Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I
Prevue
Phantom of the opera
Music trumps lyrics on Protest the Hero's latest
Walker's humour and casualness about his band is deceiving, however, because its new album Fortress is a serious mash of shredding, melody, technical tastefulness and aggressive riffs. Rounded out by guitarists Tim Millar and Luke Hoskin, and drummer Moe Carlson, Protest the Hero attributes the members' like-mindedness as one of the keys to its success. After the release of the band's previous record Kezia, the group came at Fortress with two very different approaches.
"Kezia took us almost two years to write, whereas Fortress took us eight months," Walker points out. "For us, [writing for Fortress] was a strange creative process ... it was very much an individual-based process, where everyone came up with their shit separately. It was a little complicated, because it was time-consuming and destructive, but it works for us somehow.
"The best way to explain it is, we have ADD when it comes to music. If we write boring music, we're gonna be sick of it in two minutes."
The other need was to get away from Kezia's "rigid concept"—an intense storyline that had some fans focusing so intently on the story that the band felt its musicality was being lost.
"[With Fortress] I think we're trying to avoid that same kind of thing. We didn't want people to listen so much to the message at the expense of the music," Walker states. "People were listening more to the words [of Kezia] than the music, so at some point we had to say, 'We're not going to make another opera out of this,'" he offers diplomatically. "We wanted to try and balance out the difference of the [lyrics and music], and the importance of each one, so they can be appreciated separately and together."
As a result, Fortress is less of a concept album and more a thematic symphony, with songs breaking down into movements, beautiful moments to counter the collective ADD offensive that flows throughout. Touted as a "headphones" album, Walker explains the depth of the final product that resulted from the recording process.
"Once we finished recording what we had written, we were like, 'There's so much shit going on here that we didn't even realize we were creating'," Walker laughs. "[Producer Julius Butty] was having a bitch of a time mixing it all, to get everything heard, and that's when we realized that these aren't just songs that you blast on your radio, these are songs that you have to sit down and pay attention to, or you're going to miss something." V
Wed, Mar 31 (6 pm)
Protest the Hero
As part of Snocore 2010 with
Hawthorne Heights, Elias, The Set
StarliTE Room, $25
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