Casket Robbery
Casket Robbery Interview with Cory Schneider (guitar) and Dustin Foesch (vocals)
by Chris Fox
February 2013
Casket Robbery
Casket Robbery Interview with Cory Schneider (guitar) and Dustin Foesch (vocals)
The underground tends to house many variations of extreme music, from hardcore punk to death metal. Occasionally, a band makes their heavy-hitting presence known, so that even those outside the underground are saying their name. Plowing through the regional metal scene, CASKET ROBBERY manages to circumvent the status quo with their unique brand of death metal. Guitarist Cory Schneider, formerly of Luna Mortis, explains, “Imagine the slamming death metal soundtrack that a serial killer would be hearing in his head while he chops off the limbs of his victims.” Gruesome imagery aside, vocalist Dustin Foesch says, “Our sound, in a nutshell, would be classic groove-based death metal with a modern horror twist.”
Like many bands in the genre, CASKET ROBBERY prides themselves on their live show. Schneider says, “Everything we do, we try to do at a high level. When you come see us live you will see and hear an intense, heavy band that you can really get into and enjoy.” Grinding riffs speak the mind of a quintet that thrives on the mentality that nothing is what it seems. They have a sound in which grooved-out songs are “like writing a slamming death metal soundtrack to a horror story,” says Schneider. “A song isn’t finished for me until it has a certain feeling or flow and I think that is the most important part of writing a good song. When I write these songs, I try to write from a visual standpoint. ”Foesch continues, “When Cory [Schneider] writes the riffs, they come from classic 80s gore horror-movie stuff. Dead Alive, Evil Dead, Re-animator… he takes a very visual route to writing the Casket stuff.”
As the band works on recording their full-length album, they continue to play brutal live shows. “We like to be heavy hitters on both ends. We have high-energy tunes that convey our fierceness to the listener. We like to have fun on stage and we love to see the audience freak shit,” says Foesch. Digressing on the difficulties of breaking onto the national scene, Schneider says, “We just concentrate on putting on great live shows and operating the band on a professional level.”
Unlike many of their death metal peers, CASKET ROBBERY veers from the fantastical, horror-ridden imagery. Instead, “the lyrics come straight out of history. Everything I write about is real life,” explains Foesch. “There is something about reality that is bone chilling and terrifying.” This mentality stays true to their philosophy of never judging a book (or a band) by its cover. Foesch continues, “Music shouldn’t be looked at as a rigid object with a singular destination. It’s liquid, it flows and changes in ways you can’t predict… I love guys like Prince, Michael Jackson, and Huey Lewis and I’m metal as shit.”
As a band that is establishing themselves, CASKET ROBBERY has made sure that they are nothing to be scoffed at. Though their tunes have grooved riffs, rest assured that they do not lack the traditional death metal brutality. If you’re anything like Schneider and “Listening to real, heavy, and slamming metal keeps [you] up at night”, CASKET ROBBERY is a band to check out.
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