Could you please give a short summary of the band's history and introduce the members?

John:   Vehemence is a melodic death metal band from Phoenix Arizona, U.S.A. The line up as of now contains Bjorn Dannov on guitar, John Chavez on guitar, Andy Schroeder on drums, Mark Kozuback on bass & screams, and Nathan Gearhart as the vocalist. Vehemence has now toured with many well known metal bands and has gained worldwide recognition from the releases going on the second Metal Blade released record.

  "Helping the World to see" is quite an ambitious title for an album. Why was it chosen and what does it mean?

John:   We incorporate our lyrics into our own ideologies and culture and present the issues of this world in the album. The title basically means what it says. Vehemence helps the world to see. This time around, there were no alternative album names and this was our first strong choice.

  Is "Helping The World To See" a concept album?

John:   The new album is not a fictitious conceptual album like our last release God Was Created in 2002. HTWTS focuses on the positive and negative of realistic world issues. These include songs about political issues, terrorism issues, family dysfunction, a religious television network, the process of death, a true crime story, along with other problematic issues in life. We always change our lyric structure from album to album because it is refreshing to hear something new, rather than a monotonous lyric strain album after album. These topics are what we wanted to get out for a long time in our music and we have accomplished that with this release.

  Could you please explain the cover artwork? What do we see there and what does it express?

John:   Our artwork for the new record was created by the well known artist named Wes Benscoter. The twisted artwork shows a demon with an eye on its forehead, spine coming out of its head, and holding the world with its hand. The artwork ultimately expresses the title of the album; we didn’t direct him to make anything other than give him the title of the album to come up with it in his head. We are very pleased with the album cover and we are also pleased it wasn’t banned by SPV, a German metal distributor which banned our God Was Created CD due to its gruesome artwork created by an artist named Evil Dave.

  How does the band feel about "Helping The World To See"? Are you totally satisfied with it or are there things you do different now if you had the chance?

John:   We are completely 100% satisfied with the way our album came out. We always make sure to leave the studio knowing that every finishing touch was made for a successful product. The production took steps higher than our last release. We thank our recording engineer/producer Will Solares at Open Primary Productions in Arizona U.S.A. for doing a great job! The packaging came out awesome as well with the help of Brian J. Ames, graphics guy at Metal Blade.

  There's a video track on the CD in Windows-Media-format. Do you know that there are computer users out there who will never be able to see this track, because they don't use MS Windows or MacOS? Why didn't you chose a file format that is available for almost all platforms and could also be played on most modern DVD players, like MPEG or Apple QuickTime maybe?

John:   The “Vehemence Timeline” video within the disc will work on all computers using Windows Media Player Video 9 for either MAC or Windows. Instructions are also included within the disc to get the 57 min video running. We figure since we are thinking of creating more multimedia albums in the future, we could release the timeline again on a DVD with a lot of other content on it along with the full quality version; this was just a teaser for our fans. The size of the file, was also compressed just perfectly so it would fit on the disc. Using MPEG or QuickTime wouldn’t allow the compression to be small enough for an hour long video there for we used Windows Media.

  Is there a tour planned for 2004? Are we maybe even going to see you in Germany?

John:   We are planning on touring the U.S.A/Canada a lot more before going overseas, but we seem to have interest from Party San, Fuck The Commerce, and if possible Wacken and Summer Breeze fests next year all in Germany. Count on seeing Vehemence there!!!

  Thanks for your time and answering my questions. I wish you all the best for the future and the upcoming release and hereby leave the last words of this interview to you. Feel free to say whatever you feel like.

John:   Thanks for the interview Metal Germany, feel free to visit Metal Blade Germany to purchase our new album at http://www.metalblade.de and readers check out our band website at http://www.vehemence.com and those also interested, you can email the band at vehemence@vehemence.com