Pulp Summer Slam bands say: ‘Metal labels are for magazine writers’
They couldn’t have been more different from each other, culturally, stylistically, and personally.
In Cocoon Boutique Hotel in Quezon City in late April, Finnish metal band Amoral, British “power-metal” kings Dragonforce, and American “post-hardcore” Circa Survive met the press for Pulp’s annual Summer Slam, which is quickly being acknowledged as the country’s premier metal festival.
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It is noon. The weather is easily 35 degrees outside. You wonder if, besides perhaps an opinion on the balmy weather, these people will find something in common.
Ensaymada and metal
“Yeah, we got a chance to meet one another and talk about music,” says Circa Survive’s Anthony Green, easily the day’s resident heartthrob who was raving about his ensaymada breakfast.
He, and everybody else, point to Dragonforce’s Herman Li to do the talking: Li is as articulate on the guitar as he is in speech. Li graciously points to the soft-spoken Green. “As diverse as everybody here is onstage, the one thing is that we all really love what we’re doing and we’re all here because we love music so I think that’s what draws us all together.”
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Circa Survive, well, survived a major label deal for one album and their latest work is released independently (“…the most freeing experience, I would definitely like to do it again.” says Green).
‘You can’t calculate popularity with downloads’
How much does the music industry’s business woes affect the bands?
“You better clap afterwards” remarks Li jokingly to the bands as he is tasked to answer the question. “I think the industry has changed so much now that you can’t really calculate the bands popularity or how known they are based on record sales… based on downloads or this and that. The whole world has kind of changed.
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“I think more and more artists, like they (Circa Survive) just talked about doing it themselves, don’t need to be in a record label anymore with so much stuff online that you can do yourself.”
‘We do what we do whether people like it or not’
He adds, “As any band, you can gain or lose fans; some people move on and don’t want to listen anymore or have kids… at least with Dragonforce it doesn’t make any difference whatever happens in the industry because we just stick to doing the music that we love and that’s our style and whether people like it or they don’t it doesn’t matter because we did the music that we delivered and that’s our art.”
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The affable Li elicits genuine applause; it is, in a way, one of his best solos.
Asked to describe their own music (“Nintendo metal” being one of the most popular adjective used by fans and press alike due to the extreme speed and note choices executed by Li and co-guitarist Sam Totman), Dragonforce hesitate and look at each other and draws laughter in the room.
Metal is ‘music you sing in the shower’
Li grabs the mic again. “I just wanna do this one (more laughter in the room)… well, it depends on who’s listening to it. Some people who ask me who don’t really listen to metal, I say, ‘It’s music you sing in the shower’ because you get really catchy songs….
“Maybe for metal fans you sometimes say ‘power metal’ although we’ve gone beyond the traditional power metal [Note: power metal’s lyrical themes focus on the “heroic,” and not the “satanic,” real or campy, in “traditional” metal] Sometimes we say “extreme power metal” because people confuse us with bands from the late eighties or something.
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“But … the label is not for musicians to choose. The press choose something that you can read in a magazine because you can’t hear music when you read a magazine… we don’t really care what we’re called.”
Green agrees, “You make music that you wanna make regardless of what they’re putting in the magazines… you can’t really let that determine what you do or what the identity of your band is. You have to allow yourself to change and grow and if they don’t have the appropriate label for that then… fuck ‘em.”
READ PART 2: Metal music is for fans...no matter what you call it
