Fire and Brimstone: In Conversation with Cowardice’s Julian Cardazone & Cementation Anxiety’s Kyle Nelson

Timelessness is the hallmark of any art form. Years, periods or generations, either blurred or made non-existent. There have been a handful of artists during this decade that have possessed these traits. But in the pantheon of doom, perhaps there has only been one: Cowardice.

Metal can be sometimes accused of its primitiveness. Not Cowardice, who deliver their art with deep thought and steadfast commitment. From the sounds to artwork, it’s all meticulously crafted to every grain of sound and brushstroke.

Beginning over a decade ago, in various manifestations, the band’s 2024 opus, Atavist, was the embodiment of doom metal. So good you wondered where Cowardice would go to next. The answer? Collaboration, and joining forces with Cementation Anxiety, the brainchild of Kyle Nelson, You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know has every chance of eclipsing it.

On paper, the worlds of Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety coalescing are incongruous. Both projects, very much in contrast. Cowardice’s carefully crafted compositions, imbuing an otherworldly clarity and precision. On You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know, enhanced by Cementation Anxiety’s deep explorations of ambient composition, the results hits like an avalanche.

“Often, I jokingly say CA is just a crash out, slowed down in slow motion,” says Nelson. Alongside Cowardice’s Julian Cardazone in early October, the pair are talking via Zoom about You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know. “Going into a collaboration forced me to now not think of only me in the process of writing this,” explains Nelson of the Cementation Anxiety project. One that he knew he was destined to embark on.

You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know has been years in the making. Nelson and current Cowardice members, Mark Guiliano (vocals), Nick Zwiren (guitar), Ryan Cardoza (drums) and Seth Kaplan (bass), situated in New Jersey and New York, while guitarist, Cardazone resides in Boston. “I’ll typically get up on a Saturday morning at about 5am and drive down to New Jersey in about four hours, and then we’ll rehearse for six,” explains Cardazone, who says the band rehearse again the next day from 10am to 3pm. “I’ll hop back in the car and drive back to Massachusetts and then be at work Monday morning. That’s a lot of how my weekends are spent,” he says.

It’s this unwavering dedication that solidifies the Cowardice DNA. A complete, seismic force, and it’s illuminated on You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know. An album that is, quite simply, one of the best committed to tape this year. From the opening morbid trudge of Famine, Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety guide you into their all-encompassing world. Brutal as much as it is beautiful, and one that offers endless possibilities.

The sludge-laden Elder Scripts Vaulted follows, working on various plains. At times you are placed at the bottom of the well; during others in a church. Unlearning, while something that could be considered a nod to Sunn O))), is far more than that. It’s an interlude where landscapes come into sharp focus. These exact moments where Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety move from one place to the next in their vast sound world.

And on The Mile Before the Burning Shore, they land in another part of it. Its brooding tones and unfurling cinematic characteristics, backdrops for Guiliano’s primal roar that rips apart the storm clouds. It’s an emotive power that transcends any string sections or singer / songwriter trying to force out the demons. This is sensitivity through Cardazone and Zwiren’s weight of monolithic texture and tone.

“Burning Shore was a track that was definitely a challenge for me,” says Nelson. “Most of the album is a little faster for Cowardice standards. But Burning Shore is probably the slowest song they’ve ever written. It’s a good challenge on my end, too, from someone that is a mid-tempo to faster tempo.”

Once again, this collaboration pivots. Cleric, informed by the more spacious elements of sludge and punk, is far more compositional. Effectively split in two parts, Guiliano’s vocals are delivered with immediate gusto over a wave of guitars. “I’m listening to these songs again and re-learning parts, and I’m like, ‘God, these songs are so fucking moody’,” says Nelson. “I’m listening to Cleric [thinking], ‘This is a riff I would make a lot faster’. The intro is literally fucking punk! The moodier end of punk and hardcore. Still fast, but in that realm,” he offers, drawing a line to his work in Cementation Anxiety. “It’s still the same idea, just obviously through a lot of different effects processes and lot more wash… the chordal sensibilities are still there.”

