Canadian technical death outfit Archspire exude talent, drive, creativity, and absolute dedication. A tight live performance, where impressive speeds come grinding to a halt, and in even less time twist and contort into complex passages rife with beautiful harmonies, juxtaposed against insidious melodies. An attention to song writing, focusing not only on technicality, but originality as well, take this sub genre and put it on it’s ear. When all the elements required align in such a way that they form something original, and interesting, it becomes a catalyst for something new… and in the case of Archspire, all has indeed, aligned.
Drummer Spencer Prewett talks to us about their upcoming tour in Australia, hitting the road down under with Aussie metal veterans Psycroptic which will mark Archspire’s first ever trip to the country. We also talk a little about the similarities between Australia and Canada, the Canadian metal scene as well as the influences that helped shape Archspire’s sound.
Andrew: Hows things with the band at the moment? We’re pretty excited to see you coming to Australia next month!
Spencer: Right on! They’re good, we’re very busy right now. It’s all good, it’s exactly where we want to be.
Andrew: I understand you’re doing a festival up in Canada this weekend right?
Spencer: Yeah we’re playing Armstrong [Festival] which is in British Columbia here which is the Province we live in and we play the Friday with Kataklysm I believe. It’s the kick off, we’re actually leaving for a full 3 week Canadian tour starting Friday so going all the way from the west coast to the east coast and back which is extremely far, like maybe over 13,000 or 14,000km driving. So looking forward to the shows but not the drive!
Andrew: Yeah exactly and it’s quite similar to Australia, it’s quite a big country as well where a lot of bands tend to do a lot of driving as well. It’s funny as I’ve talked to a lot of artists and musicians from Canada and they all say there’s a weird similarity between Canada and Australia and how the music scene is and how people respond to music. Obviously you have never been down here before but have you heard that about Australia at all?
Spencer: Well we toured with Psycroptic last summer across Canada and they told us that the two countries are very similar, especially the west coast here which they told us was similar to the Sydney area. We’re really stoked, none of us have ever been down to Australia before so we’re all really excited to play the shows but also see the country and meet all the people.
Andrew: Yeah definitely and I guess the Psycroptic guys probably gave you a lot of shit about the myth of the drop bears that you may have been hearing?
Spencer: No I don’t know what that is.
Andrew: Oh right well I’ll let you figure that out when you get here but I wouldn’t take it too seriously!
Spencer: [laughs] Alright!
Andrew: Well it’s good to see you in the country anyway and Psycroptic are a great band to be touring with so what can the fans expect? What are you bringing down to us?
Spencer: I think we have about 40 to a 45 minute set or something like that. We all play with in-ear monitors and click tracks and we have that broken up into 2 rack systems which we can actually bring onto the plane so technically we should sound the same anywhere in the world as we do here in North America.
Andrew: Yeah your music is quite technical so is that difficult to do without ear monitors and stuff? How does that work for you guys?
Spencer: We’ve been on in-ear monitors for about 3 years now and you can hear everything you are playing, every fuck up you make and so essentially what it does is it trains your brain to play with a really dry, honest sound and it’s good for everybody because especially with the click track, it helps your brain to clean up all the little mistakes or all the technique problems you have. So I think honestly if we had to play a show without in-ear monitors and without a click track, we could still totally pull it off but we’re definitely as good as musicians as we are right now because of the way we’ve trained with all that gear.
Andrew: Yeah and it’s obviously an important aspect of a touring band when you want to get that consistency with all your shows. So with a lot of fans down here who have probably never seen you guys before, what is your show like? How do you put on the kind of show you want to put out, no matter where you go in the world, is there a formula that you like to stick to?
Spencer: The most important thing to us as a band is making sure that we sound just like the album. We don’t want to be one of those bands that people claim that the album sounds good but they can’t pull that shit off live or they couldn’t actually play it or it’s pro-tools. So we’ve put a lot of time and effort into making sure that our tones are the same, that we’re playing all the same little intricate parts as the album. Like I said before we use click tracks so all the speeds are the same and so that’s the most important thing for us and I mean the stage show is important. Some parts are way too shreddy and you can’t really move around too much and then other parts are more groovy and you can headbang and try to mix it up. We know that there’s metal fans that like to come and cross their arms and just watch and then we know there’s people that love to come and headbang and mosh and we like to try and mix up the two.
Andrew: Well I hope that there’s a lot of movement, I guess that’s what you kind of want to see in the moshpit. What’s some of the craziest stuff that you have seen at one of your shows in the past?
Spencer: We recently had a show where a few hot girls got on stage and started twerking, that was weird [laughs]. I mean we’ve had ludicrous shows with people stage diving and doing all kinds of crazy shit, like what you would expect at any crazy metal show. It’s different from country to country, some countries the fans that are a lot more reserved than others and some of them they go crazy. The first few times we played Germany we thought that nobody liked us until we saw merch sales because they tend to watch and really critique what you are playing. In Mexico they go absolutely nuts, they want to stage dive and freak out, in Japan they stand there politely and smile at you [laughs], wait for you to stop and they politely cheer and clap. So it’s different all over the world but I mean really what you want is you want people to be stoked and enjoy the show.
