Ελληνικά
Last Updated on 08:02 PM by Giorgos Tsekas
When one of the best contemporary bands comes into your town, you don’t miss the chance. Metal Invader found Power Trip’s vocalist Riley Gale in the laundry of Huxley’s venue in Berlin in a scenery that reminded Rush’s Live In Rio. Rush were not there, but with the background noise of about 6-7 washing machines in action and while he was stretching for the show, we talked about the world’s irrational downfall, paintings and comics, his past endeavors and about diversity. Oh, and about music and his band.
First of all I wanted to congratulate you about “Nightmare Logic”, excellent record. It’s been already a year since it has been released, looking at it now from a distance how happy are you with the result and the feedback?
Oh, thank you very much man. We are super happy, the response was not what we expected. When I started the band I just wanted it to be decent enough to go to Europe and maybe Australia and Japan and so all the accolades and the “albums of the year” and the awards, that’s all extra blessings on top of everything, it’s surreal and unexpected. It feels great and I have nothing to complain about there.
Have you already decided about the direction or even recorded anything for a new record?
We ‘ve got a single coming up later this year, it’s called “Hornet’s Nest” and we are doing it for Adult Swim, which is the adult cartoon program and they hit us up about doing a song and we recorded this one song called “Hornet’s Nest” and I am really proud of it and then we recorded a cover as well and we are going to put it out as a single or a 7 inch or something before the end of the year, probably we will start looking towards writing a new album at the end of this year.
It’s striking and also very exciting to see you touring with very much diverse bands. From the tour with Lamb Of God, Anthrax and Deafheaven, then Merchandise to the one with Hatebreed and Madball, Napalm Death, Obituary and Exodus, now Trivium, one with Sheer Mag is coming up, you even played shows with hip hop bands. Is this something that is happening intentional, are you trying to infect all kinds of audiences?
I see you have done your research. Yeah, we have played with hip hop and rap artists, but not toured with them really. If you like aggressive music and you maybe mostly listen to rap, or mostly listen to something different, I think that there is something in our band for you to enjoy. Even if you listen only to Metallica, or Trivium, or Slayer there is something there for people to get into. The idea is to get in front of these crowds that might not go to metal shows or hardcore shows all the time and play and see if they like it. I like a broad type of music, we chose these bands like Merchandise and Sheer Mag, because we enjoy their music. And we want to share their music with other people and we hope that these other people are open minded, it’s kind of silly when someone listens to only one or two genres of music. So, I don’t think there is any reason we have to tour with a certain kind of bands.
You obviously tour with bands you like, but how much is it a managerial decision?
I‘ll be honest with you, we did shows with Volbeat and I never really listened to them and I am pretty new to Trivium, they are just bands I never checked out. So, we do stuff where we take risks and we also do stuff where we chose the kind of fun we want to have and what’s important to us.
Is there a certain type of audience that makes you feel more comfortable, or do you just want to show to everyone what Power Trip is all about?
I feel most comfortable playing our headliner shows, because that’s where the audience is there to see us and there I feel most comfortable and confident. I just want to be in front of a crowd that wants to be in a show with open mind towards all the bands that are in that show. You know a lot of people have come out tonight just to see Trivium, but I am hoping that they have an open mind to the openers. I‘ve been to shows where regardless how good the opener is, there always going to be this one guy that shouts “Boooo, bring on the headliner”, but there are not many of those people. So, we play to whom we want to play for and we play the best we can and hope that they enjoy it. If they have an open mind, I think the worst thing they ‘ll say is that this band didn’t suck.