Again, Hereafter is another interlude acting as another portal that leads to a new place. And in this instance, Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety arrive the point of majesty. Brimstone, the finest moment either artist has ever delivered. A dopamine trigger of hypnotic heaviness and sea of volume that poses the ultimate question: can it get any better?

You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know is something that thrives across art’s most brutal frontiers. Nelson’s involvement, offering subtle nuances that take doom to places it has never been. “I knew that this was something that catered to me as much as it was to Cowardice, who can play these tracks alone and still sound like themselves,” says Nelson. “I’m just amplifying the songs’ sentiments when we do play them together, which is very cool.”

Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about New York and New Jersey. Again, there’s a timelessness to it whereby you can’t really picture Cowardice, in particular, being from the either place. (Or for that matter, anchored to any place at all, such as the transcendental nature of their art.) It’s an interesting juxtaposition that Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety find themselves in away from this project. The former steeped in doom; the latter in experimentalism.

“We’ve seen our listener demographics be much stronger in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, typically in the U.K. and in Europe, for the most part,” explains Cardazone. “Those scenes tend to identify with our music more than the New Jersey and New York scenes. I will say Boston has made a positive change in recent years, and it doesn’t feel as pigeonholed as it used to be,” he says, noting the scene was previously hard to crack. “I do think that there’s more stuff exciting going on in other places besides New Jersey and New York than it was like in the past.”

Nelson offers his own take. “I was thinking about a lot of this… I’m in New York all the time, and the inundation of information that you have to deal with on a daily basis of living in a city is exhausting… I don’t really think about that when I do a record at all,” he says, also explaining the pockets of inspiration in the ambient guitar space, as well as beyond in the Pacific Northwest, the South, Europe and Japan. (The latter where he has taken Cementation Anxiety.)

“It’s not thriving profoundly. But in a sense of experimental music, what’s weird in being in this realm, there’s not a direct demand for ambient,” says Nelson of New York. “I’ve luckily had the New Jersey noise scene, which has gone more underground than it already was, welcome me. And New York to some extent… I do think that noise people are open to ambient. But I’m usually the drone or a guitar-driven ambient person that’s going to be playing with noise artists because that’s the only experiment.”

Perhaps, on a subconscious level, that’s why this collaboration works on all fronts. A genesis and an endless cycle of extremes between two artists moving forward and testing the boundaries. And on You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know, Cowardice and Cementation Anxiety obliterate them.

Sun 13: How long had you all known each other before this collaboration, and how exactly did it come about?

Julian Cardazone: “Kyle and I have been sort of friends before Cementation Anxiety even existed. Actually, Kyle is a really good friend of the first bassist of Cowardice, [Stephen Edwards], and I met Kyle via them. We started hanging out, going to shows, and talking music. We very quickly learned that we aligned on a lot of stuff. I had jokingly told him one time that one of these days we have to do something together. Maybe the joke went too far one day. A little bit after Cementation Anxiety started blooming out of COVID, it was like, ‘You know what? Let’s full throttle this.”

Kyle Nelson: “Now that brings to mind two things. The first, we do have a secret track that was made in 2018. It was just Julian doing pretty much what Cementation Anxiety does with guitar. But we did it together and collab-ed on one 30-minute track, which was not ever used because of recording issues. CA wasn’t even a thing yet, because I started writing stuff for CA, I think, in November of 2019, believe it or not, which turned into an actual COVID project. I had more time, but I did start writing riffs because it is a guitar-driven project, predominantly.”

S13: Right…

KN: “Someone asked me to make a coldwave band with them because I was wearing an Asylum Party shirt at an Abysmal Lord show. (laughs). The dude there was really into that kind of music, but also post-punk. So it kind of came out of that. But what happened was that person ghosted me because I think our schedules just didn’t align.

“I had all these very ambient, post-punk riffs. I was trying to think what would I do in this genre if I was to make something like post-punk, and it just didn’t happen. So I thought, ‘Well, I guess this is the time I’m going to start this actual project’. It went from there, so when Julian approached me regarding this, we were already friends, and CA was, like Julian was saying, already blooming at that point. I think you asked me in late 2021, or early 2022?”

