This year we continue good tradition of big New Year doom-quiz, there’re only 5 questions for a bunch of good and famous (or not so famous yet) doom bands. What kind of questions do we have today? Mmm… Let us see!
1. As always we’re starting with general question: What is the latest news from the band and what is it current state and plans for 2013?
2. Second one is about main hit of the band: Which song does represent the band best? Which one makes you really proud of it?
3. Striking balance as always: Which doom / metal / rock releases were most significant for you in 2012?
4. This question is something new for most of our heroes: What is the best present you got at this New Year / Christmas? I was glad that I’m not alone who get socks from grandmother each year. Long live grandma! Thank you!
5. Well, this question came pretty easy because straight before the New Year came I was enduring worst hangover for 2012. So what was your worst hangover mates? After which drink / substances did you get it and what did you do to reach such amazing results and how you survive it? Preconditions for this question are disclosed in New Year Doom quiz part I.
Carcharodon, Dirge, Echoes of Yul, Jack Frost, Lurk, Odradek Room, Midryasi, Sea Bastard and Talbot reveal their secrets of Doom and Hangover!
Carcharodon (Italy, death’n’roll, stoner)
Dr.Pixo the Maniac (bass, vocals)
1. Hey there, girls and boys! So, the latest and cutest news from CARCHARODON are:
- We're in the deep promotion of our mammoth-heavy new album called "ROACHSTOMPER", a blend of sludge, death metal, doom, stoner, southern metal, blues and country. You're askin' yourself "how can it be possible?"..well, just drink as much as we do and you'll get to see Waylon Jennings riding a HD, getting on stage with Eyehategod and partying with Entombed. Then he'd probably have a hold'em with Nashville Pussy.
- The new album will see the light on the 5th of April under Altsphere Production, a french label. http://altsphere.com/en/band-52-Carcharodon
- We're tryin' to put on a tour to promote the cd and infect as many places and holes we can.
- On our socials (reverbnation, facebook, myspace, youtube) you can follow the album making of, some songs preview and of course any news comin' from the band.
2. Oh well, that's hard to tell. I guess everyone reflects himself in a song we wrote. Personally, the one that makes me shiver is the opening track of the album, "Stoneface Legacy", a southern-doom manifesto about us and the stonehard bond that keeps the 4 of us together. It literally flashes me everytime I play it or listen to it.
But, let me tell you one thing I'm observing in these days: so, as you can imagine we're getting reviews about some promo copies our label sent to mags, zines, forums, etc. and every "reviewer" quotes a different song as the best of the platform. It's wonderful to see how we can touch different feelings in different people.
3. Well, even if I usually listen to some pretty old stuff, there's no doubt about the best albums in 2012: ZZ Top - La Futura, Witchcraft - Legend, High on Fire - De vermiis mysteriis. Then maybe Baroness, Bell Witch, Testament, Slash. Yeah, and obviously the Skynyrds and Leslie West..pure class as usual!
4. I guess the best present I/we got this Xmas has been to sign for Altsphere Production..for me it's always kind of a dream. Havin' a band, kickin' asses, having a deal, recording cds. woh, it flashes me!
5. Ha, it's hard to answer to this question. Every night is getting more tragic and somewhat superhero-like. Dont get me wrong, we drink, no substances. But we drink gallons of alcohol, it doesn't matter what. The detonator is the 4 of us together. It makes us feel on a fuckin' rocket ready to harass every person we meet.
Carcharodon “Last CristmAss”FacebookMyspaceReverbNationDirge (France, atmospheric sludge metal)
Stéphane L. (guitars)
1. We are working on our 6th album. There is a lot of material to shape so I don't think we'll enter the studio before Spring. Then recording, mixing, mastering and so on. So we'll have to spend a lot of time within our studio and for now I don't really know when this new album will see the light. Next winter would be cool. What is sure is that we won't do a lot of gigs this year, at least not until September/October.
2. It is really random, it depends on which period of our career we think about. Talking for myself, I would have said some years ago “Glaring Lights” but today I'd say “Morphée Rouge”, perhaps... But it is a difficult question as all of our songs are supposed to mirror what the band truely is in its essence, no matter the period. In the same logic, we're proud of all our work until then. Personally, tracks like “Wings of Lead Over Dormant Seas” or “Elysian Magnetic Fields” are very close to what we had in mind, to where we wanted to go during their composition. That's a good reason to be proud of.
3. Blut Aus Nord : 777 – Cosmosophy, Killing Joke : MMXII, School Of Seven Bells : Ghostory, Napalm Death : Utilitarian, And Also The Trees : Hunter Not the Hunted, Sisygambis : Translucid, Dead Can Dance : Anastasis and some more... Yes, not really doom, sorry :)
4. Those who count are still alive, that's an interesting present I think.
5. The other guys of the band could have talked about their hangover far better than me, but bad luck for you, I don't drink and I don't take drugs. I can only remember old memories of hangover during the 90's, which is not really interesting, believe me. To be honnest, I don't feel the need to get drunk or high to immerse myself in a “parallel state” ; music, visions or words are sensations deep enough to me.