Andrew: Absolutely and what about Canada, what’s the metal scene like there these days? Like I said before I hear similarities between Canada and Australia so I’m kind of intrigued on what it’s like there.
Spencer: We used to tour Canada so much and now we mostly tour the US but there’s not a huge difference in the crowds, the cultures are very similar. The stereotype of Canadians being polite is definitely true but Canadians like to drink so there’s some pretty drunk, crazy fans at shows who go pretty wild and you see them in the US too. But Canada has most of it’s population in the east, in Montreal and Toronto, Quebec and so in the middle of Canada the population is really tiny and then you have the west coast with Vancouver where we live is the biggest city, I think about 2 and a half million or something. So you definitely have small shows in the middle on your way east but once you get over there they start getting big again, we call is A market and B markets.
Andrew: Has it changed much over the years? Has it gotten smaller or bigger, what’s it been like in the last decade or so?
Spencer: Well it’s a little bit hard to have a really realistic perspective of that because when you start out, noone knows you and noone gives a fuck. The hardcore fans find out about you first, the real nerds who like to dig in deep and this year we were nominated for a Juno award which in Canada is the top music awards for the country which gave us some mainstream recognition which is really rare for an extreme death metal band. So it’s been a climb up for us and through out the years the shows have gotten bigger, the band has gotten bigger and the crowds have gotten more enthusiastic so it’s a little bit hard to judge if the scene has gotten better itself or our band just grew.
Andrew: Well it’s obviously exciting to see your band grow and grow. Who do you consider to be some of your biggest influences, not just for yourself but for the band collectively as well?
Spencer: I’ll start with me, when I was younger it was Cryptopsy, an awesome Canadian death metal band. The drumming in Cryptopsy was so mind boggling for me, it still is. But it’s hard to say, when we started out we loved Spawn Of Possession, Soreption was a really tiny band back then but we knew of them and we really liked them, Necrophagist was a really big one for us. We liked all those sort of death metal bands but we also were really influenced by a bunch of speed rap from the mid-west of the US so that’s why the vocals turned out the way they did is because we wanted to take a lot of vocal influence from the techniques those guys were using to rap to be able to reach those speeds and not blow their lungs out or be able to get their syllables out properly.
Andrew: That’s an interesting influence there, I’m not really familiar with that sort of stuff to be honest but it’s certainly an interesting element to have in your music.
Spencer: Yeah it’s funny because sometimes I’ll talk to pretty elitist metal kids and it pisses them off [laughs], because they hate rap for whatever stupid reason but our mentality was A, we did love the music and B, those guys were using techniques that noone else was using to reach very fast speeds and that’s not that different from what we were doing in death metal with our guitars and drums. So that’s why we took those vocals for our influence.
Andrew: And what about drummers, was there any particular drummer that helped you get into drumming in the first place?
Spencer: I had a drum kit since I was maybe 8 or 9 but I never played it and I wasn’t interested in it and it wasn’t until I discovered extreme metal when I was about 16. End of 16, early 17 I started picking up the sticks and practicing every day and I was really into Dying Fetus and Opeth at the time, Satyricon, obviously Cryptopsy. These were all new bands for me with crazy drumming and I had never heard blast beats before and I had never heard fast double bass before and I remember being 17 and having a fake ID and getting into a Cryptopsy show that was coming through. Where we lived, we lived in a small town and you never had any metal shows ever come through and I remember being so absolutely blown away at the drumming to the point where it became an obsession for me and I couldn’t really think about anything else in my youth so I just started practicing all the time and iut’s been 15-16 years now with just hardcore practicing blast beats and shit!
Andrew: And there you go! Cryptopsy are a great band, we saw them in Perth on the west coast of Australia a couple of years ago I think and that was the first time we had seen them as well. It’s good to see bands more on the underground side coming our way, we don’t see that too often.
Spencer: Yeah that’s awesome!
Andrew: We are looking forward to seeing you in Australia, it’s going to be a great tour. Thanks for your time, really appreciate it and have fun on tour and just be aware as mentioned before about those drop bears if anyone mentions them when you get down here.
Spencer: Are you saying drop bears as in bears?
Andrew: Yeah and I won’t give it away here but it’s a version of a koala bear, you’ll see what I mean.
Spencer: [laughs] Alright I’ll ask Psycroptic about it.
Andrew: No worries, I’m sure they’ll tell you!
Spencer: Alright nice chatting with you!
PSYCROPTIC & ARCHSPIRE
w/ Hadal Maw
AUSTRALIA TOUR DATES
August 16th – Brisbane, Crowbar w/ Kaerulean
August 17th – Sydney, Bald Faced Stag w/ Heathenspawn
August 18th – Melbourne, Max Watts w/ Primitive
August 19th – Canberra, The Basement w/ Inhuman Remnants
*August 24th – Hobart, Brisbane Hotel w/ Zeolite, The Absolution Sequence
*August 25th – Adelaide, Fowlers w/ Voros, In The Burial, Oath Of Damnation, Temple Of Athena
**August 26th – Perth, Amplifier w/ Grotesque, Unravel
(*Hadal Maw not appearing)
(**Psycroptic & Hadal Maw not appearing)
TICKETS ON SALE now at:
http://soundworksdirect.eventbrite.com / www.oztix.com.au
