“We built a bomb shelter, you know, stuff like that,” jokes Hucifer, frontman for Montreal’s latest musical export, Fattooth, as the group embarks on their North American Natural Disaster Tour.

All kidding aside, the band has been rehearsing constantly in preparation for their first cross-country tour, a 19-show journey that will lead them from Thunder Bay, Ont. to Vancouver, B.C.

“We work hard at bringing it for the crowd and putting on a performance. It’s all about the performance and the stage show for us, and we’ve refined it. We’ve played a lot of shows and rehearsed like mad for this tour,” Hucifer says of the quartet’s live punk and thrash-infused rock experience.

“And, we’re going to be recording our next album in Vancouver soon, so a lot of the songs we’re going to be playing on stage are not from the current album,” he adds, although confirms that promoting their nine-track self-titled debut, released through Reversed Records early this spring, is definitely part of it, along with unleashing their name out to the masses.

But getting noticed isn’t that difficult when the name “Gene Hoglan” is in the CD credits, and Juno Award-winning audio engineer Rob Shallcross, the ears behind albums by Strapping Young Lad, GWAR, Darkest Hour and Mr. Plow, was in the director’s chair when you plugged in to record it.

“I worked with Rob Shallcross before. He’s a good buddy of mine from when I lived in Winnipeg,” Hucifer explains of how the Canadian producer became involved. “When he saw this project, he called me up and expressed interest in recording it.”

According to Hucifer, the band had a sort of Spinal Tap story going on at the time, with drummer falling out or just plain sucking. Through Shallcross, Fattooth had the opportunity to woo one of the greatest session drummers the metal world has ever heard. Shallcross had worked with Hoglan on many occassions, including recording the Vancouver-based comedy thrash metal act Zimmers Hole, and pitched it to him.

“He enjoyed the music and we were like, ‘Right on,’” Hucifer cheered. “We got the fullest potential out of the songs as a result and then we picked up Costa Dimitroulas to fill in Gene’s shoes.”

Here’s a dumb question: was it difficult finding a drummer that could fill Gene’s shoes?

Absolutely, especially in Montreal because it’s such a concentrated city, there isn’t a lot of space for drummers to rehearse, so there’s not a lot of really good drummers in Montreal.

And that’s funny because there seems to be a lot of successful heavier bands from Montreal in recent years, like The Agonist, Beneath the Massacre, etc.

Yeah, but there’s also a lot of [musicians] that go to college and have this idea in their heads that they don’t have to pay their dues and don’t want to get on the road with a bunch of guys in a van. We’ve got no time for that. We needed somebody that was going to get in the trenches with us, and Costa step up to the plate to do that.

You said you were originally from Winnipeg. What instigated your move out to Montreal?

It was a long time ago. I plant trees for a living, too.

Hey, thanks!

Yeah, I’ve planted over three million in my career. I’ve done a lot of tree planting out west, and I hooked up with a girl who was a potential fashion designer. She works for Cirque du Soleil, so I moved to Montreal and I was writing novels. And I was going to quit rock and roll, but I bumped into a few people, including Kevin Jardine from Slaves on Dope. He gave me a call a couple of years later and had these guys to work with. He introduced me to George [Xipoleas] and Mihran [Boudakian] and we started this project.

How would you describe the band’s sound to potential audience members that haven’t heard you yet?

I’d say we’re rock and roll the way it was meant to be played. We’re bringing it back to cock rock, high-performance metal – like Judas Priest, Van Halen, that kind of stuff. Bascially, the songs are structured to bring it, so for people who haven’t seen us, they’ll be shocked. They always are. We recently played NXNE, and for people that don’t normally listen to what we play, and I think we blew the roof off. And we intend on doing that at every show.

So you’re taking western Canada by storm and getting your name out that way. What other avenues have you been taking to promote Fattooth?

MySpace has been really helpful and we’ve got a lot of publicity going on that way. We’ve been on a lot of radio programs and Internet radios shows, like Maximum Threshold down in the States. We’ve got a good publicist [at Asher Media Relations] that we work with and he’s getting us in all these magazines. And, of course, having Gene Hoglan on the album was monstrous. I mean, just having his name on there got us a lot of recognition, and that was really helpful. He loves the album and he’s shopping it around for us and talking to people.

So what can you tell me about this follow-up album you’re going to record in Vancouver? Are you going to work with Rob again?

Oh, hell, yeah. It’s going to be a monster album. We’ve got a bunch of songs that we’re already doing pre-production on. We’re really looking forward to getting back in the studio. It’s always a great time for us. We’re not a depressing band. We’re not on Prozac; we’re not on anti-depressants. We look to have a good time and we like to rock the house. It’s about producing the song in a way that’s going to rip the roof off the joint when we play it loud. We don’t do anything on the tracks that we can’t do live; that’s very important to us.

So what would you say is more exciting for you as a band: recording or playing live?

It’s all great, but when you get on stage, it all makes sense: all the madness, vans blowing up, all the hardships you go through. When you hit the stage, and people react and respond and they’re having a good time, it’s all about that.

Even though you only record what you can pull off live, how much does your live sound change?

It’s very similar. We’ll play things a little bit quicker sometimes, we bring it a little faster, but it’s very – I’d say it’s almost better.

So if people listen to your samples on MySpace, that should give them a good idea, but maybe x 10 intensity?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve got costuming and the whole works, but we’re definitely a force to be reckoned with on stage.