Interview with the band.
The CD is an exploration of individual personal struggles that converge to form this storyline thread. It primarily deals with the restlessness of our generation - our lack of attention span, increasing dependence on technology, societal apathy, media overload, and mental health crises. Most of these songs were written stemming from our own frustrations or experiences, but we tended to find that a lot of other people were empathizing with these same issues. Thematically it's frustrated, apathetic, a little bit schizophrenic and paranoid, but also hopeful and ready for change.
It's interesting because we really didn't set out to create a concept album and as a band we typically have very diverse perspectives. We all went off and wrote most of these songs on our own, with each member contributing. Most of them were merely expressions of experiences we were undergoing at the time. But as we got together and started playing through songs as a band, we noticed these common themes emerging and that's when we started to recognize it as an organism that had a personality of its own.
We each had a lot of personal turmoil in our lives and we were adjusting to life after school and casual relationships. Musically we started to show some of our more alt metal and hardcore tendencies sounding more like Chevelle, Sevendust, and AFI. But it's still rooted in alternative rock and grunge - taking after Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, and Nirvana. We're all too straight-laced to really be a metal band, and one of the strengths of our band is that we can have really heavy down-tuned rock songs and follow it up with a radio-friendly anthemic sing-along. Maybe that's a weakness from a marketing perspective, but we really relish that sonic range. We never want to be one of those bands with a CD where every song sounds just like the one before it.
The album is considerably darker than most of the stuff we've written before, and I think that's mostly a reflection of the things that we were going through in our personal lives at the time more so than any "new direction" the band is going in. I also think it's natural for bands to change sonically as the members mature and try different approaches. The truly great bands re-invent themselves continuously - you see it in The Beatles, U2, Bowie, and other acts that span decades as opposed to the radio flavor of the week rock band. If we sounded the same on this record as we did five years ago, I don't think any of us would be happy with that result. No one really sits down and mentally says "I'm going to write this really depressing record," it just flows as a result of what is inspiring you at the moment.
This is actually the first album we really wrote as a band. William [drums] had come on board right before we recorded our last release and some of his ideas are in there, but we really hadn't started to grow yet as a brotherhood. We took that experience and we wrote this album together. Everyone really has a voice in there, but there's also the overall collective will of the band. Some of the songs may have started with one member, but you bring it to the table and the other members get involved and start contributing. When you write a song it'll always be your baby, but everyone in the band adopts it as their child too and in the end it turns out better than it would've been.
Sure, the whole band was shooting steroids throughout the recording process... (not really). Actually, for vocals on "The Only One Left," Justin was performing them from a little sound booth that's basically like a closet. To make him really feel isolated, we turned off the lights in the closet and he performed the vocals in the dark. I don't know if that's original, but it seemed to work well for us.
As a band, we continually write songs. Very few make it to the stage where we really develop them into a meaningful piece. There were many more songs that, with greater resources, we might have refined to a level of quality that satisfied us. We could've released a traditional full-length LP without letting all the songs mature, but it would not have been as high quality as the result we obtained by scaling back to the material that we did. We didn't want to do our fans a disservice by throwing some crappy unrefined music on there just to achieve a certain album length. There's always a possibility some of the other material that didn't make the cut may emerge in the future, in some form or another.
Of course we'll tell you they're all good, but that would be a copout.
We really just want to be heard. We feel that this is our greatest effort yet and if you check this album out you'll fall in love with the songs just like we did. Hopefully you'll also become a fan of the band and we'll get to meet you at some point too.
© 2008 No Compromise. All rights reserved.