Читать книгу Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer - Ben Welch - Страница 14

With the deal with Sony signed and sealed, the most pressing item on the band’s agenda was to get in the studio and prove their worth as a major-label act. Right from the start, there was only one man they wanted behind the console: Colin Richardson, a legendary British producer with a list of credits that touched all corners of the metal map. He had first earned a name for himself at the more extreme end of the spectrum, bringing the aural terror of Liverpool’s grindcore pioneers Carcass into focus, as well as producing for Napalm Death and Fear Factory. Two years previously he had even worked on Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation, the debut of fellow Bridgend boys Funeral for a Friend. However, it was Richardson’s work with Oakland’s Machine Head – particularly the groove and guts of their 1994 debut Burn My Eyes – that convinced Bullet that Colin was the man for the job. Matt even used to play the album as he got into bed, lulled to sleep by Robb Flynn’s howls of anguish.

Colin dropped in on the band to hang out during a rehearsal session – an opportunity for both parties to get the measure of one another and assess whether the collaboration was going to work. Colin’s reserved demeanour is completely at odds with the music he has made his name producing; he doesn’t look like a metalhead, he doesn’t sound like one and he doesn’t indulge (at least, in public) in outrageous rock ’n’ roll behaviour. Matt would later comment to Australia’s Beat magazine that he seemed like the least metal person you could ever meet, saying, ‘If you walked past him in the street, you’d have no idea he was Colin Richardson.’ But he and the guys hit it off – within ten minutes and a few songs, Colin was on board.

And so, in the summer of 2004, the band headed to the studio to begin work on their first major release. The location was Chapel Studios. Set just outside the sleepy town of Alford in the Lincolnshire Wolds, the studio could pass for any other high-end rural idyll at a glance. And yet this converted Methodist Chapel and village school had played host to a diverse array of talent, not least Funeral for a Friend, Tuck’s beloved Machine Head and Dub War – the predecessors of Newport’s ragga-metal stalwarts Skindred. However, the sessions did not get off to the best start. They were driven to Lincolnshire by none other than Glyn Mills, the instrumental promoter in the Bridgend scene, and halfway up a hill it became clear all was not well with the transportation. ‘It didn’t break down to a stop, but the gearing… I couldn’t get it into gear,’ Mills says with a chuckle. ‘We must have been half a mile or so at most from the studio, and it was struggling up the hill and they all had to jump out; we got to the top of the hill and they got back in, all the while slowly moving forward. I’ll never forget that.’ If the band had any delusions of grandeur now that they were a signed act, that experience would have surely brought them back down to earth with a bump.

The engineer on the sessions was Dan Turner, previously of Parkgate Studios, where Cradle of Filth had recorded much of their early 2000s output. ‘There was definitely a buzz about [BFMV] around then,’ Turner remembers. ‘Colin and I were mixing another project at the time and he got given the offer to do it. He played me the demos, which I think were doing the rounds on the Internet somewhere. And immediately it was like, “yeah, this band are pretty cool.”’

And it wasn’t just on the Internet that the band were causing a stir – their short stints out on the road had also got tongues wagging. Turner said, ‘I was also chatting the same day to my buddy Rob [Caggiano], who’s the guitarist in Volbeat now, but he used to be in Anthrax. I mentioned that I was about to work on the Bullet EP and he was like, “wow – that band are amazing.” It turns out they had just supported Anthrax. There was definitely a buzz about them, so I signed on, thinking this would be a great thing to do.’ (This was the first time Bullet would get an endorsement from one of the Big Four of thrash – but not the last.)

The session was completed quickly – around two weeks of tracking and one week of mixing – with much of the material ready to go upon entering the studio. ‘There was maybe the odd tiny little tweak here and there, but nothing really changed in terms of arrangements,’ says Turner. ‘Hand of Blood’ was actually written in the studio and knocked out very quickly, as often the best things are. Another factor facilitating the speed of the recording was the band’s solid preparation. ‘For many bands’ first records, they’ve rehearsed it to death. It was a really fast process doing the first EP because they knew the stuff off by heart, down pat.’ Turner remembers being particularly impressed with Tuck’s chops as a rhythm guitarist.

