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Eye - 'Amen in black'

Another day, another battle scar. As is the case more often than not, Amen singer Casey Chaos is nursing an on-the-job injury. This time, it's a broken finger from last week's sold-out show at London's Astoria.

"I was basically jumping off the PA stacks and doing stupid shit," recounts Chaos, in transit near San Francisco. "I was in the crowd giving the kids my mic and didn't know there was water all over the stage, so when I go to get back up I slipped hard, and my hand just slammed down. That was it."

Not to worry -- Chaos doesn't actually require his hands to give the world the middle finger. His L.A.-based band Amen is one thundering, tumultuous force of rage and disdain. Their second album, We Have Come for Your Parents (Virgin), assaults the senses with tracks like "CK Killer" and "Piss Virus," attacking North American values and the public that eats them up.

Yes, Amen hits the usual targets tailor-made for disenchanted, outsider teens. But when Chaos rails against hippies, religion and fashionites, you can practically hear scraps of flesh bursting out of his throat along with his venomous lyrics. He seems as tough on his vocals in the studio as he is on his body in concert. Ironically, his strongly held convictions are often buried beneath superhuman screams and growls. This does not concern him.

"I don't care if people understand the message," he explains. "If they do, great, but if not, that's fine. This isn't Rage Against the Machine, where I'm trying to get something across. I'm just singing about my own disease and my own commentary about growing up in American society."

Muffled vocals or no, the message always comes through loud and clear, thanks to his bandmates, guitarists Paul Fig and Sonny Mayo, bassist John Tumor (ex-Snot) and drummer/co-writer Shannon Larkin (ex-Ugly Kid Joe). Experts in the field of punishing sonic bedlam, they blend hardcore attitude with metal dexterity and emerge with something that is more vicious than and quite different from the nu-metal acts Amen is inevitably lumped in with.

You can blame the band's image on touring with the Tattoo the Earth fest and/or working with producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Cold), but the new wave of hard rockers earns as much disrespect from Chaos as pretty pop tarts.

"I respect Korn, because when they came out, there wasn't another band that sounded like that," says Chaos. "Now, after years of nobody being interested in them, every label wants a Korn band to cash in on this sound. America wants ear candy, and these bands sell themselves for the American dream. I can smell their intent 10 seconds into their music."

When Amen's debut disc earned them the title of "next big thing" and a record deal with Virgin, Chaos was concerned about joining the in-crowd, so much so that he deliberately undermined his new album's commercial potential.

"Anything that had commercial appeal, we threw out the window," he explains. "The hardest part of making this record was deciding which of our 56 songs to record. If Ross heard a hook, we chucked them. We could have made a nice rap-rock song with a good video and made millions of dollars. It's that easy. Bands are being formulated by the minute to create this commodity. But with us getting signed to a major label, we wanted to make sure there was no cry of sellout."

This isn't to say that We Have Come For Your Parents is a mess of a maelstrom. The grooves are there for those who'll stick around long enough, absorbing the initial shock. Amen have more in common with the Stooges than Slipknot, and while Chaos insists his onstage self-cutting is the product of a trance-like state ("I've only done that about five times intentionally"), the allusion to Iggy Pop is clear as smashed crystal, and the album's title is a twist on the Dead Boys disc We Have Come for Your Children. But even diehard anti-establishment acts can't hide from the masses anymore, and whether he wants it or not, Casey Chaos' stardom is probably inevitable.

"I just want this band to be an alternative to so-called alternative music," he concludes, "because that's just big business now."

by Liisa Ladouceur