Amoral
Soundchasers

11.07.2012

Our conversation with Ben Varon and Ari Koivunen of Finnish metal band Amoral took place via Skype. Having overcome some difficulties in setting up a conference (and also finding out than Ben is no big friend of computers, while Ari, on the contrary, has no problems in handling technical problems), we got down to discussing the band’s latest album “Beneath” (2011), which is finally out now on the Russian market, the development path of Amoral and the music industry in general. The band’s long and winding history required special attention, as Varon, the band’s mastermind, main songwriter and guitarist, and drummer Juhana Karlsson are the only original members left, while the other musicians and singers have been replaced quite a few times. Thus, Ari Koivunen is already the third voice of Amoral, and his addition to the band was met with mixed response from its fans. Ari is a well-known singer and the winner of the Finnish “Idols” competition, whose first solo album went “platinum” in his home country and the second one achieved the “gold” status, but his voice didn’t quite match the band’s previous style, so it had to be changed quite a lot. We couldn’t pass this issue by in our conversation, though over its 40 minutes we addressed a lot of other matters as well …

First of all I wanted to congratulate you, because “Beneath” has finally been released in Russia. And as far as the record is quite new for your Russian fans, could you say a couple of words about it?

Ben: Sure! Well, it’s the fifth album of Amoral, it’s our second album with Ari singing for it, and we also have a new guitar player. And… What can I say? So far it’s our most versatile album music-wise. It’s like all over the place, everywhere. There’s a bit of punk rock, there are long epic metal songs… We just tried to keep it interesting for ourselves and to the listeners, so there’re all kinds of rock music there and there’s some influence from other things.

One can read on your website some flattering words that Esa Holopainen said about your new record. Why did you ask him to give an opinion about it? Is he one of the Finnish musicians you respect the most?

Ben: You mean Esa from Amorphis? Yeah, we’ve known him for a while, because we all live here in Helsinki and we toured two years ago with Amorphis in Europe. And he’s just really a cool guy and Amorphis of course is a legendary band with such a long career, so it just came to my mind to ask Esa what he thought about the album and if he could give us some words about it if he enjoyed it. And he did!

This album was released last year in Finland, so it’s not that new for you and you had time to revalue it. I mean, of course when you release an album, you think it’s the greatest one you’ve ever done, but as time goes by you realize that there are things you can do better. So do you have any special ideas you didn’t have then and want to fulfill now?

Ben: Well, let’s ask Ari. Ari, what do you think about the album? Does it still sound good to you?
Ari: Yeah, it’s great! But I think the band is still going forward to the real essence of itself, it’s still coming and I don’t think it’s already there. I’m not talking about the times it all started, because I don’t know anything about that, but now as far as I see it it’s still evolving. And that’s great for us all. We have to find out what we all are and we’re really into it…
Ben: Yeah, it’s also really cool and it’s also very exciting for us, because we actually have no idea every time we start thinking about our next album, what it’s gonna sound like… Now we have a few songs and some rough song ideas, but nobody in the band really knows what the next album is gonna sound like. It’s pretty much as interesting and fresh to us as it is to the listener. We might go any other way, we could make it more pop or more progressive or whatever we feel like. That’s always pretty cool. We don’t have one specific genre that we stick to.

So you don’t think about the things you want to try before you start working on your new material, do you?

Ben: No, there’re no specific rules. That’s what’s cool about this band. We don’t have just one thing that we wanna do. We just try to keep it natural and see where the music gets itself and what we feel like. It’s like, “Right now I feel like writing this kind of songs, what do you guys think?” – and if everybody agrees then we’re gonna try going that way.

Is it you writing all the new songs now?

Ben: What we’re writing at the moment – yeah, it’s me and the other guitar player, the new guy, Masi Hukari. We sit down two or three times a week and just throw our ideas back and forth and then we’re gonna start showing them to the rest of the guys at the rehearsal place.

Okay, and what about you, Ari? Don’t you want to take part in composing? Maybe you could write some lyrics – you know, many vocalists do?

