By Andrew Bansal
After a gap of five years, British stoner rock band Orange Goblin are back with their seventh studio effort “A Eulogy For The Damned”, an album that has definitely proved to be worth the wait in my opinion. Yesterday; I spoke to vocalist Ben Ward on the phone to talk in detail about the making of the album, and about the band’s signing to Candlelight Records. Read the conversation below, and check out the band’s facebook page for more info on them.
Your new album “A Eulogy For The Damned” is set to release in North America next month, on February 14th. It has taken a while, because the previous album came out almost five years ago. It must be a good feeling to put out something new again.
It is, yeah. It’s an exciting time for all of us to be able to feel like being on the verge of releasing a new record. It’s been a while. There are good reasons for it, there are some less than good reasons for it and laziness on our part, but I think when people finally get to hear the record, they’ll appreciate it and find it to be worth the wait. I’m really proud of what we’ve done on this one.
Right, that’s what I was going to ask you next. So did you purposely take longer with this album?
No, it was just a case of all of us getting away from the band and living our lives. This band is not what we do full time. There is not enough money from that, so we have to work day jobs, we all have families and children, bills to pay, mortgages and that sort of thing. But when we did finally get around to writing new material, we didn’t want to rush it. It was the first record for a new label, so we wanted to do everything right. That meant finding the right studio, the right circumstances to record it in, and finding the right producer to work with as well. And I think we made the right decisions everywhere with this one. So that’s the main reason it took so long.
Yeah, it is your first album with Candlelight Records. So, every time you start with a new label, does that inspire you to do even that much better, to start the relationship on a good note?
Yeah, I think so. The label has been very good to us. It has taken us until now to deliver our record, but not once did they complain or try to rush us or anything. So in that regard we felt that we owed it to them to produce the best we could. And now we are seeing the benefits of being on a label like Candlelight. The marketing and promotion has been fantastic, and the whole build-up has been professional. I don’t mean any disrespect to the previous labels we worked with. Rise Above Records did everything they could to help us, but it’s a two-man operation there. With Candlelight you’re talking about 70 people working for you. So, we just wanted to give back our professionalism to them and get the respect they’ve earned from us.
Did they have any specifications in terms of your music, or did they let you do your thing?
They didn’t even mention it, and had no issues with it at all. They just told us that they love Orange Goblin for what we’ve done previously and just want us to continue in that vein, which is great for us. I feel the album is just a logical step musically, and we didn’t have to change our style or direction. That was it, really. We’ll keep doing what has proven to be a successful formula for us so far.
The release date of the album is the same as the release date of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album 42 years ago. Is that intentional or just a coincidence?
What happened was, we were given a series of dates we had to choose from, and we chose this one because that is the day we celebrate by listening to Black Sabbath albums all day. So when we saw that date available, it was obvious that we’d like it to be that one. Valentine’s Day in the States as well, so excellent value for money there.
I feel that parallels can be drawn between Black Sabbath and Orange Goblin, not only in terms of the musical style but also the band names. Would you agree with that?
Obviously, the four of us come from different backgrounds, and have diverse influences that we bring to our music, but the one band that is common ground between all of us is Black Sabbath. It’s the biggest influence, and that has always come through in our music since day one. I think doom and stoner rock are very closely related to Black Sabbath, and in fact every genre of metal, thrash, doom, death, speed metal, New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, everything stems from Black Sabbath. So, they are the crux of the whole metal genre, really. As for picking a name for the band, it wasn’t so much on our mind to have a name like Black Sabbath but we wanted to have a 70s feel to it, like a Deep Purple, Blue Cheer, Pink Floyd sort of thing. We were also big fans of Tolkien and Lord Of The Rings. We were thinking of something that sounded good with Orange, and Goblin was the first word that came to mind. So that’s how the name came about, really.
Candlelight have a major distribution in the US. So do you think that would make this album a lot more accessible in the States than any of your previous work?
