Bringing The Mood

Renacer is the fifth full-length album from the New Jersey-based group that is Senses Fail. On first listen the fire of the release is quite striking – not to say that the band has never had an element of fury to them, but they've never sounded as heavy as they do in 2013. The usually melody-dominated vocals have been largely overtaken by frontman Buddy Nielsen's screams – the riffs are harder, the double kick more frequent, the atmosphere more brooding, and the breakdowns more triumphantly pronounced.

“I'd say I enjoy what we did on this record more so than what we've done in the past,” Nielsen admits. “I like the style, I like the direction, I like the heaviness. I sort of finally feel like I achieved at least part of what I wanted to achieve.”

The dynamic vocalist comes across as a little distant on the phone, and needs to be gently nudged along to elaborate a little more.

“Yeah, they were okay,” he says of the band's past efforts, the most successful of which was 2006's Still Searching, which peaked at number 15 on the US charts.

“Some of them were better than others – some of them were okay. I just think that there's a lot of things we could have done better on previous records.”

Such as?

“Just overall, I think we could have tried a little harder to do something different.”

It's true that perhaps the band's public perception melded a little into the background against the plethora of '00s era post-hardcore/screamo bands, but they were by no means followers of the flocks or latecomers to the party. Everyone's their own harshest critic, and it appears that it's hard for Nielsen to be completely satisfied with his own work, adding that “even with this record I see things that I wish I could have done better.”

Syrupy choruses still exist, and songs like the single Mi Amor can be almost confronting to hear so soon after the consistently punchy title track that opens the album's 43 minutes.

“I think there's a couple of songs that are pretty safe, and I think we could have changed it up a little bit more, and pushed ourselves. But we had to make a bridge between what we've done in the past and what this was. That's sort of what this record serves as.”

It prompts the question, is there a chance that the band's next release might finally be the one he finds himself utterly satisfied with?

“I mean I think so, but I don't think anything's going to stick as being one hundred per cent because you're always trying to do something better,” he comments, a notion that seems to be reflected in the album's lyrical content, summed up by the man himself simply and succinctly as “being positive and sending out a positive message, personal growth and all those type of things.”

Nielsen stands alongside drummer Dan Trapp as being the only personnel that remain from the team that created their 2002 EP From The Depths Of Dreams. The other members of the group only go as far back as 2008, but include bassist Jason Black (also of Hot Water Music, though replaced on tour by Gavin Caswell), guitarist Zack Roach (also of Spirit Of The Stairs) and newest guitarist Matt Smith (also of Strike Anywhere). It's a bit of an all-star line-up, however, Renacer does represent the first time the band has written without founding guitarist Mike Glita.

“It was cool. It was kind of scary, but it was fun,” Nielsen says of working with new guitarist Smith. “I enjoyed the challenge and I enjoyed trying something different. We have a bunch of mutual friends, our old producer that we've worked with a bunch, Brian McTernan, has done all the Strike Anywhere records, so we have a lot of mutual friends, and he's a good dude. It's great, we couldn't have asked for a better group of people.”

Coming into the second decade of their existence, Senses Fail don't seem to be a band weighed down by illusions of grandeur, or hopes of blowing up overnight. The members all have their day jobs and other bands; Nielsen himself an employee of their label Vagrant Records, live bassist Caswell a guitar tech for Bad Religion.

“Yeah absolutely,” responds Nielsen when asked if they're not really bothered about trying to push themselves beyond their means. The band has so far this year done only one US tour, a quick trip to Europe, and after Australia plan on doing only one more tour in the home country to see the year out. He continues with, “also there's no need to, we're not the hot band trying to win over new fans. We are what we are, and we're just trying to do what we like to do, which is travel and play shows and keep it pretty flexible for other things.”

So did they craft Renacer with the idea of reaching a new audience or not?

“Kind of... but not really, not intentionally like, 'We're going to do this, or we're going to make new fans, and push ourselves somewhere'. It's more like this is the music we wanted to play, this is what we wanted to do, and if people like it cool, and if they don't, fuck 'em. That's the attitude. You want people to like it... I want everyone to like it, but that's not reality, and you're not going to make people like it, so you've just gotta do it, and if it happens it happens.”

In regards to their fan's reactions, he says that “most of them liked it, I think for the most part. I think there's a portion of people that wish it was what it used to be.”

Nielsen exposes that their future material will be, “less about song structure – less about choruses and that stuff – and more about what we can do that's going to make somebody feel something. I want to set a mood to music.”

This notion is reflected in his developing personal tastes, admitting to recently discovering the much-hyped black metal/post rock hybrid that is Deafheaven, and citing them as his most listened to band of recent times, alongside the slamming metalcore group that is Xibalba.

“They just wrote a really cool new record called Sunbather. Deafheaven has definitely been the band at the moment. I heard of them, this is like their second record, and I'd never checked them out, but I heard this record and it was amazing. It's fucking incredible. I think it's definitely going to highly influence where I want to take the band... obviously not black metal – we're not going to go for D-beats and blast beats and stuff – but something atmospherical. It's just really exciting to listen to because it's like nothing I've ever heard.”