Ari: I’m not that good at writing lyrics and actually I’ve never really tried it. I think the thing for me is to try to make the vocal melodies so that I’m comfortable with them and they sound good to me and feel good to me also. That’s my part.
Ben: Ari’s great with coming up with harmonies and changing little things in the vocal melodies. I’m not a singer, I just write something that I think sounds good, but then Ari might have good ideas like, “It could be interesting if I do it this way” or “It could be more natural this way”. Everybody brings their own part to a song. It’s really cool.

And can you say that now you’ve found the sound (or at least the vocals) your band needs in general? Some years ago you tried to do something quite different…

Ben: We’re still searching for our sound and I’m not sure about it, it’s up to the listener pretty much to say that. People said even back in the days when we were still kind of a death metal band that we had our own sound as a death metal band and with these two albums people say that we’ve finally found our sound. I don’t know if I agree with either. I just hope that the band sounds original, whether it’s metal or classic rock or whatever we’re doing, that we do something a bit different. But I think time will tell, like 20 years from now when you listen to these albums then you can really say, “Oh, I think they really found that thing that makes them sound not like everybody else” – who knows…
Ari: I think our band’s guitar sound got that thing… When I listen to some of Amoral songs I know it’s Ben playing them, because there’s some stuff and some of the licks and things he does that tell me that.
Ben: Because I only have like two licks, so… (everybody laughs)

And what do you think about all the fans who are not very delighted with the change in the vocal style of your band? You know, there are a lot of… well, I can’t say “haters”…

Ben: You can say haters. (laughs)

Okay, so have you expected that kind of reaction when you decided to change the vocalist and the vocal style of your band?

Ari: I think it’s understandable. It’s a big change because I have like high-pitched clean voice and Niko (Kalliojarvi) really didn’t… (laughs)
Ben: That’s true… (laughs)
Ari: So it’s a great change and of course if one of our favorite bands loses a member and takes a new one in, it’s always like that. Maybe only in ten years the fans will become comfortable with the new guy. So it is like if you really loved the band, it can’t be easy, I agree with that.
Ben: Yeah, you can’t really be mad at them when people say, “your band sucks now, your sound is terrible”. First of all I’m just happy that they are so passionate about the old stuff. That means that we were doing something right back in the days. And I know that the change is really drastic and we cannot expect everybody to be as exited about it as we are, but at the same time I would hope that these guys could appreciate and respect our need to go forward and understand that we really felt like we needed to do this change and we’re standing behind our music as it is today. So even if you don’t like it you can still respect our integrity of doing whatever we feel like instead of just doing the same thing year in and year out to please our fans.

Maybe the problem is that not only the vocal style changed, but the vocalist who is supposed to represent the band is quite a different kind of man now. It feels like for many people Ari doesn’t look “alpha male” enough, if you understand what I mean. He’s a bit like a teenage boy.

Ben: Well, you know, people are gonna say what they want and there can be different opinions. For me it’s like most of us are almost 30 or over, so if somebody of us looks young it’s only a plus.

You know, when I was thinking about the questions to ask you it occurred to me that the situation with your band is almost the same to the one with Queen and Adam Lambert, who took part in American Idol, has his solo career but now is singing for Queen. What do you think about what they’re doing now, by the way?

Ari: I think that’s great because Adam has a great voice, he can sing all that stuff and… well, Freddie Mercury has been dead for years now and he was a great singer and a great frontman and everything, but if the guys from Queen wanted to make some new albums or tours or whatever they just needed to get a singer that can sing those songs. And I think that’s a great singer, so why not.

Talking about someone else’s songs, Ari, how much do Ben’s lyrics relate to you? I think it’s very important for a singer to know very well what he’s singing about, unless you can’t make it that emotional. But that must be hard when you’re singing someone else’s words, right?

Ari: It really depends on a song. For some songs I have my own story behind the lyrics. And of course Ben tells me what the songs are all about ‘cause sometimes I can’t quite find the truthful meaning behind the words. I think for pretty much like half of the songs I find my own story behind them and I put my emotions and my story to those lyrics. Then some of them have more rock n’ roll kind of lyrics. And with the older stuff that the guys did before I’m just going with the flow and rocking it out.

Ben, what inspires you to write and what are the things worth writing about?

