Month: June 2017

Sum 41

During the last day of Graspop Metal Meeting while the sun was burning us all. We at RMP found some motivation to have an in too deep interview with Jason ‘cone’ Paul and  Dave Baksh of Sum 41.

 

Hi and welcome to your first time at graspop. How has the festival been so far?

Dave: We’ve been up fro like an hour [laughs], so we ran into our friends from Steel Panter and that’s about it. I freaked out because I saw Primus was right across the walkway from us so I want to see if I can shake that golden bashand.

 

Are there any of your personal favorite bands playing here today?

D: Scorpions, Suicidele, …

Jason: Yeah, Steel Panter,….

D: Primus for me

J: Hatebreed…

D: Ow yeah Hatebreed, that’s right! I love that work that Jamie did with Body Count. I thought that was pretty rad. Who else? ..

J: I mean there so many bands so …

D: we briefly looked at the schedule today and those are kinda who we want to see. And Zombie too, I don’t know if we mentioned Rob Zombie.

 

You already played in Belgium this year at the AB and you had big balloons and you’re own version of an inflatable Iron Maiden’s ‘Eddie’ with you. Can we expect specials today when you close the last day at the Jupiler stage?

D: Ohw, yeah it’s an inflatable ‘bonesy’ we can’t call our guy Eddie. Eddie is exclusive to Iron Maiden. He doesn’t moonlight or anything like that. But today?

J: It’s a shorter set for us so we're gonna play a lot of songs that people know. I don’t think we're gonna go too deep into our albums. It’s only 50 minutes so it's hard to experiment to much.

 

Why the ‘bonesy’ figure?

D: We always wanted an inflatable, from like the early 2000’s.

J: Actually, funny enough we were talking about it on the last album, after we saw primus at a festival in Hungary. They had two of them.

D: Ow yeah, you were telling me about it.

J: it’s was so windy out there, they blow around, so they had to tie them down. But I remember when we were leaving the festival, we all thought, that’s so cool. So now we have one. [laughs]

D: So we took the first mascote from our first dvd, and it is basically a skeleton taking a shit with a camera in his hand. (Introduction To Destruction) We decided to blow that up.

 

After 6 years guys are back with an new album called “13 voices”, we were all still waiting on some new material. How has the response been so far?

D: It’s been wild, we never expected this, it kinda started a world tour for us right?

J: yeah, it’s kinda just a hard-rock album, it’s not heavier than everything we have ever done before and it’s not copied. And our fans seem to like it. We are playing a lot of the new songs live and things are going good.

D: It’s awesome to see the different generation join in and sing along to the songs. It’s really cool.

 

What’s your personal favorite song on the new album?

J: I like ‘God save us all”.

D: Yeah; I like “Breaking the chain”  and the title track “13 voices”. That’s are my favorites.

 

Everybody knows Deryck had some problems. How did you cope with the struggles Deryck had as a band?

D: You where in the band at the time, right?

J: it was just a hard situation. I mean we know each other from we were 14 years old, all of us. So you go true you're 20’s and you party and drink a lot. Like we did, we partied a lot but he ended up having a problem with it. So we done a lot of reflecting like that, we changed things, this and that way. The whole situation was unfortunate and the good thing about is that he is healthy and that’s all we can really ask for. And where here playing stuff so that’s good.

D: I remember I booked a blood test that day, to see if my lever would match his. And then it ended up that I didn't have to go.

 

Dave you can play almost every metal song? What’s your personal favorite metalsong or metalband?

D: My favorite one to play, honestly, I play it before every single show that we play, an it’s hallowed be thy name. If I don’t play it before every show than the show won't go right.

 

Cone you got your name because you ate ice cream as lunch at school, is that right?

[laughter]

J: This name is gonna keep going until I am dead.

D: Yeah, we’ve got to give you a cooler nickname.

J: it’s not that funny now that I am 37 years old. 

D: Maybe we can change the story so that you beat someone up with an ice cream cone. Yeah there we go, that’s the new meaning.

J: icecreamboy, yeah that’s what we gonna do.

[laughter]

 

Thank you so much for this interview. Do you have some last words for our readers?

D: Thanks for coming along and thanks for checking out the article. What else can we say, where 20 years old now. We hope we have many more years!

 

Northlane

We at RMP sat down and had a chat with Marcus Bridge and Josh Smith from Northlane before their first show ever at Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium.

 

Hi, and welcome to Graspop. This is your first time at graspop. In 2105 you had to cancel your show at Graspop because Marcus was sick. Are you ready for your first graspop show?

