Volbeat mixing it up at House of Blues

His dad always wanted to go to Graceland, but he never got the chance.

“My father was a huge Elvis fan,” says Michael Poulsen, frontman for Danish rockers Volbeat. “When he died four years ago, I lifted him up in the coffin in the living room, I took his comb, I combed his beard, and I promised him that I was going to take that comb and put it on Elvis’ grave. So I went to the U.S. and put that comb on Elvis’ grave and took some grass from Graceland and went back home and planted it on my father’s grave.”

After visiting Graceland, Poulsen would drive to Tupelo, Miss., to see where Elvis was born.

“The navigation system in the car suddenly just blacked out,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh no, my first time in the car in the U.S.’ Even though there were signs everywhere, I just didn’t feel that comfortable. While I was driving, there was this eagle in the air, and I became a little bit emotional about it. My father was really into eagles, he had an eagle tattooed on his chest, and I was thinking, ‘I’m just going to follow that eagle and see where it brings me.’ The eagle went a little bit to the right, so I went right. I looked up, and I was in Tupelo, and the eagle just took off.”

When he got back home, he had the eagle tattooed on his hand.

Poulsen’s a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy, a true rock ’n’ roll romantic, and you can hear it clearly in his band’s music.

As his recollections suggest, Elvis figures prominently in Volbeat’s equally earthy and hard-edged catalog, namely in Poulsen’s singing voice, as he tends to accent the last word of his vocal lines, stretching the syllables into a dramatic croon, which is also suggestive of Glen Danzig and James Hetfield.

When he sings “ripper” it comes out “r-e-a-p-p-a-h-h-h!”

Volbeat’s mining of the American music tradition doesn’t stop with Presley, though. Johnny Cash’s early rockabilly years are a clear influence, as is the crunch of vintage Metallica and the roots-excavating, hard-charging Americana of Social Distortion.

But Volbeat don’t sound like a mash of contrasting styles, nor do they feel derivative.

Perhaps the band’s defining trait is their skill at taking well-established musical touchstones and fashioning them into something distinct.

Their sound is a singular one, rooted in heavy metal, but with plenty of blues, punk and even country-western flourishes. Volbeat’s previous disc, “Beyond Hell/Above Heaven,” lends itself to both headbanging and the busting out of some air banjo licks, depending on the track.

There’s some heated harmonica playing on the album, as well as a guttural guest spot from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway.

That record, Volbeat’s fourth overall, went platinum in a number of European countries and was the first to register on the Billboard album chart here.

The band’s forthcoming new release, “Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies,” due April 9, builds upon another Volbeat trademark, a lyrical enthrallment with outsiders and gangsters, ne’er-do-wells and troublemakers, cowboys and criminals.

“It’s just something that I’ve been fascinated about since I was a kid, because my father was watching those old Western movies and gangster movies,” Poulsen says. “As a little kid, I think I speak for every man when I say that we all wanted to be policemen or cowboys or firemen. We had our heroes. Sometimes, the outlaws were pretty cool, too, because they were also gentlemen. Somehow, that’s quite fascinating, being your own man, making your own rules.”

Speaking with Poulsen, it’s clear that he relates to these characters, in his own way, like when he recalls sneaking into a neighbor’s house to hear Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut record when he was a boy.

“My mother’s brother had it,” he recalls. “I was so afraid of that album cover, with the woman at the graveyard, it was so spooky. So I said, ‘I want to hear this record.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re probably not old enough.’ He lived next door to my parents, so when he was not home, I jumped over the fence, found his key, locked myself in and put on the record. I was totally sold. I loved it. It was when I first heard Black Sabbath that I knew that I wanted to play guitar.”

Now, decades later, Poulsen’s plays his guitar in arenas. He may sing of underdogs, but he no longer qualifies as one.

“We can definitely feel the pressure and expectations and everything, and that’s good,” Poulsen says of the raised stakes for Volbeat’s new record. “That just means that we’ve got something cooking.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at
jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.