United By Flames

"We will be not be not guided/Held apart and counted/Kept within our spaces/Alone /Some of us have broken free/And we have chosen/Bleeding but we're conscious/Awake”.

The above lyrical excerpt from Alone Awake is representative of the greater vision expressed by Dead Letter Circus' second full-length. Sat at a table in Gregory Park, Milton, it's a remarkably sunny winter's day in Brisbane. Raised in Perth but having lived in the Sunshine State for the last fifteen years, Benzie is casual all over, completely relaxed, and begins enthusiastically speaking of music, and not just his own band, well before the seated destination is reached and recorder switched on.

“It's like we're all archaeologists in a way, all moving towards the same mountain, carving a little piece or finding the overall shape of music. I think we just got to the stage where all those points had met, and people were looking for the same thing,” he says of the band's rising popularity amongst the more extreme end of heavy music fans – a fact quantified by their relationship with US metal label Sumerian Records, as well as their previous and forthcoming overseas touring with such metal acts as Animals As Leaders and Monuments, with their style having subtly influenced their latest effort through sheer subconscious proximity.

“You can say that a lot of alternative rock and a lot of metal has been done now, so the quest for that thing that will stimulate your mind is a little bit harder,” he adds.

It's clear that the scope that Benzie's consciousness embodies extends much further beyond the self. His world view is holistic, having transcended far beyond a “cellular” existence and “invisible walls” people typically build around themselves. Humanity is one, yet we do not have to follow the hive mind. He retains a polite acknowledgement of rules and borders, and despite a lack of overt preachiness his presence alone seems encouraging of respectfully usurping the status quo.

“Everyone in the world right now, it's pretty hard to not be awake to the mechanics of the way the world is, and the problems of the world, being the reserve bank, an unfair system which might have seemed fair when they conceived it years ago,” he explains, pausing momentarily to take a sip of coffee. “The big companies hold [power] over the world, and that kind of thing. The Catalyst Fire is about that yearning for change that's within everyone. It's about an idea spreading like a fire – that spreading of change. Over the last couple of years, everyone's become a little more aware of how the world actually works, and the mechanics of it all.”

Stream The Catalyst Fire album here.

A bell rings, and within seconds the park is filled with the jubilation of uniformed primary school students. Benzie continues as though the environment hasn't changed at all.

“All those films like The Matrix make sense to everyone, and so it's that little quest. Every conversation you have, say it's the first time you talk to someone about that, and you would take away that idea from me and give it to someone else. It's a catalyst fire for change. That's the basic concept of what's going on throughout it – the thirst for change, burning from person to person, and snowballing from person to person to that moment where it actually does change.”

The ethos he speaks of has even translated into the band's business dealings. Back in 2010, Dead Letter Circus were catapulted to success by their debut album This Is The Warning, which under the banner of Warner Music Australia peaked at number two on the ARIA charts. Now in 2013, the release of The Catalyst Fire has been handled by UNFD – an independent label typically home to such metalcore acts as The Amity Affliction and Northlane.

“Our contract expired with Warner, and we were just looking around,” he explains frankly. “We'd had offers from everyone around the country, because obviously it's a successful business model. Something about going with a major label again, although the guys at Warner are awesome, it didn't really feel like it fit us – a bunch of guys raging against the machine – then being part of a worldwide corporation making lots of money off musicians?”

Benzie describes their experiences with UNFD so far as being “much more fair. It just feels like an even gift for what we give to them, for what they give to us. It's not just Warner – any major label that still operates in the old format... it's pretty brutal towards the musician. I never want to paint a bad picture of those guys, because they were really nice, but the actual company structure we didn't vibe on.”

Getting back to the music at hand, The Catalyst Fire stands to be hailed as an impossibly cohesive masterpiece of progressive rock. With three guitarists working as one conscious entity alongside a watertight rhythm section, the band effortlessly construct a deeply psychedelic and dynamic grid of blissful hyperspace noise over which some absolutely beautiful vocal melodies are applied.

Although Dead Letter Circus performs as a five-piece, with original bassist Stewart Hill, guitarist Tom Skerlj, guitarist Clint Vincent and drummer Luke Williams, the latter two formerly of Melodyssey, Benzie explains in detail how and why the album came to be written and recorded with an extra guitarist.

“On the actual CD we've listed six musicians as being in the band. At the very start of the record there's a bit of a grey area where Robert [Maric, original guitarist] stopped writing for the band, and I'd started writing the songs I'd conceived with my friend Luke Palmer, who lives on the Gold Coast, and basically Luke possibly would have joined the band, but he was having a child. DLC is a style, one that has improved with the new album, and the actual style of the band is a style that can be interchanged between different guitarists.

“About the same time that I was a couple of songs in with this guy, Rob left the band and we had all these tours booked, and our tour manager said, 'Well, I know the songs, I can pretty much play them now', so he took his broken wrist out of a cast, jumped on a plane and basically two weeks later was playing in the States on South By South West, and he did the tour over there. By the time we came back, we'd just fallen in love with him being in the band. It fit, it worked. We got back and found ourselves in this unique situation where we kind of had a guitar team, in that we had three guitarists playing on the album as a family, as a unit.”

Don't expect to see them playing live with all six members anytime soon, however. “My initial thoughts were I don't want to demystify the band or anything like that, by making it seem like there's someone behind the scenes, but it's actually a really nice story. He's the only breadwinner for that family, so the state of the industry dictates that no one's really making enough money for him to do it, but the musical chemistry is just so amazing.”

Although Benzie confesses that no one in the band has had a real day job for the last eight years, their existence isn't glamorous. He picks a spider he's noticed off his interviewer's shirt and explains the concept of the “kudos card”.

“It's like a credit card full of the compliments you might receive. What it's good for – it's good for drinks at the bar and occasional self-esteem boosting, like when you're picking up the home brand spaghetti at the supermarket and someone comes up to you and says, 'I fucking love your song', and you're like, 'Thanks man! I'm rich! I'm fucking rich!'”

“That's one of the awesome things about being in this genre and writing this kind of music. It's generally the soundtrack to the intensely emotional parts of your life. It's very personable music, and it's not preachy because it's more of someone figuring it out for themselves, and I just put that into the song. I think that's why people can connect with it. That's probably the best thing about being in the band – it can happen anywhere.”

“Deny it but know that we can end and nothing changes/Or decide it and hope that we ascend/That we can shape at all the fire that comes/Or we pretend so we can hope it's all just pictures in stone/It's all been for progress/Will we see it fall down just like they dreamed it would?/Will we see it burn down to rise again?/We will see it fall down/Wake from this dream and know/We must see it burn down to rise again”.