To continue a bit with the subject of diversity and maybe this is just a silly question, but how would you describe Power Trip’s music? Is it hardcore influenced thrash, because there are many descriptions out there…
Yeah, hardcore thrash punk rock and roll, something of everything. We may not sound like it, but we have a ton of influences by Motörhead, our guitar player Blake, he likes a lot of Brit Pop and Americana and we learned a lot of songwritings tricks around that, how to make things heavy, I read a lot and we have a wide range of influences, but we are basically trying to do is to boil these flavors, these ideas, this essence down to something that is kind of spicy and heavy and kicks you in the teeth. In a lot of ways it’s about writing good songs and keeping the aggression that we started off with. We started as an aggressive hardcore band and then as we got better at our instruments we were able to play metal and we were able to expand what we wanted to do. But we never really want to lose that sense of aggression.
One more question about the band’s roots, I read that you had your own space back in Dallas where you would book all kinds of diy bands.
Oh yeah, you know about that? We were just booking everybody, everybody who could get booked played there. It was the space that was meant to be used by anyone in the Dallas scene. We booked touring bands and we were going to try and live there, but the landlords ended up being scumbags and we had to get out from it, but for 6 months it was one of the best spaces to have shows. It was a Mexican restaurant with a night club attached to it and a convenient store. So, we could have small shows in the convenience store, big shows in the night club were there was already a big stage and then we built a big wall down in the middle where the kitchen was and we were going to make it into a bedroom and we were going to build beds and live there. There was an industrial kitchen, shower, laundry, it would have been amazing, it would have been like the ninja turtles would hang out there, the biggest kids club house.
So, you obviously like to blend things in.
Yeah, we are not restrictive, we don’t need to hang out only with metalheads or punks or whatever. We embrace people and not ideas really.
Do you think that you are a part of a generation of new musicians that transcends genres and bring them together? Thinking of people like your bandmate Blake, or Brendan Raddigan and all these bands that they are playing in.
Yeah, I guess you are right. I think these guys do cultivate a certain personality and people expect that if Brendan is singing in a band it’s probably going to be very good, because he is a very talented vocalist, whether he is screaming in a hardcore band or singing in Battle Ruins or Stone Dagger. These guys are saying, I don’t want to be defined by one thing, or an act that I did. For instance, Power Trip happen to be the most successful project that Blake has taken on, but I am sure if he had a brit pop or an indie band that blew up, he would probably go and do that if it meant making more money, because, honestly I believe this is the music that he really loves. Of course he is still loves metal very much, but this is the band that became successful ….sort of. I am not saying that we are entirely successful, but we have the best shot at making this into a career. It’s not that he is going through the motions, he still loves it, we all like all types of music. Chris, our drummer is in Mammoth Grinder and Impalers and we all do lots of different stuff.
Power Trip is obviously a politically engaged band, one look at your lyrics and your interviews shows that. How integral is the political aspect for Power Trip?
Well, it’s important for me, because I am writing about what’s important to me. There are some personal stuff and there are some political stuff. It entirely depends on where my headspace is at and how the music and the song makes me feel, I just go with it from there. I don’t set out to say, I am going to write a song about this, I maybe here a one liner or read a quote and that it takes me down a certain pathway of thought, I listen to some instrumentals that Blake has worked on and ideas come up from there. And if it turns out to be a political song, then that’s it. I think the personal is political and the political is personal, I don’t think there is much difference separating the two. So, in that regard it’s all political. We stand for things, that’s the bottom line.
There is a certain lyric of the title track of “Nightmare Logic” that says “the slumber of reasons gives birth to all demons”. I guess this is an intentional paraphrase of the Goya painting with almost the same title.
Actually that’s really funny. I know a lot of Goya, but I don’t know that piece. I am not intentionally influenced by that. I came up with the line on my own, honestly. So, is this a name of a painting?
The actual name is “The sleep of reason produces monsters” and it depicts an angel sleeping on a desk and its fantasy is creating monsters, so in the absence of reason our fantasy alone is letting all the monsters in and that is what the actual full title in Spanish says.
