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Interviews
Arceye - Al Llewellyn
14/06/13 || Pr0nogo
This here be the mother of all interviews – a whopping 3,500 words or so. I know, right? Global Domination was graced by the presence of Al Llewellyn, the bassist and vocalist of UK death/thrash outfit Arceye. Naturally, Pr0nogo grabbed his keyboard, hopped onto Skype, and interrogated the man until he spilled the beans about… well, everything. Read on, boys and girls.
Global Domination: Hello, Al.
Al: Hey man!
So, Arceye just finished up “At First Light”, which is going to release 7 August 2013. I’ve already written a review on the record, so I wanted to know what your take on it was. What can you tell us about this fine slab of death and thrash?
Since our last release, “The Divide Between Chaos and Order”, we’ve had a couple member changes and that was previous to this. We just released our second record in 2013, and we’ve gotten some new members, so they’ve had an influence on the sound. The album’s really tightened up since then, and we’ve gotten a lot stronger as a band. We’ve had a better vision of what we wanted to write. We didn’t write for anyone besides us, and our songs sometimes come from just wanting to jam. I think it’s a lot stronger and a lot more defined than before, and “At First Light” is definitely a better album than our debut.
It sounds to me like you feel the band was a lot more focused with this release.
Yeah, definitely. I think our previous album was a little forced. In this one, if it wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t getting in. It definitely was more focused overall.
How would you describe the sound of the album compared to the band’s debut full-length?
That’s a hard one, really, because a lot of people always want to categorise you. From the last one, we were called a progressive death/thrash metal band, and we still kind of hold that. I think that it’s a lot tighter and has more focus since we’re just making what we want to make.
That’s refreshing to hear, since I see a lot of bands artificially limiting themselves to specific genres or labels when it might not suit their music or style.
Yeah, that’s it. On our last album we didn’t have any clean singing or orchestral instrumentation, but when we were writing the album, it really worked in certain parts. We just wanted to make the album the best it could be. I’d like to think that, at the end of the day, we’ve managed to create what Arceye is, really.
Where do you guys draw influences from?
We got the album mixed and mastered with Scott Atkins. He’s done work for a lot of really big bands like Sylosis and Cradle of Filth. The reason we went with Scott is because we love the sound he achieved with Sylosis. They had this really tight guitar sound, and our guitarists are very picky, but they all loved that sound. Aside from that, it’s kind of hard to name specific influences since we have four of us in the band. Myself, at least to name the extremes, I enjoy Decapitated and Lamb of God. I also really love the oldschool thrash bands like Metallica. I really wanted to listen to our music, though, and when writing for ourselves, we focused on crafting that kind of sound – the kind we wanted to listen to.
That’s interesting, since a lot of bands just list their influences as other bands.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy listening to other bands, but we took it upon ourselves to get this album out in a timely manner. We had member changes in 2009, we played Bloodstock in 2010, and we played Metalfest in 2011. Towards the end of 2011, we told ourselves that we really needed to write a new album. Most of the majority of 2012 was spent actually writing that album as opposed to playing big shows. We wanted to get together and work on it as a unit. The real reason is time: it takes a lot of it to write, record, and produce a full-length album. We started recording in September of 2012, but with all the stuff we had to do between then and now, it’s been a bit of a long release, haha.
Well, now that it’s out, what are your plans for supporting “At First Light”? Are you planning any gigs or the like?
Yeah, at the moment we are talking about doing a bigger tour. We’ve been playing a few shows since we finished recording and we’ll continue to do so up until the release date. It’s been going down pretty well so far. We’ll have an album launch on August 7th. Before that, we’re playing on the Les-Fest in Scotland. Like I said earlier, we’re in talks about doing a big tour, but nothing’s really been confirmed yet. It’s just the case of getting ourselves heard and taking any shows we can get from the PR guys, really.
Sounds promising to me. How did you guys tackle songwriting?
I wrote all the vocals, since the other guys leave that up to me, being the vocalist. I also play the bass. With my input in regards to writing, I’m more of a visionary of how to put the songs together. I’m not that great about coming up with better riffs or solos – the other guys are really good writers in that department – but the four of us got together to do all the music. You can go through the song and pick out a riff here and there that someone thought of individually, but by the time you go through the whole album, you forget who did what.
Did any of the other guys approach the writing of the album like that?
Yeah, I think so. One thing I wanted to do for me is vocally improve. We had a singer before we went in to write the first album, but he couldn’t commit. It was a few months before we recorded the first album when I said, “Oh, I’ll just do the vocals and see what I can do”. The way I kind of approach writing is that I think of what kind of sounds I’d like to hear on top of the music, and then I get the pen out and make words that sound good in that context. After that’s all said and done, we all demo up and hash out a song between the four of us. We’d really roughly record it with a few mics around the room, we’d refine it, and the drummer would record his stuff. The guitarists work on solos afterwards. Finally, we review it as a whole and assess things like length and verse placement. We take it away as a really rough recording and bring it back as a refined and polished track by the end of the process.
