Leif Edling détaille la création de cet album, si vous avez le courage de tout lire
Leif Edling is tired. Exhausted. And not because his band, legendary doom metallers CANDLEMASS, have a new disc, Death Magic Doom, out and are riding a wave of excitement. Because he can’t get a good night’s sleep.
“I’m getting ready to go to bed,” says the bassist when we get him on the horn to chat about all things Candlemass. “It’s almost midnight here. I normally go to bed a lot later than this but there’s construction work going on right outside my window, so they wake me up at 7 every morning. I’m not fucking too happy about that. Especially when I go to bed at 3, 4, 5 in the morning and they start at 7… man, the pain.”
Pain? Perfect! After all, this is a guy who’s made a life out of crafting some of doom metal’s finest tunes. If he suffers, we reap the benefits, in the form of kick-ass tunes like the ones that make up the new disc: equal parts grimy ‘70s proto-metal and swampy new-millennium Satano-doom, it’s a mixture that ends up sounding like a band that everyone from PENTAGRAM to ACID BATH worship. Because it is.
“We worked real hard in the studio and I’ve been working my ass off writing the songs,” says Edling on the new disc. “I’ve worked one year from beginning to end with the album and another five or six months with the after-work on it, but we’ve got incredible reviews in Europe and some amazing reviews in the States now. I’m pretty happy. Last week I got 20 links to websites and magazines; 19 were fucking so good I couldn’t believe it. One was lukewarm, but I can live with that (laughs).”
Perhaps one of the reasons the new disc—the third in the band’s kick-ass ’00 collection which thus far features ‘05’s self-titled disc and ‘07’s King Of The Grey Islands, the first to feature vocalist Robert Lowe (also of underdog Texan doom heroes Solitude Aeturnus), replacing the mighty Messiah Marcolin behind the mic—is so good is because the band had more time to spend on it.
“Maybe I took a month or so more than usual to write it,” says Edling, “so I spent five months preparing the stuff, writing, playing guitar, getting songs together from November to April and I spent a month demoing the stuff. The guys had most of the songs on a CD before we took off to the States in early June, so we had three months to listen to the stuff before we went into the studio and started rehearsing and I had three more months to arrange stuff, so that was a lot of time for me to arrange the songs so they’d be interesting and not boring to listen to. I did that more this time than I’ve ever done it.”
“We rehearsed for a month in August, recorded the album in early September for ten days, then we had two months off so we could think about the album,” he continues. “We’ve never done that before; normally we record and mix and that’s it. So now we have two months to do some extra overdubs, add some keyboards, whatever. Then we mixed in November and we’re done. This time we had extra time (laughs). I think that’s important, so we can do an album that’s even better.”
I suggest that the band has been on quite a roll recently but Edling points out that perhaps they were but the roll was put on hold while fans adjusted to the vocalist change. While Lowe more than ably proves himself, living up to his large-haired predecessor—especially in the eyes of the doom faithful—was no small task.
“From the white album (self-titled), from 2005, we had great success, playing lots of gigs and we sold lots of albums,” says Edling. “The black album (King Of The Grey Islands) did that too but people were a little skeptic towards Robert to begin with. So we didn’t get as many gigs as we wanted. We played a lot but not as much as we would have wanted. Now with this album, people embrace Robert, we get incredible reviews and are offered gigs and tours, so it’s a lot better than the last album.”
Considering this is doom metal royalty I have on the line here, I had to ask Edling if he keeps up with what the newcomers of the doom scene are doing these days. Turns out he does have an ear to what’s going on… but just one ear.
“I go down to a record shop here in Stockholm quite frequently, two times a month,” he says. “If there’s something good coming out, I’ll hear about it. To that extent, I follow it. I read Terrorizer and the Swedish metal magazines so I get a little bit of info and if there’s something especially good coming out I’m sure I’ll buy it. But I’m not 100% updated. I get good information from my friends that are total metalheads and music nerds and doomheads or whatever so I don’t have to plow through 100 really, really bad albums to find the one I really like. I’m very happy about that, I don’t have the fucking time to do that. It’d be a total waste of time.”
And what about other projects on the go? Edling put out a solo album, Songs Of Torment, Songs Of Joy, in November of ’08. But he says he’s more interested in a new disc from Krux, the doom supergroup of sorts, when I ask if he’s going to put out another solo album soon.
“No,” he chuckles. “No, man. This year’s going to be total Candlemass. That album came out half a year ago. Maybe 2012 or 2013, perhaps. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a Krux album next year. So a solo album is way, way in the future. I’m looking forward to a new Krux album, that’s going to be great to do that. But we’ve also got a 25 year anniversary coming up for Candlemass, so we’re going to do some anniversary gigs. We’ve got a couple gigs lined up next year where we’re going to do the entire Epicus (Doomicus Metallicus), two-hour shows and stuff.”
And while there’s no Canuck dates in site, Edling hopes the gang will make it over here soon (and adds that any interested promoters should get in touch!). Even without hitting Canada, the band’s touring schedule is getting filled up again; the doom machine rolls on. “We’re going to play a lot of festivals this summer and August is pretty booked, September is totally booked, October is getting very booked so I’m pretty sure it’s going to be like that for further on,” he says.
Then he excuses himself to go to bed, where the jackhammers will awake him in a few hours and legions of doom fans will breathe a sigh of relief knowing that, somewhere, Leif Edling is unhappy.
Je sens que ça va être l'un de mes albums 2009 
(par contre je ne peux pas comparer avec "King..." que je ne connais pas 
)
j'ai adoré king of the grey islands (je l'ai encore écouté hier, il est simplement énorme)