Dirge “Morphée Rouge”Official WebsiteFacebookMyspaceEchoes of Yul (Poland, atmospheric doom / drone)
Michal Sliwa (all instruments)
1. We`ve just released new album entitled “Cold Ground” on Italian Avantgarde Music. I`m currently working on next album and should finish it this year while i`m doing some remix/engineer work for others. So plans for 2013: work, work, work. I love it.
2. The last track on new album (surprisingly called “Last”) is one I’m really proud of. It took so much time to compose, record and mix the whole thing and I think it is quite good representative to direction I want to take on next EOY album – more organic and raw slo-mo riffing with repetitive guitars and more mellow atmosphere.
3. There were few albums I was waiting for and they didn’t failed: Thomas Koner returned with amazing “Novaya Zemlya”: deep, slow, abstractive and suggestive in the same time - absolutely astounding record, I wish I could hear this through Sensurround system – these sounds are so cinematic. Om did fantastic “Advaitic Songs”. Darsombra, The Young Gods, Windy and Carl, Ametsub also done great albums.
4. Definitely new record. The delay in release was huge so I’m glad that it is finally here.
5. Headaches after nicotine/caffeine combos are enough for me. I prefer to stay sober (laugh).
Echoes of Yul “Last”
FacebookBandcampSoundcloudMyspaceAvantgarde MusicJack Frost (Austria, doom metal)
Mournful Morales (guitars)
1. Jack Frost is rehearsing again after an almost 2 years' break. We are working on new songs, of course without any guarantee that there will be a new record. We are looking forward to playing some decent shows in the year of our 20th anniversary which our agency is trying to get booked at the moment.
2. If "represent" means that a song is incorporating the typical jack frost style I would choose "The Wannadie Song". A song we're really proud of is "You Are The Cancer" - it should have sold millions of copies.
3. I have not purchased too many doom releases but the new from Saturnus is of course most significant. Two relevant rock releases were the Cult's "Choice of Weapon" and Danko Jones' "Rock And Roll Is Black And Blue".
4. The autobiography of Arnold Schwarzenegger ("Total Recall").
5. I guess we had our worst hangovers when we were in our whisky era. We won't talk about other substances here but I’ve heard that there are some that make whisky affect even more, haha. No idea how we survived those days....
Jack Frost “You Are The Cancer”FacebookMyspaceLurk (Finland, sludge / death doom metal)
Kalle (drums)
1. We've been working on our new album for some while now and currently we're in the final stages of the mixing process. In that light, 2013 is looking good for us and bad for everybody else.
2 From the first album it's probably 'Deliverance', but everything on the new one utterly demolishes those old songs! Our new album-closer is just madness pretending to be music and everything preceding that is on a completely new level, compare it to what you will. If the first LP was assault and battery committed in a drunken frenzy, this new one is totally power-mad interplanetary mass murder and/or suicide.
3. I believe I enjoyed the new High on Fire album and the release of Silmienvaihtajat 1985-87 collection. Tame Impala's Lonerism is awesome too. I'm really bad at following release schedules, so I might make a better list for 2012 a couple of years later, when I finally catch up with everyone else.
4. Woolly socks, couple of movies and some acid.
5. It has probably been a case of drinking anything and everything for a number of days. It's hard to put a finger on a specific date, 'cos it's more than a few times it has happened. As for survival I suggest a healthy dose of false promises and lying to yourself. Never again! Until next time, that is...
Lurk “Deliverance”FacebookBandcampMyspace Odradek Room (Ukraine, prog doom)
Artem Krikhtenko (vocals, guitars)
1. We are looking forward to our debut album's official release, which happens to come out a year later than the recording itself was finished. We've made a full remastering of the album for its edition at Hypnotic Dirge Records. We have also resumed our live performance activity and I'm working on the new material at the moment.
2. It's hard to tell. The album shows the very gist and makes us proud, because it also reveals the diversity which we've been keen to gain.
3. I think this year I've been listening to Devin Townsend and Joe Hisaishi, also ethnic music and trip-hop most.
4. Presents themselves are not so important. What matters is that our folks are with us and in full health. That would be a rather big reason to be happy.
5. This happened in about 2008, and it was vodka without any snack that became a reason of a really gloomy morning.
Odradek Room “Faded Reality”Facebook Midryasi (Italy, stoner doom rock)
Paolo Paganotto (guitars)
1. The question comes at the perfect time, because right in the next days is going to be released our new album, called "Black, Blue & Violet". It comes on CD (released by My Graveyard Productions) and Vinyl (released by Rockwolf Records) and we all are thrilling for that.
After the album release we'd like to promote it playing live as much as we can.
2. Good question. In every gig we don't miss to play Hypnopriest, a song which was released on our very first album. It's one of the songs people like more and for us it has become a sort of battle horse, so i think it is one of the most representative of the sound of the band.
