The BELIEVER album 'Extraction From Mortality' extracted a response from the Cross Rhythms reviewer "has to be the best Christian thrash LP so far". Doug Van Pelt spoke to the band's leader Kurt Bachman.

Believer

Kurt Bachman is a committed individual. He's not committed to a Pennsylvania state institution tor the mentally ill, hut to his Lord, his hand, and his music. So, sit back, loosen up your white laboratory coat, and monitor this conversation between two patient people: myself and Kurt.

Kurt: "What are we going to talk about this time?" asks Kurt.

Doug: We'll talk about the new album.

Kurt: "Okay. There's three ballads on it."

Doug: Where are the three ballads man? I've heard the album.

Kurt: "Oh, the first three songs. We didn't put any side two, 'cause that'd be like copying Stryper. We don't want that. We all like this album better than the first one. What do you want to know about the album?"

Doug: How 'bout the lyrics?

Kurt: "We wanted to touch on some subjects that we felt were not covered by any other band out there. I think the lyrics on this album are a lot better too. We took a lot more time on the lyrics. We went about it the same basic way, you know, as far as using direct scripture and stuff as much as we possibly could.

The first song, 'Sanity Obscure,' deals with the end times, and signs that we can see but others don't. The next song, 'Wisdom's Call' is about wisdom from God. The quest for wisdom. We have to go after that. 'Non Point' is about the environment. It addresses the abuse we have done to this planet, like with the rain forests being cut down and not replanted, and corrupting the air. The song kind of switches around and changes meaning at the end by talking about the pollution that corrupts our soul. It's probably the most technical song on the album, as far as time changes and stuff like that goes.

"Idols Of Ignorance" talks about idolatry from a number of angles, including how money can influence you to do wring things. "Stop The Madness" deals with drug abuse. It talks about how totally wrong and bogus and insane it really is. I hear that Road Racer wants to use that song. They have a little message inside all their albums, and it says 'Stop the madness!' They support this campaign that started in England to stop the use of hard drugs. They want to use our song in a radio campaign.

We have the song "Diesaries," which is like an Opera-type thing with violins and stuff in it. It's a requiem, which is like a death mass we wrote. It's all in Latin. We took bits and pieces from a lot of Mozart's Requiem. The translation's in the album. It's pretty neat. We have a song called "Dust To Dust." It has to do with the meaninglessness of our labour here on earth, and the meaninglessness of a lot of things without God. From dust you came, and you're gonna return to dust. Whatever the work you do, you labour in vain. We took a lot of that from Ecclesiastes. The we have the cover tune (laughs). It's U2's "Like A Song.""

Doug: What inspired you to do that?

Kurt: "There's a lot of bands, like Dark Angel did a Zeppelin cover...even Vengeance did a Deep Purple cover. A couple of bands have done Black Sabbath covers and stuff, and they're all, like, old metal bands that they did covers of. We wanted to do one that we liked, that was kind of still underground. So, we picked the 'War' album and the song "Like A Song," because when you listen to the original, you can hear a lot of potential stuff that we could add to make it a Believer song, like some double bass parts and a heavy feel. We all like the tune, and we just decided to do it. People think we're weird because we did "Stress," and stuff like that, so we thought we'd do a U2 song and be a little bit more weirder. Plus, we'll probably be touring with them (laughter). No

The title 'Sanity Obscure' really fits this album. We're gonna have an abstract art piece for the album cover. We wanted to avoid the confusion people had on our 'Extraction From Mortality' cover. We want our ministry to be the lyrics, you know. We want people to find out what 'Sanity Obscure' means by reading the lyrics to that song. Plus, the abstract artwork kind of fits our whole thing, as far as being weird and...insane. We wanted to be different...instead of all these gory thrash albums you don't understand. We wanted to take a different approach, since this album we feel is a little more technical than the last one. There's a little bit more thought out parts, and Joey goes off a lot more on the drums."