By Will York

'WE'VE DEFINITELY HAD our share of bad luck," Soilent Green guitarist Brian Patton says, and he's not kidding.

Broken bones, totaled vans, massive medical bills, and worse: It all goes back to 2001 and their third album, A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down (Relapse). It was supposed to be their breakthrough, following the word-of-mouth success of 1998's Southern rock-grindcore-death metal tour de force, Sewn Mouth Secrets (Relapse) – that it came out a week after 9/11 may have been a bad omen. In any case, they'd just finished a big tour alongside Napalm Death and Isis and were in the midst of an even bigger one opening for Morbid Angel and Deicide, in December 2001, when a van accident sent them back home, with Patton and then-bassist Scott Williams nursing broken arms and separated shoulders.

They bounced back, though, and were on the road again just a few months later, when an even worse accident landed vocalist Ben Falgoust in the hospital with two broken legs and no left heel. He spent eight months in a wheelchair and underwent a total of eight surgeries. As if that weren't enough, Williams – who by then had been replaced by current bassist Scott Crochet – was shot and killed in a murder-suicide last April. The official details are sketchy, but New Orleans' Times-Picayune reported that the killer was Williams's "partner," an implication that led to tasteless commentary from homophobic message-board pundits on sites such as Knac.com and BlabberMouth.com.

"Lack of respect, man. People ain't got no fuckin' respect. But it was more of a personal blow than anything else," Patton says of the tragedy. "And it happened at a time when everything else was goin' on. But you gotta bounce back from that stuff. You can't let things like that ruin your life."

Confronting the worst

Soilent Green titled their new album Confrontation, as if to emphasize their resilient, decidedly un-emo outlook on life. It's a monster of an album too: a gargantuan riff-fest that draws on practically every underground metal subgenre – black, death, doom, sludge, grindcore, metalcore – and smashes them together in compact, jarring songs that careen through 10 or 15 parts in the space of three minutes. Hearing it for the first time is sort of like running the gauntlet while trying to solve a difficult math puzzle. It's intimidating and overwhelming, and it hurts too. But it's not just an exercise in musical sadomasochism. Once you get over the shock, it becomes a fun sort of game, trying to sort out their nonlinear song structures and guess what off-the-wall riff or tempo change is coming next. In stark contrast to the bulk of extreme metal CDs being churned out these days, Confrontation is one you can listen to over and over and still come across new details and subtleties each time.

"That's definitely what we aim for – just to try to make it as dense as possible," Patton says, speaking from his apartment in the New Orleans suburb of Metarie, just days before Hurricane Dennis was set to tear through the Gulf Coast. "If you don't like what you're hearing at one point, wait around for a minute and maybe you'll like the next part."

Thanks to their labor-intensive songwriting approach, Soilent Green have never been a very prolific band. Three to four years between albums has been the norm, even when there haven't been van wrecks to get in the way. Part of this also has to do with the band members' other projects: Patton plays in the influential Southern-metal outfit Eyehategod as well as EHG spin-off Outlaw Order, while Falgoust fronts the Southern black metal band Goatwhore, and drummer Tommy Buckley fills in with sludge-metal journeymen Crowbar.

Assembly required

Still, Confrontation was especially difficult to assemble. "The band had been reduced to Ben being in a hospital bed, and me and Tommy sittin' in the practice room by ourselves, looking at each other, thinking, 'What the hell are we gonna do?' " Patton recalls, thinking back to a couple of years ago. "A couple of the songs were written with just me and that dude sittin' in a room with nothin' better to do, bummin' out about the whole situation. It got to be real frustratin.' "

The upside is that, with fewer cooks in the kitchen, Patton and Buckley were able to put together a record that's at least more coherently all over the place than its predecessor, Symphony. "In my opinion, we took a step down with that record as far as the songwriting goes," Patton says. Despite some jaw-dropping riffs and several excellent songs, the album does have moments where the parts feel awkwardly pieced together as opposed to flowing smoothly as a whole. Patton blames creative tensions between himself, Williams, and then-guitarist Ben Stout (who's since been replaced by new recruit Tony White), as well as a creeping bit of "technique-itis," a side effect of instrumental prowess that Soilent Green have otherwise done well at avoiding.

"Just because something is fun to play doesn't mean it's necessarily fun to hear," Patton explains. "And every now and then, you've just gotta step back and hear the melody of the parts and make sure that the catchiness is there. It's all about the hook – that's the important part."

Soilent Green are hitting San Francisco for the first time since December 2001 – when they played here just days before the first van disaster – as part of a whopping 65-day, 61-city headlining tour. Talk about making up for lost time. The goal is to have another album out before 2009, but before that happens, we can expect more from Falgoust's Goatwhore and Patton's Eyehategod and Outlaw Order, with the latter two scheduled to hit the studio soon after this tour finishes. "I'm all booked up for the rest of the year, man," Patton says, and that's fine with him. "Three years ago, I was just sitting around wishing I could be doin' all this stuff."

Soilent Green play with A Perfect Murder, Into the Moat, and Watch Them Die Fri/5, 8:30 p.m., Pound-SF, Pier 96, 100 Cargo, SF. $12-$14. (415) 826-5009.

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