Moreover the cover of the first album represents the Hypnopriest itself and recently we used it to issue a new t-shirt for celebrating our 10th anniversary.
The song which makes me very proud of it is Corridors, the title track of our second album. After 4 years I still think that it is an amazing song. I'm also very proud of Behind my Eyes, from our forthcoming album.
3. I appreciated a lot the latest Solstafir album, absolutely brilliant. It is significant to me because also because I used to listen to it while moving with my car to the studio where our new album was mixed. I liked also a lot Tragic Idol by Paradise Lost and El Camino by The Black Keys.
4. A professional digital camera case. Excellent.
5. Very difficult question because there are plenty of situations to choose from. Maybe, the worst is the one that I got when I was 20 years old. I was at the seaside in a famous Italian resort during the summer holidays; one night my friends and I started to drink, speaking about music, etc.
With us were some guys we had never met before, they brought a lot to drink. So, without any particular reason, I drank many beers and a lot of whisky; in the end I was so drunken that I needed two days to completely recover from the hangover!
Midryasi “Corridors”FacebookMyspace Sea Bastard (United Kingdom, sludge doom)
Steve Patton (bass)
1. Currently we’re waiting on the finalities for the production of CDs and double vinyl of our album. The vinyl’s been pressed, just took a while to get the sleeve sorted, and it will soon be available via Tadpole, Headless Guru and Mosh Tunage records. We’re not totally sure who’s releasing the CD yet, so that’ll be out a bit later in the year.
Immanent plans are mainly gigging for the next couple of months, trying to play some towns we haven’t before, and trying to get more gigs with bands we like. We’ll also start writing some new songs and possibly try to record a second album or EP by the end of the year.
2. Personally, I’d have to say possibly Smashed by Sunlight or Aqua Vitae represent us best. They both kind of sum up what we’re doing and are both songs where the four of us work well together. Aqua was the first song we wrote, in the first rehearsal, and Smashed just has a feel to it that is us, especially the outro.
I think we’re pretty proud of all our songs. We don’t tend to even pursue ideas we’re not totally into, and with songs as long as ours we don’t really need fillers. We’ve only gigged one song we took to completion that we’ve now dropped, and even that we wish we’d got a live recording of! It was called Dungeon Crawlin’, and was about 20 mins long. We only dropped it because we couldn’t play it well enough in rehearsals to do it live loads, but the two times we did do it were great.
Overall we’re all really happy with the album, as all five songs are strong and we feel very proud of that. We just tried jamming a couple of years ago, and I don’t think any of us really planned this far ahead, so both Great Barrier Riff and the Sea Bastard album are more than we were necessarily expecting.
3. I’m utterly the wrong person to ask about this, as in 2012 I was more going back to bands I knew of when I was young, and felt I should explore more now. Bands like Free, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd.
There were lots of bands we all got into, and also albums we liked in 2012, but overall as a band we just went along with what we do. Bands like Ishmael, Enos, War Wolf, Gorse, and various others all released great albums last year though.
4. Not representative of the band at all, but personally I’m interested in archaeology, so my best presents were a Neolithic flint that my Dad got me from an auction, and my girlfriend got me a subscription to the Sussex Archaeological Society. Not very rock ‘n’ roll, but I liked it.
5. My worst has probably been from white ciders, which have nothing but cheap chemicals in. No drug has ever left me feeling as terrible as when I have woken up having drunk far too much Frosty Jack, or some other white cider of that type. I’d rather repeat the worst acid trip I’ve ever been through than deal with one of those hangovers again. Oh Lord…
Sea Bastard “Aqua Vitae”FacebookBandcamp Talbot (Estonia, progressive doom)
Jarmo Nuutre (drums, programming, vocals) and Magnus (bass, synth, vocals)
1. Jarmo: Recording the new album, releasing it in the spring 2013 and then touring around the world with it.
2. Magnus: For me it's 20k Years Underwater. One of the first songs we' re ever written and also the longest. Having it's haunting downtempo heavy groove, this song somehow always remains fresh sounding to me.
Jarmo: Probably it's the Combat Zen Speech for me. It has the moods both from Tundra and EOS and somehow it just works very well.
3. Magnus: Notable ones are Om - Advaitic Songs and Soundgarden - King animal
Jarmo: Get Your Gun - EP
4. Magnus: Nothing too big, chocolate candy bars and ginger bread… like it's always been :)
Jarmo: Good ol' pair of socks
5. Magnus: Worst one was mixing beer, wine and vodka without eating anything and having no water around. And in the morning you realize that together with a hellish hangover you have caught some cold. Painkillers and lemon juice are handy then.
Jarmo: Haven't had a hangover in years and fortunately don't remember the ones from the earlier days too.
Talbot “Combat Zen Speech”Official WebsiteFacebookBandcampMyspace
Interviews By
Aleks
