Those aware of the vicious nastiness of Birmingham UK’s Fukpig will be more than familiar with key member and ex-Anaal Nathrakh live bassist Paul Kenney. Five years ago, Kenney began Occult Doom outfit Kroh as a duet, and has resurrected it to stunning, electrifying effect with second album Altars (Devizes Records).Continue reading
My Dying Bride 2015
More often than not the most gut-wrenching, profound music has its roots in real-life experience. Throughout a career celebrating its silver jubilee this year, that’s been the case for Halifax, West Yorkshire Gothic Doomsters My Dying Bride. New album Feel The Misery (Peaceville) is arguably their finest, a tour de force of despair which possesses the deathly steel of earlier years.
Vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe explains the creative process: “Emotions are almost elbowed to one side during recording. You’re aware that time is money so you’ve got to crack on in the studio. Writing is different. We really put a lot of effort into our songs as we want them to have an impact, something that touches you and lifts you to a different place. We imagine people listening to our music with headphones on, their eyes closed and just enjoying the experience: going off on a journey, as dark as it may be. It sounds clichéd but when I write the lyrics I always do so in the middle of the night. It’s practical as well as emotive: just undisturbed, quiet time. I only write when I’m feeling pretty low, so what you end up getting is words from somebody who’s not in a great place.”
Album opener ‘And My Father Left Forever’ didn’t start out as autobiographical, but it sadly assumed such significance. “I wrote the song last December. Sadly my Father died in January, right in the middle of recording” explains Aaron with no little emotion. “The guys said “You know, we can change the title, we can drop it.” But I wanted to go ahead with it because when I wrote it I felt deeply passionate about it. I had to take a break but, when I came back, I was in a very dark place but I went for it and did everything I had to do. When you finish an album, it’s customary to go out for a curry or a beer…there was nothing like that this time. It was a sad period.”
Aaron’s intonations are usually a perfect blend of romance, horror and drama. This time however, his harsh vocal stands out. “I was possessed, obviously. When I returned to the studio I was angry and sad at the same time so when it came to do the Death Metal things, they weren’t a problem at all. Normally when I’m singing I stand up straight but here I was, hunched and screaming in agony. I was moving further away from the mic so they had to lower it a good few inches to capture it all! Subsequently I was spent: I couldn’t talk for a day or two afterwards. It’s great that after 25 years I’ve still got that ability, but I think my Father’s death pulled out a performance that may not have been there otherwise.”
The harsher elements of the band’s past are revisited frequently during the album, assisted by occasionally rampant rhythm section Lena Abé and Dan Mullins. It’s easy to conclude, somewhat mistakenly, that the return to Academy Studios and the welcoming of original guitarist Calvin Robertshaw back into the fold have been telling factors: “I guess the studio must have made a contribution. Our usual studio, Futureworks in Manchester, was unavailable. We knew Academy, and our drummer Dan is learning how to be a studio engineer there. We asked ourselves if it was a risk, letting him twiddle the knobs: he’s in the band too of course, so he didn’t want to fuck it up. But he did a grand job. I couldn’t believe just how skilled he was; I was really impressed.
“Calvin actually returned quite late in the day, when most of the album was already written. He contributed a few riffs and some lovely harmonies, but Feel The Misery is 95% Andrew Craighan’s guitarwork. I don’t really know why it’s got that old-school feel to it. What goes around comes around I suppose, and we’re sort of back where we started.”
Speaking of which, that 25th anniversary. There are no plans of a celebratory DVD and tour for this unique outfit: “We’re not really celebrating it. We would have liked a party, because it is some kind of milestone: we just haven’t got around to organising it yet! I made some coffee mugs for everybody, that’s as far as our quarter-of-a-century celebrations have gone! I’m sure something will happen around Christmas-time, when the summer festivals are out of the way and when the album is comfortably out. We’re not making a huge fuss about it. There are people saying “Why don’t you do the whole of Turn Loose The Swans (Peaceville Records) at a great venue in London or Paris” (but) we thought “Meeh, everyone’s done that!” We figured we’d just release a great album instead.” It’s said with tongue-in-cheek, but a sense of satisfaction also.
That reluctance to tour widely is borne of pure integrity: “We want people to feel the experience. In the early days we lit loads of incense sticks before we went on stage because we wanted people to smell us! We only do about ten shows a year. That’s not due to being bone idle, it’s because we want to make sure that when we do a show, people talk about it. We want to give 100% every time as we need each show to be filled with passion.”
