As we expected, The Atlas Moth’s new album The Old Believer (Profound Lore) is as much a study in rough hewn crushing heaviness, as it is in delicate somber patience. One of the best releases this year so far, fans should expect it to top many year-end, best-of lists. When Chief Editor Keith (Keefy) Chachkes caught up with Chicago’s Svengali of riffs and screams, Stavros Giannoplous was on tour opening for The Ocean and Scale The Summit, we conducted our interview in the crowded, smoke-filled little green room, while The Ocean jammed about 20 feet away on stage. Our conversation ebbed and flowed freely, like the water pipe that was passed around, as we discussed the new album, the pressure that comes with critical acclaim, and how one of the most prolific guys in the metal scene creates art on his own terms.
There were clear advantages for the band being out on the road in the months before their new album dropped. With no fanfare on this night, were treated to three new songs from The Old Believer, and everyone in the crowd had their mouths agape when it was over. Having already heard the rest of the new album shortly thereafter, we began by asking Stavros to contrast his new opus with their last album An Ache for the Distance (also Profound Lore):
“It’s really all over the place. I’d like to think it’s a pretty logical next step. We don’t try to write a certain type of song or anything. We just make a lot of fucked up noise, like we always do, and it just comes out like it does. The leap from the first record to Ache was really huge, this is more like a regular step as opposed to a gigantic step to me. It’s a definite progression from the last one, but you know it’s kind of hard to explain. It varies throughout the entire fucking record. No two songs sound the same on it, so that is very cool.”
An Ache for the Distance was such a critical success and certainly one of the best albums of 2011. We wondered how much pressure Stavros and the band placed on themselves to top it, and if it interfered with the creative process:
“Yeah. I feel it musically and artistically, like as far as layout goes. The layout last time just seemed like a perfect storm. Everything kind of came together and it just happened. It was great! People still ask me about it and it came out great. I still look at it and I totally feel like I accomplished everything I set out to with it. It doesn’t matter if anyone agrees with me or not. It means a lot to me. Everything about this new one was so hectic. So the people who really enjoyed An Ache for the Distance really connected to it. So it’s kind of hard to ask them to care again and become emotionally connected to a new piece of music. I know myself, I am probably my harshest critic. But at the end of the day you can’t worry about the pressure. It’s going to come out how it comes out.”
The Atlas Moth, by Meg Loyal Photography
In addition to work on The Old Believer, Stavros has been involved in now defunct black metal supergroup Twilight, Chrome Waves, several other bands and art projects on a continuous basis for several years now. We surmised that he must be a fairly prolific guy artistically, and that perhaps makes new music all the time. He weighed in on this theory:
“I don’t know about all the time, but I play a lot of guitar at home alone. Sometimes things happen, and somethings things don’t. And I’m a very big believer that if I don’t remember something I wrote, it probably wasn’t that good. I’m kind of freewheeling with things. And now I really write a lot off of what other people are playing. It’s become a real strength for me. It’s more realistic for me than…I just don’t sit around and say I’m gonna write a song today between 8 and 10, you know? That would never work for me. Sometimes it comes and that’s great, and sometimes it doesn’t and I let it go.”
As a band that has logged many moons on tours in opening slots, choosing a set list at this point in their career must be a challenge. Especially when you factor in the three new tracks tonight that made up more than half of their set on this night:
“That is a really great question. We did a week of headlining dates by ourselves before the tour, and we ended up missing half of them, because our van fucking blew up. We were in Seattle and we had a good mix of old and new songs. Then I thought we had 25 minutes for this current tour, but then we found out that we had 40 minutes! So we were trying to put more (songs) in there. I wish we’d had more time, because now with three records of material, it’s kind of tough. We barely play anything off of A Glorified Piece of Blue Sky (Candlelight) anymore, and even less since Ache came out. Even just picking between Ache and this new one has been really hard as shit. I am really looking forward to playing an hour-long set again when we headline.”
The Atlas Moth, by Meg Loyal Photography
Since Boston was the last night of the tour, Stavros was feeling reflective on the past few months on the road: “It’s been really rad! I feel like I have been gone forever. But also I feel like it’s over already and it really hit me today. I mean, we still have three more shows with The Ocean in Canada. Overall, it is kind of fucking weird. Between Silver Snakes, Scale the Summit and The Ocean’s fans, we are like the tie that binds everything together. It’s been an awesome tour! It was good to play for all these guys fans. It’s kind of like we are playing for that same Gojira crowd again, which is really the last national tour we did. So it’s nice to come back here and tour the entire country to full rooms before our album comes out, and get warmed up before our release. It’s been really cool.”
KEITH (KEEFY) CHACHKES