Mourning Beloveth
A Contrast Is Essential

15.04.2013

Ireland’s Mourning Beloveth need no introduction for the lovers of quality death doom metal music. "Formless", the band's fifth album that comes out five years after its predecessor, highly successful “A Disease For The Ages”, is bound to drive fans mad and make them faint from pleasure. Moreover, these fans (in case they’re from Russia or neighbouring states) will very soon have another chance to experience the band’s magic live, as they are scheduled to headline the 6th “Moscow Doom Festival”, due in the Russian capital on April 28. We approached bass player Brendan Roche to share with us the secret of success and some details on musicians' life…

Hallo Brendan, how are you? What’s the weather now in Ireland?

Greetings Richter. How is the weather in Ireland? Well, so far this week we have had snow, rain, sun and wind, so pretty much a regular month of March for us. It’s why we go drinking in raincoats and sunglasses, and all of our bars have roofs...

By the way, does the weather influence you a lot? Any link between the precipitation and your/other bandmembers’ mood and creativity?

I guess to some degree the fact we are marooned on a small rock of an island out in the Atlantic Ocean does have an influence on us as people. It certainly cultivates a sort of siege mentality, us against them kind of thing. And obviously who we are as people defines the way we collectively write music. But it typically takes us between 18 months to 2 years to write an album, and the weather fluctuates so much in that period, I wouldn’t think it has that much influence on our music. We do spend a lot of our time dodging rain, and the best place to do that is indoors. And as I’ve mentioned previously, all of our bars over here do have roofs, so...

I could learn that the band is from the towns of Athy and Kildare - is that correct? Which member of the band is from where? What can you say about your native town?

Yeah, the band was started by a group of school friends and based around the town of Athy, which is a smallish one factory market town in the south midlands of Ireland where they all grew up. Over the years, there have been two notable lineup changes, myself joining on bass in late 2006, and Pauric joining on guitar in late 2009. Neither I nor Pauric are from that area, or even close to it. I originate in a the slightly larger town of Wexford in the extreme South East, and Pauric from a small fishing town called Killlybegs, in the extreme North West. Both Pauric and I live in Dublin these days, while the other guys still live in or around Athy, which is where we still have our rehearsal studio, and once a week we convene there to give out about stuff, tell bad jokes, drink some beers and even play and try write some music together, on occasion. There is nothing of much worth to mention about the place really, at least nothing worth the time to type it out at least... Did I mention the fact our bars have roofs??

I’ve recently become a fan of Irish TV-series “Father Ted”. Have you seen it? Do you watch TV, or is it "fecking shite for them eejits"?

Haha, ah, “Father Ted”! You would be hard pressed to find somebody on the whole island of Ireland that is not a fan. Well, maybe someone without any sense of humor, or a severe bout of the old catholic guilt syndrome. It’s actually quite funny you mentioned “Father Ted”, as the last time we were in Moscow in 2009, we were on tour with an Australian band, Mournful Congregation. So there we are, traveling through Europe for a few weeks in a van, which had a DVD/TV player on board. Adrian, our tour manager at the time, is an Irish guy (and actually Mourning Beloveth’s ex bass player too) living in Spain, teaching Spanish kids how to speak English. And what does he use as a tool to help teach these kinds English?? Yes, “Father Ted” DVDs. So anyway, we are all sitting in the tour bus, and Adrian pulls out this DVD boxset. So we start watching it while driving between gigs. The Australians have never seen it before, and for the first few episodes are sitting there wondering what the hell all these Irish guys are laughing so hard about. It took them about 3 episodes before they understood the humor of it, but by the end of the tour, they were committed fans of the show. It’s quite funny how close to real life it actually is, especially in rural Ireland, where for many years the Catholic Church held complete control, on everything from education to health care. And like most institutions, it was staffed by complete incompetents. In Ireland, the first born son inherited the land (land in Ireland is absolutely EVERYTHING, see the movie or play ”The Field” by John B. Keane to get a pretty accurate idea of the importance of owning ones own land here), while the second son joined the Church. You guys had Communism, we had Catholicism. You have vodka, we have whiskey...