JC: “Yeah.”

KN: “I was already putting out things, recording all the time at home. It was already happening at that point. But then, ironically, the recording was the predecessor to of all this. We still have it. Maybe it’ll be released in like 20 years or something.” (laughs)

S13: You both arrive at this point via slightly different paths. Has metal always been the divining rod from both your formative years?

JC: “I would venture to say yes for the most part. Definitely extreme metal was what got me more into guitar music. But preceding that, I definitely wasn’t into metal immediately. When I realised I liked music was when I heard The Cranberries, and thought, ‘I don’t want to do sports in school. I want to do music’. Very quickly through my guitar teacher, he was easing extreme metal into our guitar lessons, and eventually I had sort of stumbled upon Carcass. That changed the entire game for me. From then on, about age 13 or 14, that became really the driving force behind writing and doing music.

“Of course, when you’re a teenager and metal comes into your life. I think for a lot of people it’s a little all-encompassing. It feels exciting to fall into this niche, but eventually I started picking out other sub-genres and other genres that I thought captured the same intensity that I really liked with metal. And then there was other things that trickled into my taste. But honestly, never really hardcore or punk, which I think is different for Kyle. I never was into hardcore. I was never really into punk music at all.”

KN: “I think this actually ties in really well with us even meeting. Stephen, the original bassist of Cowardice, has two great bands called Varlots and Flatwaves – both of which are in the shoegaze genre and different sides of it, but definitely in that realm, and alternative music in general. Steve and I were good friends for a very long time, and we both were listening to punk music.

“I always tell people, there are two types of people that get into subcultural stuff like punk and metal. There are punk people who get into metal, and there are metal people who get into punk. And you could always figure that out immediately. I think it shows in one’s personality in various ways. But that was a thing, and I got into extreme metal and at an older age, at like 20. But I was listening to punk music since I was like 10-12. So punk has always been part of my life.

“I had a hardcore punk band that was pretty much a predecessor to a lot of the textural ambient stuff that you would see in Cementation Anxiety, called Bodiless. That was short lived, but fast punk music with a lot of reverb, which in the next few months, I’m resurrecting with a different band name. It’s going to be that idea again, but smarter and much more mature. So punk is still always with me. I like Les Pauls because of a lot of the punk music I grew up listening to and whatnot.

“I think coming from that background made this an interesting fusion because I got into a lot of moodier music as I got older. That urgency of punk and hardcore music is still there, and the moodier end of that led to me wanting to do experimental music. I would never say anything I do with CA is ‘punk’, but I think if you know how to play guitar, [with] some of my chord progressions, you can hear where I come from. I think even punk, in the sense of ethics and how we approach things, manifests there.”

JC: “Yeah. The DIY aspect of punk has always bled into how I approach original music. I think that the figurehead band would be Thou. They were a band that came across my sights early on in getting into metal music, and I was lucky enough to become quite good friends with all of them.

“With that punk ethic they have, they were very adamant that their shows should be accessible to as many people as possible. They should be cheap to get into. They should be as all ages as possible. There were times where I was a teenager and Mitch [Wells – Thou bassist] would get me into a 21-plus show if they happened to be playing one. It was like having a band that was blowing your mind musically, and were also great people. The ethics of their music and getting people into their music was from a punk background. Because those guys, especially Bryan [Funck – Thou vocalist], who is very punk and hardcore-oriented, that was a huge impact.”

S13: With Kyle’s inclusion, how did you approach You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know in comparison with Atavist?

JC: “The writing for Atavist was really quite rushed. It’s funny because it’s such a long record, right? But it was written in essentially a 10-day span. I was in a miserable job that I hated, and I would wake up every morning before I had to go. I usually worked the later shift, and I had this goal that I felt like I was in a rut with Cowardice music, and I wanted to force myself to write a song every single day. More or less, it was done in 10 consecutive days, song after song.”

