Kylesa
by Morgan Y. Evans
live pic by Ronan Thenady
full band pic by Danin Drahos

Music, literature and art are (ideally) constantly evolving organisms, truly reflective of humanity and life. Like plants in nature, some musical endeavors will blossom into wonderful, unique creations (such as the stylistic mélange of David Bowie’s HUNKY DORY, the quirky comfort of Penguin Café Orchestra’s “Music For A Found Harmonium” or the potent yearning of Elvis Costello’s THE DELIVERY MAN) while others die on the vine. It’s sad when a band stagnates with no growth or simply can’t match past glories (initially very promising, yet now disbanded, conceptual emo band Armor For Sleep spring to mind). There will always be artists who made one great record and then couldn’t recapture that potency, whatever the recipe entailed. Other artists morph and distinctively evolve, such as the shift of influences apparent in the journey of members of Bl’ast unto their current band Dusted Angel or the forward thinking non-“traditional black metal” risks taken by Ihsahn on his recent album trilogy which started with THE ADVERSARY and concluded with AFTER.

The key to staying relevant through ups and downs is to keep in touch with your inner evolving spark (eloquently and alchemically discussed here by my good friend/ blogger/model Darla Downing Braquet). Life is full of opportunities to freak out, expand your horizons and merge disparate disciplines and influences on one big canvas (the unlikely genius hodge-podge of GODEL, ESCHER, BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID by Hofstadter won the Pulitzer, for example).

Savannah, Georgia’s Kylesa have been expanding with every stubbornly self-indulgent (in a meaningful, good way) record, turning heads with each “once more into the breach” tour. Call them “sludge” or “heavy psych metal” or what you will, the band follows their vision and can appeal to everyone from crust to “alternative” to stoner fans. Kylesa have always been known for intense tribal drumming, caustic metal screeds commenting on society and strange, hypnotic trippy parts, but it was with TIME WILL FUSE ITS WORTH that the group started really pushing outward by leaps and bounds with every album. Few thought they could top the monstrous STATIC TENSIONS (still maybe my favorite) but with their latest hyper crushing yet melodically liberated release SPIRAL SHADOW (their first release for Season Of Mist), the band have honed in on ALL their strengths and evolved into what sounds like a “long term” band.

I spoke with guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants via phone from New York in the midst of a blizzard and found out that the weather down South wasn’t so hot either. We talked about the triumphs and perils of the road, embracing the call of originality and the inspirations behind SPIRAL SHADOW.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: Hi Laura. How have you been? Good to talk with you today. It’s been terrible weather here in New York. We’re in the middle of a blizzard.

LAURA PLEASANTS: We’re getting bad winter storms down here too. Georgia just fuckin’ gets shut down. The cities are not prepared.

MYE: Some places like North Carolina, I’ve heard they’ll get a little snow dusting and everything closes, but in Georgia it must be even worse…and this is real snow!

LP: I was stuck in North Carolina for a couple of days. I mean, the highways were complete ice. There’s nothing we can do. I hope this doesn’t fuck up our tour. I was like, “We should have fucking gone to the West Coast, not the East Coast in January”!

MYE: (laughing)

LP: (laughing) You know what I mean? Fuck!

MYE: I was gonna ask you if you’ve ever had any bad weather experiences on the road before.

LP: Yeah, we have. For sure. They’re not fun.

MYE: Most of my band just fled out to L.A. for NAMM Convention and I didn’t get to go. Bastards.

LP: Awww, poor thing. I know. It’s probably much nicer there right now.

MYE: So the new record SPIRAL SHADOW is awesome. It sounds like confidence is really running high. You are all really dialed in on this album.

LP: Thank you very much.

MYE: It was really interesting to hear the approach versus STATIC TENSIONS, which I thought was such a high point for the band. I wasn’t sure you could top some of the stuff on that one. I mean, I love all your albums but “Nature’s Predators” for example…it was so massive. Another level. This new one is in some ways your most psychedelic record yet.

LP: Yeah. It’s our most psychedelic. I mean, it’s not as aggressive or as straight forward as STATIC TENSIONS and certainly not as aggressive as our earlier records.

MYE: There are still a lot of stomping riffs, though.

LP: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think that’s gonna ever go away. Stomping riffs are pretty much what we are. (laughing)

MYE: “Cheating Synergy” has the intro and especially the title track; the guitar textures are so crazy and mind bending.

LP: Oh, Thanks. Thank you. The title track…that one took awhile. I was real anal about that song ‘cuz it had a lot of personal meaning. I wanted it to come out a certain way. I definitely had visions for it. It went through many different incarnations.

MYE: Did you have more studio time this time?

LP: Honestly, the studio was a fucking wreck! I mean, not a wreck but I mean…it was stressful. We were trying to run two studios at once with not enough engineers and not enough time, so…I’m amazed that it got done. It was to the fucking last second. It was hard. It was a hard record to do in the time we had to do it.

MYE: It’s pretty ambitious but still is concise.

LP: I still wish we’d had more time. It would’ve been a perfect record. That said, I’m really happy with how it came out.

MYE: I was thinking of “Where The Horizon Unfolds” and this nature/cosmos versus the human world and how we interact. Internal and external themes as metaphors seem to fill your band’s lyrics. The songs are interpretive but have a lot of meaning too.

LP: Yeah.

MYE: SPIRAL SHADOW has a lot of themes of movement. “Crowded Road” mentions travel a lot or “Tired Climb” could be a metaphor for life or even the music industry.