Is your type of music popular in Ireland? Do you often play live in Ireland and in your hometown?

Not really. Over the years we have built up a good underground following, but have never experienced any airplay on national TV or radio for example. Nor do we ever expect to. When we do play in Ireland, it’s generally in the bigger metropolises, Dublin, Cork, Limerick. We don’t play too often at home either, maybe once a year, if even that. We are strong believers in the idea that overexposure can led to contempt and indifference, we would much rather play less often and make it an “event”, rather than “another Friday night and another Mourning Beloveth gig in the same venue as last week” type thing. But it’s crazy, when our friends at home hear about our travels overseas and the level we are at in strange, far-flung corners of the globe compared to being completely ignored by the media at home, well, it just reinforces our belief in just how much of an inbred shit hole Ireland can be.

Looking at the tourdates section on your website I got the impression you were touring extensively in 2003 and 2009, and this year another peak in touring activity is coming. Why is that? I mean, it’s sort of unevenly distributed: today nothing and tomorrow a lot.

There‘s a few things to consider about this. Firstly, we as a band are pretty shit at updating our information about concerts we have played. In our defense, we are semi-alcoholic musicians, and not semi-alcoholic secretaries. So we have actually played a lot more concerts than our websites would lead you to believe. Secondly, we do Mourning Beloveth in our free time, it’s not our full time “job”. For example, I manage a tattoo studio in Dublin, Darren (Moore, vocals) is an engineer, Tim (Johnson, drums) is a food production manager. So we do Mourning Beloveth in our free time, and that obviously impacts on the amount of touring we can do. Thirdly, it comes back to not wanting to over saturate every festival with Mourning Beloveth. We are quite fussy about what concerts we agree to play, where we play them and which bands, promoters and fans we play with and to. We would rather make it a special event people will look forward to for months before hand, that gets them excited, rather than playing the same place every few months or even every year. So we like to do it in cycles that coincide with us releasing a new album. The last time we played for you guys in Moscow, in 2009, we were touring the “A Disease for the Ages” album, and this time we will be promoting our new album “Formless”. So my message to all of our Russian cousins reading these words is come to our gig next month, because it might be 4 or 5 years before we get over to you guys again.

Do you like touring? What about other band members – is there anyone who loathes rolling down the road? Like, say, Aaron from My Dying Bride, who, as I heard, hates playing live.

We fucking love touring. What’s not to like about it? Sure, it can be draining, mentally and certainly physically (my liver has not spoken to me since 2006). But I’m sitting here talking about playing a concert in Russia! How many people from my little shitty home town can, at the end of their days, smile and say, “Yeah, I’ve played some concerts in Russia”?? Not too many, believe me. We have met so many cool people, seen so many cool places we never dreamed we would see except from the pages of a book. There are so many more places we would love to visit with Mourning Beloveth, Japan, South America, Australia. So any downside to touring is more than compensated by the once in a life time opportunities touring can present. On stage is where our music comes alive. We write all our songs in a live environment, the five of us playing together, eyeballing each other. Blood sweat and tears. And on the stage, we can share all that with our audience, invite them into our world for a little while, and share the Primeval Rush.

By the way, are you friends with My Dying Bride? Is there any rivalry? Are the questions about similarity to MDB annoying?

Yes it pisses me off, massively actually. No we are not friends, simply because they live in their world, and we live in ours. There is no rivalry between us, as I’m sure My Dying Bride spend exactly as much time thinking and worrying about Mourning Beloveth as we do worrying about them. They do their thing, we do our thing, and never the twain shall meet... The first few albums My Dying Bride released are very important musically for me, and stand without doubt as some of the best music ever created. But we are miles apart from what My Dying Bride do now, musically, sonically, aesthetically, so much so in fact that anytime I’m asked in interviews or are compared in reviews, I really just consider it as the ultimate in lazy journalism. Open your fucking ears people!!!

Do you read reviews on your music? Is getting critical feedback important?

