Interview - LIVE BURIAL - The most important thing for us was that the album flowed well and sounded complete. ~ DEADLY STORM zine

Interview with death metal band from United Kingdom - LIVE BURIAL.

Answered guitarist Rob, thank you!

Translated Petra, thank you!

Questions prepared Jakub Asphyx.

Recenze/review - LIVE BURIAL - Unending Futility (2020):

https://www.deadlystormzine.com/2020/05/recenzereview-live-burial-unending.html

Ave LIVE BURIAL! I haven’t found any interview in the Czech language with you, yet. So please, first introduce the band to our readers who don’t know you. You could start from the early beginnings and describe the whole LIVE BURIAL history.

Hi Jakub. Thanks for arranging the interview. I’m Rob and I joined Live Burial in 2014 on guitar. Live Burial formed in 2012 initially as a side project for some of the band members. The idea was to play doomy death metal in the style of Asphyx and a demo was recorded in 2013. Shortly after recording the demo, original member Jake Bielby (Plague Rider) departed the band to focus on his other projects. I was then asked to join the band as I had worked with Jamie before in our previous grindcore band (Rat Faced Bastard). We then recorded our self titled EP in 2014 that we initially released ourselves on CD and digital. We managed to sell all the copies of the CD and printed a further run which also sold out too. We were then approached by Polish label Till You Fukkin Bleed who released the EP on cassette. The label owner put us in touch with Dunkelheit Produktionen and we started writing and recording our debut album ’Forced Back to Life’. At this time we were quite active playing shows in the UK underground scene and played with bands such as Asphyx, Voivod and Acid Witch. We also managed to land a spot at Live Evil Festival in London. We toured Finland for the first time with our friends in Solothus and we were told that Indian label Transcending Obscurity were interested in working with us. We contacted Kunal (label owner) and we liked what he had to offer so we agreed to release our second album ’Unending Futility’ through the label in 2020. The reception to the release has been amazing and we are now hard at work writing our third album.

I’m just listening to your new record „Unending Futility“ and I feel like as if I am closed in some tomb together with ASPHYX, MORGOTH, DEATH, BOLT THROWER, CANCER, UNLEASHED, INCANTATION. The record has a great dark sound. Where did you record it and how satisfied you are with it? Did you have the "last word" concerning the resulting sound?

Thank you for the kind words. We were aiming for a darker and heavier sound on this record compared to our previous work and we are very pleased with how it sounds. We recorded at a local studio to where the band is based (Newcastle in the North East of England – home of Satan and Venom) and then our good friend Dan Mullins handled the mixing and mastering. Dan currently plays in the UK old school death metal band Blasphemer and previously drummed for bands such as My Dying Bride. Dan understands the sound that we were looking for and we couldn’t be happier with the results. We wanted to create an atmospheric record that sounds a little bit different to most other death metal bands at the moment. The band had the last word on the overall sound of the record.

How was the new material for album „Unending Futility“ created? How exactly LIVE BURIAL writes the music?

For this album I wrote most of the riffs and the general structures of the songs at home and sent them to the rest of the band for them to add and adjust any sections. We would then get together to rehearse the songs as a band and make any further adjustments if we felt that the songs needed them. This was a slightly different approach to our debut where we mainly jammed some ideas together in rehearsals and worked on the structures as we played. For this album I tried to map out the structure of the song before I wrote the actual riffs. The main exception to this is ’Rotting on the Rope’ which Matt (Drums) and Lee (Bass) pretty much wrote entirely themselves from jamming together. There was a lot of quality control when we were writing this album and we actually dropped 2 songs from the record as we didn’t feel that they fit the sound that we were going for. The most important thing for us was that the album flowed well and sounded complete.

„Unending Futility“ has dark cover art. Who is an author? I really like his work. How did you actually choose the idea of the cover and what exactly illustrates?

Luke Oram (Oram Art) created the album art for us. We’ve known Luke for a long time and we are huge fans of his work. We actually used his art for our debut album too. One of the reasons that we like working with Luke is that his art is quite different to the style that a lot of bands use and we think that the album art really sticks out, especially for death metal. The album cover is based on our song ’The Crypt of Slumbering Madness’. The song is inspired by the video game Dark Souls 2 and the lyrics deal with a King who lost everything and was left to slowly rotting in his crypt. We felt that the subject of this song captured the atmosphere of the album perfectly and asked Luke to create the artwork to match this.

