Seizing Life

Released in June last year, Leveler is the fourth album from Pennsylvanians August Burns Red. The band is seemingly set on the sound they established and have been improving ever since forming in 2003 – mixing Gothenburg-esque riffage with off-kilter breakdowns, technical compositions, bittersweet melodic passages and vocals that simultaneously sit within the realms of heaviness and clarity.

Davidson, who joined the band as their second bass player in 2006, is “very pleased with the response” to the record, and despite the fact that it does maintain all the elements that popularised the band in the first place, believes that “it's quite different to our previous records”.

“There's a few songs that really stand out – songs like Internal Cannon, Carpe Diem, Salt & Light, those are three songs off Leveler that I feel are very different songs for our band,” he says. “To hear kids asking for us to play those songs live... that's incredible. Carpe Diem – I was not expecting that to be as big of a song as it is.”

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Leveler isn't another album made out of the same tried and tested metalcore tricks that the band has employed so effectively thus far. The progressive and more reserved – dare someone say 'post-like' moments – hinted at on 2009's Constellations have begun to spread their wings.

Continuing, he offers that, “kids actually asked for us to play those songs, and I was very surprised, because it's a slower, different song from us, so I was very pleased with the response from our fans to the record because of those three songs in general. I am just stoked that they did as well as they did, is what I'm trying to say.”

Asked about their musical trajectory and any conscious links between that and the concepts of change and progression, Davidson offers some insight into the way his band works.

“Typically you don't want to write the same record you just wrote. So you want to start to write songs that are obviously different but still within your genre. I don't want to write Constellations all over again, and have back to back repeating records. Someone said to me before, 'Messengers is way better than Constellations, you should have wrote another Messengers'. Well guess what? You're going to get really bored because you're going to get the same record twice in a row. It's not going to be good.

“But I don't think we really pushed to write songs that were different. JB [Brubaker – guitar], who is the main writer, just writes what he feels. I remember when he wrote Carpe Diem, it was just called Song 13. He sent it over and said, 'Hey guys, what do you think? If you don't want to use it for August Burns Red I'm just going to record it for one of my side songs just to have, because I know it's very different'. We went with it, we recorded it, and we decided we liked it and we kept it.”

Serving as the band's backup screamer in addition to his bass duties, it turns out Davidson contributed lyrics for the first time – for the song already being discussed, no less.

“Carpe Diem is a song I wrote, and I've never written a song for the band. I know it's a short song – not a lot of lyrics in it – but I wrote that song about something different. It's about my Dad telling me that I can't be in a band for a living. In the song it's Jake [Luhrs – vocals] screaming, and myself screaming, and Jake is me – he's a kid that wants to fight for something he loves doing. Then I'm playing my Dad's role saying, 'What makes you think you're going to do that? You can't do that. You know how many people are able to make a living off being in a band?' So I wrote a song about that, but it's open to interpretation. I like everything to be open to interpretation. I've had kids say, 'Carpe Diem got me through boot camp training', 'My Dad said I could never do this', 'My Mum said I could never do this and I proved her wrong and did it'. So that's what I like – I like writing stuff that's open for people to interpret and compare to something in their lives. It makes for a better song if you can relate to it.”

Given the fact that the members of the openly Christian but minimally-preachy August Burns Red are in fact able to quite comfortably live off their musical success, one wonders if Mr. Davidson Senior still doesn't believe in the power of their breakdowns?

“No, he's very supportive – in the song I made it sound like he was a lot worse than he was just to get my point across,” he admits. “When I was a kid, I want to say 16, 17, he was a mechanic and he was trying to get me to work on cars, which I did for a while. I was always like, 'I want to do this' and would spend all my money on musical equipment because I wanted to be in a band. He wasn't being a dick about it, but he was like, 'Do you know how many people play music for a living? Look where you live. No one gets to do that. It's going to be really hard, you need to have something to fall back on like mechanics'.

“Recently, my Dad picked me up from the airport, I want to say around this time last year, and he just straight up told me, 'Hey, I just want you to know I'm really proud of you, I see that you get to travel the world,' and he actually mentioned Australia because that's a place that he wants to see, and, 'You get to see all these places that I've never been to, and you make me really proud'. So that was really cool.”

Delving deeper into the topic of lyrics, Davidson explains the back story to the name, but is a little more unclear as to the precise meaning behind Leveler.

“Matt [Greiner – drums] actually came up with the title. We spend a lot of time trying to agree on titles – we've never come up with one we don't like. Matt, he came up with the idea of calling the album Leveler Make Level The Road For The Righteous which was a line in the last song on the album. But we thought that was a super long title – all our album titles are one or two words. Then we said, 'How about we just call the album Leveler? He didn't like it at first, but we ended up sticking with Leveller. It's heavy. It's a heavy album, and that's why I wanted to go with the title. Matt has a story behind the album but I can't describe it because I don't really know what it is. To me it's just a hard sounding album title.”