My Dying Bride 2015
For a band still averaging an album every two years, it’s natural to think that My Dying Bride would be getting more selective about their ingredients. Aaron dismisses this notion. “I think we’re becoming less choosy about the material. Andrew invited me round to his house one evening, to hear some riffs. They were bright, not the uber-crushing Doom riffs you normally get, but they had a melancholic harmony running through them and I thought “That’s absolutely perfect! Go with that”. He was relieved because in the past we’d have thought “It’s too bright: if it’s not crushing the soul and spirit, we don’t want it.” These days we’re allowing a little bit more of the twiddly guitars and the rather nice, pleasant moments to seep in because we’ve learned over the years that those moments pick people up, which means when the pulverising riffs return, they push people all the way back down again. If you’ve got 100% crushing Doom all the way through your album, the impact will be at the very beginning, then people just get used to it and it becomes a non-entity. If you hold people up, then drop them from a great height, repeatedly, they’re going to notice it!”
That balance is so evident throughout the record although, with typical candour and modesty, Aaron underplays the intent: “That’s a fluke because when we write, we don’t know whether the album’s going to be more Death Metal-heavy, Doomier, where the Gothic bits are going…we just don’t plan it. We don’t write it all down, we go with the flow and see what comes out.”
The master of understatement. Among its many stories Feel The Misery pores forth the heartbreak of a lovely, eloquent, candid gentleman, and returns My Dying Bride to total supremacy in the process.
Feel The Misery is out now via Peaceville Records
WORDS BY PAUL QUINN
For such a modest gent, Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes is one such musician who can remember the glory days of record label advances. Surely Paradise Lost wouldn’t have had access to bountiful excess, but they did indulge their rock star side. “When we started with EMI we hired Jane Seymour’s stately home to stay at while recording. We bought loads of studio equipment and had a chef and everything! It was great. That’s was the benchmark of success for us, you could get a fillet steak whenever you wanted! It was fucking ridiculous when I think about it but there was money in the industry and people bought albums! If you think its right or wrong, you get wrapped up in it because you have industry people telling you it would be a good idea. You can enter a different world easily. We did waste money on silly things and spent a fortune on booze! The bar bills were insane! It was a real cliché but we spent a lot of money on booze especially around the Host album!”
“We dipped our toes in the pool of rock stardom but we never plunged in. It was like being Metallica for a day but then it was gone again. Now it’s strict budgets. I remember the first time we went to Israel and did all the tourist stuff and hung out. These days, you’re off stage and on a plane two hours later!”
Having invested Gothic Metal and created a memorable legacy, many bands have come and gone during PL’s career, splitting up and reforming on a whim. Yet Paradise Lost have endured and existed without such issues. “We need to make a living. We forfeited a life doing anything else years ago. We never had the time to have a couple of years off and reassess things. You could count the bands on one hand who could take five years out. You don’t shut down the shop just because you’re fed up.”
Such acclaim for Greg’s Vallenfyre project has been well deserved with a spark clearly ignited under Paradise Lost. Surely though at this stage in their career could talk of side projects been a concern to the productivity of Paradise Lost? “I didn’t know what he was doing on his time off. I didn’t know how much he’d got back into death metal. He asked me if I wanted to do the vocals but my head wasn’t in the right place at the time. I didn’t know I’d do it himself. It runs alongside PL fine. I keep missing their shows so I want to catch them.”
Considering Nick’s confession that he could have been a part of Vallenfyre, his involvement in death metal supergroup Bloodbath, were Holmes replaced Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt comes as an even greater surprise. “It was a good two or three years after that. We’d look on the early days of death metal with great fondness. The guys in Katatonia are all four years younger than me, but that was a lot when you were all teenagers. We listed to different generations of death metal. They were listening to Deicide and I was more into the early Death stuff. The tape trading days were a great time, exciting and new. Anything that has happened with PL has been a gradual change. We had written the whole album before I did the Bloodbath stuff and already decided that there would be death metal elements.”
What must it be in a band with the guys from Katatonia, a band who have cited Paradise Lost as an influence? “Half the conversation who can name the most obscure band and who has all the old demo tapes. Jonas is very into that stuff. Bloodbath are weekend warriors, we get on a plane, play a gig then go home. It’s refreshing to play with new people and worked really well for us. Everyone is friends so there’s no negative.”
