RGG February 2016 - p.23
Having been through the wars, voluntarily made
tougher by insisting on playing intellectually and
technically challenging music for fans that
demand it - and then made harsh again by the
evolving contours of the music industry, most
notably the shift to singles and single songs –
SYMPHONY X have triumphed, creating a
panoramic old school “album rock” experience
in an era cursed with shorter and shorter
attention spans.
“This new one is about the song”, begins axe
wizard Michael Romeo, chief writer in the band,
and possessor of The Dungeon, the tricked-out
studio in which the album was crafted, newly
equipped with the latest in technology required
to execute the band’s famous symphonic and
orchestrated touches with aplomb. “Every
element added was in service of the song, so
the album flows song to song and becomes a
total listening experience. Every song is to-the-
point and fine-tuned, with us paying a lot of
attention to the hooks, voices, riffs, and keeping
the interest and the energy high for the whole
record, so it can be listened to start to finish. You
know, industry people have talked about how
we'll never see a »Sgt. Pepper's« or »Dark Side
Of The Moon« again, and that idea... I wanted
to defend the reputation of the album, and really
try to make »Underworld« an album worth
listening to as a whole album. It's what I love
about »Moving Pictures« - great individual
songs, but still an album experience. I don't want
to sound like I'm preaching, but it was a point I
wanted to make. It was about the flow of the
whole record. It speeds up here and then it dips
down here. It all makes sense together, it all
works together and it all flows together. And
that’s me, dude. - I still listen to whole records
(laughs).”
And it's been the product of thoughtful strategy,
the way »Underworld«'s inviting peaks-and-
valleys sequencing was achieved, through the
establishment of concept, and then a smart
pulling back from it, again, in search of defiantly
self-contained songs, songs that create their
own eco-system, but with synergy, so that the
sum is greater than the anthemic parts.
FEB
12
“»Underworld«'s not really a concept album”,
agrees Michael, “but like the last couple of
records, there's a theme that carries through,
without it being storytelling. We try to find
something to key in on and get the juices
flowing, and here the goal was to find something
a little dark but with emotional content. I started
looking at Dante, and Orpheus in the
underworld, where he's going to go to Hades or
hell to save this girl. So there's the theme of
going to hell and back for something or some-
one you care about. So we could inject
hellish imagery and at the same time there's an
emotional quality to it, where you care about
someone, you're going to go through all this,
and yet trying to do the right thing. But it's an
outline, not storytelling. We had a concept and
we pulled back and at the same time made it
more personal and less pretentious. We found
some kind of parameters to work in, where both
musically and lyrically it wouldn't be going
overboard.”
MYRATH
(which means Legacy) is a Metal
band from Tunis-Tunisia, a small country well
known for its resort areas on the Mediterranean
coast but certainly not for its Metal bands, yet in
just few years what started out as a teenager
cover band became a relatively well known and
respected band by the international Prog-Power
Metal community.
MELTED SPACE
is a project created in 2007
by pianist and composer Pierre Le Pape
(Wormfood, Embryonic Cells). Influenced by
metal, movie soundtracks and electronic music,
he tries to create compositions mixing those
styles. Here are the roots of a strange “world”:
Melted Space! A world that would be the last
step of Dante’s journey, a world occupied by lost
and forgotten souls which tell their adventures
to travelers. Sunk into oblivion, this is their only
way to perpetuate their memory.
r
gg
since
1995