Marcus: Yeah, I got unwell unfortunately. So it’s good to finally get here, I was really bummed about last time. Graspop is just one of those festivals I remember from watching live sets on “Youtube” when I was younger, so it’s good to be here. 

 

You’ve never been on Graspop before as visitor?

M: No, never before. So it’s quite the experience.

Josh: We don’t live close enough to come and watch. [laughs]

 

Yeah Australia is kinda far from Belgium.

 

You surprised your fans with  a fourth album ‘Mesmer’, how has the

response been so far?

M: The response has been great. When we released the album the respons was overwhelmingly positive and there was more reaction than northlane ever received on the initial release of a record. It’s so good seeing so many people being positive about it. Especially with that lack of warning.

J: Yeah, I think it was a cool way to release, it was a gift to our fans, they could listen to it stread away on “Spotify” or wherever they wanted. And they didn't have to wait. We noticed when playing the new song live, that they are going really well. The audience are singing the words, they know the songs, they're really enjoying them.

 

That's good then.

J: Yeah we're very happy. [laughs]

 

Mesmer is derived from physics, can you give us more content about

the term ‘mesmer’?

J: Well Mesmer is referring to Franz Mesmer, all of his theory's where disproven. He had some really cool theory’s about magnetisme between all living things, he called it animal magnetism. I thought that this would be really interesting, I think it’s quite a cool theory.

M: I guess that idea of everything being connected has weaved its way true Northlane’s music along time. It's just a different angle on it I guess. That was very interesting to us.

J: Most of all we thought it was a very cool sounding. 

 

When releasing the album you stated that this was the toughest recording process you’ve ever endured. How come?

J: We all went thru a lot of personal stuff enduring the process. We lost friends and family, we had relationships failed.

M: A lot of bad things happened while we were writing the album. 

J: We were able to channel that into the stories we told with our songs. Marcus especially was pushed really hard by our producer David Bendeth to bring things up he never really talked about before and truly convey what he was saying through the music.

M: Yeah there's definitely a lot of deeper, not issue’s, but deeper kind of feelings that a lot of us, especially myself, never been able to let out and get channeled into our music. And I think it was very freeing and therapeutic to talk about some of this tragic stuff that’s going on. And in the end I think it’s made for songs that are more personal and something people can connect more when they are listening. It was definitely difficult but I think we achieved something special with it.

 

The album artwork got a very graphic feel to it. How did you come by this design?

J: well, there’s a certain style of designers we are into. There was this one guy in Montreal, he goes by the name Fvckrender, [laughs], he uploaded new pictures on his instagram account that he come up with. We spoke with him about doing our album artwork because, we thought his stuff was really cool. We gave him a concept and then he did something for us and we didn't really liked it. So we weren’t really sure what to do, we thought about for a week, and during that week he uploaded a picture. As soon as we saw it we were like, oh my god that's perfect, that’s us. It had got like these things in it, these recurring motives that are in all of our album art and straight away we told him we want to buy that album artwork of you. We had to modify it a bit, because everytime he makes a picture he doesn’t save any of the stuff, he just uploads it and then it’s done. So he created something very similar and that became our album artwork. It was really cool.

 

You also use a triangle in a lot of your merch or band design. Does this has a reason?

J: No, there is no real reason.

M: I think the interesting thing with the Mesmer art as well, it’s a combination of art that all have come before us, a lot of the colors are very similar to our past artworks. And I guess the cube looking design that Northlane had in their designs for a long time so it’s a cool mix of everything.

 

Any bands playing here today that are or have been a great inspiration for you guys?

J: yeah, Rammstein. [laughs]

M: Did I see Sepultura is playing today? Cause that's outrageous. 

J: They were one of my favorite bands as a kid too.

M: and I am very keen to see Europe. Their not necessary a big influence on me, but they're a band that I am very excited about to see. 

 

Thank you for the interview, do you have any last words for our readers?

M: thank you, thanks for having us. Good to be back in Belgium.

J: Yeah, good to be back.

Triple Tuesdays, June 20th, 2017

Hey there everyone, welcome back to Triple Tuesdays! Today we present Vespera, Two Year Break, and Hollace!

We're starting off with Vespera, a rock band from Seattle,Washington. "Bloom", the debut single from their upcoming album is a dark and mysterious song that talks about time and speaks of unlocking the memories and what they can do together to overcome their past.

Two Year Break is a pop-rock band from London. Their recently released single called "Hourglass" talks about wanting to change and realizing what can be done to make things better for themselves.

Hollace is an alternative rock band formed in Coachella Valley, CA. "Sidewalks" is full of beautiful harmonies and has a strong 90's rock feel to it. The song itself speaks of starting anew, looking for something better, and wanting to be free.

Thanks for listening!