When DevilDriver finally got back on the road this past March – following a three-and-a-half-year absence reflective of the pandemic and vocalist Dez Farfara’s near-deadly bout with Covid – lead guitarist Mike Spreitzer got to take his number one electric guitar out of its case for the first time in ages.
Spreitzer is quick to point out he was still shredding at home, but when it comes to his drastically angular ESP V, some things just aren’t built for riffing on the couch.
“They’re not the most comfortable shape to play sitting down,” Spreitzer says with a laugh, confessing that ESP Eclipses are his go-tos in those cases, this also extending to the guitar pool he turned to while tracking DevilDriver’s bombastically grooved Dealing with Demons Vol. I and II.
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In a live setting, though, he’s simply awestruck by the attack of his custom V, which features an inlay of DevilDriver’s logo at the 12th fret. And he’s not the only one. “There’s just something about that one in particular… Almost every time I go out on tour, I’ll catch one of the other bands playing it. When we were on tour with Static-X, Koichi [Fukuda] would take that out of our guitar boat every day.”
Like DevilDriver’s return to the stage, Dealing with Demons Vol. II has been a long time coming. Spreitzer and former guitarist Neal Tiemann tracked their parts all the way back in the fall of 2018, concurrent to the 10-song Vol. I, which came out in 2020 (Tiemann left the lineup in 2021).
Like its predecessor, Vol. II is an all-out war of gun-turret tremolo picking and darkly anthemic choruses, the music matching Farfara’s raw-screamed salvos on betrayals and broken relationships.
Songs gained extra heft mid-session when Spreitzer pushed arrangements from their drop C origins to drop A. And while I Have No Pity offers some traditionally floored scale work from the guitarist, on the whole Spreitzer says his lead style these days focuses on keeping things uncomfortable, via “less noodling, adding a lot of dissonant notes together and letting [notes] actually sustain.”
Though Dealing with the Demons Vol. II finds DevilDriver as oppressive as ever, its heaviest moments – take the relentlessly chunked-and-trilled Bloodbath – also possess an overcast, mournfully melodic spirit.
“Honestly, I think most of my riffs have that vibe to it,” Spreitzer says of his inkiest creations. “I don’t really utilize major scales; everything’s in harmonic minor. I would [also] say we use Phrygian mode a lot. Those kinds of scales and that kind of note selection lead to the melancholy vibe.”
