Rest in pieces

Blasphemous Creation’s latest disc, Black Winter, sounds a bit like the soundtrack to an emergency room in hell—an unfathomably dark and painful place, where living people are punched open by jackhammers and their organs dissected with rusty garden tools; their heads snapped off of their necks with giant bottle-openers and tossed into some Teutonic grinder.

Surprisingly tight—totally berserk, but musically precise—the band doesn’t so much “play” their songs as it does attack them and beat the shit out of them with tire irons. The vocals sound like Satan’s priest barking obscenities at you.

However you describe Reno’s premier blackened-thrash metal band, their musical formula seems to be working, as the group’s fan base now stretches literally around the world.

“I let my girlfriend borrow my jacket because she was cold,” says guitarist Ben “Gatekeeper” Brown, who’s wearing black jeans and a black tank top, exposing various skulls and other grim ink-jobs on his arms. Gatekeeper’s girlfriend is asleep in the tour van.

It’s 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and Blasphemous Creation is busy tightening its tunes. The group ranges in age from 15 to 26.

Lead singer and guitarist Isaac “Fleshgrinder” Wilson and bassist Jed “Disinter” Wilson run through the beat of a song called “Ripped in Half.”

Isaac Wilson recorded a solo EP, Rest in Pieces, in May and June of 2006 with a drum machine. Later, he asked Edwards if he could play the drum patterns.

“He pulled it off,” says Wilson. “He was just like the fucking drum machine.” Then Jed Wilson and Ben Brown came on, replacing former, older band members, and the final lineup was set.

“Disciples of the underworld, bow before the masters of demise, disciples of the underworld, rise from the blackened pits of hell,” grunts Isaac Wilson, over a thrash-style fire of guitar rips and speedy drumbeats.

The band is polite and well-spoken, especially the leader, Wilson, who seems rather business-orientated.

His band’s newest EP was released in April 2007 and has already been reviewed in death metal magazines Metal Maniacs and Pit as well as others in the United States and Canada.

Christophe Spajdel, who also created the logo for the band Emperor, created Blasphemous Creation’s logo, which includes an upside-down pentagram. Emperor is “the most well-known black metal band on Earth,” says Edwards.

The band has good chemistry and plays well together. But the members live different, somewhat incongruous lifestyles.

Jed Wilson, who looks even younger than his 15 years, is the only member without tattoos.

“His mom would kill him,” says Edwards, who does amateur tattoo work and seems to live the craziest life of the four.

“I just fell asleep (downtown by the Truckee River) and woke up with slugs and bug bites all over me,” he says. “And it was raining.”

He showed his band mates the bumps on his back. Usually, he says, he couch-surfs from friend to friend and rarely sleeps outside. But he had been out drinking the night before.

The band hopes to get signed soon. Wilson says that while there isn’t really a death metal scene in Reno, they are getting national and even international attention, so he hopes that getting signed may not be too difficult.

They plan to record a full-length album early next year in Sacramento.

“The studio in Sacramento knows how to give it balls and just fucking make it bad,” says Wilson.

Emo, this is not.