Botch was a band between 1993 and 2002, and whose influence on modern progressive metal cannot be overstated. Their landmark 1999 album We Are the Romans still holds up today, as does the rest of their unfortunately brief catalog. So will we ever see Botch again? Vocalist Dave Verellen told The Peer Pleasure Podcast (via Lambgoat) he'd be down for a reunion, but it probably won't happen.
"The odds are really low," said Verellen. "But I mean, there was a couple of years where…Especially in the last five years, there was a lot of people that were like 'Hey man, before this light goes off where you guys can no longer attract a crowd anymore, because they're [the fans] all too out of touch or given up or whatever, you guys should do a show.' And there was like a surge of bands doing shows again, Snapcase was doing shows again and some other hardcore bands were all getting back together.
"So all this stuff was happening, all these promoters that came up from hardcore are now involved in the music industry and they can make it happen and they can fly you out and make equipment happen, and do all these things and make it really, really easy. We got to the point like 'yeah, this could happen'. But then the question though, do we really want to do it?'
"One of the things that came up… you know, if people missed it, maybe they just missed it and it's not fair to rehash it in some halfway 40-year-old version of Botch versus 25-year-old version of Botch. And we were really fearful that we couldn't pull it off and it wouldn't sound how people wanted it to or they'd be disappointed — all these different things that could occur.
"So we kind of continually were saying why would we want to do this? There's lots of reasons to do it, and there's also reasons not to do it, and I guess eventually that won out. For the record though, I would love to do it."
If you're unfamiliar, go listen to We Are the Romans. Now.