Could you reveal us who is an author of the lyrics and what is their background? Where did you take inspiration for certain topics?

Our vocalist Jamie writes all of the lyrics. There are varying themes and inspirations throughout the record. For example ’Swing of the Pendulum’ is inspired by the Hammer Horror film ’The Pit and the Pendulum’ whereas ’Condemned to the Boats’ is based on the ancient Persian method of execution called Scaphism (also referred to as ’the boats’). The rest of the lyrics on the album are mainly original horror themed stories.

You play music as old as death metal itself. How do you perceive new directions in the death metal? I mean mixing with death core or technical death metal? Do you have any favourite bands in “modern metal”?

In general I don’t have much interest in the more modern sounding death metal. I don’t have a problem with the bands that decide to mix those styles but it’s not something that I enjoy listening to myself. Thankfully there are a lot of amazing newer death metal bands that capture the spirit of the classic bands from different regions and eras. The current Finnish death metal scene is a perfect example of this. Bands such as Krypts, Corpsessed, Lantern, Gorephilia, Solothus and our labelmates Sepulchral Curse show how strong the scene is in Finland at the moment and all of these bands are continuing the legacy of the classic Finnish death metal bands like Demigod, Rippikoulu etc.

What about LIVE BURIAL and concerts? Do you play a lot? Are you going on tour or you are choosing only bigger festivals? And what about touring over Europe?

Before COVID we were quite active live in the UK. We had just supported Incantation in London and completed a UK tour with our friends in the amazing French death metal band Skelethal. We had plans this year to do a small tour in Europe and we had some festival slots arranged in Europe too. Unfortunately the COVID situation has either cancelled or postponed these plans. We aren’t sure when we will be able to start playing again but we do have some festival slots booked next year both in the UK and in Germany. Hopefully we will be able to add more shows in Europe when things are looking better. We would love to do a big tour of Europe.

Can you recommend some new albums, which impressed you at the latest time?

There have been some excellent albums released this year. Some of my personal favourites so far are releases by; Black Curse, Caustic Wound, Void Rot, Rope Sect, Solothus, Bohren & Der Club of Gore and Atramentus. The Atramentus album is probably my favourite. It’s easily the best Funeral Doom album that I’ve heard in a long time.

Do you know and listen to some metal bands from the Czech Republic?

We actually played a few shows in the UK with Czech crust band MÖRKHIMMEL. They were a very good live band and really nice guys too. But the band I probably listen to the most from Czech Republic are black metal legends Root. Lykathea Aflame are probably the first band that I think of for death metal from the area with their unique take on the genre.

We are slowly approaching the end of the interview so I would like to ask one more philosophical question. How would you define the death metal style? What represents this music for you and why did you choose exactly this genre?

That’s a tough question! There are a lot of different styles of death metal but for me death metal is always about lots of riffs and a dark atmosphere. If I could use one album to showcase death metal and everything that it stands for then it would be ’Altars of Madness’. To this day I still think it is the best death metal album ever recorded and it is a genuine perfect album.

We chose to play this style of death metal because we are all huge fans of the old school death metal bands. When we were starting out there seemed to be a lot of bands bringing back that style. I remember in the early to mid 2000’s it seemed to be mainly brutal death metal and deathcore bands that were popular but thanks to bands like Cruciamentum, Funebrarum and Kaamos the older and darker death metal sound seems to be dominating the genre again.

What LIVE BURIAL is planning for the next few months?

We are currently writing and rehearsing the material for our third album. We have written over half of the album so far and we have a good idea of what the rest will sound like. The aim is to record the album next year with hopefully a release planned for 2022. We are taking extra time and care when writing and we are confident that the next record will be our best release to date.

Thank you for the interview and I wish you a lot of sold CDs, hundreds of crazy fans and tons of great ideas.

Thank you for taking the time to interview us and for your kind words!

Recenze/review - LIVE BURIAL - Unending Futility (2020):

https://www.deadlystormzine.com/2020/05/recenzereview-live-burial-unending.html

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