the mend now. We can’t really wait around for these guys, we are very creative people.

MO: Did Steve or Mark influence much of the writing process for ‘Omega Wave’?

CL: I gotta tell ya. It always starts with a riff. A couple of songs were already written. I wrote Adapt of Die and Hopnosis before Steve came along. Mark contributes to a lot of the stuff I write because I believe he as a drummer is really important to this specific genre. You know certain bands, I wont mention their names, but they never credit to these great drummers and you know what, It’s not like they’re adding a lot to what we do, but they still get credited for arranging and making it better, you know, so those guys are important to me. When Steve joined he was wonderful to bounce ideas off of, because he’s always accelerate or add something and deviate of off it and come up with a part that compliments it. He’s been easy to work with from anyone else I’ve worked with, with less self conciseness about it all. The chemistry was really cool.

MO: Omega Wave’s lyrical themes seem to be heavily influenced by social disorder and politics of a corrupted nature. Do you mainly get inspiration from the mainstream media, the alternative media, or is the album more of a personal point of view of how you see the world?

CL: I get all my information from all media then I differentiate it in my own way. It dissolves into my brain and out of my mouth. [laughs] I read a lot of alternative media and at the same time I gotta watch the mainstream media and associated press to see what they are  telling us the same thing. Essentially. if your seeing it on the “mainstream news” its usually corporate bullshit.

Even if it is real. there will still be a spin on it and that’s also in the alternative media. Nothing is completely isolated or devoid of some sort of plan or agenda. Like I said before, the album has more to do with these things. How do you wrap your head around this. When Russ and I sat down we were like “What are we going to write about here?”. I just said “Lets just attack every issue one at a time and don’t lay out”, just go for the throat on whatever we are talking about and don’t be to cute.

At the same time there is a whole lot of ambiguity within the words which lead to different stories within one thing.  Sometimes I really explain it, other times I just don’t really want to explain to much because people need to get there own picture of it.

MO: Having said that, what are your thoughts on the current situation in the United States? You have high level of foreclosures, a never ending war both home and abroad, a weakening dollar and the political and social system which seems to be falling to pieces everyday.

CL: It feels like I’m watching Rome. It’s hard not to see it from a million miles away and just know that some of these things are happening on purpose for other peoples gain. It’s like we are a social experiment. This country was in a cocoon of self righteousness and manifest destiny long enough. The resentment is well deserved and it’s been a very slow hand pulling the strings towards our countries collapse. That happens within the country too. I mean we’ve been sold down the river by the people who live here too.

This is just our turn. America has been doing this for awhile, but this has been happening in the rest of the world for a long time. The untouchables have finally been touched. As I stated earlier this album wouldn’t have been written if I wasn’t inspired by a lot of this stuff. I mean we were out on tour and Barack Obama hadn’t been elected yet, but I knew it was coming from a thousand miles away.

I could see what was happening here. He’s a very charismatic figure head. He’s someone who was going too speed people up if he would say the right thing and he managed to not say anything, and that was pretty amazing. He had millions of people disenging on change…and listen,  I voted for the guy, but that’s because every 4 years out here I get told I get a shit sandwich and douche to vote for and you have to vote for one or the other.

What has changed? Not a god damn thing!

It’s just more power to the banking system, the federal reserve, you know? We owe more money to that than you can possibly imagine. What is money but an illusion.  It’s just disgusting. Lots of good lyrics come out of that though. You got that right! [laughs]

MO: Do you believe this problem is sorely rooted with a corrupt and unjust political system or do you think its more to do with a shadow government with speculations of a New World Order or Illuminati  running the entire planet, or going to the most extreme case I’ve heard whereby an evil extraterrestrial race has been bent on experimenting and enslaving the human race since the start of civilization, by controlling all major political systems and causing major effects to our social, religious and personal beliefs, inevitably turning us on each other?

CL: Listen people don’t be to shocked. Once you realise you’re a blip in a matrix, you’ll soon understand it. Well, what is evil first of all? What is evil but a point of view. Everyone has their own survival in there mind.

If you look throughout history you’ll see a lot of what your talking about, being set up for thousands of years. I believe the government has been manipulated by extra dimensional beings, forever. I just believe that! It’s not government, its just people in societies who don’t understand that we are all the same.

We are living in a time right now where we have so much technology that we can’t really prop our heads around what we use and misuse. We don’t really do anything special with it. We have iPhones or whatever, but essentially the ultimate mind control is making people feel like they have this freedom, freedom of information which actually dumbs you down. It could be all these things and probably is a little bit of everything. You know, I’ve heard this is similar to a pyramid of knowledge. We are at the very, very bottom of the pyramid. A few of us down here get certain information and go a few blocks up, but you have no idea whats really going on.

MO: Do you believe this could be avoidable?

CL: I think this impending doom is avoidable if consciousness were to snap the fuck out of it. I don’t think people have to surrender to this impending doom and that’s really the point of the new album. Its all misinterpreted information which will inevitably fly us right into the hands of mind control and right into the hands of whatever powers that be, that want to herd us into groups and control us even more with fear. A lot of this stuff could be avoidable, maybe I’m the minority which means it wont be avoidable. People could very easily change things and manifest a better reality for themselves, if they choose too.

MO: Are you a spiritual person.  Do you believe “good” will come from all this supposed predetermined future, god forbid if it does ever happen?

CL: We’ve put this planet in such a state of pain. It’s throwing up on itself right now, you know. It’s shitting itself, throwing up on itself and pissing itself, but eventually things always go back to what they are suppose to be. If there is a disease which happens to kill everything, what does it do? It rots and turns back into dust and comes back up, you know. We may be all the victims in this torment, but maybe all this does need to happen too. It would take an awful lot of changes to right this world. It’s not like your going to yank all manipulative corporations and all these weapons off the planet in one go. I mean what do you do with all this stuff, where does it go? Are we ever safe again?

We are living in a wacky time. I’m kinda glad to be here though.It’s the greatest show we will ever see.

MO: It actually reminds me of a Bill Hicks quote, he said something along the lines of “We have the technology to shoot missiles down air ducts, so couldn’t we feasibly use that technology to shoot food at starving people?”. We essentially have the technology to destroy an entire nation, yet we still can’t stop the famine in Africa or solve simple social problems home or abroad. No one ever seems to question it.

CL: It’s fear first of all and control right behind it. We have to control these people with fear. You have to have enemies to make people have sides. You need to have sides to have weapons. It’s a crazy ass world. I’m going to repeat myself here. [laughs]

MO: Well a lot of people see it as an experience that we need to learn and go through to evolve, so I guess will eventually find out why we are here when the time comes. At the same time though we shouldn’t take advantage of people or ridicule someone for their beliefs, as we too are none the wiser to why we are truly here.

CL: If there is a positive song, in a very weird way on the new album it would be Immortal Wounds. It’s really a mindset that once you leave this reality, you kind of a reverberation, you know. What you believe when you exit this reality. It’s kind of like an infinite possibility to whatever your sub consciousness thinks. Whatever you most believe is where you are going to go. Ultimately it’s your interpretation of reality.

Due to technical difficulties the second half the the interview was lost. We do apologise.

Craig did mention that Forbidden would be touring Australia very soon. Will keep you posted as we get more details of the tour.

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Q’s: Anwar Rizk
A’s: Craig Locicero
Band: Forbidden
Date: 14/10/2010
Origin: USA
www.myspace.com/forbiddenofficial