Reviews
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2.7.
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SINISTHRA is not that typical Finnish kind of band. How would you describe the style of the band in your own words?
Basically metal, influenced by all kinds of non-metal things and heavily tinted with melancholia. That’s what naturally comes out of us and that’s what we want to do. Music to listen to at 5 am when the night still lingers but the morning is already waiting in the wings. Music to soothe yourself with, or possibly to shoot yourself to. Although the latter option is not officially recommended by Sinisthra. There’s always hope, no matter what.
How do you think about bands using typical clichés? When do they reach the point of making ridiculous fools out of themselves?
Nothing wrong with using clichés. Clichés are tried and tested and usually found good. But clichés can be used in many ways, of which the creative way is always preferable to just mindlessly repeating something that’s already been done by someone else. When bands are starting out their musical heroes often shine through in what they do and that’s very understandable as they haven’t had the time to develop their sound yet and everybody needs to start from somewhere. But if the bands’ say, fourth album sounds exactly the same as their first the clichés are starting to wear themselves a bit thin in my opinion. Then again, some bands are completely happy to belt out the same stuff year in year out and who am I to argue if that’s what they want to do?
I think finding your own voice is the most rewarding thing in making music, although it can be a very time-consuming process. I’m not saying that we have a completely unique sound of our own but I feel we have an occasional sparkle of originality here and there.
Where do you guys get your song ideas and influences from?
The ideas are fickle things. You can’t force them and you can’t make them come to you by just snapping your fingers. If we knew where the ideas come from we’d be ruthlessly milking the source until it runs dry. But we don’t know. When you’re depressed the ideas often present themselves but you’re too tired to work on them. When you’re feeling better, you might get lucky and still remember them and start developing on that. Everything inspires everything else and influences can be drawn from highly unlikely places. And if you can’t think up anything worth using you can always take something done by someone else and turn it around and around until it becomes unrecognisable and then pass it on as your own…
Are you jamming together until a song is ready, or do you have one or two songwriters?
We jam together occasionally and come up with all kinds of things, some good and some not. Usually not. And then it gets frustrating. The most effective way to write is the method we used when we were composing the songs on the album. Our guitarist Make puts together a demo at home, we learn to play it and Tomi our singer comes up with the melodies. Then we tape it and I’ll take the tape home with me and write the lyrics to fit his vocal lines. Recently we’ve branched out a bit, there’s more songwriters in the band now and anyone is free to bring in their own songs and ideas. The new songs have more variety and a wider musical scope than the ones on the first album and we’re very satisfied with this development.
Are you satisfied with your work on the album, or would you still say, that it isn’t ready, or any things you would have done in a different way?
There comes a point when you have to make the decision that it’s ready now and nothing more is going to be added. Otherwise it will never be finished. So yes, we are quite satisfied with it, we had a pretty good idea of the arrangements and what we wanted the songs to sound like and we had recorded most of them in the studio before for our previous demos so we had good reference points. But it’s over a year now since we recorded the album and if we were to record it now it would sound very different I think.
What are your expectations about “Last Of The Stories…”?
Hopefully realistic I’d say. It might fall between genres you know, not being metal enough for the people in the metal scene and being too metal for people not in the metal scene.. can’t be helped though. At least it has ”us” written on it and that’s the most important thing. It’s not run-of-the-mill-metal and it’s hard to compare to other bands. I hope it sells enough copies to make the second album possible.
Which songs of the album do like the most?
”My Sweet Nothing” was everybody’s favourite I think when we were writing the songs. It seemed to be some kind of a key song to the whole album and that’s why we placed it in the middle. Listening to it now, it doesn’t particularly stand out from the rest of the tracks as exceptionally good. My personal favourites vary and it’s much easier to name a song I like the least and that’s ”Fucking Fragile”. To me, the song justifies it place on the album by bringing in a few more colours and contrast but it’s my least favourite one anyway.
How are the reactions like so far?
Scarce but very positive, mostly. There’s not that many people who’ve heard it yet, or at least we haven’t heard their opinions yet. But the reviews we’ve come across so far have been heart-warming and enthusiastic.
Did you shoot a video-clip for any song of the album?
No we didn’t, there was no budget for it and I don’t think we’d been able to decide upon the song to make a video of anyway.
Why did you change your name from NEVERGREEN into SINISTHRA?
Nevergreen just wasn’t us anymore. It somehow lost its’ meaning as time went by, the band changed, the musicians changed and the music changed. And besides, there were lots of Nevergreens around the world and some of them had already released numerous records. We wanted to steer clear of the misconceptions and wanted to stop receiving e-mails starting with ”did you know there’s a band called Nevergreen in Hungary/ Britain/ Italy/ Denmark/ a dozen other countries” or ” I really love your new live album.”
How did you and Arise Records come together? Isn’t it a problem that you live in Finland while your label office is in Spain?
We sent e-mail to lots of labels, and I mean LOTS, describing what we have and asking would they be interested. If a label expressed interest, we sent them a copy of the album and if they liked it we started negotiating. We had only limited amount of time to make the decisions and Arise was always very friendly and superfast in their communication. And what they offered was very fair and reasonable compared to some other labels. I don’t see any problem with the locations here, everythings’ went just fine so far.
How is your relationship to other Finnish bands? Are there any bands you are hanging around with or something?
We’re familiar with people in many Finnish bands, since we’ve been around as individuals for such a long time and Finland is a small place but we don’t actually hang out with them that much. The only band we’re frequently in contact with is called Graydance.
We all can imagine that there is a big competition between the metal bands in Finland, because there are so many of them. Do have to fight for your audience? How difficult is that for you?
Haven’t seen that much competition really. I see no point in being jealous to other bands if they’re more successful than your own band. The people here are mostly very down to earth and the rock star antics are usually quite rare. So there’s no need to fight for the audience.
But there really is a lot of good metal bands in Finland and some of them are enjoying considerable success in the charts too. I just checked this weeks’ singles chart and top 10 features 7 finnish artists which can be loosely classified as metal.
Tomi Joutsen, your man with the vocal part, has also become the new singer of AMORPHIS. Is that a problem for SINISTHRA? Which band is the main band for him?
There’s no point or the need to choose a main band. Of course Amorphis tends to take more of his time at the moment because they have a new album to record but we have no problem with that. We are currently writing new material and taking our time with it so it’s not necessary for him to be around every time we go to rehearsals.
Will we have the opportunity to catch you playing live in Germany?
Hmm.. let’s just say that we are willing to tour anywhere as long as we don’t have to pay for it out of our own pockets. At the moment we have no booking agency but we’re working on it. So playing Germany in the near future seems highly unlikely.
So I wish you the best for SINISTHRA… some last words for our readers?
Think for yourself and form your own opinions. Never let anyone tell you what to do and never let others dictate you. Never take anything for granted and never settle for information fed to you by others if in doubt.
And thank you for taking time and the effort to interview us. I really hope we could come over to Germany to play some day, a few of us have visited your country with another band and will be again this summer and we’re quite looking forward to it.
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