Boy does Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn like to talk. In the most recent installment of his blog posts on the band's Facebook page, he compares the band taking a long time to record guitars to the recording process done while recording 2007's The Blackening. Then follows that up by saying the fans should not expect another record like that.
"Not to say that this record is anything like The Blackening, it isn't. But what I would say is that the song are as epic in scope, if not more so, except where The Blackening was more epic in the guitar department, this is more epic in the EVERYTHING department. Strings arrangements, keyboard arrangements, massive vocal layering (one track, 'Sail Into The Black' has 40 tracks of vocals), drum overdubs, and of course the standard-Machine Head quadruple-tracking of the guitars."
He elaborates further.
"I know I brought up The Blackening earlier, but I want to re-iterate, I don't feel this record sounds like The Blackening. It feels like we're still moving forward. If I HAD to compare it to another record of ours, it may be closer to Through The Ashes Of Empires in one aspect only, the simpler song arrangements. It's still what I would just call Classic-Metal, but we've simplified beats, simplified riffs, taken the unnecessary complicated-ness of something and made it simple.
I've even applied that to my lyrics, where I've stripped out a lot of extra words ('the's', 'and's, etc), and invented a lyrical technique I call 'clustering', where you cluster vowels or cluster "plosives" ('K's', 'T's', 'Ch's') together to make it sound heavier, or flow better. It doesn't read all that poetically, but in the song it sounds really cool. I've also really worked hard on sharpening up my rhyme-schemes, finding clever places to place rhymes, instead of the usual place at the end of a line, or even again, "clustering" rhymes. It makes an abstract concept like 'Killers & Kings' (which references 20+ Tarot Cards, and that I'm very proud of the end result) to have a real meaning.
Out of that stripped down musical landscape, we've then taken that new (to us at least) "extra space" and added in layers of strings, layers of dark, ambient keys, layers and layers of vocals, and it sounds HUGE. I just watched a documentary of A Night at the Opera by Queen, and while I'd never EVER put myself in Freddie Mercury's-league, there have definitely been times during this recording where I've drawn a parallel to the epic-ness involved to make this album be what it needs to be.
The A Night at the Opera Of Metal? Well… that's a fuckin' stretch, we are just a metal band at the end of the day, but we're on to something here. "
Not that I wasn't excited before, but now I am even more! Flynn says the band have already shipped off "Killers and Kings" and "Night of the Long Knives" to Colin Richardson to mix and are just finishing up a new track called "Ghosts Will Haunt These Bones." Stay tuned!