Wow, that’s amazing. I came up with that by myself, but what I am essentially saying is that when the reason goes to sleep we sort of open up the opportunity for demons to come in and I think that talks about what’s going on with our political system right now, with all this complacency has led to this waking nightmare America or world that we are living in, set to explode on any second. It’s funny you mention that, I love Goya, both times we had Paolo [Girardi]working for our records I mentioned that I wanted to have Goya type of influences. That’s amazing, I have to look it up because I didn’t know this painting, unless it was some deeply subconscious thing I missed. That’s a great pick up man, honestly one of the most interesting questions I have ever had. I just like how in tuned you are to the art and the lyrics too, that’s awesome.
Having in mind that this was an intentional gesture, I wanted to ask you what do you think about modern irrationality, I thought those lyrics were a comment on that.
I think we are living in times where people are overrationalizing things and that makes them irrational, nobody wants to take blame for what they do, nobody wants to take responsibility for their lives, nobody wants to reach out and help other people, there is so much irresponsibility going on because everybody says “me, me, me”, they want to point the finger at everybody else but themselves and reason goes out the window and you are doing a lot of fucked up things to preserve your safety. If that is difficult for me then I say that I don’t want to do that, but they don’t care the repercussions of it all. And that leads to stuff like putting refugees in concentration camps. The world is very irrational right now, we have a lot of that going on.
Do you want through your lyrics in general to enlighten your audience, in the sense of an awakening?
I want them to just be educated. If you are going to have a stance, I want you to be able to argue about it, I want you to have confidence in what you say and what you believe. Yeah, it is about awakening, it is hopefully looking at a topic in a different way than the way you did before, or expressing a new idea and a way of thinking about something you hadn’t before. But I leave it up to the reader to decide what that meaning is, a lot of my stuff doesn’t have really strong points to them and it’s open for interpretation. Things are not going to happen on their own, you can’t wait for the world to fall into your lap, if you are not happy with something, you are the one to change it and in order to change it you need to be prepared and educated and smart, I think all that is important.
In “Conditioned To Death” from ‘Manifest Decimation’ you are commenting on the modern ways of incarceration influenced by Foucault’s biopolitics, at least this is what you stated in a previous interview. Also I think “The Hammer Of Doubt” has a strong philosophical touch, it’s as if a sceptic or a cynic wrote the lyrics.
Yeah, that’s basically about what you think you know, might not be true. Probably it isn’t. Almost every argument has a counter argument, you look at a mathematical equation and it has an inverse. Something that says that this is true and something that it isn’t, there is a way to discredit it. So “The Hammer Of Doubt” is just me in my own small arrogance saying I can take what you believe and I can probably put a seed of doubt in it and that can probably shatter someone’s expectations. It mostly has to do with a lot with the place where I come from, turning people away from Christianity and pointing out the flaws and showing the irrationality of it and the damage that organized religion does, when people are sure footed in their fate, I think I can go there and prove them that they are wrong. I don’t want to sound overly cynical or anything, I think spirituality is a good thing, I am more focused in the organized religion, no the spiritual communion some people go through. So, it is about being surefooted in your believes before you go and try and tell other people how to live.
What are your readings lately? Have they affected “Nightmare Logic’s” lyrics, or have you written anything for the next album? Five years ago you were into all these French postmodernists.
I read a lot of that stuff, I can’t say I was burnt by it, but I felt like a learned a lot of things and right now I read a lot of comic books, I am getting into comics and I am not talking about big superhero stuff, I am talking about independent comics, or I find a writer that I like and I read the works that they do. I discovered that you can say a lot of things with comics, because you have the visual and the written aspect and you can project all these big broad ideas. There are a lot of postmodern comics out there and there are great stuff that have to do with futurism and great political commentary, I am not talking about DC and Marvel, even Image and Dark Horse are doing some great stuff, then there’s Fantagraphics and so many individual publishers, I am really becoming to admire a lot of the comic industry, because they work so hard for so very little. I think that the work that they produce is very important, the French call it the 9th art and that’s a great description, it should be viewed as an art form and it can be deconstruction like anything else. I am far from being an expert, I have been only reading for the last 4-5 years and it’s hard to get some of them in Texas, but I am open to anything if you have any suggestions.