Ben: There’re a lot of different things, especially with the new album. I just wrote all over the place, it was like one year or two years, the time when I wrote all the lyrics, and it just came to me everywhere, whether it was on the road while we were touring Europe or just at home, or just when I was fucking everything up in my personal life or just saw somebody else, like somebody close to me, doing something stupid to themselves. And then of course, you know, some personal losses that you see. Everybody knows this feeling… by the time you’re 30 – Ari knows that pretty well – you lose people along the way and if I write a song about that, it doesn’t matter who wrote that, because Ari can interpret it in his own way and make it his own song, which is cool. It doesn’t have to be about, you know, me-me-me. If the lyrics move you, you can have your own version of their background. Ari’s doing a good job with that. But it can be anything really. Some of the ideas can just come to me in dreams, it’s some stuff that keeps haunting you and then you just put it in words and make a song out of it.
Ari: I have to say that it’s both funny and hard when we are on the stage and we want some song to sound like a party anthem after we played a sad song. It’s pretty tough for me emotionally to move myself out of like a sad zone to the party zone.
Ben: And that’s what you have to take into consideration when you’re doing your setlist. You have to think not only about the guitar tuning but also the feelings of the songs so they make a better flow.

They say that to have a good band is to have a kind of special chemistry between its members. You went through a lot of line-up changes and you obviously had a chance to learn a lot about working as a team. Can you say that you have a proper band now and do personal relationships matter that much for you?

Ari: Of course they are a big part… I think it’s becoming better and better all the time. Everybody brings something new and we’re all so different. We have different music tastes and different philosophies in life and everything and we like to talk about that stuff, so I think it’s good.
Ben: Yeah, especially when it’s not a real job for any of us. We don’t really make money with this thing. We just can enjoy it all. And that’s exactly why there were so many line-up changes. When somebody’s not really there anymore and he starts to not enjoy maybe the company or the music itself that much, then you just shoot him out and make room for somebody who wants to be there. Because there’s nothing worse then having somebody in your band who you can feel doesn’t want to be there. It just puts the bad vibe to the whole group.

You said you can’t make money with your music. So what do you do for living?

Ben: Well, we make some money but we also invest a lot of money back into the band. So let’s say we play 20 shows in Finland and some festivals and we make some money, but then we spend it by going to play in Austin, Texas or something like that. But we need that to keep us going or we’ll be just stuck in Finland for the rest of our lives.
Ari: We hope that maybe in 5 years we’re gonna get some of that money back. But we get to go and see countries and places we wouldn’t go to other way, so I think that is one of the “pay-checks” that we get from this.
Ben: For sure, like going to China. I’ve never been to China and I’ve always wanted to see the place and now I’m going to go there and play my music at the same time. That’s much better than a month pay-check that you’re just gonna waste on some boring stuff… But we all have other things to do as well. Some of us are still in school I think. And some of us have day jobs at record stores. Ari has some session work at a studio singing stuff. I don’t know exactly… What do you do, Ari?
Ari: Whatever there is in music. I sing… and whatever.
Ben: I make most of my pay-check as a DJ, I play rock and metal music in a club. That’s really cool.

And what about your free time? Do you have any?

Ben: Yeah, you’ve got as much free time as you can take from the other stuff you wanna do. I think the situation is pretty good at the moment, especially now. I don’t have any strict day job taking all my time, so I can work a bit less and concentrate more on practicing and writing songs. At the same time I can’t say that I have different time that is “free time” and different time for writing songs. It’s combined. Whenever I get the feeling I pick up the guitar and if I don’t come up with anything I go back to watching movies. And I think that’s the same with everybody in the band… except for Masi ‘cause he’s got too many bands and projects and jobs… (laughs)
Ari: And he loves it.
Ben: Yeah, that’s how he wants it. But I think I have some spare time. Especially with the band. I think we should be more busy, with more shows and more stuff to do.

So you take your band as a kind of hobby, right?

Ben: It’s a very serious and an expensive hobby. I think of snowboarding as a hobby. I may go once a year and maybe some winters I just skip it ‘cause I don’t have time or the energy. So that’s a hobby to me – something you can go back and forth with whenever you feel like it. And with this it’s a part of my life every single day.
Ari: It’s like a life’s work.
Ben: Yeah.

And what about you, Ari? Do you separate your free time from your “life work”?

Ari: Well, I watch movies and TV series, I do skateboarding and play bowling and so on. I’m trying to do as much different stuff as I can. Also I love Nintendo games, so… That’s one of my hobbies.

