Brisbane Progressive Rockers Caligula's Horse Prepare To Take On The World

It's all happening in the world of Brisbane progressive alternative metallers Caligula's Horse at the moment. As they prepare to unleash their third long-player Bloom onto an unsuspecting world, they're first circumnavigating Australia as support for respected UK prog-metal outfit TesseracT, and then at the conclusion of that run they're heading over to Europe for a massive 25-date tour alongside Norwegian extremists Shining. Fortunately they're stoked at the evolution their music has undertaken on Bloom, believing it to be the perfect calling card for this quest to rapidly expand their following.

"We knew this album had to be the real deal," stresses vocalist Jim Grey. "We've had a couple of releases under our belt now, so we approached it with the idea that we wanted it to have a mission statement from the get-go — not let the project form itself over time, we wanted to know exactly what we were doing every step of the way. That's why it came together so quickly — we had a sit down meeting because we wanted to nut out precisely the themes we wanted to cover, and obviously we wanted it to be a bit brighter and more colourful than The Tide, The Thief & The River's End, our previous album, just because that was a heavier and darker work. So with that in mind we went crazy with colour and optimism pretty much."

"I want people to sing with me and I want people to feel good about themselves"

Originally seeming to exist on the fringes of the local metal scene, the sound of Caligula's Horse has sonically expanded to the point where they've had to prescribe themselves their own genre label.

"We're off the leash a little bit now," Grey says. "We've found who we are as a band and we're a lot more settled now as players, plus Sam [Vallen — guitar] and I have definitely got a system down in regards how we write together now. The track Dragonfly is definitely a personal favourite of Sam's, and it's one my faves off the album as well, but you can definitely hear in that one some of those influences like Jeff Buckley — and for me Tori Amos and things like that as well — coming through in the sound, that we either haven't had the confidence to use before or the experience to use before. I think now is definitely the right time to introduce them. We use the moniker of 'progressive alternative rock' rather than 'progressive metal' because I think that captures where we're coming from as best as any term can."

Grey further believes that it was important on Bloom to evolve the band's sound beyond that of its 2013 predecessor.

"I think we're always going to be making music that reflects where we're at presently," he reflects. "The Tide, The Thief & The River's End was a triumph — we're still really happy with it — but we didn't want to come back and do another concept album, we always want to do something a little bit different. I think just given our influences and what we're interested in doing, for me personally I want people to sing with me and I want people to feel good about themselves, and I want to feel good about myself as well — I think that's all reflected in the album.

"But also we wanted the album to reflect a lot more the energy that we bring when we're playing live, because it's quite a physical show and quite an exciting show to watch and be involved with, and we wanted this record to come across like that as well."

But even though there's no unifying concept linking the songs on Bloom together, Grey tells that Caligula's Horse have still explored plenty of themes on the album.

"They're not linked explicitly — in terms of it being a concept album or anything like that — but each of the tracks have sort of their own themes or their own inspiration," he offers. "Some of the themes covered on the album is that all hope's not lost, and how you can't measure a person's worth by what they do or what they own but rather from who they love and who loves them — it's meant to be a celebration of music and one another.

"A lot of that is reflected by the music and vice versa; when Sam and I would be working on a new track, a lot of the sounds would be quite bright so I was inspired by that and tried to reflect that in the lyrics as well. So each song has a little story; another of the album's tracks, Turntail, got its concept and inspiration from a moment in my head that lasted less than two seconds, and that's all that took to get that song out. But on the whole I like to leave it to other people decide what it all means to them."