Playing It By Ear

It seems there are certain milestones in a band's career that they'll always remember. That first tour. Cutting album number one. Heading overseas to play music... Now that it's been ten years since Epica decided that Sahara Dust wasn't working for them as a band name, they've clocked up all of these milestones and a fair share more. They're five albums deep into a career lauded for its blend of symphonic, progressive and gothic metals, and there's no slowing down in sight.

The band's upcoming tenth anniversary show in their native Holland finds synthesiser/keyboard player Coen Janssen reflecting on Epica's accomplishments, and looking back on their beginnings. He figures that coming together as a band in the Netherlands really helped Epica.

“In Holland, you can go to a good metal show every night of the week,” he explains. “So you really need to convince the audience about your music and of your capabilities to play. They're more waiting to see whether you can do what you do on the album. It helped us to create a fanbase, because we could play everywhere in Holland. There were good facilities around the country and lots of small clubs that we could play. And that's my only advice to younger bands, just play, play, play, because that's the only way that people are going to know you.”

From humble beginnings in the water-logged land of hashish, Epica's profile grew steadily, with each new album they were able to tour further abroad and refine their sound. Case in point: album number five, Requiem For The Indifferent. The band's late-2012 effort marked the most coherent implementation of their disparate influences to date. What were Epica hoping to do with the album when they sat down to write it?

“We wanted to maintain the path we started down on Design Your Universe (2009) – that was the first album with Isaac Delahaye on guitars. When we recorded that album he was only just in the band, and this time around he'd been in the band for longer and had become a full-time member, so we wanted to see what we could do with this line-up. More focus on the guitar, more heavy stuff, was the result of us going in and seeing what we could do at that point in time. Our previous guitar player didn't want to play solos, so he brought those to the album. And the riffs are just a lot more technical and interesting, so I think the sound changed a lot because of what we did on this record with the guitars.”

Discussing Epica's maiden voyage to these parts, Janssen considers how our country will greet the band.

“Unlike in Holland, in some parts of the world they just want to party – it probably doesn't matter what you play. But first time in Australia, we don't know how fans will react there.”

Though unsure how Australian fans will receive Epica, Janssen makes clear what the band will be bringing to the stages Down Under. “We play loud and fast, but because there's the symphonic element to the band people can bring their girlfriends… or their mothers.”

And as for what fans can expect next, and if the band's already started thinking ahead to their 20th anniversary celebrations, Janssen simply laughs. Even after ten years, Epica have never really figured out all of that planning stuff. “We've never really sat down and talked about how our career should progress and what we should do with the music. It's always been more like 'we can book a tour here' and 'we could try to write an album there'. We just see what happens.”

Epica will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 17 April - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Friday 19 April - Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW
Sunday 21 April - Billboard, Melbourne VIC
Tuesday 23 April - Capitol, Perth WA