Twilight Of The Gods, the extreme metal supergroup featuring Primordial’s Alan Nemtheanga, Mayhem’s Blasphemer, ex-Cradle/Dimmu drummer Nick Barker and members of Thyrfing and Einherjer, are putting the final touches to their debut album, Fire On The Mountain, which is due to be released in February or March next year via Season Of Mist. Subterranea got an early listen, and in the first of a two-part interview we chat with Alan about going back to the past, siege mentalities and the joys of being obvious.
This new album is going back to the old school, but it doesn’t sound kitsch. Some bands can sound too knowing and Fire On The Mountain finds a good balance between knowing your marker points and being progressive at the same time.
“Yeah. I guess the thing is that we’re a bit older. We grew up with and through most of our reference points. This is just what just came out when we play, we didn’t need to go, ‘We need to write songs that sound like Manowar’, but we all love Manowar. There’s a fine line to walk between pastiche, parody and putting of the old gonzoid heavy metal charm into it, but not being too self-knowing in that sense.”
Was it weird to switch over to singing classic metal lyrics, and finding out how you relate to those lyrics?
“Definitely, the thing is that it’s full of the gonzoid heavy metal idioms – the swords and the steel and the blood and the fire. It was a difficult balance to find, to strike between being full of a certain glory and beauty and charm of old heavy metal, without it being too wink-wink, nod-nod, self-parody, but really genuinely meaning it because that’s what we all love, and treating it with the sort of kid gloves and respect that it deserves.
“But yeah, it was difficult trying to find a different voice, another kind of lyric but at the same time, if you take, say, the title track Fire On The Mountain, that’s my Dio tribute and it sounds like a Rainbow song title. But yeah, the song is about the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman empire in 1683 where King Leopold I and the Holy Roman See defeated the Turks, and those, I think, had a lot to do with saving the European culture and the Enlightenment and all sorts of stuff. So if you were to actually look at it, you’d go ‘Actually there’s something being said here, but it’s written in heavy metal vernacular, which was handed down to us from Iron Maiden and whoever. But it’s a challenge for sure, and it’s also a challenge to write a chorus that people could sing. You’re sitting there for the first time thinking, actually how could I write this in such a way for people at a show or at a festival to get behind it, you know? It’s just a traditional, hard rock structure, which is a breath of fresh air for all of us, because we’ve all, for the past 20 years, been playing extreme music and darker music to some degree, so it’s a bit like something fresh for all of us, despite the fact that it’s all old.
Is it difficult to write simple lyrics?
“It is. It’s only when you try to write a simplistic lyric, which has the onomatopoeia, which has the rhythm, as the rhyme, has the meter and you have to make it fit into the timing and the framing of the riff. This is something I don’t have to do in Primordial because it drifts along and you sing over that, and you do move with the structures, but this is a much more disciplined thing and it’s only when you start to listen to something like Judas Priest, when you listen to Rapid Fire or Grinder or something where you’ve got the vocal moving against the rhythm of the music and yet meeting it. So, yeah, there are some very clever disciplines because we have had no structures like that in our other bands. It’s all a heavy metal/hard rock discipline that we weren’t used to. It was very challenging to be honest and again trying to put some meaning onto the music.”
I guess it’s that mix of journey of discovery and what’s been internalised.
“Yeah, you’ve been living this for 20, 25 years so you should be able to know when the key change comes in. We should all feel it and go, ‘Hey, maybe we need to go to F sharp from C’, or whatever, and then you go, ‘Is that too Maiden? It doesn’t matter’.”
It’s liberating to know that you can be obvious?
“Sometimes because if you listen to Primordial what you listen to Rune’s work with Ordo Ad Chao, it’s not obvious stuff what we’ve all been trying to do. Maybe Einherjer is close to his heavy metal straight