Sometimes out of morbid curiosity I’ll read some reviews online, more so to see if anybody picked up on the ideas we were trying to get across and to have a good old chuckle at those that miss the point completely. The only critical feedback that is important is that which comes from us, ourselves. We are our own harshest critics, always, and every move me make has been thought over, fought over and over analyzed for literally months, if not years before any critic has heard it, so we are well past giving a flying fuck about anyone else’s opinions at that point. But, yeah, some reviews do give us a good laugh, and usually not at our expense either haha!

In one of his latest interviews Darren said that he finds the songs from the album “A Murderous Circus” (2005) a tad too long. To me it’s somewhat strange to hear that from a guy in a doom death metal band. Isn’t it natural for doom metal music to be really long?

Well, the first thing a song needs to be, despite whatever its length, is good. You need to have and to write a good song, first and foremost. Length is not really an issue with us, as long as the song is good throughout its duration. A bad long song is just as bad as a bad short song. We write a song, and it takes exactly as long as it takes for it to say what it needs to say, express everything it needs to express. We write the song and worry about how long it is much later, if at all. We like our songs to be like a musical journey, to take you somewhere, and then through its progression, carry you to another emotion, another place, another feeling. So, for us it is natural that our songs tend to be long, for if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. On “A Murderous Circus”, we didn’t always achieve the result we wanted to, there was a huge amount of experimentation on that album, and yes, some of it didn’t work out exactly as we wanted it to. And that’s exactly the reason we made the album after it. And why we made the new album, and why we will make another one in a few years. The day we feel we can’t improve on our last release, is the day we stop making music.

Speaking of duration of music: I'm a fan of short songs. To me "Amber Gray" by Gridlink is the ideal album in that respect as it has 11 songs that last under 12 minutes. What is your ideal album in terms of length?

I have no interest in sizing music in such a way. It is as long as it needs to be. If it’s shit, being 29 minutes or 219 minutes wont make any difference. Simple as that really.

Do you think that long music forms are compatible with modern life? Do you often find time to listen to new albums (or even classics) from beginning to end giving them full attention?

With modern life, no. It’s actually one of the lyrical themes of “Formless”, our disgust at how over the last 15 years everything in life, and I do actually mean everything, is being condensed into bitesized, bullet points. Headlines. No substance, no attention span, no research, no thought, no questioning. Samples of this. Highlights of that. Insight, context, setting a scene, history, all are being abandoned for a few mere minutes of gratification. Everything is wrapped in plastic, single servings, one size fits all. I abhor it with ever fiber of my being. I listen to albums, the way the band/musician intended, from start to finish. I don’t do samples online, I wait until I have the full LP to listen to. For example, “Formless” is sequenced very specifically, with a lot of thought to which songs come next, from track 1 to track 6. If you listen to it out of sequence, it just does not flow to the same degree, and you will miss out on a lot of the atmosphere. But that is the world we live in now, where people take the “news” they see in 3 minute segments between some brain dead, artistically void “reality” show. Fuck them and fuck the system. While you still can my friend...

What music are have you been listening to lately?

Today I have mostly been listening to the music of people screaming while being tattoo’d in my shop. Such sweet notes, as if from the song of a nightingale....

We all come from a metal background, so that would be a very large staple of my listening habits, from the early 70’s rock/prog, straight through NWBHM, early death/black metal, trad and death doom, and these days you could also add artists like Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, basically any band and or artists that operate the same way I see Mourning Beloveth operate. Those that are true to themselves, following their gut instincts rather than trends or stereotypes, bandwagoneers and followers. Sheep are for eating, not following...

I hear you got the lyrics and the cover ready before the music was done, which was unusual for Mourning Beloveth. What did it feel like, to have everything ready that fast?

Strange, but as usual we didn’t really get to hear the lyrics, themes and vocal line/patterns until we were recording them. But the fact Darren was so prepared before entering the studio allowed him so much more time to experiment with his voice, his phrasing, everything. That’s why his and Frank’s (Brennan, also guitars) vocal performance on “Formless” is so fucking good, because he had the time to try new things. I suppose it maybe put the pressure on the rest of us a bit more to get the music written so the project could move forward with a decent amount of momentum, but other than that, it was pretty much business as usual in the rehearsal studio.

