Lucubro 
Rust Buckets in the Sky
Doom Metal is a hell of a thing. In a death race full of razor saddled stallions snorting fire and galloping into battle, their heavy hearted, slumberous cousins are content to crawl to their destinies on their wounded bellies, slow and agonized, as if they drag burdensome chains behind them, shackles of misery, loss and dread. Its death-trip appeal is an inside job, heavy metal as a sonic narcotic, the codeine of the rock gods, the perfect prescription for flooding the synapses with a comfortably numb trip into bleak landscapes where every move is an introspective epic of awe and terror. Doom has its roots, like all of us, in Black Sabbath, but unlike the napalm star, freak powered stoner rock contingency, Doom traveled down a muddier path, straight down a maudlin well forged brick by brick by the morose Godzilla roar of bands like Candlemass, Pentagram, Trouble and Cathedral, bands that were less serpentine than tube worm, less action rock than post mortem nerve twitch. All this elephantine rumbling and shuddering reached it's final and inevitable conclusion in Worcester's own Warhorse, the band that out-doomed them all, the band that finally achieved that elusive negative nirvana known in deep dark circles as 'Total Fucking Doom'. So slow, caterpillars turned to butterflies and flapped their last, crashing back to Earth and renewing the cycle, all within the time it takes for the mighty 'Horse to change one of their King Black Acid power chords. It is from these hoary slabs of back snapping metal that the Lucubro story begins, as the goth-erotically named Krista Van Guilder, Lucubro's regining metal queen, will forever be known in doomier circles as the 'chick that used to be in Warhorse'. Lucubro is an entirely different rock and roll animal, of course, all cold metal and moon fog and werewolves on wheels, their sound ranging from high speed on ice to grinding neo-grunge, but the
echoes of grimness past carry on. They are a meaty stew of style and inspiration that spirit walk all the way from denim and leather Satan parties in suburban Blair Witch woods to the too dark park in the back of your drug panicked mind, a band that straddles doom, goth, and soul metal with equal dexterity. In a scene that views metal with a jaundiced eye, if at all, Lucubro have embraced all things earthdog and rivethead without shame, and they have arrived on the shores of Rock City to bang the head that does not bang. After searching fruitlessly for the right cemetery to meet in, I just went ahead and called them on the phone to roll the bones and tell dead men's tales of rock bands that work at night and horses that wage wars against the music industry.
Slow Ride
"As it slashed at me through the darkness, I remember my pain, I remember my screams." - 'Laid to Rest', Warhorse
Krista Van Guilder- the name sounds like a Countess in some Hammer horror movie, laced in Victorian finery, with a trickle of blood escaping from the corner of her mouth-carnal darkness in a velvet shroud. Trade the bodice for leather pants, and you've got Lucubro's front woman. Her spectral moan is an ethereal Siren's wail, her guitar is like a steady torrent of freezing rain crashing down on the windshields of a funeral motorcade, and her hair is black as night, just like her mournful lyrics. None of this is evident in talking to her, though. All the aesthetic trappings of wounded hearts and deadened eyes are abandoned when she's off the stage or out of the studio, and she slips into her alter ego, the easily amused Sabbath chick. "People always think 'Van' is my middle name", she tells me. "I'm always like, 'What about Eddie Van Halen?' It's Dutch. I think it means 'the dollar', which is pretty funny, if you think about it." Dollars, you see, have not been pouring Krista's way just yet. That may all change with Lucubro, but railing against the tide of the music industry was part of the Warhorse philosophy, the once and future doom kings that define the concept of a 'cult' band. Krista tells me how she helped build the horse that gallops so slowly through the endless night. "I had just left this band called 'Dolly is Dead', it was an all chick band, metal kind of stuff. I knew Jerry Orn (Warhorse's Lemmy-esque bass player) from a few years before that, because we played in a punk band together", she explains. "He had just left this band called Desolate, so we were both out of bands, and we decided to jam together. We started playing together, and we searched around for a drummer, until we eventually came upon Mike Hubbard. It was pretty funny, because we really had no idea about what we wanted to do. We were just jamming, writing songs, but when Mike joined, we all just kind of gelled. Before we knew it, we were heading down that doom path. Mike was a great drummer, and he was a visionary. He definitely had an idea about exactly what he wanted to do. He was very into the slow, druggy, dirty, heavy shit." That much is certain. Mike is Boston rock's very own Mean Machine, heavy in every possible sense, the kind of cat that would most certainly ride his Harley in slow motion if he could only figure out how. As time went on, Krista found herself out of step with Warhorse's bludgeoning manliness. "The reason that I ended up leaving was because as we progressed and started writing more tunes, the stuff started getting really different. The songs were getting a lot longer, a lot slower, and I was looking for something that was a little more, I hate to say this word, but commercial. Something, anyway, that was a bit more listenable, where we could play a faster song if we wanted, and it wouldn't ruin the feel of the band. Where we could write a three-minute song, and that would be ok. They wanted to do stuff like release 7 inch records, and I was going to school for multi-media, so I wanted to do stuff like CD-Roms. They just ended up having a completely different vision than I did." Warhorse continued it's dark mission without her, while Krista took an extended two- year break from the rigors of rock and roll to study and forge a career from her efforts. But sooner or later, the wolves would come calling for her again.
