Reviews
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20.6.
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SINISTHRA
Maximum Rock
For 5 years your band name was Nevergreen. Was it really necessary to change it in Sinisthra ; did you have problems with Nevergreen from Hungary?
No problems directly but lots of problems indirectly. Nevergreen is the kind of name that easily seems to pop up when someone starts to think up a witty name for a band. Doing a google search will reveal how many Nevergreens there are around. The Hungarian one is the most well known and naturally we took some flak from people who sent us mail asking where to buy cd’s or wondered if we knew of the other bands with the same name. We knew we had to change the name before releasing any albums of our own. Should have done it much earlier, we just couldn’t think up a suitable name until now.
Who are your band colleagues?
You mean the bands we hang out with? We don’t do that. We have friends we’ve known for years in many Finnish bands but the only band we occasionally hang out with is called Graydance.
We can speak a lot about your band’ s name. Which is the real meaning of the word Sinisthra from your point of view?
Sinistra is an Italian word for left, as in opposite of right. The left side usually represents individuality, creativity and femininity. Unfortunately the actual word also has very strong political references so we added a letter “h” to steer clear of any leftist allusions. The english word sinister stands for menacing, threatening and dark and we’d like to try and include something disturbing in our music, something that isn’t clearly visible but still there under the surface, giving an vaguely uneasy feeling to the listener. I don’t know how well we’ve succeeded in projecting that so far but we’re working on it. The traditional satanic Left Hand Path also makes a lot of sense once you drop the most obvious and hollow references to some actual embodiment of evil. To put it shortly, we’d like people to think for themselves and not take for granted the opinions others try to feed them.
Your songs have a sad sound but what is really interesting is the fact that words like "love" and "death" are missing from your lyrics.
Well. Writing about death feels like flogging a dead horse. It seems to me every single matal band is writing about death. “Death” is done to death by now. And it’s way too big a subject to tackle carelessly with. If you want to be melodramatic but aren’t prepared to put some effort into it, you sing about death or love, or better still, death AND love.
We don’t sing about death because we want our lyrics to be based on our personal experiences and luckily for us death isn’t included in that list so far. Love, on the other hand, is, but if you sing about love you don’t have to be so blunt and use the actual word itself.
I’ve seen that the recordings and the cover of the album have been made by M. Mäkinen. He is also the producer of this material. Should I understand that M Mäkinen means Sinisthra?
The best way to put it is M. Mäkinen meant Nevergreen. He put the band together in the first place, it was his vision and most of the music is written by him. Lately other members have written music too so M. Mäkinen doesn’t mean Sinisthra as such. He still has the final word to say about most things and he’s the only one of us capable of producing music in the studio and doing an artwork of an album. But every member is very important now that we’ve found a satisfying line-up and everyone can voice their opinions. Sometimes they are even listened to..
Even if usually artists avoid comparing themselves with others I would like you to choose 2 or 3 bands near which we can put Sinisthra and to tell us what makes you different from them.
Now that I’ve seen the first reviews of the album, most of the bands mentioned in them don’t really have that much to do with us musically. So it’s easier to name a few bands we don’t have anything in common with: Sentenced, Entwine, To/Die/For or any of the more gothic stuff. We aren’t even familiar with their music and still we seem to end up compared to them.
Anathema, Katatonia and Koma are the kind of bands we might share something with, not so much musically but more in the overall spiritual sense. The melancholy is there but not in the form of utter hopelessness. Marillion is a big influence but that doesn’t show through in our music either. So I don’t know really who to compare Sinisthra to.
What are you waiting from this first album?
Very realistic expectations I’d say. I know this kind of stuff is hard to sell because it doesn’t sound so familiar to lots of other bands. But I hope it sells enough to give us an opportunity to make another one. Our new songs are a big step ahead musically and it would be a pity if we couldn’t record and release them.
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