You recorded “Formless” in Wales at Foel Studio, right? How was it? In what way was recording in Wales different from recording in Germany or England?

The studio is called Foel Studio and is owned by Mr. Dave Anderson, himself a veteran of the early UK rock scene. We chose to record there not because it is situated in Wales, or anywhere else for that matter. We chose it because of the quality of the studio itself, and more importantly, because of the engineer there, Chris Fielding. We had heard and loved quite a few albums that Chris had recorded in Foel, by bands such as The Wounded Kings, Primordial, Darkest Era and Electric Wizard. We had an idea of how we wanted “Formless” to sound, how we wanted it to feel, and we knew that the combination of Chris, the studio, and the isolation of being stuck in the middle of nowhere, away from every human distraction, was the perfect setting for us to achive our ambition and rough vision. For whatever reason, all five Mourning Beloveth albums have been recorded outside of Ireland, in either the UK (“Dust” (2001), “The Sullen Sulcus” (2002), “Formless”) or Germany (“A Murderous Circus”, “A Disease for the Ages”). We had 10 days to record 80+ minutes of music from scratch, which is quite a challenge. But thanks to the amazing work that Chris put in, working 12/13 hours a day, every day, we got it done, just about!

How is Pauric getting on? What has he brought to the style of the band?

Well, Pauric came to our attention through his own band Decayor and their EP “Recurring Times of Grief”. When Brian (Delaney) left the band at the tail end of 2009 (our show here in Dublin supporting Opeth in October 2009 was his final gig with us) we took a few weeks to decide what we were going to do; continue, or say goodbye to Mourning Beloveth? That was our simple yet rather stark choice. Brian’s guitar playing was one of the bedrocks of the Mourning Beloveth sound up to that point, so his leaving was a bit of a hammer blow to be honest. After a few weeks of sulking and feeling sorry for ourselves, we decided that we had more to give, we were not finished, and neither was Mourning Beloveth. That, and we needed a new guitarist! We decided that we really, really didn’t want to go down the route of advertising and then having to shift through countless applications and auditions, as that would impact dramatically on the amount of time we could spend in the pub, so instead we delved deep into the Irish underground to see what was happening, who was about and who would we like to work (and drink) with. That’s how we found Pauric. I had a memory of meeting him once before in person, sat around the kitchen table in the early hours of Sunday morning in my house, drinking and listening to some music after a Pagan Altar gig in Dublin. So we asked him if he was interested in playing in Mourning Beloveth and would he like to join us for a band rehearsal or two? He said he would, and so began the logistical nightmare that was Pauric trekking his way down once a week, every fucking week, from where he lived in the extreme (and I do mean extreme) North West of Ireland, to where we have our rehearsal studio in the south midlands of the country, all the while relying on Irish public transport too! But from such hardships are great things born, and having Pauric in Mourning Beloveth is working out so well that we can’t believe our luck. What he brings to the table, well, I don’t think I can describe it in words. Obviously, I know what it is he brings to Mourning Beloveth, and what he brings out in the rest of us, but how to describe it? Just listen to the new album I guess, then you can tell me, because I don’t have the words. While it was obviously important that Pauric was on the same page as the rest of us musically, for us it was even more crucial that he fit with the rest of us as people too. Being stuck in close proximity to four other strong willed, highly opinionated people can be tough, but it’s all working out way beyond our highest expectations. If things keep going like this, we may even let him win an argument one of these days. Or years...

I have a feeling that the motor that drives your music is sad and epic theatricality, which can be heard especially well in the clean vocals parts. Are you theatre-goers?

I think more than anything, our influence is life, not fiction. Obviously, the tools Darren and Frank use to bring life to Darren’s words are perhaps the same as an actor would use to bring to life the script from a play, and the rules of meter, flow, tempo, are the same that enable the words of poetry to leap from the page they are written on. Darren is a voracious reader of books, and has been known to frequent the cinemas that show the more artistic movies, so the tricks of those trades will undoubtedly find their way into his own artistic vision and methods. But life is the greatest show on earth, the best comedy, the best tragedy, and if you spend 5 minutes observing the sheep as they live their lives in the fast lane of the rat race, you can learn much, things, thoughts, musings and rantings the likes of which even the most fantastic work of fiction could never spawn.

