Interview With Casey Jones (No, Not That One) (Guitars)
Nobody can tell a band’s history quite like the band members themselves, so tell me a little about how you came to be. I certainly love what I’m hearing here on the disc, and feel that the journey has been well worth it.
Well we don’t really have a history as such as we’ve only been together since October 2016. Me and Szymon met online I saw an advert he’d placed and we were pretty much at the same place in life with regard to music and this was basically our last shot at making something we were proud of or we would call it a day. So really we just got our heads down straight away and worked fast and hard to make something we loved. And a bit later we were joined by Max who we got on with well and fitted right in. I think we’ve all had experience with a lot of bands previously that haven’t really gone anywhere due to “personalities” so really the mistakes were made before and we have a very low drama work oriented relationship where we can pretty much just concentrate on what we like musically.
Tell me a little about what it was like writing and recording the disc. How was the studio experience? Are you happy with the final result of the disc?
A lot of the initial writing was done via the internet to save time as we live some distance from each other. I usually start with the lyrics then choose riffs that fit the atmosphere I’m looking for in the song. From there Szymon adds his own take on the songs and that’s usually when they start to really come together and start kicking ass its always great to hear what he can do with what he’s given. Then we get together and thrash them out till we’re really happy with them it’s a pretty stress free process as we have similar taste in music and enjoy each others work. Max probably had the toughest time joining three weeks before recording but he did really well and a lot of his writing for the parts where the Bass really lifts the songs was done in the studio and that’s a credit to his willingness to experiment and work with me as a guitarist which doesn’t happen with Bass players often.
We recorded parts at a number of different studios when we could afford it or had time so that was a bit chaotic. But we had a good vision of what we wanted from demoing all the songs in advance which helped a lot.
We’re really pleased with the album, we worked really hard to get it where we wanted it in a short space of time and we think it stands up to the best of the death metal albums of the year, we think it stands out style wise from a lot of releases at this point in time. We also learned a lot making it so we’re very hopeful to make the next one even better.
Obviously, your influences range from Bolt Thrower to early/current-era (funny how that happened) Paradise Lost, Asphyx, Entombed and others. But what are some of your personal favorite discs, the ones that you feel are essential to the formation of this project?
Man, there are so many I could choose from I think really the big ones would be Warmaster, Shades of God, Leprosy, Heartwork, The Rack, Necroticism, Utopia Banished, De Profundis, Beneath the Remains, World Downfall, Covenant.
I suppose it’s really the era, I think we really love that late eighties early nineties period where thrash, death and grind were similar and we have so many great memories of bands from that time, so I think they really formed our taste for metal.
What are some of the events that inspired the lyrics on this album? What were you feeling around the time this disc was written?
Well at the time I started writing I’d pretty much given up music but was writing short stories. I was having the stereotypical existential crisis and was trying to get an outlet for that as well as trying to understand it. So, I was reading a lot of Jung and Nietzsche and similar writings and was trying to find a way to organize my thoughts on how to deal with events in my own life. Most of the subject matter really stems from grief or political anger and without some form of outlet I was feeling like I was being consumed by those things. At the time I was living and working in the Middle East and certain things about being there were exacerbating those feelings. Just by chance as I was in this stage of my life I walked past a guitar store and couldn’t help myself. And from that point onwards the stories became songs and I started looking for some like-minded individuals when I moved back to the UK.
I think the lyrics are the important backbone of an album I’m really sick of listening to bands that have gone through a dictionary and looked for clever words to shove into a song or have read two pages of Marx and decided that they’re an intellectual. Orwell is one of my favorite writers and it’s because he had genuine integrity and life experience. When I write a song I try to have to really feel passionate about what inspired me to write it in the first place so if it’s an angry sounding song you can bet your life I was fucking angry when I wrote it, there’s been a rage there which has been lived with and through. I don’t think you get that with a lot of bands these days because most people who can afford to be in bands are middle class teenagers who live at home, like what the fuck have you got to be angry about, go and live a life for a while and see what you have to write about then and if you don’t want to anymore you shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.
What is it like working with Dan Swano? The man’s an absolute master. His contributions to this scene are countless and I hope that he gets proper commendation for all of them, being one of the best producers in this business.
Dan was amazing and if I’m honest I’m not entirely sure why people would go to anyone else. Because of how we’d recorded the record at different studios it wasn’t coming together like we wanted and knew that it could, then Dan just came in and sorted it out like a super hero. I don’t think there are many other engineers or producers on the planet who have his level of knowledge technically combined with a genuine understanding of metal music, he really gets it which is important. And that his fees don’t price out bands at our level is also fantastic. We really think the album sounds amazing so honestly couldn’t be more pleased with his work.
The Grim Tower mixes music with geek culture, so we want to know what kinds of things you guys geek out on. These don’t have to be movies, books, games or television, per se; they can also be anything that you devote a lot of time to outside of making music.
We’re pretty fucking geeky people so most things really. In all seriousness though it’s only through being a geek I got into death metal in the first place, I loved Warhammer as a kid and John Blanche (who was an artist for games workshop) did some art for Bolt Thrower and Sabbat so I bought those records when I was around ten purely based on the artwork.
Most of my time these days is spent geeking out on martial arts, my day job is as a BJJ and MMA coach so I spend a large portion of every day obsessing over small details to do with fighting and the teaching/coaching of fighting.
But then in my spare time, well, everyone loves computer games right? Myself and Max are the ones in the band who prob spend more time gaming, though Darksouls 3 is really pushing the boundaries of how much I can actually enjoy a game at the moment though. It’s pretty likely that by the time anybody reads this my Xbox will be thrown out the window. Though I’m trying to not let that happen before the next Elder Scrolls game comes out. (Reminder that it’s 2023 and a new Elder Scrolls game still hasn’t released yet.)
Thanks for answering my questions and for making a terrific disc that has a lot of thought and effort behind it. This is the kind of thing that metal needs right now, there’s just too much core if you ask me. I wish you the best of luck in the future!
Thank you very much for saying so and thanks for taking the time to interview us we really appreciate it. We couldn’t agree more about core there was too much in the late nineties let alone now.