You know, there are so many metal bands in Finland. Isn’t it difficult to find something that can make you different from all other bands that already exist in your country?

Ari: Yes it is!
Ben: Luckily for us, we’ve got away from all the death metal singing style because that’s what many of the bands do and that’s really limiting, it makes you sound more like everybody else. Ari’s got such a distinctive voice and it’s combined now with the Amoral sound and our songwriting that, I hope, is getting more and more original. But you’re right, there’re so many bands and it is hard to be original these days. Everything is like Black Sabbath and everything was better 30 years ago.

What about you debut in the USA? How was it and do you think that European bands still need to “conquer” that market to feel “big” enough?

Ben: I don’t think you really need that because there are a lot of big metal bands that are only big in Europe and maybe Japan or somewhere else but didn’t make it in the States. For example Iron Maiden has never been as big in the States as they are in Europe and I think they’re doing okay.
Ari: And there are a lot of big bands from Europe that are big just in Germany and I don’t think anyone has ever heard about them in the USA.
Ben: Yes, there’s a whole another market. But at the same time it still has that mystic that many bands want to be big there, even though it’s much harder and might not make any sense financially if they try to push themselves over there… But it is the birthplace of rock’n’roll for many of musicians. And overseas is always more interesting. There’s just the psychology aspect in it - “yeah, we’re gonna make it in the States” sounds more interesting for many bands than “yeah, let’s go to Germany”. It doesn’t make any difference, you know. A new country is a new country and record sales are record sales.
Ari: But it’s so hard to make it big in the USA! They’ve got so many bands there and they are there, so they can tour there all the time. For a European band to be big in the USA you have to go there and tour and tour and tour. That takes a lot of money and time. It’s really hard.

What was the people’s reaction like when you got there with your band?

Ben: Really cool. Actually it was a showcase, so we had like 40 minutes and we played pretty early, but there was a decent enough crowd and they seemed to enjoy our performance. We were kind of scared because there were some showcases two days before and we came over there and some of them really didn’t have many people and those that did, many of them wanted to leave… But I think we had a good crowd.
Ari: And it was hot as fuck in there.

And it seems like you’re pretty successful in the Far East, like Japan or China…

Ben: We don’t know about China yet, we’re gonna play there for the first time in a couple of weeks… But we’re doing okay in Japan. Nobody’s selling records even there anymore because of piracy and illegal downloading, but we’ve got some really nice media covers there and when Ari was there with his solo band and when we were there five years ago the response was really cool. So we have fans there. We’re gonna see how it is now, when we go there in two or three weeks, but I think it’s better than in many other countries.

Don’t you think that sooner or later the musical industry will become bigger there, in the East, and they will dominate over the Western music?

Ben: Probably, yeah. I think China is gonna be the next big market because the doors are quietly opening for shows there. Lamb of God were there, Finntroll were there as well a year or two ago and now we’re going there. Japan has already been a big market for years, like from the 80s. Lots of bands played huge shows there, whether it was Michael Jackson or Guns N’ Roses or Children of Bodom, but China is a new territory and there’re so many people there and if metal starts to break big there, that could be a really important thing for the whole music scene.

Do you think it’s possible for Asian bands to become as big as some Western bands are?

Ari: I went to a couple of gigs in Finland in Tavastiaklubi. For example Dir en Grey and some other bands. I can’t say that they had a whole of it, but there were like a thousand kids lining up in the street with Japanese clothes on, so I think there is a market for that and the enthusiasm for those bands. I don’t know if they’re gonna be big here ‘cause they’re totally different from our music.
Ben: But I think the language barrier matters a lot. It’s good if they have fans who enjoy the music, the Japanese culture and the clothing and think those guys to be cool, but I don’t think they can hardly make it if nobody understands what they’re singing about. Of course there are exceptions like Rammstein, but not many.

After you released your album in Russia, are you going to play here?

Ben: We’ll try to. We’re already talking with some booking agencies in Russia and nothing is confirmed yet, but there are some plans and we definitely wanna try to come back. We’ve only played once in St. Petersburg and that was years ago. So we can’t wait to get back there with the whole new line-up and a few more shows.