Naturally, a huge part of getting the right sound is getting the right gear and, as a fledgling act, Bullet were a little light on equipment. Turner recalled, ‘As they were a young band without any money or serious endorsements, a lot of the stuff was hired. The drum kit and the bass was hired, though Matt had a really nice ESP, a Les Paul-type guitar. And we spent about two days trying to get the guitar sound; if I remember correctly, we ended up borrowing a producer called Andy Sneap’s rig, which I think used to belong to [Carcass guitarist] Bill Steer.’ Hearing the thunderous sound of a well-mixed set of drums and a time-tested amplifier from a metal veteran had an obvious effect on Bullet. ‘The band were really excited to be doing it. When they heard the big drum sound for the first time, got the guitars going, there was definitely a sort of open-eyed awe about it all,’ says Turner.

What Turner remembers most of the sessions is the ease with which everything came together, pointing out that often the process of making records is somewhat mundane. With that said, he was left with a sense of Matt’s drive to succeed. ‘It was their first record, and for the most part bands tend to be putty in your hand. But Matt was always a really focused and intense guy. Not in a difficult way, but in the sense that he knows what he wants, and he has an idea of how to go about getting it.’

Following completion of the EP, Bullet had just enough time for a five-date tour around the UK with 36 Crazyfists, this time playing London, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. Bullet for My Valentine hit stores in the UK on 15 November 2004 and was put out through a licensing deal with Visible Noise, the same label that had released Lostprophets’ debut Thefakesoundofprogress in 2000.

To properly understand the significance of the Bullet for My Valentine EP, it’s important to understand the context in which it was released. Over in the US, 2004 had been a significant year for what would come to be known as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, with Mastodon’s Leviathan, Lamb of God’s Ashes of the Wake, Killswitch Engage’s The End of Heartache and Slipknot’s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) all having been released by summer. But on UK shores, the metal revival was nowhere to be seen. Funeral for a Friend were still riding high off the back of Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation and Lostprophets would top end-of-year lists with Start Something but both albums drew more from post-hardcore and American alternative rock than heavy metal. The mainstream’s interest in guitar bands was swinging further towards indie, thanks to significant releases from Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the ongoing Libertines saga. So, as an ominous swell breaks into the frantic opening riff of ‘Hand of Blood’, the message was loud and clear: British heavy metal was back.

As far as openers go, ‘Hand of Blood’ is a stormer. Even now, it puts everything that Bullet do best front and centre, from the furiously precise riffing and salvos of double-kick drumming through to a soaring middle eight of harmonised lead work. What’s most striking is the ease with which the song moves between brutal, ballistic metal and melodic, vocal-led passages – a characteristic that would see the band filed away by much of the music press with the metalcore pack. But where the typical approach of the genre was to keep the screaming confined to a frenetic verse and open space in the chorus for some tuneful singing, ‘Hand of Blood’ demonstrates a deft ability to intertwine brutality and beauty throughout the song – a skill which the band pretty much encapsulate in their name.

‘Cries in Vain’ repeats the same trick but this time the song skips along on a galloping beat from Moose, accompanied by a riff that shows how naturally the band can express their melodic inclinations through their guitar work. Padge expounded the way in which the band develop their guitar parts in an interview with Ultimate Guitar and what’s striking is how organic it seems: ‘It usually all stems from one guitarist who will come up with the riff, but then we kind of work on the riffs, the harmonies, and take a look at it. We will all go into a room and then jam it out,’ he explained. ‘Me and Matt have actually been alongside each other for about ten years now, I think. So […] when we go to do a harmony, we kind of know what harmony to do. We just interact with each other mentally.’

There’s plenty of sophistication in the song structure too, with counter riffs and melodic callbacks creating a sense of irresistible momentum that carries through a two-part verse, a chorus, a middle eight and an instrumental coda. It’s a neat piece of sleight of hand to have such complexity sounding so natural. Lyrically, Matt seems to be railing against a higher power that won’t answer his prayers or offer him deliverance here. The band have remained somewhat tight-lipped about their religious beliefs throughout their career, although Matt did tell Eric Blair on his Blairing Out Show, ‘I wouldn’t say I’m a good Christian. I don’t go to church or anything like that, but it is something I keep in the back of my head most days.’

