MetalSucks

It’s The Environment, Stupid: Part 2

Let’s go all the way back to our headlining tour of Determination back in 2002 and see how your environment affects your band. Our headlining tour for that record consisted of two unknown bands (at the time) by the names of Bleeding Through and Avenged Sevenfold. For us, the tour was terrible as hell. I can’t speak for A7X or Bleeding Through but the shit was horrible. No one came to see our band play and it deflated our aspirations and brought us back to earth.

We weren’t going to be the biggest band in the world. Back to the drawing board. The environment of Century Media pushing our band in all the magazines, doing big tours like Nevermore/Opeth, Cradle Of Filth/Nile and Gwar/Goatwhore put us in a place before that headlining tour where we thought we’d be THE SHIT. Since that wasn’t the case we hit a point where we were all thinking of what we wanted in the band. Without those experiences we wouldn’t have written Gone Forever.

I’m sure some of you have heard our band was on the brink of destruction during that time, and I’m sure everything you heard was accurate. We were thinking about quitting. We wanted to be something more than we were. Jump forward to a show my brother Doc and I went to at the M&M Hall in NJ. We’re watching Killswitch play at a hall and it sounded pretty awesome. Jesse was still in the band, Adam was playing drums, Mike and Joel were still in their same positions. After the show, Mike gave me a new demo of the new stuff they’d done. It consisted of “Numbered Days,” “Alive Or Just Breathing” and one other song that escapes me. It blew my fucking mind. And it changed the way I looked at doing our band.

We had always been a melodic band but never understood how we can utilize it with singing. We tried some singing stuff on the Determination pre-production and it just didn’t gel. What KsE did for me personally was allow me to see how our parts were made for clean vocals and how song structure was important to being in a band. Song structure includes everything, guitar riffs, bass riffs, solos, bridges, singing, etc. If you can name it and it can go in a song, then it’s part of structure. But what KsE did on that demo for me was show me how less is more and how our band can utilize that vision using those principles.

My bro and I were also listening to Wages Of Sin [Arch Enemy] and when we were talking about the record Doc said two words all the time: “Big Riffs”.

There was a lot of dissension in our band at the time because my brother and I for the first time had a clear idea of where we wanted to go with the band. This created problems because we were doing stuff on a drum machine and that pissed off our drummer. I wanted to sing on the new stuff and it infringed upon Byron’s role in the band. If any of you knew me I could be a real asshole, especially back then. I must have quit the band 4 or 5 times at that point due to frustration and blaming everyone else but myself for our success or lack thereof.

Our environment at that time was live or die. We had put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make a great album but also survive. Surviving wasn’t just making a great record, it was selling more records than we’d ever sold before and getting a solid fan base. Luckily, we got a chance to tour with bands who had fan bases and watch how their fans reacted to their songs. Through all of that experience we gathered that just because we were good at playing our instruments we didn’t have to overplay or overwrite. We decided to lay back and write a simple metal record.

Yes, Killswitch showed us how to incorporate singing but we don’t sound like KsE. Yes, Arch Enemy made us aware of big riffs but we had to write those riffs. Our environment at that time brought us to these new things and we combined all of these elements to make Gone Forever; which sold three times as many records as Determination and ten times more than Reject The Sickness.

Use your influences and pay attention to what’s going on around you! Your gut won’t fail you!

HORNS!