When Earth Crisis stepped onto the scene in the early nineties, hardcore changed forever. In celebration of the anniversary rerelease of their groundbreaking debut album Destroy The Machines, vocalist and Vegan Straight Edge legend Karl Buechner revisits his band’s tumultuous past with us.
Sometimes it just takes a small group of dedicated people and a dream to change the world. That’s cheesy, it’s idealistic, but also – at least sometimes, luckily – the truth. Because if it weren’t for a gang of young guys from Syracuse, New York, in the nineties, hardcore would look and sound very different today: You can’t talk about Vegan Straight Edge and metalcore without crediting Earth Crisis. In the face of the crack epidemic and impending environmental collapse, they brought a new ideology, a new militancy and new sounds to the genre that would influence everyone from Hatebreed to AFI.
Building on the legacy of vegetarian straight edge Youth Crew and New York hardcore bands of the eighties, Earth Crisis added veganism, animal rights, environmentalism and direct action to the thematic mix, along with a new heaviness and aggression taken directly from metal greats like Slayer and Bolt Thrower. Needless to say: They stirred shit up. While their second EP Firestorm (1993) started a huge hype and their debut album Destroy The Machines (1995) turned into the most-sold release on Victory Records at the time, the hate and outrage grew. (Needless to say, homophobic and misogynist hardliners, violent, elitist edge crews and people rocking “Kill your local drug dealer” shirts didn’t help the Vegan Straight Edge image.) But while Earth Crisis didn’t shy away from conflict, they also took to the stages of all kinds of shows and festivals in the metal and hardcore cosmos as well as TV shows to defend their beliefs and advocate for a cruelty-free, drug-free lifestyle. And that’s what they do until this day: Earth Crisis and its quasi-spinoffs Freya, Sect and Path Of Resistance (who also celebrate the 30-year anniversary of their debut Who Dares Wins) are still going strong.
With Earth Crisis and Path Of Resistance celebrating the 30-year anniversaries of their debut albums with special rereleases, we took the opportunity to talk to vocalist Karl Buechner about the inspirations, the mindset and the pushbacks that made Earth Crisis one of the biggest hardcore bands of the nineties.
Karl, when you wrote and recorded Firestorm and Destroy The Machines, did you feel you were doing something different than whatever else was out there at the time?
I think so. I loved Youth Of Today, Uniform Choice, Judge, Killing Time and all those bands, but I didn't really want to be them. We wanted to do our own thing, and we also had a deep love for metal. So, my thought was: Let's incorporate elements of metal into the hardcore sound. Some of my favorite songs, as far as lyrics go, were Shoot His Load from Agnostic Front, Pink Things from Token Entry or The Deal from Brotherhood. I liked songs that were about freedom fighters or what the media would refer to as vigilantes. I thought that would be a cool angle to hit on and a cool history to explore. And we have been continuing to write songs about that ever since, these things that are happening on the margins of history that don't necessarily get a lot of light shed on them.
Especially your lyrics about environmentalism and, most importantly, veganism, were something that was not really a thing in hardcore back then. Did you know this sort of lyrical content from other genres, or was that an influence that came from outside of music?
We had a strong love and appreciation for bands like Concrete Sox and Conflict. We liked how they weren't just singing about being vegetarian or vegan, but they had songs about direct action to save animals. And I thought that was one of the most important things, to run a highlighter over these individuals who were taking it upon themselves to break into fur ranches or vivisectionist laboratories and rescue those creatures from being tortured and killed. So, Earth Crisis ended up having songs about the Animal Liberation Front, Earth First, Sea Shepherd and specific incidents, like how some whaling ships were sunk in Iceland or animals were saved from a vivisectionist lab in Maryland. We would kind of stir them together and do quick outlines of those stories, and hopefully, listeners would explore further on their own.
Did you feel that was something that was lacking in the Youth Crew movement or the Straight Edge movement before, that it didn't go far enough in that regard?
It's not that they didn't go far enough, it's that we wanted to take it further. We will always owe a deep debt of gratitude to Youth Of Today with the song No More, or Insted had a song about animal rights with a great line saying something along the lines of “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would stop eating meat.” We agreed with what they were saying. We just wanted to carry it further.
Why do you think that was?
I had been volunteering at the Syracuse Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, and I was seeing animals that had been intentionally harmed for no reason other than that the people who were committing those acts of cruelty were sadistic. Animals that had been burned or hit with pipes or whatever else. And not only did I pity those creatures for the suffering they were enduring, but I had a genuine hatred for the people who had inflicted that suffering on them. I wanted to vent that out.
So, Earth Crisis was and is a form of activism?
I think it is. If we were photographers or poets or filmmakers, that's what we would be involved with because it's in our hearts. We want to spread this message. And most importantly, we wanted to spread the message of compassion over cruelty. And that's why we wrote songs like New Ethic or Morality Dictates. We really wanted to spell it out. I'm sure one of the critiques in the future will be that it just sounds like propaganda or a pamphlet – that's okay because at that time, you have to remember, there wasn't the internet, there wasn't a lot of these giant organizations, there wasn't all the celebrity chefs online promoting this concept. So, we were coming from out of nowhere in a lot of ways because we didn't just want to preach to the converted in the punk or the metal or the hardcore scene. We wanted to reach outside of it. And that's what we did. We would tour with bigger bands like Gwar or have guest vocalists like Rob Flynn from Machine Head. We wanted to be on metal radios, we wanted to reach out and we took advantage of the opportunities when MTV or ABC News or CNN started to take notice of this huge rise in numbers of people that were involved in all this.
