Where’s the most metal place to film a guitar video? A spooky woodland, or an abandoned warehouse, perhaps? We’re here to tell you that it’s neither, and that Nishad George – of West Coast metal purveyors The Offering – has found the answer.
For his new playthrough of WASP, opening track of the band’s seething new album Seeing the Elephant, George managed to wrangle his way into setting up his guitar rig at the altar of a church.
But as he explains, the church staff were not aware of the brutality of the music George intended on filming. “The staff didn’t know about the band beforehand,” he says. “While I’m grateful, I’m pretty sure I won’t be invited back there any time soon!”
WASP itself is a seven-and-a-half-minute riot wrought with savage 7-string guitar antics – including chuggy palm-muted riffs, overhand natural harmonics, soaring melodic leads and a face-melting guitar solo with frenetic multi-string alternate picking and dizzying two-handed tapping lines – and they’re all on display in George’s new playthrough video.
As George explains, his guitar parts on the track were heavily influenced by late Children of Bodom frontman Alexi Laiho.
“The guitar’s role here is to manage the aggression,” he says. “There isn’t a moment where I’m not playing during all eight minutes of the song, and the cherry on top is the song’s massive three-minute lead guitar section near the end… I wrote the riffs to this song a day after Alexi Laiho had passed – it’s musically a bit of a tribute to one of my late heroes.”
The gear George managed to smuggle into the church long enough to film the playthrough included a V-style Ibanez 7-string electric guitar fitted with Ernie Ball guitar strings and tuned to GDGCFAD, a Neural DSP Quad Cortex floor amp modeler and two stompboxes: a Morley 20/20 Bad Horsie wah pedal and a DigiTech Whammy DT pitch-shifter pedal.
The Offering's new album, Seeing the Elephant, takes no prisoners, to say the least. Another standout cut is Flower Children, which takes aim at the boomer generation.
