By Andrew Bansal
Based out of Vancouver, Canada, progressive metal band Anciients put out their debut full-length album ‘Heart Of Oak’ earlier this year via Season Of Mist Records, an album that instantly captivates not only everyone that has a liking for this particular genre of music, but with its vastly diverse patterns, it’s a compelling listen for all fans of heavy music. Following the album’s release, the band has managed to get on some killer North American tours, starting with the Death To All run in the Spring, then the Lamb Of God/Decapitated tour and most recently with Scale The Summit and Tesseract. They were scheduled to be on Sepultura’s November tour of the same continent. but the cancellation of that tour left them in the cold with a slight lull in activity. A couple of weeks ago, I caught up with guitarists/vocalists Chris Dyck and Kenneth Cook to discuss this cancellation, past tours, Heart Of Oak and future plans. Read the conversation and check out some of their amazing music below.
Chris and Kenneth, it’s good to have you guys on Metal Assault. I believe you guys were supposed to be an opening act on a part of the Sepultura tour in North America but they canceled the entire tour due to their own problems. That must be a bummer for you because touring is pretty much the livelihood for bands these days, isn’t it?
Chris: Yeah, definitely man. It was quite a bummer because it would have been really good exposure for us, with a good variety of bands on that tour. It’s a bummer too because you plan for it in your life too, you take time off work, you budget to go away and order a certain amount of merch and things like that. But it’s okay, I think they might be inclined to ask us the next time they go out, so that might happen in the future. We’ve been really lucky anyway with touring so far, so can’t complain too much!
You were also supposed to do some of your own headline shows at the end of November, right? Those are canceled too?
Chris: We had a West Coast run of dates on the way home, but the only one we’re keeping now is Portland because it doesn’t make sense to go all the way down and we just can’t do it, now that we know that we’re not doing the Sepultura thing and won’t be making the money that we would have made each night on that tour. So we can’t afford to go down through the West Coast as originally planned. But we’ll do West Coast next year, for sure.
That’s sad to hear. You were slated to play a headline show at the Whisky in Hollywood as well, and now that’s not happening either, obviously.
Kenneth: Yeah that’s canceled. It’s just too far for us to travel down without another bigger group of shows around it to make money from.
Chris: If we had an extra month or so, we would be able to plan may be at least five or six shows and play San Francisco, Sacramento, and may be another town in Oregon or whatever, but there’s just no time and you don’t want to just play rushed shows in places you haven’t headlined before either, right? You want to make sure that the first show you play in Santa Cruz or Sacramento is a kickass one before heading to LA. But the LA show cancelation is a bit of a bummer though because we were wanting to play with a band that’s on Season Of Mist called Black Sheep Wall and finally that had worked out and we were going to be able to do a show with them, but we had to cancel that one. I was looking forward to it. It’s a really famous venue as well.
I’m sure you’ll be able to play there sometime soon, man.
Chris: Yeah, hopefully!
You mentioned that you’ve been lucky with the tours you’ve done so far and there’s not much to complain. You were on the Death To All tour and then you toured with Lamb Of God earlier this year. What were those experiences like? The last time I spoke to you for the Guitar World thing, it was around the album release, way before those tours.
Kenneth: They were all super cool dudes who knew what they were doing and had such a great level of professionalism. It was really good to be a part of that!
Chris: Shows of that level of operation taught us a lot of things. You learn a lot just watching and keeping the ears and eyes open.
Kenneth: With our first tours being such big ones, it was definitely a reality check for us and it was good to be able to learn things like that at this point of our career as a band.
Chris: Yeah, I think it’s going to benefit us in the long run. We’re a relatively new band and hadn’t toured or played shows of that size so it was definitely hard for us, but now anything we do is, not easy, but we know what’s up now. We played on a tour with a band like Lamb Of God and we’re probably not going to get something that big again for a long time, so everything else that we do now is relatively easier. We’re getting better at this touring thing!
I think your musical style is the reason you’re able to do all these different kinds of tours, because it obviously allows you to fit in with a bunch of bands that sound totally unlike each other.
Kenneth: Yeah, we definitely lucked out in that aspect. We’ve incorporated different styles into our music and fans of different genres can find a little something they can like, so it makes things easier for us to find a match with many bands.
Chris: The three tours we’ve done so far this year have been stylistically highly different. Death has the old-school death metal as well as really proggy stuff like on ‘Human’, and then Lamb Of God is just a straight-up American metal band with Decapitated being a fairly technical death metal band, and then this last tour we just did was with Scale The Summit, an instrumental prog band and Tesseract with the djent, kind of poppier metal sound. It’s cool because on all three tours we found people that identified with what we were doing and we somehow fit in each time.
So, ‘Heart Of Oak’ came out in the early part of this year and you’ve been playing a lot of it live. In your own opinion, how does it translate from the studio recording to the live setting? Are you happy with how it’s going in terms of what you expected it to sound on stage?
Kenneth: Yeah, it’s going great. I think we can pretty much 95 per cent match exactly what we do on the record live. People tell us that it sounds very similar to the studio recordings when we play it live. I think it’s translating well on stage for the songs that we’re choosing to play so far. It’s working out really well.
Chris: To add to that too, may be it wasn’t a 100 per cent intentional, but during the recording of the album, we wanted to make it such that we would be able to replicate it with just us. We didn’t add too many bells and whistles on the record. It’s pretty much just us playing, so everything translates to the live setting. I think it was fairly intentional to keep it like that. In comparison to the EP we put out before this, the vocals are also, I wouldn’t say easier, but just comfortable to sing, keeping in mind that we’re going to be singing and playing these crazy riffs at the same time, so we want to be able to not kill ourselves doing it, right? We want to make it feel natural. So that was another thing with Heart Of Oak as opposed to the first release.
Following that, have you had a chance to write any new songs at all?
Kenneth: We definitely have some stuff that we’ve worked together on as a band. We have one song which is pretty much already complete, and it’s 10 or 11 minutes long. And we have a lot of material that we haven’t really brought into the band setting yet, but I’m sure it will come together rather quickly once we all start to work together. So the juices are definitely flowing (laughs).
Chris: Yeah! Each time we get together, it’s usually to rehearse for a show or when we’re getting ready to go on tour. But we did work on and complete that one song, and that’s a good chunk of new music already, 10-11 minutes of it.
Good to hear. Finally, what plans do you have in the near future?
Chris: We have Europe in April. It’s the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Holland. It’s going to be really amazing to be a part of that, because Opeth is playing, Yob is playing, Tom G Warrior’s band Triptykon is playing. It’s a very relevant festival for us to playing and it’s a big honor. Not a lot of bands get to play it, if I’m right. It’s very selective. We have about three weeks in Europe that we’ll be doing including a couple of other festival dates as well, mid-April into early May. And then we’ve been talking about doing a headlining tour across Canada sometime in the Spring, and hopefully we’ll get to go and do another tour of the States in the summer to do some of the bigger cities again. Hopefully we’ll hit the West Coast.
That’s cool man, Roadburn is a pretty elite festival, and a dream gig for you. You’ll have fun there, I’m sure.
Chris: Yeah, the only problem is, I think we only get to hang out there the first night when we play, and then our tour starts. So we won’t even get to hang around and watch some of our favorite bands. But no complaints (laughs).
Related: Lamb Of God/Decapitated/Anciients Anaheim gig review
Visit Anciients on the web at:
Anciients.com
AnciientRiffs.bandcamp.com
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youtube.com/user/ANCIIENTS