INTERVIEW: VALLENFYRE

VALLENFYRE sets forth their newest album, Splinters, on May 13th, 2014. Greg Mackintosh transports us back to the roots of extreme music with his band’s sophomore offering. This album refines and hones in on the Vallenfyre sound, and with Greg Mackintosh at the helm, you simply can’t go wrong. With the occasional ophelian tendency, this band cuts through to get in past the superficial layers of the status quo, and the Splinters left over are embedded more than merely skin deep.

RockRevolt Magazine was graced with a moment to speak with Greg Mackintosh himself regarding all the latest endeavors of the band. Read on and satiate your need for the return of a classic genre with VALLENFYRE!

Thank you so much for giving me a call. How is your day going so far?

Cool! I’m doing interviews amongst helping with the editing on the Vallenfyre promo video.  It’s quite a busy day.

You said promo video. Is it a promotion for Vallenfyre or a specific song off of Splinters.  

It’s for the title track, “Splinters”. I got Century Media to trust me enough to give me a budget  and just let me go and do it.  I’ve got  a lot of people to help me, and now we are editing it. I wanted to do a disturbing short film. I mean, who wants to see a bunch of long haired guys head banging to a heavy song. There are enough videos out there like that. So, you know, I wanted to do something a little more creative. If it works out, Century Media will be happy. If not, I don’t know! (laughs)

VALLENFYRE – Splinters (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

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The new full length album, Splinters,  is a follow up to Fragile King,  and I read that you wanted to develop the sound and songs so that it rounded out and mature the Vallenfyre sound from the debut. Do you feel you’ve accomplished this?

It is kind of weird, what we are trying to do with it. We wanted to push the envelope a bit and make it more extreme in every direction. We want to get out our personality a little bit more, for everyone in the band, and make it feel a little more spontaneous and lively. One of the big things was try and develop our sound a bit further so that within the first few minutes you can say, “This is the Vallenfyre record,” rather than saying, “this is just another old school death metal record.” We do pull a lot of influences from the golden era of extreme music, which is the early 80’s to the early 90’s. We tried to do that in a way that it is relevant to a modern extreme metal scene.  It is not a straight up retro record.

What are some of the elements that you feel essential to extreme music?

It’s a vibe more than anything else. Even grindcore songs from the 80’s had a hook. It’s changed in the last couple of years. It’s actually improving, the musicality of it. I think the production in the early days were individual. You could tell each band from each other instantly. Even the most extreme types of music have hooks in there, so you can remember the song afterward. As much as anything, to be able to survive as well, and good song writing. Even from hardcore punk, to post punk, to death metal of that period, it was all new and exciting. Nobody had ever heard this kind of thing before. I want to capture those shoots coming through the soil: the extreme, the real sense of excitement of that time, I want to capture that and put it into a modern context. I can’t answer whether I’ve achieved that. That’s for other people to answer. I hope I’ve achieved it, but time will tell I guess.

Absolutely. Where do you feel that extreme music has begun to fail at those things?

I think over the 2000’s it definitely became stale, right up until now. Up until a couple of years ago things were sounding so generic and repetitive, everything produced the same. Drums samples, replacements, reamping. There was no vibe. People just tried to play as fast and as technical and as heavy as possible, without any real thinking behind it. I think in the last couple of years there are a few bands out there turning that around and realizing that even though it’s extreme that you can actually construct decent songs that have good hooks and a vibe to it. That’s the reason I looked to Kurt Ballou, because he has a similar ethos in production that we do to our music, which is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. In many of the records that I listened to growing up, the imperfections sometimes made the record.

It makes it real.

Yes. If you happen on to brilliant riff, but it’s slightly out of tune, who cares? If you stop to tune up again and then come back in, it’s just this robotic rendition, what’s the point?

Very true. I’ve reviewed a couple of records lately that I’ve seen played live, and it’s like two completely different bands. The albums are so polished, that it polished the life out of it.

It’s just mouse clicks these days. That’s what death metal has turned into. It even sounds like mouse clicks as well! (laughs)

That’s a pretty rocking mouse I must say! You used a tremendous assortment of gear and pedals for this latest album. What is the magic combination of pedals and amps that you use to create the Vallenfyre sound?

If I could remember that! (laughs) We took pictures and I still can’t make sense of the pictures! There were so many leads, pedals, and amps stacked all over the place. Even from the pictures I can’t tell what’s plugged in to what.  It’s a real trial and error thing where we just said, “We want to kind of get this vibe, but we want to get that vibe.” We must have daisy chained 20-30 pedals. We would use three or four different amps at a time, all recording them all simultaneously. It was just a golden moment when then sound got to a point where we said, “Yes, that is the right combination.”

So – you took a picture of it all, but you can’t make sense of the picture to do it again.

No! We profiled the sound with Kemper Amps where you can profile the sound and get it pretty close for live purposes.  But I still think we’re just going to use a lot of pedals live instead, just daisy-chain them and see what happens!

I’ve read that Splinters  was all done in one session while living together in one house…how did you keep from killing each other, and how did you divvy up the showers?

I got in there quick and put my dibs down on the best bedroom that had its own shower, so I let the other guys struggle over the other shower!  We did it in Salem, MA, and  it was in the extreme cold bit—the polar vortex. When we landed it was -35 degrees.  The house was 5 minutes walk from the studio, and that was literally how long you could stay out in the cold before your face started to hurt.  So, we’d walk from this house to the studio, we’d be gone all day, then at nine in the evening we’d leave and walk 5 minutes to the next bar, and then the next bar, and we’d just daisy-chain bars then.

