Feature article - Maximum Perverts
On the surface Daniel Majer looks like a fairly normal person; nothing about him seems to really demand attention for further inspection. But if you were to look closer, you would find that under this façade of normalness, pulsates a deeply perverted musical mind that makes up one quarter of one of Perth's top metal bands, Maximum Perversion.
Maximum Perversion is the hideously deformed lovechild of Daniel and it's three other members: brothers Jon and Andrew and friend Jason. It was born about seven years ago, when drummer, Daniel, met guitarist, Jon.
"Jon Basset and me both did the same Tafe course and we both found out that we listen to pretty much the same styles of music, so we decided that we'd start playing together. It was just he and I for the first 8 months of the band and then his brother Andrew joined…we recorded another demo and then Jason joined and we recorded the full-length album."
Seven years later they have amassed a large following not only in Perth - they were voted among the top five metal bands of Perth through an online poll and invited to play with famous international and national acts such as Pungent Stench and Blood Duster - but also in other countries such as Japan and the United States, where it seems an underground fan base has emerged based upon pirated copies of their first album, Repugnant Perturbation Excursion.
"We haven't spoken to probably half the people who are selling our CD overseas."
In the U.S., for example, a large distributor, Razorback Records, is selling their album, but how they acquired copies is a bit of a mystery to the band.
"Someone was on the Internet and found that our CD was in their new releases, I think their supplies must have siphoned off from another shop because we sent some to other stores over there"
Unfortunately for the band, this hasn't made them wealthy.
"It's good for the exposure but its bad because we don't see any money from it."
This exposure has not only been confined to overseas. Around Australia, it seems that there has been a growing demand for the band's perverted style of music.
They have been invited to play at an all ages gig, called Metalsurge, in Adelaide in October. The gig will be showcasing ten bands from around Australia, who gained the privilege from being the 10 most popular requests on Adelaide radio station Three D's metal show, Powersurge.
So just what style of music does a band called Maximum Perversion play that has made them so sought after? They have been described as an "auditory lavatory" and their live sound has been likened to "a misfiring FA-18 dragging an overturned bus." They have three vocalists, which is fairly unique for a band of their type.
"We're probably one of the few bands that have more than one vocalist and we're probably one of the bands that plays something like what would be called death 'n' roll, or grind rock. A lot of other bands play kind of thrash or melodic metal or just death metal…we have these rock and roll riffs but it's sped up."
And then there are the lyrics. Lyrical topics include, but are not exclusive to: eating flesh, men who enjoy licking the floor of fast food restaurants and strange cults. This is a band with a sense of humour; their song about eating flesh called "Thy Flesh Consumed" was later rewritten to become "Thy Ice-cream Consumed."
"We definitely laugh a lot when were thinking of the topics for the songs, lyrical ideas; we definitely don't wanna be serious."
Fans of this particular type of filth will be glad to know that the song topics for their next album will be even more bizarre.
"Some of the songs that haven't been recorded properly, we've got lots of demos of them but songs that haven't been recorded professionally, the topics for them are a lot more sort of…messed up."
Rather than spoil the surprise, I will leave it to you to go and find out for yourself exactly what the upcoming song entitled "Endoscopic Kaleidoscope" is all about.
Maximum Perversion are looking to release their next album, which they have been busy writing material for to play in Adelaide, sometime soon after that show, when they will be in form from having
practiced and performed.
"We're gonna have a lot of material that we're going to be able to play there. Right now were concentrating on writing some new songs and they're pretty much a similar style to the [first] album, but they're maybe a little bit of a step away from it because…there's a few more changes, the songs have a lot of twists in them…"
Then, it seems, follows the plan for world domination.
"We definitely want to sell it in as many countries as we can, 'cause we've gradually gotten our first album spread out over quite a few countries now and it seems to be happening," Hopefully this time they can make a little money doing so.
