It’s been a while since ‘The Headbangers Ball’ on MTV were proclaiming Trivium to be the next big things in metal, the future titans of thrash, with videos of Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr and A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation on regular rotation.
It’s been almost as long since they played a gig in Ireland, with their last visit being way back in 2008.
When guitarist Corey Beaulieu sat down to chat with GoldenPlec, he admitted he didn't know what’s taken them so long to get back here. “I’m not sure the reason why we never came back to Ireland, cos when used to tour there back in the day the shows were always packed and they were really killer shows.”
But this time around, he says, they were sure to make “a point of hammering home to our management and our booking agents the need to get some kind of show in Ireland.”
The Florida band will be popping over to the academy later this month, right in the middle of a run of European metal festivals, including Download in the UK, Graspop in Belgium and Hellfest in France. It’s a route the band are well used to at this stage.
While Trivium have become mainstays on the metal festival bills in Europe (and Japan, where they’re huge), something has held them back from becoming a big name worldwide arena filling act. They’ve been plagued of accusations of being a mere derivate act, imitating the likes of Metallica and Machine Head without bringing enough originality.
Beaulieu goes on the defensive when this point is raised. “Machine Head and Metallica are great bands, so being compared to bands that you love and respect then it’s not a bad thing. It’s better than people being like, 'Well it sounds like some really shitty pop band.'
“There’s obviously influence there of some sort,” he admits, “and people have bands that are more influential on them than others. Some kind of influence is always going to be worn on your sleeve, to a certain extent.”
Aside from a perceived lack of originality, Trivium seem like they’ve fluctuated in terms of their sound, drifting from the simple thrash heaviness and screaming vocals of their breakthrough album ‘Ascendency’, to the technical complexity and clean vocals of The ‘Crusade’ and ‘Shogun’, only to end up back in a straightforward thrash sound on their recent releases ‘In Waves’ and ‘Vengeance Falls’.
The reason for this is that every record Trivium make has to have some new elements thrown into it. “Our sound’s very diverse, and we can kind of take it in a lot of different directions. And we just try to take what we do and make it, you know, new-sounding. I mean we don’t want each record to sound exactly like the previous one.”
The fans may not really agree, with the ‘In Waves’ return to straight forward thrash being seen by many as the best thing Trivium had done in years. But Beaulieu discounts any suggestion that they tried to replicate the ‘In Waves’ formula on ‘Vengeance Falls,’ even if the pressure was there to do so. “On ‘In Waves’… we wanted to simplify things, and for things to be more straightforward songwise. And it’s funny because ‘Vengeance Falls’ is actually very complex, but I guess people take it at face value just listening to it.”
What are the differences between ‘In Waves’ and ‘Vengeance Falls?’
“‘Vengeance Falls’ is more cohesive, the songs really gel together. It’s not like all singing or all screaming songs… I think vocally it’s a lot more melodically driven, with not quite as much straightforward screaming. In terms of complexity and the syncopation between the guitar and drums, there’s a lot more detail in this record, as far as playing off each other, than the previous record.
"We started to tap into that on ‘In Waves’, and we took that into ‘Vengeance Falls’ to really try to push in to the max. There’s a lot more focus on rhythm dynamics, and there’s a lot more focus on the vocals, to give them more of a focal point with the melodies and hooks.”
‘Vengeance Falls’ also saw Trivium work with David Draiman – lead singer of Disturbed, who produced the record. Beaulieu admits it was a perfect fit for the record they were trying to make. His experience as a vocalist meant he “had a really good ear for what we needed to put our focus on,” Beaulieu says.
Draiman’s role on 'Vengeance Falls' took the form “of working on the smaller parts of the tunes, really just fine tuning them. You know Matt [Heafy] had a lot of vocal ideas, and he just had to fine tune the note choices and everything like that.”
As positive as working with Draiman was, Trivium have other ideas for the production end side of their next album. “We’ve been throwing around ideas, and we were thinking, on the next album, we’re just going to do it ourselves.”
Likewise the sound of the overall album is likely to be yet another sonic reinvention, with Beaulieu telling GoldenPlec that of the eight or so songs already written for the as yet untitled next album; a couple are old demos from the ‘Shogun’ era. “At the time we ended up kinda dropping them, because we had so many songs for the record that we just cut a couple of songs from the album list. And then on the last tour [of Europe] I was listening to old pre-production recordings on my iPod, and I played the guys a couple of songs that we had for 'Shogun' that we didn’t end up using, and everyone else had forgotten about them. And I played them for everybody and everybody was like, ‘why the hell didn’t we use this?’”
So can fans expect a return to a ‘Shogun’ type sound in Trivium’s future?
"No the songs we ended not using for ‘Shogun’ don’t really sound like anything from the ‘Shogun’ album itself. And listening to them now, they actually fit more with what we’re doing right now than what we were doing back then… But a lot of the stuff we’re writing, we’re using seven-strings and stuff like that, so I guess sonically it has a bit of that ‘Shogun’ tinge, but musically it’s kind of like its own thing."
As far as Beaulieu is concerned, this sonic shift is as much a product of a natural change in a musician’s interest and outlook over time. “I can’t write a song now that is like a song I would have wrote when I was eighteen, because I don’t have the same mentality… my environment’s different than it was when I was at that time, and you’re just writing, you’re not really thinking about this, it’s more of an unconscious thing.
“So when people go like, ‘oh I hope you write a record that sounds like this record,’ you’re all, ‘well I’m not the same, my life’s not the same as it was then.’ There’s a lot of factors that make you write a certain way, and you can’t really just force a sound to be authentic, you just gotta be natural. But so far the stuff we have going forward into the next record, I think it’s really cool, whether it makes it into the next record or not…”