Interviews : Insomnium

After meeting band after band for which touring was just another part of the job, it was rather refreshing to meet the good fellows from Insomnium. One would never expect music as devastatingly profound as theirs from anything less than your average jaded metal veteran, but on this, their first North American tour, they were the complete opposite, bursting with youth and vitality both onstage and in person while acting with class and a genuine gratitude to their fans.

Vocalist Niilo Sevänen was magnanimous enough to take time from his day to let me run a few questions by him before he and the rest of the band carved so profound a path of aural devastation onstage that the proverbial battleground may still be smoldering.

So the first US tour, you know this means you've hit the "big time," right?

Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, maybe we could say that. It's been great here; the crowds have been great, the merchandise sales have been great, much greater than expected, so everything has been superb so far. Nothing really to complain about.

No mishaps on the road yet?

Eh, well lots of things happen while you're drunk, but the whole thing has gone over really well. Lots of guys get drunk together, and things happen over this time, and we "accidentally" drunk a vodka bottle, (whispers) which belonged to one of the Swedish bands,and we got in a lot of trouble. It was an accident, we can explain it, we didn't know who it was for, and we had to drink it. There was nobody sitting by it telling us not to!

How does the US compare to Europe?

Well the people are really friendly, they want to buy you a lot of drinks when you go here, which is nice (smiles). Sometimes in Europe the support bands are treated a bit better at the venues, like you get what you have asked for, but some places here you only get fucked. You get 10 guys in the door, get what you need to eat or drink for the day, and that's not much. We even have to buy the water with that money, so that's not always fun, but we've managed. But the US and Canada have been great.

Crowd reactions good every time?

The reactions have been awesome. Every place has been great. Every place has had the people where it's been "Oh my god, you're finally here," it's been great.

When you started out, did you think you'd be playing with bands as big as these after only your third album?

Well no, we just wanted to play music that we liked. We didn't dream of anything like this, and now we get to tour the states with these great bands, and now in November we get to play with Amorphis, and when we started, Amorphis was like "Whoa!" We were in school and they were a big band. We never thought we'd play with them on the same tour, but at this moment it feels like the normal thing to do, like, "Oh, we're gonna tour with Amorphis," but when we started it was very different.

It's especially interesting because Amorphis is one of the bands that you're always being compared to.

Yeah, especially in the early stages we took a lot of influences from them, maybe now we've gone in a little bit of a different direction, but especially now it's great getting a chance to play with them. We know that they like our stuff too, like in some of the interviews they've said, "Oh, there's this Insomnium band from Finland, they're great too."

That actually leads into the next question, how do you respond to being compared with legends like Dark Tranquillity, Amorphis, and Opeth?

I have no problem with it, but of course, if some people have only listened to one song, and they say "Oh, this sounds just like Dark Tranquillity, blah blah blah, fucking rip-off," listen to the whole album and you'll see that there's a lot of different stuff there. Some might hear Opeth, some might hear Amorphis, but they all come together in Insomnium's music. I think we have our own style, of course it's melodic death metal with some doom put into it, and it's a little thrashy, but hey, every band is based on tradition, so I have no problem with it, because they all are great bands, and we have listened to them, and there's no denying that they have influenced us a lot. Of course we want to do our own thing, and if there's someone in rehearsal that says, "Oh, this is my song, but it sounds too much like something else, then we leave it."

There was one song in particular off of "Above the Weeping world" that sounds a lot like early Opeth, the name escapes me now, but it's always been compared with Opeth, and it's been said that was a really important song since it paid tribute to where you came from.

I would guess that's "The Last Statement," it has an Opeth kind of feeling.

How would you describe your musical progress from the demo to now?

Well basically we're doing the same thing, but we're just learning to do it better and better. Arrangements, we've learned to do well, there are no dead moments in songs, all the time there's something little in the background that you don't necessarily notice the first time, but when you listen for the fifth time, you're like "Oh, there's something there." Things like that. We have more progressive stuff, and things were more straightforward, but we haven't really changed that much.

It seems you've been utilizing more staccato guitar work, as opposed to the legato that made the first album so flowing. Why is that?

Well well well, what do I say? We just made the kinds of songs that jumped out at us, and the different guitar work, well, I'm just the bass player. But we really just made the songs that we wanted to play,.

You've said that the new album is your best yet, what makes it that way?