S13: Wow…

JC: “Although I’m extremely happy with the results from that, and I’m still very happy about how Atavist came out, I didn’t want to take the same approach because I felt like it would give me more room to write. There were some stipulations I had voiced to Kyle, too. I said, ‘These can’t be songs that we can only ever play with you’. We have to be able to play them as a five-piece unit as well. Obviously, for full effect, if we’re able to have Kyle for some of those shows, we would love that, and there will be some shows that will have that set up, but we want to mix these songs into our sets with other songs.

“I think the approach also was that Kyle is extremely descriptive in the way that he explains his music. And it’s descriptive in a way where I appreciate his subjectivity about his music. I see his music completely differently, which I think is fine. I actually think it makes it more interesting. When I was writing a lot of these songs, I was trying to write to the subjectivity that I get out of Kyle’s music. That in more ways than not, when Kyle sent me demos of other work, I think sometimes my feedback was a lot different than maybe he was expecting.”

KN: “It’s good. That’s why I need that.”

JC: “When I’ve had that history of providing feedback that maybe you’re not expecting, it almost makes me think, ‘Can I make the songwriting from my angle work in synergy with this?’ I didn’t want to give Kyle an obscene amount of cues on what to do, but I wanted to steer the subjectivity of it to how I planned out a riff, or how I planned out a section, or how I wrote an intended atmosphere for a part. And of course, also the big difference was writing it over a longer period of time. It still wasn’t a lot of time that I wrote it over; maybe approximately two months or so. The songs came together in the Cowardice version until we presented them to Kyle and said, ‘Here’s what we’ve got. Let’s work’.”

KN: “The joy and also the problem of doing something like Cementation Anxiety is that you kind of get trapped in your own head. When you’re doing solo work of any genre but especially if you’re making drone and ambient or noise adjacent music, at times it becomes very solipsistic. You get really trapped in yourself. So I think the prospect of doing something collaborative, which was to my knowledge, the first collaboration–I’ve had a lot of other collabs that I’m doing or are already out–but this first one was a very inviting prospect.

“I was actually surprised when he first asked me about it, because I know how seriously he takes Cowardice. And that’s not even self-demeaning. I just knew this is super important for him. So going into that process of doing this, I had to think of how I fitted in with this process. If Julian left me space, I had to figure out how to fill out that space.

“I literally sat on them for a while, and we had our first rehearsal in late July of 2022. We went up to Boston and did it for two days. We didn’t record anything, we just jammed. It wasn’t really until later that year that I think Nick programmed the drums where I then started sitting down where I home record to figure out what works and what doesn’t. In the sense of recording and practicing them and then bringing a more rehearsed version of those songs to the ones that we would then do in early 2023. It wasn’t until then we booked time in 2024.

“I think I was really trying to just fill in the blanks in the correct spaces, and give time for Cowardice and myself in respective projects. I’m a very busy punk guitarist I would say, and it’s funny. Literally, Steve was talking about this yesterday about not taking time in between things. I have a very busy ambient sound compared to how I play guitar on this collaboration album. So I think with Cowardice–knowing that they were more or less taking the lead–gave me a space to slow down in the sense of how to complement and not eclipse what they’re doing, but also obviously being present. I didn’t want to make it the CA show. I knew that if I did that, it wouldn’t really be a good representation of what Cowardice is doing either because it’s their riffs that I’m playing to, respectfully.”

S13: Hearing Julian speak of the process of Atavist, it’s a fascinating contrast to this record. I feel like Cowardice’s brand of doom is very much stitched together in a compositional way. Are you building parts in songs and then working outwards?

JC: “We’re shying away from this now, which is sort of my preference. But for the longest time, I would bring the entire skeleton of the song to the rest of the band. If there were embellishments to be made, some people would give their opinions or embellish where they would like. I would say, it came into play over the years before we had Nick as our other guitarist. Once Nick joined the band, he and I realised this yin and yang relationship that we have with songwriting, where if I bring him the skeleton, he’ll dress it up with everything. Maybe this is a horrible comparison, but it’s like bringing a dead body to a coroner, ‘Put him in a suit and get it in the casket’. I’ll bring Nick the body, and he’ll do some of the embellishment work.”