Kind of like the same way you did your pedals!

Yeah, but with beers! (laughs)  I kind of got into the American beer.  You can finally brew beer over there! You couldn’t brew beer for like 20 years and all of a sudden there’s all these micro-breweries popping up with these fantastic IPA beers, and I think I tried just about every single one while I was there.

I’m glad we’re finally doing something right!

Oh, you do lots of other things right, but beer wasn’t one of them at one point. It was all piss weak!  But now it’s really good.  I even got a raspberry beer, and it was really nice but it came in this really fancy glass – so everyone was laughing at me.

Did it have a little umbrella in it?

It’s weird you should say that because Scoot, our bass player, went to the bar to get it for me and he asked for an umbrella in it, so yes it did have an umbrella in it.

You released “Scabs” and “Odious Bliss.”  What made you decide to offer those two up as appetizers for the new album?

“Scabs” just because it was the first track on the album and I thought it was a pretty hard hitting song: no messing around, no frills, and I thought that was a good way to present the album first off.  It’s not the exact benchmark for the album, because there’s some really slow stuff in there as well, but I thought it was a real good, obnoxious we’re-taking-no-prisoners type song to start off with.  “Odious Bliss” was our bass player’s idea, it was his favorite.  I’m kind of proud of the record; I think every song is strong in its own right.  It is quite diverse after the first record.  You go straight from a seven minute doom song into a one and a half minute grindcore song.  That’s why I would listen to it. I wouldn’t listen to a full grindcore album, I’d listen to two tracks and then say, “I fancy something a bit metal now.” In a way the album is a bit of a mix tape.

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I was reading some of the reactions to your video about “Splinters” and lots of positive comments in there—one of them was someone said “tuning in C is totally awesome.”  Understanding that when you tune to C you get a heavier, deeper sound; have you always tuned to C or did you tune in E and then switch to C?

We tune in drop C, but it’s a seven string guitar, so we have a low A as well in Vallenfyre.  We’ve been tuning to that for a while because over the years I’ve tried lots of different tunings on different songs to try and be clever, but when you start to play them live you’ve got to tune up and down and up and down and change guitars.  So I switched to a seven string and tuned it down to C, then I was able to play every kind of tuning, but just transpose it how I play it and just have one guitar live.  It was kind of laziness in a way. I just didn’t want to take lots of guitars on the road.

I love it—you’re tuning in C because you want to be lazy, but you don’t want to be lazy with the songs because you want to be diverse.

Who wants to carry around four guitars when you can carry one around?  I’m not lazy mentally, I’m just lazy physically!

But not lazy enough to take the umbrella out of that beer! 

Nah, I just drink around it.

I’ve read that “Odious Bliss” is about self-medicating. Why did you choose that topic?

It related to me on a couple of levels.  I drink probably a bottle of wine, at least, every night.  I’m self-medicating.  It suits me fine, but there is something a bit sinister about it because it is obviously doing harm as well.  The other side of it is when my father was dying of cancer he had these lollipops that were dipped in morphine—and that made him feel better, but it was part of the whole killing himself.  I thought “Odious Bliss” was quite a good title and I thought that was interesting subject matter—things that you think make you feel better, and maybe they do, but really it’s like this thing that’s making everything worse.  Just an interesting concept, I thought.  “Odious Bliss” is a title where there is good and bad in one title.

You also just released a flexidisk track with Decibel.

I just liked the idea of a flexidisk.  It’s a thing you don’t get to do much anymore.  We used to have them in the early 90’s and late 80’s. All the magazines had flexidisks on the front.  The CD has pretty much died out in favor of digital downloads and vinyl—for collecting and having a physical title, something tangible.  You’re kind of either or; you have vinyl or a digital download, and CD’s just exploded.

The vinyl thing is such a novelty, I’m waiting to see the novelty of tape come back, but I don’t think that is going to happen.

It will probably be a little novelty thing, but it’s definitely not going to come back because it’s too annoying.  It used to chew up in your car and things like that.

But you can rewind it with your pen, that’s kinda cool…

Yeah, that is cool, cause if it was the end of the world, no electricity or anything, you could still rewind it.

But where would you listen to it?

Right.  I never thought of that.  (laughs)

The song that is going out on the flexidisk is “The Great Divide.”  Why that on the flexidisk?

When we put the album together, we recorded 13-14 songs.  When we compiled the album, we did it from the first track to the fourth or fifth track because we were thinking about it in vinyl terms (what would sound good on the A side, what would sound good on the B side) and we wanted it to flow and not get boring.  So, when we compiled the album we put “Splinters” at the end, and we thought nothing should really come after that. So then we had 2-3 tracks left over, and the idea came up for a flexi for Decibel.  Of the three tracks, “The Great Divide” was the most representative of the album I think.  It had kind of doomy bits to it and very aggressive parts as well, just a nice concise song that works well on a flexi when people have no clue who your band is and there’s no attention span. It’s good to give them a two and a half minute song that sums it all up.

Also maybe whet their appetites to go out and get your album!

Well, there is that—but I’m just a pessimist.  Everything I say sounds like the glass is half empty—what you said makes more sense.  So, put that down!

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By:  Alice Roques, RockRevolt Magazine CoFounder and Managing Editor

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