LP: Totally. We write about personal experience for the most part. We have been traveling a lot but it goes deeper than that. The metaphors could go many different directions, but it’s all based on personal experience. Looking back to where we’ve been and as a band. It’s also about looking forward. The start of a new decade. At the end of the day it’s about life.

MYE: There’s one lyric in “Cheating Synergy” I love where it says “Reasons for risk are endless”. It made me think how the band has had a unique sound and the band has taken creative risks. It isn’t the easiest path necessarily.

LP: Right. We’ve been taking risks. I mean, the lyric wasn’t necessarily about taking creative risks, but we certainly have taken many risks. Creatively and in the way we run our band, for sure. Even doing what we do is risky. It’s rewarding in many ways that make the risks worth it.

MYE: As the band’s star has risen I was wondering what kind of recent accomplishments between this and the last record are you feeling good about within your camp?

LP: We’ve been really lucky to tour with some amazing bands that we respect and enjoy musically. I feel that we’ve been really lucky to tour with bands that we dig. It doesn’t always work out that way but we try to make it work out that way. For example, a band like Clutch, we don’t sound like them at all but we’ve toured with them and really enjoyed it. Similar bands like Torche or High On Fire…we’ve toured with Torche a lot and it’s great to tour with them. We’re great friends and so it is good because of friendship and because I love the music. They are a great, heavy band. Same with High On Fire. It’s good to put together kind of a package of similar aesthetics with the way things are with the economy.

MYE: Or where you know you’ll get along with the bands if you’re stuck out there with them.

LP: Yeah, that helps.

MYE: How did you get involved with Season Of Mist? I love some of that label’s recent stuff like Christian Death or The Old Dead Tree, who I am really upset, broke up, and I think Dillinger Escape Plan signed with them also, right?

LP: Yeah, Dillinger signed with them before we did, I believe. I mean, I’m not gonna get into it too deeply but we were ready for a change. We liked that Season Of Mist was a metal and a rock label. They didn’t just do one kind of thing. They have a pretty diverse roster. We felt comfortable with them.

MYE: The production sense for this one…was there anything ahead of time you knew you wanted to accomplish?

LP: We had Phillip producing the record again. He and I talked about how each song had such a different vibe that it kind of needed a different sound for each song. Both of us wanted a headphone record where the mix was really geared to someone listening to it on a nice pair of headphones. We wanted to do a lot of weird panning and guitar interplay with the mix in general. As the songs started coming together, because all the songs were different in nature they all required their own sounds. We wanted to explore using different amps and guitars. The guys at The Jam Room have a lot of nice, vintage Fender amps. I’m a huge fan of Fender Amps. I wanted to use those amps and use different effects pedals. We had a huge library of effects pedals going on. We took pictures of them. I think they are up on our Facebook page. We wanted to have different tones rather than an overall distortion, to record according to the part rather than just recording all the stuff through one or two amps.

MYE: “Don’t Look Back” is so big and layered and then it goes into “Distance Closing In” and it completely shifts. You can listen to the record all the way through quite easily.

LP: Wow. Well, it is a journey.

MYE: I think the title is good because it really is a winding kind of…trip, you know? (laughing)

LP: Yeah, totally. It was important to us to have movement in the songs. I wanted to write songs with more breathing room, where it ebbed and flowed more. I think we were successful with having the record really pulsate and have a life and vitality to it.

MYE: it gives you a lot of options live also, for the kind of show you want to present any given night.

LP: We have the catalogue now where we can do a totally brutal show or show the softer side or psychedelic side in a Kylesa set, y’know? We definitely could do that if we wanted to.

MYE: Oh fuck! My foot fell asleep. I was sitting on it. Ahhh! It is tingling like crazy.

LP: That sucks! I hate it when that happens.

MYE: Jesus. So professional. Ok, I wanted to ask you about the artwork for SPIRAL SHADOW. How did you come up with the concept for that?

LP: We were very closely involved with the artwork for this record. Our friend John Santos did the illustrations. We’ve known him since he started doing t-shirts for us in…I guess 2005. Out of everyone we’ve ever worked with, he’s always drawn from our lyrics and thought the artwork represented us as a band. We started talking to him about themes and then he came up with the spiraling tree. It just really worked. Before I even knew he was gonna do a tree I knew I wanted to take a photograph of this tree in Savannah, so it kind of worked out perfectly.

MYE: I love the way it is kind of reaching into this vortex and the tree almost looks like a body or something.

LP: We all were involved in what we wanted for this record and especially for our live show, we’ve been adding visuals as well.

MYE: You think of Black Sabbath or a band like even The Rolling Stones, I love to imagine all their records on the wall and see the progression or the changing cover art.
Each record has a distinct visual identity but still fits each band’s aesthetic. It is like every album is a chapter.

LP: Each of our albums is…like you said, little chapters. Every cover really represents what was going on at that time.

MYE: While we’re on the subject of kind of chapters…you’ve made quite an impact and have been around awhile and made a number of albums now. You’re the kind of band where it is evident in the sound that you create a lot of this for yourselves, not that you mind fans, but…how do you see the band’s place or is there anything in particular you want to contribute to the larger movement of heavy movement? Anything you are happy to be a part of?

LP: We’ve always wanted to push the expectations of metal or heavy music or whatever genre people want to associate us with. We wanted to have our own unique sound and I think it takes time to do that, honestly, without just emulating your peers. I think we’ve ultimately achieved that through our ten years of being together. We just wanna write music that we enjoy and that’s challenging to ourselves and that others will also enjoy. We hope the fans in the past stick with us and new ones enjoy it as well.

MYE: Well, it is always good to talk to you and this is really such an important and great record. Good luck with the weather.

LP: Thanks, Morgan. Good talkin’ to you.