And what are the main goals you want to reach as a band in the nearest future? As far as I know your recent albums reached like 4th or 5th positions in the Finnish metal-charts …

Ben: No, it’s depending… I think only our third album was… It was a slow week in the charts, so we had it on number five.
Ari: No, it wasn’t a slow week, I was at number one then. (everybody laughs)

So, what kind of perspectives do you see with this band?

Ben: What about you, Ari?
Ari: Ohhhh… I think I just want to go all over the world and play for people who like our music.
Ben: Yeah, I just really wanna keep making albums that we could be proud of. I never wanna get the feeling like some bands admit that they have or had with some of their albums – like when you put out the album and you already know then that it’s not the best thing you’ve ever done. It’s never happened to us and till now with all the five albums we’ve done it was like we came out of the studio so proud and thinking, “By far it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of”. I just wanna make sure that this feeling stays there till the end ‘cause the day you come out of the studio with a new album and you feel like, “Well, it could have been better”, is the day when you really have to look yourself in the mirror and think what went wrong.
Ari: Yeah!

Ari, are you still working on your own project? Are you going to release anything under your own name?

Ari: I actually don’t know. Maybe in the future, but not right now. I’m just… We’re doing an album with Mauro Gargano, the former drummer from Ari Koivunen band, but that’s not gonna be anything like power metal. That’s something completely different. So I don’t know… Maybe in 3 years, maybe in 10 years, maybe never. (laughs) I really have no idea.

What do you mean when you say that the album you’re working on with Mauro is “different”?

Ari: Well, it’s not gonna be metal, I tell you that.

But what is it?

Ari: I can’t say yet, ‘cause we’ve never said anything about that… So let’s just say it’s not metal.

Ben, do you have any side projects? As far as I know Amoral is the only band you compose music for, but am I right?

Ben: Yeah, everything I write is made for Amoral. If there’s something really poppy or really-really weird that doesn’t anyhow fit in coming out, I just put it on the side. Yeah, it’s the only band I compose for. I play the guitar in a rock’n’roll band (Grease Helmet), but I’m only a guitar player there and I haven’t written any songs, so that’s really just a therapy to go and play some open G chords. But I focus all my energy and time on songwriting in Amoral.

And don’t you sometimes want to collect all the songs that don’t fit Amoral and try to do something different? I think all the composers do at some point…

Ben: That’s true, but then again I’ve had to do so many different kinds of things in Amoral so far compared to many bands that are stricter with their style of music, that I’ve got most of my steam out with this band. But you’re right, if I get a feeling of doing something really different that doesn’t fit Amoral then I’ll just do a side-project at some point. But this band is pretty time-consuming and I’m happy with the music we’re making, so I don’t really feel the need to do a free jump.

Okay. And the last question for both of you: what does a good song mean to you?

Ari: Well, it’s got to move you in one way or another, it’s got to bring back some memories or whatever with the lyrics or the song itself needs to make you wanna dance or play your guitar… There’re a lot of things that make a good song. It can be one thing that makes it great in a whole or there can be many parts. I don’t know. I listen to so much different music. At a time I was listening to only death metal and at a time only hip hop music or whatever, now I’m listening to everything.
Ben: Well, I think the melody of the song is probably the most important thing for me. If it has a good melody and a good riff or two then it’s already a good start. But I’ve noticed that if I really come back to a song from time to time or if I get really exсited about a new song, they usually also have really cool lyrics, ыomething that I feel is genuine and sincere. And many times I’ve seen that I really enjoy the most the sadder songs for some reason. I get more feeling out of them. But the melody is number one. There has to be a beautiful melody.
Ari: And also I think there are songs for fans, music listeners, and for musicians, like really difficult stuff, more progressive stuff… I don’t think that “I’m listening to reggae when I drive to work” kind of guy gets them at all. You have to be a musician to fully understand songs like that.
Ben: But there are bands that can combine these two approaches, like Opeth for example. They have catchy riffs, beautiful melodies and cool vocal, but at the same time there’re complex arrangements and so on. I think it’s the best way if you can combine the best of these two worlds and make your music interesting for both musicians and the casual listener.
Ari: And I think we’ve done that!

Amoral on the Internet: http://www.amoralweb.com

Special thanks to Hetta Hyttinen for arranging this interview

Ksenia Artamonova
May 10, 2012
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