FATALISMO – JOEY CARBO
Art: Januz Miralles
Woorms is from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. Their 2019 debut LP ‘Slake’ saw a wide release and has never been out of print. Woorms third LP, “Fatalismo”, was released on Steve Austin’s SuperNova Records in 2022.
Here’s some shit people said about Woorms.
“A great band that achieves a pulverising heaviness and presents something truly creative and interesting is rare; the debut album ‘Slake’ immediately put Louisiana’s Woorms in the same company as their famed contemporaries (Melvins, Neurosis, Mastodon, Godflesh) creepy and frightening blend of sludge, doom, noise and atmospheric scapes.” – Doomed Nation.
The lyrics are about nihilism and food. I have no lyrics about food, but the titles get accidentally tied to it. We have this super positive message like IDLES or something like that, but I tend to write more cryptically for Woorms. Sometimes lyrics are an inside joke; most times, they are very serious, and writing is something I take very seriously and do well, but I don’t always want Woorms lyrics to be exactly clear. Sometimes mystery is great for songs. It’s cool when a song creates its own story in your head or even makes you wonder how many different ways the song could be going. For this record, ‘Fatalismo’, we rented a cabin in the woods and stayed hidden until we had most of it.
The lyrics reflect my pessimistic side. Maybe that’s even my larger side, but all the loss, chaos, and sometimes complete nonsense make it into Woorms lyrics. I only believe in and know how to write sad songs, and I see the band wants full, controlled chaos. Those guys want to go take heads off live and make great records. They go all out for every rehearsal, and our philosophy is we have to murder the crowd every time. When the crowd is packed in and feeling it, you can escape your body for extended periods, and it’s the same with jamming out new ideas and plotting and executing production.
Everything is a form of worship or, to use a better word, devotion. I’d be repeating myself from a bunch of interviews here. I had an epiphany at age four while crying to a Johnny Cash song. So that can be looked up, but I think any artist has a similar experience. I think you hear a sound one day, and your life is never the same again, whether as a listener (I know many of our fans are music historians and students and audiophiles) or as a writer if you’re wired for that experience. Many people aren’t. Woorms are definitely of the mind where music has often or always taken complete precedence in our lives. But to oversimplify significantly it (and speaking partly only for myself), those bands were Soundgarden, Faith No More, and Nirvana.
I never stop writing in my head. It’s a constant grit of sand under my tongue. If I’m not making music, I’m thinking about making it. If I’m not playing music, I write in my head all day and make notes and tabs for when I can play later. I’m sure Aaron and Miguel live the same way. I also have a studio near Baton Rouge that’s open to clients, so I’m not working.
Guys that come to mind are John Frusciante and Sturgill Simpson. Everything Frusciante did up to this electronic stuff of the last decade was some of the best music of the previous twenty years. Simpson, I think, is such a talented person. I’m impressed by the way he progressed to producing so quickly. The freedom that guys like that have to make any record they want that’s also something to aspire to.
It can be the best way for some people to experience the world; in my case, books and records have always been the way I did. There’s an entertainment component (of varying degrees), no artist can say different, but spirituality and Entertainment are, most often, the same thing for a person. Live music, all the great albums, being in independent music, feel like people at their most honest when done from the heart and with true style.
Heavy music doesn’t dominate my listening at home, but I catch hell whenever I touch this question. I’ll name some bands I think some readers could get into and some that I don’t care about either way and think are doing the lord’s work. (Past tense for some) The Drones, Sharon Van Etten, Killer Mike and RTJ, Lana Del Rey, xui xui, Mexican Institute of Sound, Jeff Buckley, Lucinda Williams, Wooden Wand, Lhasa De Sela, Tinariwen, Cat Power, Funkadelic, António Zambujo.
https://woorms.bandcamp.com