There must be a place to humor and good spirit in your life, I’m sure. Does it get reflected in the lyrics, or it’s only bleakness, formlessness and sorrow you are dwelling upon?

We are without doubt the biggest collective of jokers that you could possibly hope to meet. There is nothing funny about what we do, or create. We take our music and even our legacy extremely seriously, we are aware of course that both of those things mean very little in the grand scheme of things, or to anyone else. But to us, Mourning Beloveth and all we represent is our life’s work. Through the band we channel a lot of our personal darkness, fears and loathings. It is in a way a safety valve, a cathartic experience. I have no doubt that without the band and the release it provides, 1 or 2 of us may have indeed ended up in some serious trouble. So as people we tend to enjoy life outside the band quite a lot really. A good party only really kicks off when the Mourning Beloveth guys show up. We love a drink and the odd row, to us a night shared with good friends, good booze, good music and bad jokes is a night well spent. The razor sharp insult to one of our own is badge of (dis)honor! But all the dark, black things that build up in any person dealing with getting by day by day in this life, all those things end up in our music and lyrics. As Darren is fond of saying, “You never grow out of life”.

How can bleakness be expressed by the kind of beautiful music that you make? Don’t you feel an urge to get rid of melodies and beauty and start sandpapering the ears of your fans to let them truly know what misery is?

I think that to truly convey any emotion, express any opinion or truly understand any argument, a contrast is essential. How can you truly understand black if you’ve never seen white? Or know love without seething with hate? Some of the most spiteful, venomous verse ever committed to paper was written in the most beautiful, flowing language, more so than any pray to whichever deity. And for me, music is no different. Conveying filth through beauty, death metal vocals with clean signing. Fast tempos, slow tempos. The more beautiful the guitar melody, the more potent its sadness. Some of our riffs can be nothing but caustic, empty. It’s all about contrast to realize the  potential of everything. And in our own way, we do sandpaper the ears of our fans, but we do so in such a way that they enjoy the experience. Maybe that why we don’t have too many fans!

How do you cheer yourself up? Any hobbies (aside from music)?

Pretty much the same as most people I guess. Music, books, movies. A night in the bar with some good friends, a good concert. A good discussion, a good argument. We are not really active sports people, except to watch a match from the comfort and safety of a bar, but Darren does play soccer, mainly as an excuse to spend 90 minutes kicking as many people in the ankle as possible...

Speaking of hobbies – do you guys like booze a lot? Did you broaden your experience in that field during your visit to Russia in 2009?

Yeah, it’s fair to say we like a drink. Usually several, and all the good and more likely bad that that entails. You can’t play in Mourning Beloveth and not carry a war wound from some night on tour. Unfortunately, on our last visit to Moscow, it was a very short visit. We were actually in the country for less than 24 hours, as we were right in the middle of a tour. We did manage a taste or six of your vodka, so we hope to have a bit more time to have a drink and meet some of you guys too this time around! What beers would you recommend to try out?

Well, I don’t drink bear, beg your pardon. What other memories do you have of that trip? And what are you expecting (in addition to beer and vodka) of the upcoming trip to Russia in April?

Great promoters, great venue, great sound, and great, great gig. We truly enjoyed that night, and it’s still one of the great highlights of our career. And to get the honor to play to some of the most wonderful fans, fantastic people. We are privileged and honored to return and do it all over again. And like I said, this time we will hopefully have more opportunity to meet some of you guys and share a beer!

Your last words (for this interview) to your fans and random readers?

Cheers Richter, thanks for the opportunity to speak to all you, and hopefully we'll get to see a lot of you at the show. We can’t wait to get over there, and we'll be bringing some shirts and other merchandise with us, so don’t spend all your cash on beer! Even though we probably will....

Mourning Beloveth on the Internet: http://www.mourningbeloveth.com/

Special thanks to Elena (Sepulture Union) for arranging this interview

Richter
April 4. 2013
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