How Paradise Lost have kept relevant and free of nostalgia. “I never heard the term ‘The Peaceville Three’ until recently. We started before Anathema and My Dying Bride. I think Anathema played their first gig in Liverpool with us. As a band we don’t need to name drop or fit into a scene. We are institutionalised in making music. I’ve blown my chances of being a surgeon long ago. I could write a book but that would be about what I have done with the band. You never know!”
ROSS BAKER
The mid-to-late 90’s bore witness to a phenomenon in underground metal. If the UK with Napalm Death et al had been the birth place of death metal, a sound that travelled the big blue to the States to be forged into the beast we know today, then the British Isles was once again the location for the conception of one of the most influential albums for a new sub-genre that, while it didn’t infect the American sound, instead traversed east rather than west and took Europe by storm, giving birth to the eponymous “Gothic” Metal.
Paradise Lost’s Gothic (Peaceville) wasn’t just a landmark, it was an album that tolled a massive bell with eager, willing and creative minds and created the landscape for the mid-to-late 90’s in underground metal. Last year saw the twentieth anniversary of Amorphis’ Tales From The Thousand Lakes, an album that was to develop that blueprint and take it in a different direction, the Finns being one of the first to fuse death and doom with folk-inspired melodies, clean vocals and progressive 70’s influenced music. But without Gothic, and it’s ground-breaking innovation, bringing in female vocals, orchestral manoeuvres (most probably in the dark, yes) and haunting melodic leads over doomier death metal, …Thousand Lakes may not have turned out the way it did.
“It was probably one the most influential albums for Amorphis in the early days, yes” agrees Amorphis lifer, Esa Holopainen, the six-stringer responsible for creating the Finns classic early release. “Paradise Lost started the way of combining melody lines into death metal music, with a doom ensemble. That then started to influence a lot of bands.
“It’s funny, because, you see in the longer term bands, there’s a lot of bands, like Moonspell – I just heard their new album – bands start to look back at where they came from and their past”. Even Paradise Lost themselves… “Yes. Everyone is starting to walk the circle around and taking more and more influences from their roots, which is a really good thing.”
When Holopainen was taking inspiration from Gothic and crafting the two albums that really put Amorphis on the map …Thousand Lakes and the follow up, Elegy (both Relapse), it was in the midst of an explosion of creative excellence that flooded through Europe.
“The period of time was when little underground labels started to grow up with their bands, and bands were releasing their classic albums. In the 90’s a lot of classic albums and a lot of albums that became milestones to those bands were made, and that influenced other bands. It’s pretty amazing, but look back at how many great metal albums there were (at that time)!
“There hasn’t been another era after that since then that’s matched it for so many good albums. I don’t know why.
“A lot of bands at that time, when we did those albums, proved to be a platform for the metal scene to be able to explore what we were doing, but much wider. Since then there’s been more and more new bands (influenced by the European metal albums of the 90s); heavy metal became almost trendy over here in Finland when Lordi won the Eurovision and even grandmothers were listening to metal, and those albums of the 90’s were the platform for the next wave of bands.
“You see Nuclear Blast who weren’t so big then are now probably the biggest label out there, selling as much as some major (labels); it’s pretty amazing how it’s all grown.”
While Paradise Lost may have opened Pandora’s Box, Holopainen’s Amorphis were one of the first bands to stick their heads deep into its recesses and really find freedom in the possibilities. Their debut The Karellian Isthmus (also Relapse) had been a decent, Scandinavian death metal album, but they then took the bold step to incorporate doomier riffs, clean vocals, folk music, keyboards and take influence from Deep Purple, Rainbow and other more retrospective elements.
“At that time we were huge fans of 70’s rock bands. In Finland there were a lot of progressive rock bands who were incorporating traditional and folk music, and we were listening to things like Jethro Tull and Hawkwind, lots of hippy music we liked!
“The big thing was, we felt there were no limits when we were writing the music for …Thousand Lakes – there were some really strange arrangements in there! We had a keyboard player, Kasper, who came into the band and he’d never played in a metal band, he was totally into The Doors and playing those types of songs. He was so excited when he realized there was a mini-moog in Sunlight Studios and, naturally, he wanted to use that a lot.
“All that mixture of things, all that soup, became the Amorphis sound.”