Where did you guys pull the motivation from to make something like this?
I think it was really the fact that we didn’t release the first album properly. We finished it up, but then we were like, “What do we do now?” We were lucky enough to have a good manager who really pushed the album for us, and thanks to the reviews from magazines like Terroriser, Metalhammer, and Kerrang!, we got a lot of listeners and a lot of really good feedback. The driving thing for us when we went into writing this album is the theme that runs through it as a whole. One of our guitarists was watching Pumping Iron, that Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary, and there was a specific quote that he really liked: “The wolf that’s climbing up the hill is hungrier than the wolf that’s on top of it”. We were hungry to make the album and show people what we could do – get up the next rung of the ladder. That’s the premise of the artwork. We also really wanted to push our boundaries, and I just hope that people who are listening to this record are also pleased with it, and expect great things from our next release.
If I’m any indicator, I’m pretty sure they will. Specifically talking about how the band works inside the studio, what allowed you to keep that inspiration during the recording process?
Well thanks for that! We’re pretty solid with keeping up inspiration, and I think it comes from getting into a room with your bandmates and facilitating that kind of linked conversation. Someone comes up with something that makes you think, “fuck me, that’s amazing!” You end up with all this energy, and you jam it out and feel like it was just a great writing session. We were so excited to write the album that we started to meet up to three times a week to for that purpose. I feel that if you can impress yourself, and impress your bandmates, you’ve pretty much succeeded. I hear that a lot of bands end up losing their drive. The key for us was to make sure that if it wasn’t a great idea and it didn’t fit with the rest of the plan, we simply didn’t put it in.
You said you were the guy behind all the lyrics. How does that process happen?
I’m involved in the writing and I play the instrument, and that means that before I write the vocals, I know the music back to front, inside and out. I know what I want to hear on top of the instruments, but lyrically, I don’t like to write anything that’s just nonsense. I like to have a message or a meaning that relates directly to what I can talk about within the song. When you get these ideas, you have to make them into meaningful words, and you get a theme going. For example, not long before we were due to go into a studio, our band practice and rehearsal room was broken into and about four and a half grand in gear was stolen. The song, “I Silently Wait” was pretty much a big “fuck you!” to that kind of human. I guess it all depends on the mood and I had a lot of bile to spit at them when we wrote that song. After I finished the vocals for that one, it ended up being the heaviest song on the album, in my opinion, and I think that’s why.
That’s really weird, since I just heard that Darsombra’s gear was stolen, too. Running off of that point, what’s your stance on using the Internet to steal music?
I don’t do it and I don’t think it’s because of the issue of right or wrong. It’s just that I love the feeling of having a CD in your hands. It’s not the same to have the digital mp3 or whatever. With the thanks list and the inlays and the artwork, it’s really like a big physical package. That’s enough of a reason for me to buy the physical thing. So I personally don’t do that, but I know other guys who do. It’s weird, because the whole thing about people ripping off our music is that ultimately, we’re still getting heard – and even if it’s not ideal, hopefully they enjoy it. Thinking about it, you can’t download a t-shirt and you can’t download an autographed CD. The people who really love the music that they stole will come down to our gigs and potentially pay for the stuff that they can’t download. It hurts big name bands in smaller ways since they have a lot of money, but it’s a bit more benign for smaller bands since they get their music out there in a more accessible way. If you ask me, the strugglers are the midway bands – the guys who’ve kind of made it, but kind of haven’t. It all swings in roundabouts, though, and you’ve got to have it in order to get anywhere. If you were stingy about not letting people have your music, there wouldn’t be that many listening to you at all.
That’s a pretty broad look at the issue, and it’s nice to see someone examining all the points. Switching gears back to the album and the band, though, “At First Light” had a lot of different elements on it – things such as the instrumental tracks and the clean vocals – that weren’t necessarily common in death or thrash metal. In your opinion, what key elements of the band have changed between the old record and the new one?
Well, we’d get together in the same way for writing purposes and we had a lengthy instrumental back on the last album. The orchestral bits are pretty new, though. The drummer had a friend of his who was in a quartet, so he got him to pull a few favours. I was quite skeptical at first, but when we got the masters back, it just clicked. It’s hard to deny the quality of something when you hear it for yourself. The clean vocals were never a part of our band at first, but it wasn’t through choice, just exclusion – and I didn’t want it to be that way. If it fit on this album, it was in. The idea that I had was to have a bit of melody. I don’t think the clean vocals are out of place on the album, even though they’re only on one song – they’re more of a surprise, especially since they’re quite deep into the record. Overall it’s quite the same, but of course we had two new members and things do change. All in all, we hit the nail on the head as far as doing what we wanted to do for this album.
