Coal Chamber 'Shock The Monkey'

09/07/1999 7:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(9/7/99, 4 p.m. PDT) - Coal Chamber's new album Chamber Music, released today, adds new dimensions to the band's modern metal sound, including strings and a reworked version of Peter Gabriel's "Shock The Monkey."

The band's members love the song, but drummer Mike Cox and singer Dez Fafara tell LAUNCH they were hesitant choosing it as a single because of the current trend of covering classic songs lick-for-lick to break onto the charts.

"A lot of bands right now are using covers to do this, but they're doing the cover exactly like [the original version] and it sounds nothing like the rest of the record," Cox says. "And that's what we didn't want to do. So we definitely made it anti-pop and anti-radio, so if they latch on then they do, but they can't say, 'Oh they did it for radio.'"

Fafara adds, "And the video is the same thing. It's not a huge flashy affair. It's really dark and gritty, grindy, and it's almost something you'd see from an old Nine Inch Nails video."

Coal Chamber is currently on tour with Roadrunner labelmates Machine Head and Slipknot through Sept. 17.

-- Darren Davis, New York

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