Happy to talk about their prestigious history, and their first landmark album, Holopainen continues. “We didn’t have a big plan, we were just doing the album how we wanted, until Tomas the producer asked “Does your record company know what you’re doing?” He was afraid they weren’t going to like it because it was so different! We just thought “OH SHIT!” but carried on.
“Then we started to get praise and good critics for it, and it was a success. It was kind of, but not by accident, but it came by following our instincts and being ambitious with what we wanted to do.”
Did you realize at time how ground-breaking it was? When did it sink in that it was a “classic”?
“It came as surprise how popular that album became. It took many many years before we realized how important an album it actually was. Even just a couple of years ago, we were only just realizing it must have been a really influential album because you read interviews from other bands that they say …Thousand Lakes was influential for them.
“At the time there was no black metal scene, it was just bubbling under, and no folk metal at all; that was many years later with bands like Ensiferum, and they say our albums were very influential for them.
“That is the greatest feedback you can get as a musician that you actually influenced other musicians to make their bands”
The second Amorphis classic was to follow two years later, as the sound evolved and deathly chugs were replaced with a much more progressive and folk-tinged rock bent, power chords replaced with open strings, and the timeless Elegy was created, an album most definitely not better unborn.
2016 sees Paradise Lost bringing Gothic back to life on stage at Roadburn, and following the success of both 2014’s tour and Amorphis’ spot at Maryland Deathfest playing …Thousand Lakes’ shows, could we see a twentieth anniversary celebration for Elegy?
“It’s not an impossible idea. We had a good time doing the Tales… shows, and the good thing about production now is we know how to get these sounds and make these things work. One of the great things of Amorphis is we can do different products – we did an acoustic tour – and we like to challenge ourselves and do something different.
“Elegy, for me, is my favourite album of the earlier Amorphis times and it’s not an impossible idea that we can do an Elegy tour.”
Under The Red Cloud is out on September 4th via Nuclear Blast. Order here.
STEVE TOVEY
Roadburn Festival 2016 has been announced for next April 14-17th in Tilburg, NL. Headlining the festival will be Neurosis in the midst of celebrating 30 years as a band with a career spanning set, and possibly supporting their highly anticipated new album. Joining them will be Paradise Lost who will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of their Gothic (Peaceville) album with a full performance. Curating the weekend-long event will be Lee Dorian (Cathedral, Napalm Death). Dorian performed with Cathedral at the very first Roadburn. More bands will be announced soon and tickets have yet to be released.
Lee Dorian commented on being chosen as the Roadburn 2016 curator:
“I feel very honoured to be handed this prestigious task to curate Roadburn 2016. Having been involved with Walter on a personal level for many years now, I always felt like part of the family, as opposed to being someone on the outside. So, with that in mind, I was both shocked and excited when he asked me to take on this fantastic opportunity.
I promise to make this an event that no-one will forget, and I’m already frothing at the potential of possibilities available!! It’s a dream and one that I never expected. This is what I love, so I will not disappoint. Come and join us in this ritualistic nirvana of praise and offerings to the unholy Blind Dead. Templars Arise!”
Neurosis has released a statement on being named Roadburn headliner:
“To be invited to celebrate our 30th anniversary in Europe at Roadburn is an absolute honor. Roadburn is a treasured and unique event that embodies the spirit of open minded community and original, emotional heavy music. We are humbled to be a part of it again” – NEUROSIS, August 2015.”
Neurosis, by Hillarie Jason Photography
Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes has also commented:
“As a young band we spent a good deal of time in the early 90’s driving around The Netherlands in a small transit van, living off chips with mayonnaise, drinking Chocomel and playing stuff from this album. ‘Gothic’ totally reminds me of those days, so if we were ever going to play the album in its entirety in 2016, it has to be in The Netherlands, and where better than the Roadburn Festival!!”
The first thing to say about Germany’s Burning Down Alaska and their debut release Values and Virtues (Redfield) is that this feels much more like an album than an EP. Coming in at 9 tracks (7 songs actual) and displaying a progression from the build of, um, ‘Intro’ (one of the few short tracks that commence an album that actually enhance and do the job of leading you into the first track while setting the scene of the music that will follow), through the utilisation of a thoughtful album dynamic, to the closing anthemic ‘Trophies’ with its hollered chorus over a hooky lead.