Well first, the sound. The overall sound is much better than the first album. When you listen to the third album, then go back to some of the older stuff, it feels different, it doesn't kick so much. The sound's better, and we've really learned to arrange the songs better. We've added a lot of progressive stuff, and now it's more of a complete package. I think some people would like some more progressive stuff, but I think that all of the songs on the album work really well when you play them live.

Is there anything you're not satisfied with?

No, not really. We're really satisfied with the album, and now we feel that we have to make an even better album next time, that's a tough job. There's not a single riff or part that I would change.

How did the preparation differ from the last ones?

We were in a different studio, and the whole process was easier, and the guy that worked sound engineering was a really good guy, he had everything together all the time. The process of writing and recording the second album was a bit frustrating, we had all kinds of troubles. It took all summer, and we had to master it twice; it was really painful. But this time, everything went really smoothly. There was, of course, that we had a few months to go into the studio and not everything was finished, but that went well. And we had to make the video as well, which was really good. It cost like 3000 dollars, which is like nothing, and it looks so good that it gets played on MTV. We're very happy with that.

How was it different from making the video for "The Elder?"

Well this time we worked with true professionals. They were students, but we had a crew of like 20 people, and they're all in this school where there are cameramen and directors, and they'd done 50 music videos per year, so they really know what they were doing, and it showed. We left almost everything to them, so when we saw the final thing, we said, "Oh my God, it's this good."

I really liked the video for "The Elder," I thought it conveyed a lot of cold bleakness.

Yeah, it has its own strengths, but it's obviously a low-budget video, but it was the best video that, at that time, we could make. We didn't have the connections, and we didn't have the money, but we tried our best.

Much of your lyrical content deals with sorrow and loss, is there any event or series of them that influenced that?

Well not really, there are three of us that make the songs, so I can only speak on my behalf. Well, one guitarist wrote one song when he was having personal issues with his love life, and he was letting the theme out in writing the lyrics, but the rest of us, no not really. You have to have some kind of life experience to be able to write convincing stuff about the topics, and I've had my own trauma back then, but recently, I've been a happy man. But what we write in the lyrics comes out naturally, we watch dark, soulful movies, and movies and stuff, so the stuff that we write is pretty dark. The Finnish nature is also really like the mindscape of the music, and the way we see the lyrics, and the new melodies that we get are not from Cleveland (laughs).

A lot of the lyrics also paint a picture, a setting for the song to take place, do you just pull that out of your head as well?

Well, I don't know where that comes from, well, from the head obviously, but we try to get in the mood, and we try to think of what kind of feeling, what kind of landscape, and there is some kind of nature in the lyrics, some kind of setting so that it's not just some abstract thing.

The title track on the first album is like that, with the "Evening full of grandeur, skies tinged with red..."

Yeah, that's a good song, but it's also a long song. We only get to play for 35 minutes, and we really don't get to play it. If we come play a headlining show, then we have to play it, because a lot of people want to hear that. In my opinion it's the best song on the first album and clearly one of the best songs we've ever made, but it's just so long.

Which has the better metal scene between Finland and Sweden?

(laughs from around the Finn/Swede divided room)

Matti Honkonen (Swallow the Sun): That's a tough question!

Niilo: That is a tough question! I think that Sweden, and maybe Norway have good ones, at least when you compare how many people are living in those places. Of course I have to say that Finland has the best, but it's a tough competition between the bands, and the atmosphere was really good. There's a friendly rivalry, but that's a good thing. Everybody keeps getting better and better and putting on better performances. When Swallow the Sun gets the stage first they always do a great job, but it just has to keep going up and up. It's been great.

What goes on in the Insomnium camp besides the obligatory sex, drugs, and rock & roll?

(laughs) Well we try to make music and stuff. After the tour ends we'll make another album. Of course we all have our normal lives, and touring takes a lot of time from that. We're busy men, being always together. We're not that big that we don't have to work. We need to work, we need to go to normal work, and it's difficult to put it all together, being in a band and having a relationship. But so far it's worked for some of us. If you have nobody at home, then you tour the world all the time no problem, because it's fun. But if there's someone or even more than one person waiting for you back home, then it's more difficult. It's tough to be away from home that much, but it's what we want to do, and back home they understand why we're doing this, otherwise this wouldn't work.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Most of you have already made up your mind about Insomnium, either they're solid-to-spectacular melodic death, or they're a rip-off of (insert X band here) and they suck. For those of you that haven't been exposed to them, kindly remove yourselves from your burrows and do whatever is necessary to catch them on this tour with Katatonia, Swallow the Sun, and Scar Symmetry. In a decade, it will have been legendary.