Coming off a North American tour behind Oracle, their second full-length CD, London, Ontario natives Kittie have plans for a new album that will make their sophomore effort look, well, pussy-soft by comparison.

"I think the next record's going to be even more insane," says drummer Mercedes Lander, who co-anchors the band with singer/guitarist, big sister Morgan. "People are probably going to end up stabbing themselves in the face 'cause it's going to be so heavy."

Back home in Canada, Kittie can now scratch out that dream in wet, red letters. "We don't write on the road at all," Lander says, laughing. "And we don't have the proper equipment to do it -- we're not one of those bands with a record company that'll pay for stuff. We don't have a drum machine in the back, we don't have a recorder; we just have to wait until we get home and try to remember what we thought about a month ago."

Currently a three-piece, with new bassist of nine months Jennifer Arroyo on the low end and guitar tech Jeff Phillips standing in for long-departed second guitarist Fallon Bowman, Kittie's fire is unabated. "It's fine," says Lander of the present arrangement. "We are a three-piece with a touring guitar player." Alluding to rumors that Bowman had gone off the bend (according to a story in Rolling Stone, she'd developed a cultish obsession with the Columbine killers), Lander emphasizes that "working with people who aren't crazy takes a real load off you. It's a lot less stressful and it's a lot easier to work with people that are sane. It's just a lot more fun."

Lander has nothing but praise for Arroyo. "She is the most amazing bass player I've ever seen in my entire life, and I've seen a lot of musicians. I think she's just a great person to work with, and definitely very sane -- she's not crazy -- a really well-rounded person, and a great musician!"

Talena Atfield, Kittie's third bass player, lasted for the duration of their Artemis Records debut, 1999's gold-selling Spit, and halfway through Oracle. Atfield replaced Tanya Candler, who had provided the memorable stage business involving a blow-up sex doll the band desecrated in unspeakable ways. "With her [Candler] went that," says Lander with a laugh.

Kittie's current release, the "Safe" EP, features a remix of the title song by Sascha Konietzko of hard industrial giants KMFDM, along with live versions of "No Name," "Severed," "What I Always Wanted," "In Winter" and "Pain" from Oracle. The DVD-enhanced disc additionally contains live videos of "Wolves," "Mouthful of Poison" and "Charlotte" from an August, 2002, gig at Hollywood's Whiskey A-Go-Go.

A haunting and melancholy song that builds from keyboards and Morgan's voice to the more familiar death metal wallop associated with Kittie, "Safe" becomes a different animal after Sascha's deconstruction of it. "We figured that since 'Safe' was such a slow song, and kind of dark, that it would be a good idea to make it sound more upbeat," Lander explains.

"We just wanted to make a complete 360 of what the song was originally. We brainstormed -- we had a list of people that we wanted to do remixes, and the company that makes our merch, knows Sascha. We basically decided on Sascha because of his longstanding history of making good techno -- no, good industrial, because a lot of music that is done with that sort of thing is crap -- but he seems to do very good remixes and makes very good music, and plus he has a great track record with a lot of bands. We decided to go for him, and he made the song wonderful."

Still in their teens (Mercedes is the youngest at 18), Kittie are road-hardened pros who enjoy touring. Lander has a few choice words for rockers who complain about life on the bus: "Those people shouldn't be into music then, because they're fucking retarded! They should go fucking die, because, what are they in it for, the money? The touring is the best part of being in a band, and if you don't like it, you're in the wrong profession."

Lander recounts an "interesting experience" from their latest sortie through the American south. "When we played in Mississippi, we were supposed to play this huge outdoor place, and it was very cool, but then it rained, so we got the venue changed the day of the show to this redneck-owned KKK bar. We had a lot of fun there. By the end of the night, the owner of the club was walking through the stage and from the stage I threw my water bottle and hit him in the head!"

Redneck club owners aside, Kittie's garnered mostly praise in the US and around the world, faring less well with the Canadian press, although Lander says the situation has improved somewhat. "They don't even bother us. Well, they bothered us a couple of times. I think they learned their lesson because we badmouthed them so much. And now everybody from America that listens to our music knows that they're kind of crap. I mean, not to say that we never got good reviews in Canada. We did, but the bad press outweighed the good press, and the people with their nose stuck up in the air outweighed the people that were nice.

"We pretty much can't play in Canada anymore because of a couple of incidents the last time we played which involved fights and stuff. Oh well, it's not my problem. I would love to play in Canada and it's not our fans' fault. We love our fans and we love those people that have come to our shows in the past, and whatnot, but I don't know. But I don't know. We're under the circumstances where we can't do it right now, but sometime in the future, when the one promoter that books all the shows in Canada dies or something!"

Kittie appreciate their fans, and remain highly approachable despite their burgeoning fame. Says Lander, "The whole rock star crap, I don't think I'll ever want to be that. That's not something I look forward to realizing, and I don't think I will. When we first went on tour, it was like, 'Eh, we're touring now, this is cool.' I guess that's when my realization kind of kicked in, that I was going to be doing this for the long haul -- not like I didn't want to, because I always have wanted to, but it was a great realization that I was going to be doing this and having fun at the same time."

Oracle's hard-hitting tracks show Kittie edging further towards the extremes of metal, a track they've been on since their inception. "We were really weird, my sister and I," Lander says of the band's early influences. "We used to listen to bands like Helmet and Tool, and before that it was Van Halen and AC/DC. We always listened to the late 80s early 90s hard rock scene, 'cause there weren't a lot of really good metal bands around in the 90s, except for Pantera. And then of course our tastes developed into harder stuff -- death metal, grindcore, black metal, the hardcore scene, the metalcore scene, Swedish metalā?¦I think that we draw our influences from so many types of music that it's just a mishmosh of everything."

Aside from its more sophisticated production values, Oracle also features integrated vocal arrangement. Whereas on Spit, Morgan switched between a harsh growl and an angelic lilt, the current album layers the two modes, with the rhythm section hitting behind the death metal snarl. Recreating this effect onstage requires no special accommodation. "Her screaming doesn't hurt her, it doesn't cause pain," says Lander. "She can do that really quickly; she goes for the transition in a split second."

Comparing Oracle to their debut, Lander says, "I think Spit is probably the least polished record I've ever heard in my entire life. It was recorded in nine days on Fender Squires. It was a point in our lifetime, and it was like a snapshot of what we were like back in 1999."

Nevertheless, Spit's focused assault belies the youth of the band members. According to Lander, it's a simple matter of "Practice makes perfect. We'd been a band for so long, we played over 200 some odd shows before we got record label interest. We were playing every weekend that we could. Sometimes we were playing during the week. We traveled to Toronto, to Detroit; we played a lot of shows. A lot of bands that play 12 shows before they get signed, they sound like crap on their record; they're experimenting on their recording, and they don't know what they want to do. We were just lucky because we knew what we wanted to do."

(Thanks to Chris Bade at Mazur PR for making this story possible).

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