Eye Of The Beholder

It's been a long road for Lo! – one that began rolling out slowly, hindered by the process of finding that perfect line-up, yet nonetheless inevitably paved by persistence, dedication and a genuine knack for writing some killer heavy tunes. Having dropped their debut Look And Behold in late-2011, the band's second album Monstrorum Historia was released this April on Pelagic Records, a German-based label run by The Ocean mastermind Robin Staps. Further to that, the four-piece immediately toured across Europe with both The Ocean and Sweden's Cult Of Luna for a massive run that encompassed 23 shows in 25 days.

Quite clearly, it's been the biggest year yet for the group, Whitbread adding that “it's the biggest year of my whole life since I started playing music”. With the band having begun as a project in late-2006, what took so long for the pendulum swing to reach its current critical mass?

“I used to play in a band called Omerata, and that sort of finished in mid-2006. After that I actually didn't really do any musical stuff for a while,” Whitbread reflects. “I didn't really play my guitar or anything, and just wanted a break from it. I think it was right at the end of 2006 I started writing stuff at home – just really casual – and probably over the next year just fucked around at home, wrote some demos. I wasn't really so gung-ho about getting another band together straight away, but then after a while I was really liking what was coming out, and I thought it'd be good to try and get some people together who were interested.

“I ended up jamming with a few people over the next six months to a year, and some of it didn't work out too well, and we ended up finally getting the line-up that we have. So then we had to find a singer, and we auditioned a whole bunch of people. After all that sort of messing around, that was probably a good three years or something, but finally we had the solid line-up, all the songs written, so it was a matter of practicing them and recording them and all that. We finally played our first show in 2010 and went from there.”

To reminisce and compare for just a moment, how has acceptance and interest in the darker, more experimental underbelly of the metal/hardcore crossover changed since the Omerata days?

“It seems to definitely have grown a fair bit,” Whitbread responds. “I think there's a lot more appreciation and following for that style of music. The progressive style has gotten more popular over the years. I think the audiences have gotten a lot more diverse. I was pretty much used to growing up and going to hardcore shows, and you'd see bands like Toe To Toe and Mindsnare, where you'd be lucky to see a woman at the shows, and it'd all be full of thirty-five-year-old, angry, tattooed men, but I think now the diversity is a lot different, and the progressiveness of the bands is a lot more accepted by everyone. People seem to be less close-minded these days as well.”

Yet the past is in the past, and Monstrorum Historia is where the band is currently at. Influences and comparisons can be seen in their sound from groups such as Coalesce, Mastodon, Old Man Gloom, Cursed, and their aforementioned European tour mates, but on …Historia the band has come more into their own. Also responsible for engineering and mixing the effort, as well as creating its artwork, Whitbread reveals that the bulk of the album was written and recorded within a four-month period, with the band's looming European tour deadline providing the impetus for a fierce turnaround.

“We just knew we had to pull our fingers out and get it moving,” he smiles. “We only had maybe one or two songs before that written, which we'd just thrown together, but to be honest we were a bit lazy about writing new stuff straight away. Once we knew that was happening, we put our thinking caps on and started trying to churn out some stuff. It was very stressful. We all have full-time jobs as well, so it was definitely a very hectic period – coming home from work, working on a song, sending it around, getting feedback, all that sort of stuff. I'd write the majority of the stuff at home like I did on the first album, but this time there was a lot more input from everyone. Adrian [Shapiro – bass] wrote a few, Jamie [Smith – vocals] wrote a fair bit.”

The members of Lo! treat their craft with utmost importance, to the point where drummer Adrian Griffin moving to Hong Kong for work wasn't even going to stop the wheels from turning. Whitbread explains that “he flew over, and we basically jammed for three or four days straight, got really tight learning all the new songs together, and jumped straight into the studio”, where the whole effort was recorded and mixed in under three weeks.

With the album in the can just in time, Lo! headed off to Europe for the tour of a lifetime. In addition to the regular club shows with Cult Of Luna and The Ocean, the band shared festival line-ups across Europe with names like Behemoth and High On Fire.

“I think one of the biggest shows we played would have been Romania,” Whitbread remembers. “I think just because they don't get lots of bands coming through there all the time, the people seem a lot more excited about any sort of show. We played in this venue called The Church, and it looked like a church but it was all made out of metal; they had a crucifix on the wall, and it was really sort of modern and futuristic, and they had all this fetish and dominatrix gear behind perspex windows and stuff. It was really surreal, and looked like it was from the future. The crowd there was probably about 800 strong.”

Whitbread reveals that the band's current Australian tour will be their final shows with vocalist Jamie Smith, explaining that “basically he's decided to leave to pursue study. He's starting a film music course soon, and that's pretty much going to take up all his time. I think he wants to focus on that at the moment, and I think the band's just going to be a bit too distracting for him.”

Rest assured though, it's not going to slow them down, with plans already underway, and a confirmation of their new vocalist expected in the immediate months.

“It's definitely full steam ahead at the moment. We're pretty confident that everything will work out with the new vocalist. If for some reason it doesn't we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I don't think it'll hold us back too much. We definitely plan to write some new stuff and do a new EP towards the end of the year.”