It feels like your doomiest.
Yeah, I definitely agree, that’s one of the anagloies that I have used as well. It’s doomy and I think that comes a lot from the slower samples on the record. Three of the songs we tune down to B, so they are just heavier because of that right off the bat. We just found that although we are all fans of fast and aggressive music, that we are able to get more of just slowing things down and creating more breathing room for all the instruments. When you can take it down a notch, there’s much more room for the drums to breath and for the vocals to fit in there nicely, and the guitars to be in the perfect layer that they need to be in. Each kick and each snare drum just has a lot more power, because there’s not so many things going on at the same time.
We just like that vibe and that feel, and soon as we wrote the first couple of songs in that manor it shaped the way for the album. Will the next album be like that? Probably not, because we like to do something different each time. We don’t say, ‘Okay, we need to make this different than the last one.’ It’s just a different time, two years later, and people have two years of different influences. Two years of us playing together and everything is just super natural, not supernatural (laughing), but extremely natural. So just slowing things down and making it jam, and there are a lot of really big parts you could really bob your head to and that’s kind of what we were going for this time.
That really shines on the ‘The Heart Of It All.’ Is that just a nod to old school metal, the epic instrumental?
Well, we are all big Metallica fans, and we all grew up listening to their instrumentals, the great ones on Ride The Lightening, [Master Of] Puppets and […And] Justice [For All], and we have been doing instrumentals since 2003. We had our first one, ‘Implements Of Destruction,’ on the Impossibility Of Reason record. We didn’t have one for the self-titled and for Resurrection we had one that kind of had vocals in the beginning and the end, but the whole song was surrounded by this epic instrumental section in the middle. This time around, we decided to just do another one. It was a chance for us to not stick to the typical song formal. It’s a chance for the instruments to shine. To show people how layering different guitar parts and harmonies can really change the whole feel of a part even though we may play the rhythm part twice, it sounds different each time because of the harmony and the solos and things like that. It’s a chance for us to just jam and show people what we’re made of.
What is the most amazing part of being in this band for you? You’ve had some line-up changes, some label changes, so it the resiliency?
I guess it’s that we’re all doing it. We’ve all been going to shows since we were young, and dreaming of being onstage, and playing the instruments that our idols played and playing these big shows. We’re doing that stuff, and we’ve played with all of our idols, we have great gear, and a fantastic practice space. I’d say that’s the most gratifying and glorifying aspect of it. There are certainly positive parts to it, and negative parts to it like any job, but yeah, sometimes you have to sit back and say, ‘Fuck, yeah, I play in a heavy metal band for a living.’