Were there any goals you guys couldn’t meet when it came to writing this album?
There were a lot of songs or aspects of songs that just didn’t make it, and it wasn’t because we were like, “oh, that’s no good”. If something different just didn’t fit with a song, like slightly different time signatures for example, it wasn’t in. On the other hand, though, if something really clicked, that’s what we included. We couldn’t find the space or the reasoning to fit a lot of really cool ideas in, but we have it for the next album. In some respects, I enjoyed not forcing stuff in, and nothing on this record feels to me like it doesn’t belong. Like I said, if it was a great idea but couldn’t fit into “At First Light”, we’ll see about including it next time around.
I’m gonna jump around for a second and go back to what you said about lyrics. You mentioned that you like to have the songs you write hold some kind of meaning. What were some key themes of “At First Light”?
I look at the songs that bookend the album – the first and the last ones. The meaning of those were really just about pushing our boundaries and improving as people. As far as forming the themes, though, I’ll start with an idea that’s loosely related to a feeling or an experience in my life. Obviously, though, to write a full song, you have to kind of explode it and appeal towards the wider idea of that theme so it can relate to other people’s experiences. It’s all about stuff that I felt or lived through at some point or another, though, even after I’m done expanding the meaning of the song. “Damage Done”, for example, was written about the struggle for time we were fighting while writing the record, and we made it into a song about putting all your efforts against the clock. There is definitely a lot of meaning to the songs, but I also like to leave some of it up to interpretation. You put an idea in people’s heads and see what they make of it.
How does the band warm up before they play live shows?
One thing we did for this album, live, is that we’re playing to an audio track for the orchestral bits. Our drummer was in a previous band called The Hollow Earth Theory and he had never played to a clip track. In some respects, that’s kind of relaxed our live performance – normally, when we play live, the adrenaline goes through the roof and you speed up a bit. This time around, we didn’t have to worry about that, and we kept it in line with the original timings. As far as warming up goes, I know the guys just play their instruments, but with me, I always used to get a beer because I thought that it would calm me down. What actually ended up happening was that it started getting my throat dry, and I’d end up losing my voice a bit after the first song. So I’ve just been chilling out, playing the bass, and humming a little to work up my voice. We’ve been doing it long enough now that it’s kind of second nature before a gig.
I know you guys probably all have day jobs, seeing as how few bands make a living off of metal. How has that affected your lives as musicians?
Thankfully, we’re all working jobs that are pretty easy to move shifts around. We will potentially be away for weeks on the longer tours, and even though I’m self-employed, if you don’t work, you don’t get your money. I think if you have a bunch of like-minded and committed guys, you can make it work. If it ends up becoming a problem, we tend to just cross that bridge when we come to it.
Well, hopefully the tours help a bit with that situation. Have you seen any reviews or reception? There probably isn’t a whole lot since the release date is still a few months away.
Like I said, we’ve played a few new songs live at smaller gigs. We did a bit of a hometown show since we hadn’t played there in quite a while. It was a small little place, but it was rammed full and everyone there was blown away by the new stuff. A lot of people are still trying to take it in since we haven’t released the album to the public yet, but we are getting a lot of good reviews. I got a lot of good press about my voice, too, especially from one particular reviewer. It’s funny, because we as a band listen to it so many times while we’re making the album, and when the finished versions get back to us you can’t help but listen to it again. By the time a fan’s heard it the first time, we’ve heard it about a million times.
How do you feel about the direction the band is going in with this album? How will it translate to the future of the band as a whole?
For me, it’s probably the best thing we’ve done, since it’s more of what I like to listen to. If you can write an album, and think, “what do I want to listen to”, and you can put your own music on because that’s what you want to hear, then you’ve written a successful album. It might sound like you’ve got a bit of a big head when you do that, but really we made this album because we wanted to listen to that kind of music. Now, we release the album, we get on the good shows, and we get back into the swing of things. We’d love to tour different countries and make sure all sorts of people hear the new album, too.
Well, this was a very solid interview and I appreciate you taking all this time to give us a look at what Arceye’s all about. I’m sure the guys will love the record. Any final words before we close this up?
Well, we’re doing a bunch of shows in the UK, so keep on top of our Facebook and that sort of stuff. “At First Light” will be released on August the 7th, and we’re working on creating studio video blogs and putting those online. I think that before the album goes live, we’ll be doing a full livestream, too, but I’ll have to confirm that. In any event, that news will be on our Facebook, so again, keep watch on that. Thanks for your time!
Check out all things Arceye at their Facebook page
Photo credit: Mark Weatherhead
