“Doing an album without the defence of comedy is daunting!”: Why Blood Vulture are no laughing matter

Best known for hilarious metal chat show Two Minutes To Late Night, Jordan Olds is an obsessive music-lover. He spent much of lockdown putting together one-off supergroups for covers of everyone from Kate Bush to the Misfits, with members of Mastodon, The Dillinger Escape Plan and My Chemical Romance to name but a few. So he must have been planning his new project Blood Vulture for ages, right?

“Weirdly, I didn’t think about doing about it until 2023,” Jordan explains. “A lot of musicians start a band, play two or three shows, do an EP or a demo, and then two members stop getting along and it ends. And I think that happened to me every time! But I was on tour with LINGUA IGNOTA, and our mutual friend KW from Vile Creature sat me down at a Cheesecake Factory in Boise, Idaho, and asked, ‘Why don’t you have a band?’”

His friend’s encouragement may have lit the fuse, but Blood Vulture – an intoxicating blend of grandiose doom, with notes of death metal and seriously haunting harmonies – aren’t what you’d expect from the man behind corpsepainted comedy host Gwarsenio Hall.

“Absolutely, it’s terrifying,” laughs Jordan. “Just doing an album without the defence of comedy is daunting, and this is the most sincere thing that I’ve ever done. I think people would expect me to have a project that was more like Thin Lizzy or Judas Priest.”

With so many esteemed musicians on his contacts list, it’s also a surprise that the official featured guests on Blood Vulture’s excellent debut Die Close number just three, all chosen in a spirit of devotion and with a desire to challenge.

“When I was getting into punk and alternative music, AFI was the gateway band for me,” Jordan recalls. “The most abrasive, fast and riffy song on the album is Grey Mourning, and I thought of (AFI guitarist) Jade Puget as one of the last guitar players that people would expect to hear on a song like that!

“Then when I was writing Entwined, it turned into this big rock opera. Kristin Hayter (of LINGUA IGNOTA fame) may be the best modern singer right now, but she’s never done a song like that, and she’s this magic piece that really pulls it together. And Brian Fair [of Shadows Fall] has the coolest scream I’ve ever heard in my life. Burn For It is the poppiest song on the record, so I thought it would be fun to put the most aggressive vocalist on it!”

As well as musical influences, Jordan drew inspiration from Bram Stoker’s gothic classic Dracula (“Every sentence is macabre and beautiful!”) and the works of film-maker Wong Kar-Wai. But did he choose his project’s name from a creature in the game Warhammer?

“Honestly, it’s a total coincidence!” he claims. “I was getting a tattoo of a bearded vulture, and through my research I discovered that when they kill something, they roll around in its carcass and wear its blood on their white feathers. And also it sounds like a term for a vampire! So no, I’ve never played the game, but I do love (the Warhammer-obsessed) Bolt Thrower, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me!”

Die Close is out now via Pure Noise.

Read this next:

• Album review: Blood Vulture – Die Close
• The story of doom metal in 29 songs
  
• Vile Creature: "The most metal thing that you can do is care about other people"