Burning Skies - An interview with Liam
After I reviewed Burning Skies’ new album, I got the offer to do an interview by mail with them. My questions were kindly answered by guitarist Liam, here’s the result.
‘Great thanks. Glad to be in out of the cold. It’s freezing here at the moment.’
‘We’re Burning Skies from Bristol in the UK, we started in 2002, we play a mix of death metal/thrash with a few hardcore elements thrown in from time to time. We’ve just released our second album through Lifeforce Records called Desolation. Our last album was called Murder By Means Of Existence which was released in 2004 and we have an EP we self released as well in 2003.’
‘Ha ha. This was the first bio we did after we’d just done our EP and it was meant to be only up on our site until we could think of a good bio, unfortunately that didn’t happen for a while and we’re unable to change that section of our site (we’re not very accomplished with computers) but we have someone working on a new site for us so I think we’ll put up a better one when the new site’s done.’
‘We do have plans for a full European tour early next year supporting another band but it’s not 100% confirmed at the moment so we’ll have to wait and see. As for America we have no plans as yet but hopefully one day we’ll sort something out for there.’
‘It was great, apart from the 20 hour drive to Germany it all went really smoothly. The guys at Rape Of Harmonies were amazing. They got a great sound and made us feel totally at ease with the situation and we were getting everything down in 1 or 2 takes which I really didn’t think would happen. A smooth runner, which was nice as the recording for the first album was a very tense few days.’
You guys pack a monstrous groove, what’s the background of the musicians to get to this extremity?
‘Myself and Andie used to play in a band together which started out a bit kind of nu-metal. ha ha. But we ended up sounding a bit like At The Gates meets Helmet with a bit of Hatebreed or something like that. Ben used to be in a pretty straight forward hardcore band, Phil was in a grind band kind of like Discordance Axis and Merv had been in a death metal band. We all grew up listening to things like hardcore, punk, death metal, grind etc and we just like to mix all of favourite elements of those genres.’
‘Call the fire department! I’d probably be a bit confused, turn on the tv and see what the news was saying and judge whether I should panic or go and make a cup of tea.’
‘Arnie. He has the best one liners ever.’
Do you have anything else to add to this interview?
‘Thanks for the interview. Hopefully see you at a show soon.’