Skip to main content"It's called the 'new old-school,'" says a bemused John Duffy from the living room of his Woodstock home. He is talking about an article he read tracking the recent rise of throwback metal, young bands indebted to the extreme sounds of the 1980s underground—bands that owe a lot to the likes of Wehrmacht, the group guitarist Duffy and the guy sitting next to him, singer Phillip "Tito" Matos, started in Portland more than 20 years ago. Back then, there wasn't a faster act in the Northwest: Aspiring to bridge the gap separating the punk and metal scenes, the five-piece earned the tag "speedcore," releasing two albums now considered underappreciated classics of the era before breaking up in the early '90s. Since then, the band's legend among hardcore metallurgists has grown to the point where it's become a lodestar for this new generation of worshipful revivalists.
What better time to get back together?
But the band insists this reunion isn't about cashing in on nostalgia. It's about righting something that ended prematurely. "There's so much stuff we didn't get to finish that we started," Matos says.
In 1985, a mutual friend introduced a teenage Matos, Duffy and second guitarist Marco "Sharko" Zorich to drummer Brian Lehfeldt and bassist Shann Mortimer, who at the time were dabbling in Aquanet and pop-metal but wanted to get into the harder stuff. At its first practices, the quintet started out writing songs with standard tempos. "A week later," Duffy says, "Brian just started blast-beating it"—referring to the blindingly fast drumming style typically employed by grindcore bands—erwhelming speed became Wehrmacht's defining characteristic—as did its love of beer. Although its name, which translates generically into "defense force" but is most commonly associated with the armed forces of Nazi Germany, conjures up images of war and fascism, the group's actual ideals were more Animal House than brownshirt. Its song titles include "Drink Beer Be Free" and "Munchies"; the cover of its second album, 1987's Biermacht, depicts a cartoon version of the band flanking a keg-shaped tank.
Wehrmacht's hard-partying attitude, coupled with its then unprecedented instrumental velocity, immediately attracted fans from both sides of the punk/metal divide. The band drew huge crowds to all-ages Portland venues like Satyricon, Pine Street Theater and Starry Night, and opened for practically every major heavy act that passed through town, from Suicidal Tendencies to Slayer. In Seattle, the band's shows were frequented by a pre-fame Chris Cornell, Green River and Alice in Chains. When it went to Europe for the first time in 1989, the group played for crowds numbering in the thousands.
Then the '90s hit. Nevermind famously killed off mainstream hair metal, but it also drew listeners away from bands like Wehrmacht. Plus, the interests of its members, who had just entered their 20s, began to splinter. After the group's split in 1992, the musicians went in radically different directions: Mortimer became a defense attorney, Lehfeldt did a stint in Everclear, Duffy went in and out of several unsuccessful industrial-metal outfits before joining Lehfeldt in a Van Halen tribute act. Matos underwent the most radical career change, becoming a high-profile club DJ and moving to Las Vegas.
Talk of reuniting began a few years ago. Initially, Matos resisted, but, tiring of life in Sin City, he eventually relented, under one condition: "I won't play publicly whatsoever if it's not really tight." Rehearsals started last September, and the band discovered it hadn't lost its chops, nor its intensity. At its first gig back in San Francisco on Aug. 3, the fivesome performed a powerful set for an ecstatic crowd that was mostly the same age as they were when they first got together. Some things have changed, of course—Matos prefers cocktails to beer these days; Duffy hardly drinks at all anymore—but overall, "It's like we haven't missed a beat," Duffy says.
Matos agrees. "Even though we are older, we really do sound identically heavy."
Duffy corrects him: "We're even better." He laughs. "We're not all drunk."
Wehrmacht plays the Hawthorne Theatre on Saturday, Aug. 15. 8 pm. $10. All ages.
WWeek 2015