Things change gear with the opening section of ‘Curses’ and the EP dips in intensity for the first time. The metal influences are backgrounded a little here, with the song following more of a post-hardcore or even nu-metal template. Lyrically, there’s some respite from the tales of murder and mayhem, with Matt even indulging in a little tenacious optimism – ‘when you feel like shit, you gotta keep on pushing’. With that said, the band still can’t resist a brief but explosive passage of riffing as the curtain falls.

The band’s love of Pantera creeps its way into the muscular ‘No Control’, a raging paean to anger complete with gang vocals and a pummelling palm-muted riff tailor-made for slam dancing. And as if composed specifically to sum up the EP in miniature, ‘Just Another Star’ seems to contain everything that has come before it in a single track – it opens with a scything, urgent riff a la ‘Hand of Blood’, moves into a grooving, muted section that recalls the one in ‘No Control’, has an unexpectedly melodic chorus and even throws in a couple of throat-rending death-metal screams for good measure. It’s an eccentric and slightly schizophrenic burst of ideas that blasts past in just under three minutes but, as a demonstration of what the band were capable of, it’s undeniably thrilling.

The release of the EP caused an immediate and somewhat unexpected stir. Matt would later recall that seeing the CD in stores was a defining moment for him but he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that a real groundswell of support was building and that it was somewhat out of the ordinary for a band who had only released one EP. ‘We just captured that nation’s imagination at that time, and it snowballed across the planet. It was crazy,’ he later said to Scuzz TV.

The excitement around the band was such that they sold out London’s 1,000-capacity venue the Mean Fiddler (previously known as the Astoria 2) for their headline date on Valentine’s Day 2004. The band had been there just four months previously as main support for 36 Crazyfists, and Moose recalls being terrified before the Valentine’s Day show. Bullet hadn’t released enough songs to fill the forty-five minutes required of a headliner, so they had to bulk out the set with new material. They opened with ‘Her Voice Resides’. The audience, not having heard a note of it before, went crazy anyway. They followed with three more new songs that would ultimately find their way onto the debut, including ‘Spit You Out’ and ‘10 Years Today’ and the fervour among the crowd was such that a frantic mosh pit broke out, with crowd surfers sailing over the barrier. By the time the band played ‘Cries in Vain’, the crowd’s singing was so loud that they almost drowned Matt out. The sense of a band teetering on the edge of a huge breakthrough was unavoidable and Tuck dutifully noted that the show felt like ‘a dream come true.’

It wasn’t until May 2005 that ‘4 Words (To Choke Upon)’ would be released, despite demos of the track having been available since 2004 (the demo features some slightly altered singing and guitar lines but is otherwise fairly true to the later studio version). But it must have felt sweet to finally get the song released, complete with an accompanying music video filmed at the Mean Fiddler show – the band had spent years in a dogfight of unsigned acts as Jeff Killed John and had their fair share of detractors to boot (Matt’s former manager in his day job at the record store springs to mind). But the song is about as plain spoken a ‘fuck you’ to the naysayers as there could be; ‘look at me now’ goes the refrain, a joyous declaration of triumph to all those that told the band they should give up on their hopes of success. Musically, ‘4 Words (To Choke Upon)’ is a maelstrom of squealing leads and furious drumming and, of course, comes complete with a huge, anthemic chorus. The video shows Bullet at their best, shot in a slick monochrome palette, with a throng of fans dutifully throwing the horns, crowd surfing and pressing to get closer to the band. It’s a telling document of the intense support the band were eliciting in even these early stages of their career. The release would just about sneak into the Top Forty in the last position – though it did top the UK rock chart, beginning a streak that continued for their next six singles.

The feeling of a growing wave of excitement was amplified even further when Metal Hammer announced the nominees for its annual Golden Gods awards on 20 April, with Bullet singled out in the category of Best British Band – a full five months before their debut album would come to be released.