Possibly, yeah. I hope so. People were raising questions when we first signed to Candlelight because they’re more renowned for death and black metal bands. But that’s fine with us, and I’ve been a big fan of a lot of the music they’ve put out over the years. They’ve also worked with bands like Crowbar, Entombed and more recently Corrosion Of Conformity, which is a little bit closer to what we do. But you know, if people who’ve never heard of Orange Goblin go and buy our album because it’s on Candlelight, that can only be a good thing for us and the label, because it’ll be spreading their name as well as ours.
What do you have in terms of your touring schedule?
First up, we go to Croatia in Eastern Europe on Saturday, for the first time. We’ve never been there on any of our European tours. It’s always been something that’s sort of eluded us. So we’re just going to fly out for that one show, come home, and then we have nothing until we do a full UK tour in April. On that tour we’ll do England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. We’ve got tours to Germany and France, and festivals in the UK planned for later in the year. But I think throughout the summer we’re be looking to heavily do the bigger European festivals, do something for Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy, up through Scandinavia, Germany and Holland. We’re talking about the Sonisphere festival here and a couple of other big UK festival appearances.
With this album, do you feel like your creative flow is going again, so much so that the next album will come quicker than this one did?
I think it definitely will. We’ve all sort of got the hand to write again. We’ve found out that we can successfully record in London, closer to home than we’ve ever had before. The way we did it, there definitely won’t be this much wait till the next one. I’d like to think that we’ll get this year’s touring schedule out of the way, may be do Australia and the USA the year after, and buckle down and start writing another new record. So hopefully by the end of 2013 we could be having another one in the can.
That’s great to hear. You mentioned that you started to record closer to home now. Does that make a difference to you, if you have to travel somewhere, compared to recording in London?
Yeah, it has affected us in the past, because we’ve been the sort of band that got away to residential studios and spent three weeks all shacked up together, being in each other’s company, recording from 11 in the morning through to 11 in the night. You can get bored and distracted quite easily when you’re doing it like that, because you find yourself for long periods of time just sitting around, doing nothing but drink, smoke and lose your mind a little bit. But this time, recording in London meant that we could all go home to our families. We recorded over a succession of nine weekends. We had the working week in between sessions. So we had a chance to go away, listen to what we had done, and try to make changes if we could or needed to. As a vocalist, it was a lot more beneficial for me to put in my full effort to record for one weekend, rest my throat for five days and then go back and do it all over again the next weekend. So it was a lot more professional in that respect and it produced much better results. That’s obviously now become the formula that’ll work for us. We had a great time recording at the studio we used, and hopefully within the next couple of years we’ll be back there doing another album.
Another interesting thing is that Andy Jackson, who has worked with Pink Floyd, has mastered this album. What difference has he made to the end product?
He brought in a lot of experience. Obviously he didn’t do a great deal of music similar to ours. He was nominated for two Grammys for his work with Pink Floyd, so it was great to get him involved. He was very helpful. He did the job in amazingly quick turnaround time, and we’re very pleased with the results we got. It was like a cherry on the cake, really. The cake was done with the job of producing and mixing the album, and then Andy Jackson’s mastering just sort of put the final touch.
Obviously the album will be released on the standard CD format, but what else are you guys planning in terms of limited editions and stuff like that? Will there be something for the fans to hold on in that sense?
Yeah, the US version comes with a bonus track of a Black Sabbath cover. There’s going to be colored vinyl with gatefold cover, and then next year I think we’re looking at doing a limited split 7-inch with Corrosion of Conformity as well. So there’s a few things in the pipeline, and it will be an opportunity to get the creative juices flowing again, so it’ll be interesting to get back in the studio and may be record a 7-inch for some interesting vinyl releases and stuff like that.
It’s great that you mentioned COC. Have you known or worked with those guys before?
We know them from festivals and seeing them at our shows in London. I’m in touch with Woody on facebook quite often, and stuff like that. But we’ve actually never put it in our work schedules to do anything together. So it will be interesting to see what we come up with.
Related: Check out my review of the album here.
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