Macabre’s Lance Lencioni, a.k.a. “Corporate Death”

“Murder music” might sound like a buzzword from a PMRC wet dream, but no other term describes Chicago’s Macabre better. For more than 25 years, the band—fronted by vocalist-guitarist Lance Lencioni (a.k.a. “Corporate Death”)—has terrorized the metal underground with its twisted humor and songs based on the real-life atrocities committed by notorious killers like Albert Fish (“Albert Was Worse Than Any Fish in the Sea”) and Richard Speck (“What the Heck, Richard Speck?”), as well as an entire album based around Jeffrey Dahmer. In anticipation of the band’s 11th-annual “Holiday Of Horrors” show at Reggie’s Rock Club Dec. 23, The A.V. Club caught up with Lencioni to talk murder, “scary tales,” and what people can expect at this year’s Horrors.
The A.V. Club: You guys have been doing this for a while, and, in a lot of circles, are regarded as having influenced death metal. Does it get weird hearing people say that?
Lance Lencioni: It’s really cool that people say that, and I guess we’ve been around a long time now, but we don’t really do “death metal.” We have in the past, and there are some death metal elements in there. We’ve been calling it “murder metal” for a while, and now I just call it “murder music.” A lot of death metal bands are limited to what they can do, because if they start doing nursery rhymes in there and stuff like we do, I don’t know if people would accept it as much.
AVC: How did the killer-themed music come about?
LL: Me and the bassist (Charles Lescewicz, a.k.a. “Nefarious”) have been jamming together in bands since high school. At some point, someone brought this drummer over (Dennis Ritchie, a.k.a. “Dennis the Menace”). He was a kid, about 12 or 13 years old. But Macabre started from a book report I did back in junior high about Bonnie and Clyde, and I had also read about Albert Fish and Ed Gein in this book called Bloodletters And Badmen. I was just fascinated. How could this old man (Fish) be eating little kids? It was just like, “Wow,” you know? I didn’t really know much about serial killers or anything like that. Years later, this came out in our music. I said, “Let’s do a song about this Ed Gein guy and Albert Fish.” Then one thing led to another and I just said, “Let’s do nothing but serial killer songs. We’ll be pioneers of it.” That’s kind of how it started. This is probably about seven or eight years after I did this report that we started doing the killer songs.
AVC: Earlier this year, you released an album titled Grim Scary Tales. Based on the title, I thought there might have been a thematic shift from killers to gruesome fairy tales…
LL: There’s no fairy tales. We sing about “scary tales.” It’s all real stuff. There’s nothing that’s fake in there. I mean, this Vlad The Impaler guy existed and killed numerous people by impaling them, you know? It’s all historical figures, all real. What I was trying to do was base it on the Grimm’s fairy tales. A lot of those stories are based on real killers, and I’m like, “Okay, we do the kids’ rhymes and stuff in there,” so it just popped in my head one day. I was going to call the album something different, and then it just popped in my head.
AVC: The annual Holiday of Horrors show is coming. How long have you all been doing these shows and how did they come about?