The second is that this is a mature and very well put together proposition for a debut, particularly one in the modern/post-‘core field (can we not come up with a genre tag without the word “core” inappropriately tagged on the end of something?). No generic breakdown chugs for the sake of it, where matters do “break down”, such as on first song proper ‘Brighter Days’ it is to a slower expansive, reflective music piece, that led by the throat of Tobias Rische is used to provide contrast to the next section, where a gang shout brings the song back to tempo.
Credit is due to the musicianship on display, as littered throughout are careful and clever melodic quasi-clean, quasi-lead based guitars, multi-layered and excellently composed, with Marvin Bruckwilder and Dario Sanchez complimenting and interweaving with each other perfectly, with a reflective almost gothic quality on the ‘Reality & Fiction’, a track that belies the stage of development this band should be in.
In terms of comparisons, Burning Down Alaska have jumped straight to the more progressive, grown up and developed point of their career, pitching in the Sempiternal (Bring Me The Horizon – RCA) or Daybreaker (Architects – Century Media) ballpark, fully developed and ready to stand their ground at that level. ‘Savior’ introduces female vocals to the mix to brooding effect, and proves, along with the excellent melodic hardcore anthem ‘Phantoms’, that this Recklinghausen quintet have the depth, gravitas and vision to really make a mark in the modern field of heavy music.
An excellent first impression.
8.5/10
Burning Down Alaska on Facebook
STEVE TOVEY
Death metal supergroup Bloodbath has finally revealed their new front man to be legendary Paradise Lost front man Nick Holmes. Long admired for his great vocal delivery and genius lyricism, this seems like an inspired choice. Their fourth album Grand Morbid Funeral will be released on the Peaceville label on November 18th. This announcement comes on the heels of Opeth‘s Mikael Akerfeldt retiring from the band to focus on his main group and other projects.
From The Press Release:
Stockholm, SE – Sweden’s master of horror, Bloodbath – notable for the inclusion of Katatonia and Opeth members – is set to release its fourth album of supreme death metal,Grand Morbid Funeral, onNovember 18through Peaceville Records. Following the departure of Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt and months of speculation and rumor,Metal Hammer(U.K.) has revealed Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes as the new vocalist of Bloodbath.
Blakkheim (guitar) commented, “Little did I expect to be working with the voice behind the death metal classic Lost Paradise, or the genre defining Gothic, and yet here we are decades later fulfilling another death metal dream. With his sinister and ominous vocal delivery, it’s an absolute pleasure to make Old Nick the bell-ringer in Bloodbath’s Grand Morbid Funeral!”
Jonas Renkse (bass) commented, “Ever since I got into Lost Paradise back in ’90, Nick Holmes has been one of my favorite growling vocalists out there. He was always audible and articulate but still deep and definitely morbid. It is a great pleasure to work with him some 25 years later after I was introduced to his thunderous roar!”
Recorded once again at Ghost Ward Studios and the City of Glass Studios in Stockholm, and mixed by David Castillo, Grand Morbid Funeral is undoubtedly the band’s darkest and dirtiest opus yet; an organic collection of filth-ridden tracks straight from the grave, boldly eschewing the approach of somewhat over-produced modern death metal in favor of something altogether more rotten to the bone.
With eerie, doom-like melodies mixed with raw and savage riffing, and featuring a number of guest appearances including Chris Reifert and Eric Cutler from U.S. gore-master, Autopsy, Grand Morbid Funeral is a new high-point of brutality for Bloodbath.
Bloodbath online…
www.facebook.com/bloodbathband
Heavy Metal Movies (Bazillion Points), written by Mike “Beardo” McPadden is a project the likes of which any metal geek-movie geek fusion would be proud to have accomplished in their lives; proof that they have indeed seen more movies than you, and can tell you how headbangingly awesome each is in their own way. Indeed, this titanic titanium tome does indeed show, rather than tell the sheer amount of neck-snapping cinematography observed by one man needed to even dare a book of this lethal thickness. From A to Z, it’s an outpouring of movie mayhem and magick from teenage stoner boners to Nordic loners; rockumentaries and mockumentaries; canon appearances by the metal gods on screen and on record; from swords to spaceships, and from monsters to Manson (Editor’s note: both Charles and Marilyn), this book packs it all in, dating from the silent era Nosferatu (1922) to the modern Hollywood bombast of The Hobbit (2012) and a whole hell of a lot of stuff in between that inspired distortion, patched denim, leather, and poor hygiene worldwide.