S13: He’s like Michael C. Hall in Six Feet Under, essentially…

JC: “Right, exactly (laughs). That was the case with Atavist, and we felt this synergy grow through that writing process. Once I brought him those songs, and then we tapped into that even more with the collaborative record, also with keeping in mind that we were going to have to make room for a third guitar as well. It was like, ‘Okay, that sounds great. What if we strip this away a little bit, though?’

“To your point about the compositionality of a lot of the Cowardice music, that is an extremely intentional component of the band, and I’m glad that comes through because I do think sometimes people recognise it, but they don’t always know how to explain what it is. We’re becoming a little bit more collaborative in our writing sessions now, which is marking a bit of a turn in some of our music, I think, in a very good way. It still feels like Cowardice, which is the really cool part. It doesn’t feel like a total distance from our old sound. There’s an extreme sense of compositionality, but now there’s an intention for all members in the writing process now that feels like it gives us more of a varied approach.”

S13: By extension I also feel that the stories embedded in your work are as vital as the music itself. Have you always held an interest in mythology and literature?

JC: “Sure. A lot of the lyrical work is not of my writing. That is only our vocalist, Mark. He is an extremely well-read individual, as are most of the members of Cowardice. Their educations are strongly rooted in philosophy and whatnot, so I’ll give them credit for those things. Are there philosophical concepts and readings that inform my writing? Yes, definitely. I’ve sort of joked with people before that nowadays when I work on Cowardice music, [they] often ask me, ‘Oh, who are your influences?’ Oftentimes, I really try not to listen to anything that is even remotely adjacent to our music because I don’t want any inflection of other heavy bands, colleagues, or whoever that is, to inflect on our music whatsoever.

“That being said, there are other facets of art and writing and reading that I think impart themselves on the music, or at least how I craft the music, more than other musical influences. Whether it be philosophy, whether it be fashion, maybe it is physical art. Whatever it be, those things are much more impactful to me now.

“The last note that I’ll make of it, and it’s another fun conversation that me and Mark typically have, is that I’m an extremely visual individual. Aesthetic is extremely important to me. I feel like we show that pretty well in the Cowardice identity, but from a songwriting aspect as well, when I’m writing, I want to see something. I want to create a world to which this song needs to be a part of. Our typical layout is: I am the one who names the songs, and I give those names to Mark. I don’t give him any other context, and he’ll write lyrics around the title of that song. I try not to mess too much with how he crafts his lyrics, but there is always this multi-modal.

“There’s a story for me in these songs in the way that I write them and name them, and there’s a story for Mark in how he writes the lyrics that are completely separate from how I see the song in my head sometimes. And then there’s a completely separate story from a listener’s point of view. How are you, the listener piecing the title, the music, and the lyrics together? There is also an intention here that there should not be a very simple way to pin anything of it down, right?”

S13: It’s funny how you said that you’re a visual person, because I think Kyle’s work in Cementation Anxiety is that, too. There’s a bleak undercurrent that captures these times, which, in essence, galvanizes this collaboration.

KN: “It’s interesting that it reflects the times. Usually with this project, I think of what I’m doing, and it’s very much an exploration of mental health. In that sense, I would say I’m hitting on different transient moments in my life. As much of a political person I am, in the sense of values and being very engaged with what’s going on in the world, CA is not really a direct reflection of that. I’m not intending to write that way in that sense, which is interesting if it comes out, because that’s really not intentional.

“There are three releases that might be reflective of my reaction to some of the exhaustion of the world that we’re in – the Glacial trilogy of EPs that came out last year. I don’t usually focus on these concepts, so I’m flattered that in whatever way that it is reflective of the times because it is there clearly. I can completely hear what you’re saying. But it’s usually a reflection of something that I’m going through with mental health. I’m a stable person, but I do use this project for working through a lot of whatever I’m going through at that moment or have been going through for the last 15 years or more.”