Musically, it made sense for you to be on those metal bills because you had incorporated a lot of this chuggy metal heaviness into your sound. By that time, metal and hardcore had already separated quite a bit – so was that controversial for you?
It was, but we weren't alone in pioneering that. There was Merauder with the Master Killer album, Turmoil, Ringworm and, of course, Integrity. These guys that grew up in the hardcore scene going to shows in the eighties were like: Well, how do we make this music even more aggressive? And it was pretty simple: Just start putting aspects of metal – the percussive, brutal aspects of metal – into hardcore.
Throughout the years, Earth Crisis had several stylistic incarnations. Looking back at Destroy The Machines, do you feel like that was already what you wanted Earth Crisis to be?
When it comes to the musicianship of Scott, Ian and Dennis, they delivered it. I wish I was a better vocalist at the time. I think I was striving too much for clarity, and I didn't put the power into it that I was able to later on. I'll be forever happy with the final versions of To The Death, Neutralize The Threat, Salvation Of Innocents and Vegan For The Animals. Those records are where I achieved what I had always been striving to vocally, where there was a balance of making it as hard as possible, but you can still kind of hear the words.
Still, Destroy The Machines was your first big step towards becoming one of the defining hardcore or metalcore bands of the nineties – which probably means there was a lot of hate as well.
There was. Obviously, there were people who wanted more of the same. In My Eyes, Mouthpiece and these Youth Crew revival bands, they're fantastic and they're recreating what they grew up with. They're the next generation version of the Taang!, Revelation and Indecision bands. I'm glad they're there, but with Earth Crisis, it was always kind of a laboratory, and we were in there to experiment. The goal was always to make it more aggressive than what we've done before.
And you guys started your own more traditional hardcore band with Path Of Resistance. What was your vision for this band?
That is basically our version of a Straight Edge hardcore band. I wanted it to be kind of a throwback to what we grew up loving in the eighties, but we wanted to have a unique spin on it. And I thought bringing in three vocalists, trading off words and chanting together on choruses would be different enough that we would stand out. And it actually kind of worked.
That first album Who Dares Wins came out 1996, just a few weeks before Gomorrah’s Season Ends, when Earth Crisis was starting to blow up on a bigger scale. It seems like it was an opportunity to step back from all this hype and do something bit less controversial.
Yeah, I think that was one of the aspects that made it fun. It was very direct and it wasn't hard to write. I think we wrote all those songs on the album in three practices, and we recorded it in maybe a week. Oh, and we're actually working on a new record now.
Earth Crisis is known to be a militant band but the lyrics of that first Path Of Resistance album are also pretty harsh – you guys didn’t hold back. Now that you have the gift of hindsight, are there any lines you wrote where today you feel like you went too far?
Well, hardcore is about expressing your viewpoints, and it's also about releasing the anger that's inside of you through music. So, in that sense, I do think that it is positive and healthy. As far as everything that happened beyond that and outside of that: Of course, there were some people that took ideas and weaponized them, and they were being judgmental and harsh with others. But that honestly was never the case for us. We always toured with other bands – some of them were Krishna, some of them were New York City or New Jersey street guys, some of them had political viewpoints. We got along with everybody, but we were rock solid with our beliefs and we didn't sugarcoat anything. I think people respected us because of that, because a lot of the straight edge bands prior to us kind of treated the whole thing like a rock and roll fantasy camp. They were involved for three or four years, and then they disappeared and started indie rock bands or whatever and there were no real trace elements of anything that connected to animal rights or straight edge anymore. That's fine, they moved on.
But what was disappointing was a lot of those people would run the ideas down in interviews and run people down that still held those views. That was pretty insulting at the time because we were trying to get something established that would be real, that could grow. We didn't want a private club for us and our friends, we wanted this to hopefully reach out and help some kid in a town where a mayor declared a state of emergency because meth-related crime was so out of control that there was no other alternative. We wanted that kid to know that he didn't have to go down that drain. He could step out of that and into a different world and create a band like ours or write poems or make documentary films or whatever to forward straight edge to more people, and then it would grow and hopefully have a positive impact on their lives in the way that it did for us. So, there's nothing that I regret because it's like a diary. That was what was real, that was what was going on, and I think it ultimately served a very good purpose.
So, you spent a lot of time trying to win people over.
There was definitely a lot of hostility to our ideas. I remember people throwing full cans of beer at us while we were on stage or burning cigarettes or meat or cheese or yogurt. We played a club in Rhode Island and someone was throwing dead mice at us. You have to remember that when you're on stage, the lights are blinding, so you can't really see where this is coming from. And my thought at the time was, it's like in World War Two when the pilots were over the target – that's when they were getting the flak. The anti-aircraft fire was coming up from the ground and the bombs were exploding around them. And I felt like that's what we were doing: These people were so offended by our message or challenged by it, that this was them pushing back. And in a way, they were testing us. If things like that happened, we would make it a point to go back to that city over and over again. If you antagonize us, we're coming back, and we're going to bring people with us, too. Sometimes there'd be two carloads or a van that would follow us with our friends. It let kids know that we were real, we weren't going to be scared away.
There’s a great urgency in the songs of Destroy The Machines. It’s been 30 years – and look where we are now. How does it make you feel to see the current state of the world?
I think in some ways, there are things that we can look at that are better. There are more people involved that consider animal welfare. I think a lot of ground has been gained when it comes to vegan alternatives of things that prior to our age were the direct product of the confinement, torture, suffering and killing of animals. It's pretty amazing that you can walk into a grocery store and basically not miss anything. It's incremental steps. And every day, somebody new discovers Earth Crisis or Freya or Path Of Resistance, young guys or girls that are curious about all these concepts. I think it's important to give them some guidance.
