Periphery

Mon 17th May, 2010 in Features

Periphery is a progressive metal band from Maryland fast entering the limelight after releasing a self titled debut album.

FasterLouder caught up with guitarist Alex Bois to discuss how the professional career of the band has been intensifying and about the upcoming Australian tour with mathcore giants The Dillinger Escape Plan and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster.

“It’s a dream come true for me to bring the band to Australia. My father is from Melbourne and I was lucky enough to get citizenship while I was young, but to bring the boys with me to play music is awesome. And to tour with Dillinger is an honour for us, we’ve been fans of them for a long time, they’re an amazing live band. We’re all super excited.”

The music of Periphery is a tough nut to crack, with complexity and melody in equal portions, opposites attracting and all somehow becoming a cohesive package. I asked how the material has translated to a live setting. “We’re not your typical rock band that just plays power chords. We’ve got three guitarists all playing different parts, there’s a lot of layers and polyrhythms going on and it can all get very difficult, but we rehearse as diligently as possible, and for some time now we’ve played live almost every night.”

Bois stresses the importance of a balance between showmanship and musicianship; “we want to make sure that we put on a good show but also perform at a certain level, to have our live show come out as an accurate representation of what we put out on record.”

Having three guitarists might seem excessive but Bois feels that it’s necessary for a Periphery show. “There’s a lot of bands out there that might have a keyboard player to fill out their sound, and two guitar players is standard for almost any metal band but having a third guitarist is the best way for us to present all the different things you can hear in the album.”

“In a perfect world,” he quips, “we might even have a fourth or a fifth guitarist but that might be getting a bit out of hand.”

Though metal is already being a genre saturated with a vast number of absurd buzzwords for subgenres and influences, Bois welcomes one of the more recent expressions linked to Periphery and a few similar acts. “I think the term ‘djent’ is a great word to describe this sort of music. It’s onomatopoeia, like you always hear people saying “chuggchuggchugg” to describe a heavily distorted guitar sound, and it’s cool that this current generation of metal coming around has it’s own term, and I think it’s brilliant, this style of riffing really sounds like “djentdjentdjent!”

It appears to be getting more widely acknowledged as well, as Bois explains how one of his idols lauds the word around. “I had the idea to have a t-shirt printed up that says “Got Djent?” like the “Got Milk?” campaign and we actually spotted Jens Kidman from Meshuggah wearing one at a festival! We were very honoured by this as they are the pioneers of our style.”

The band’s recent debut album features many offbeat and often humourous track names ( _ Jetpacks Was Yes!_, Ow My Feelings ) but does the group take the music business seriously? “We’re just goofy guys, but we take the music very seriously. It’s who we are, it’s not to say we’re a joke band, but in comparison you look at a lot of metal bands and they have long hair, tattoos and have a very dark sort of image, but we don’t really try to put that on.”

The most prominent example of this goofiness is the voice sample at the end of one of the album’s highlight Icarus Lives. “The sample at was done by about through a few friends we have in a company called Bethesda Softworks who produced Fallout 3 and other games, and we heard them doing these clips in the voice of some announcer from the thirties or something and we loved it and got them to put a bit of that on the album. And actually, the same friend got on stage and used the same voice to introduce us to the stage before our album launch show.”

The material that appears on this first album is partly derived from a backlog of demo tracks that were compiled right from the bands beginnings and presented on the Soundclick community website, uploads which garnered a lot of attention from their peers and attracted an eager fan base. As Bois explains, “it’s not to say we weren’t getting out there and gigging to get ourselves heard, but the online thing is where it all originated and got us noticed outside of Maryland.”

Despite the band’s relative infancy, a follow up album was already on the cards and again the band is using Soundclick to test new material. “On our Soundclick page there’s like a hundred-plus songs on there,” Bois states, “it’s been a dumping ground for all our ideas. We’re going to take from that what we need, but when we do go back into the studio it’s definitely going to be a lot of new material.”

Catch Periphery supporting The Dillinger Escape Plan and Maylene And The Sons of Disaster this May , proudly presented by FasterLouder:

Tuesday 18th May – Adelaide, Fowlers Live – All Ages
Wednesday 19th May – Melbourne, Palace Theatre – 18+
Friday 21th May – Sydney, Metro Theatre – All Ages
Sunday 23rd May – Brisbane, The Hi-Fi – 18