When the Wolfbane Bloomed
Lucubro formed in January of 2001, a black flame spawned from a random spark. "I wasn't really looking to be in a band", Krista says, "But this girl I was working with had been at a party one weekend, and she mentioned that she met these two guys that were from Worcester, and they wanted to get a band together, and they were looking for a female singer. So she jumped up and said, 'Hey, I know the girl that used to be in Warhorse!' So,we all swapped phone numbers, I went to check them out, and it all worked." The 'Two guys from Worcester' were guitarist and drummer Jeff and Steve Provost, brothers in metal as well as in blood. Along with Heath Thayer on bass, the four formed the earliest incarnation of Lucubro, but Steve unceremoniously split nine months later. His kin explains why. "Well, he was my brother, and he still is", Jeff starts to tell me, as the rest of the band cackles in the background. "but it just wasn't his thing. He didn't like pushing for notoriety and all that stuff, he was just interested in being the epitome of 'underground', I guess", he says,somewhat cryptically. I suspect the perpetually youthful and snotty accusations of 'sell-out' were tossed around. "Maybe a little bit too much for him, yeah", Jeff says, "But for me, the more people that hear what I'm doing, and appreciate it, the better. Steve didn't have that view, so he left, amicably, and we got Larry to replace him." Larry Murphy is the newest member of this dark circle. He was no stranger to the group, however, having played with Jeff and Heath in a band called 'Tainted Image', a name which raises my worst fears of suburban glam. The band chuckles at my assertion. "No", Larry explains, "We weren't a glam band, the name didn't really fit. We were more a psychedelic thrash band. I say 'psychedelic', because no one wanted to sing", he laughs. "So we'd just have a 3 or 4 minute intro to every song, and then the actual song would only be two minutes long." Perhaps, I offer, 'Tainted Image' were just ahead of their time. "Well, I think that Lucubro is Tainted Image with a singer", Krista says, as the rest of the band hisses and laughs her off. They do that a lot, this band. They laugh, joke, and contradict each other for kicks constantly. It's been almost twenty minutes, and I've found no evidence of the swirling graveyard dust and heavy hearts inherent in the Lucubro sound. Where is the black and purple goth philosophies? Where, for god's sake, is the doom?
A Light that No One Sees
"Whenever he comes an waits, I try to breathe. Whenever he comes and waits, I try to scream" - 'Heaven Can Wait', Lucubro
"I don't think we're a doom band anyway", bass player Heath offers up from the murk of the speaker phone.
"Everybody has their own take on it", Krista says. "We hear doom, and we hear straight up metal, and we're like, 'Whatever, we're a rock band. A rock band that really, really, likes the dark. "Well, who the hell wants to be happy?" Heath again. "Yeah", Jeff adds. "Happy is boring." Krista seems perplexed by her own dark tendencies. "It's funny that you say that, because I've been playing guitar since I was twelve, and I wrote my first song at 13, and ever since then, it's always been this dark, gloomy and doomy kind of stuff. Kind of weird." I ask her if she really needs perpetual soul-ache to write such somber songs, and if happier times would find her struggling for inspiration. "Oh, I've been actually quite happy for a couple of years", she laughs, "but I guess I'm still dwelling in the past. And some of it is inspired by other things, like a book I read, or a friend of mine that's going through some really tragic things, and I'm trying to write a song through their eyes. There's always shit going down, no matter which way you look, so hopefully no, it won't dry up." Jeff is more prosaic about it all. "It's the weather", He theorizes. "Fuckin' New England. It's always miserable." For whatever fuels Lucubro's misery train, it's been building up a healthy head of steam in their scant time as a band. Their self-released EP has been picked up for European distribution, and the band is currently working on their first full length, to be unleashed like a horde of vampire bats on an unsuspecting populace this fall. A perfect schedule for a band that's never even been photographed without snow on the ground behind them. "That's funny, because our first show was in the summertime, in the bright daylight", Heath tells me. "It was at Worcester state college, at like 4 in the afternoon. I was out there for a half an hour, and I think I got a sunburn", he laughs. "Yeah, it's interesting that both photo shoots we've done have been in the winter", Krista muses, "And they were taken a year apart." A fitting image for a cold metal band whose name, in Latin, means 'We work at night'. "We're going to wear our coats all the time, even in the summer", Jeff says. "We'll just have some dry ice around, in case somebody wants to take a picture." And the laughter, if you listen closely, starts to sound like the lonesome pining of grey wolves in the distance.