S13: It’s interesting that you reference the mental health aspect about Cementation Anxiety because I think that connects both of your projects here. It imbues a real sense of emotional intensity. The Mile Before the Burning Shore really captures this. Is that something you’ve thought about, or do you think it comes through subconsciously?

JC: “I’ve been pushing Mark to impart a bit more emotionality into some of the lyrics. The music, from at least from my point of view or my intention, was to make it a bit more emotional on this record, and I’m glad that’s come through. I think Atavist encapsulates a really wide range emotions, and that was almost some of the marketing of the side A and side B. Whereas the first part of that record felt lighter, or heavier in a more fun way, the latter half of the record felt heavier in a bleaker way.

“Because I see an introspection in Kyle’s music, I was hoping this record in full would impart a bit more of an introspective bleakness. Not something that is immediate. I don’t like the idea of this immediately identifiable bleak component to music. That sometimes feels extremely overplayed, and the descriptors around some of that stuff in popular music turns me off from listening to some of it.

“I’m interested in emotional music in a broad sense. I do like something that pulls at you in a way that maybe you can’t put your finger on, and how I explore that is mainly through a specific chord change or the way that the guitar feeds back in a certain way. I pull a lot of that from someone like Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson. Those two talk extensively about how they interact and let their guitar interact with their amp. They play to the strength of the instrument, and how does that feedback and that frequency make you feel? There are big, long, drawn-out sections of Mile… that intentionally does that, and the emotionality of it should be ambiguous. But it should be present, which I hope people get that out of it.”

S13: The other big standout track is Brimstone…

JC: “That one was really fun to record. We got the base of it done, and then we would add another layer, like one more thing here, do this little thing there, and I think by the time we were all done putting all the embellishments on, it was like, ‘Wow!’ I’m really extremely proud of this one. It can take me a bit sometimes to get to that. Often I’m happy with how things come out. But Brimstone, I was really excited. I’m really excited to share that in the next few weeks.”

KN: “I was talking to Steve and said that one of my proudest achievements of writing music was that song. Being part of that track and adding my take on what I was hearing with it… besides Elder Scripts Vaulted, that was the one that just came. I think some of the best songs, at least for me, probably because I made punk music first, can be done very quickly versus 10-minute epics that doom loves to do. I like long music clearly if I’m listening to ambient and noise stuff. But that track… writing it felt very natural and very quick. Obviously, there’s nuance and more complexity now. But I felt like that song specifically was done when I came to the first rehearsal.”

S13: Kyle touched on it, but I also feel that there is a political undercurrent in Cowardice’s work. Do you think the band is informed by them?

JC: “I would say that the subconscious undercurrent is absolutely there, and I think it’s funny. Mark’s a really great lyricist, and the way that he imbues some of the undercurrent is clever. I’m glad that he does it in that way. I think that there is a quiet, intentional aspect about his lyricism that I like, and it touches back on this point that I want people to dig a little bit more. I don’t really want to put the answer for everyone on a poster or a sheet of paper.

“There’s plenty of geopolitics that I think impart themselves on our music. Although I think the music itself tends to be without a definitive timeline, which I think is my preference. It doesn’t feel like this music needs to be only a part of this specific timeline we’re in. We pull from a lot of aesthetic that is from 100 years ago, or sometimes more. With some of the woodcut art, that’s another intentional thing, but it should still serve the purpose of making some of these clever deliveries of lyrics feel more timeless and how can we express that without being so intentional with the word choice that it feels like it’s only topical for this moment. There are certainly topical moments in the past, however we’ve been working on this for years. There’s a lot that has gone on in the U.S. and abroad since then.

“I hope that the amalgamation of those things is a broad stroke on a record like this, and that there’s not a particular line or anything that someone can point to and say, ‘This was probably written around this time because maybe this was happening then and they want to talk about this’. I hope that it captures a much broader stroke than that. It is there. If you dig, it’s there.”

You Have Taught Me Everything That I Know is out November 20 via. Pre-order from Bandcamp.