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 INTO
ETERNITY - Living in Oblivion
By Liam Savage
If you ask me, what today’s vast metal spectrum needs is creativity.
Let’s face it, there are many exciting bands gracing us with
their talent these days, but few really stand out as being fresh.
This isn’t necessarily due to their lack of drive or ambition,
but due to a huge musical scene with many bands trying to horn in
on the impressionable metal listener.
So it stands to reason that to break out, a band would need to have
something catchy, memorable, and unique in their sound. One of the
few bands these days to do this is the exceptional prog/death masters
in Regina, Saskatchewan’s Into Eternity. Through two very successful
independent albums (2000’s self-titled and self-financed debut,
and 2001’s Dead Or Dreaming on DVS Records), they helped to
pave the way for the popular clean/death vocal trend, and melded
progressive, death, and thrash into a fine mixture. So after a three-year
wait, Into Eternity has released easily their most creative and
passionate album, Buried In Oblivion (Century Media). The album
finds them even more sure of their musical journey, and has received
nothing but favourable reaction from the metal world.
Talking to co-founder and guitarist/vocalist Tim Roth from his home
in Regina, he discusses how they came up with the progression of
their hard-to-peg sound.
"I knew for sure what we wanted to do before we even started
this album, because on Dead Or Dreaming, the thing I didn’t
like about it is we’d have some songs that had like 80 per
cent clean vocals, and then we’d have a couple of full-on death
metal tracks. I thought it was cool at the time, but after listening
to the album a few times I realized that it didn’t work out.
So with the new album, every song we write with the exception of
the two sort-of ballad songs are balanced with clean and death vocals,
so it sounds more consistent."
If you compare the new release to the band’s last two albums,
it’s abundantly clear that they have done just what Tim suggested
and have made the mix of styles work even better this time around.
However, it seems like the melodic and progressive end got more
of the work, as it comes out more in the music. So does Tim see
it this way, or does he think they’ve kept the balance between
the technical and death styles?
"I think we did. In fact, on this album there’s way more
off-time and meter changes than on Dead or Dreaming. Dead or Dreaming
for me was more straightforward compared to this album. If you count
out half of the new riffs [on the new album], it’s pretty messed
up. If you took the time to dissect each of these songs, you’d
definitely see that they’re more progressive. We did that on
purpose too, but we tried to blend it together while we did it so
it’s not so obvious, and so you can at least move your head
to these songs."
2003 was great in a musical sense for the band, but personally,
both Tim and new guitarist/vocalist Rob Doherty lost their mother
and father respectively. The healing process for the band was put
into their music, as is evident in the lyrical content of songs
such as "3 Dimensional Aperture."
"Rob wrote the lyrics for that song actually. Whenever you
see someone die and waste away of cancer, it’s gotta be one
of the most insane and worst things I’ve ever seen in my whole
life, so when you’re writing lyrics it’s always in the
back of your mind. But that’s a release. If you’re a painter
or sculptor, that’s how you get your release, but for me it’s
with writing music and lyrics. And when my mom died she knew that
this album was almost out because I wanted to play it for her, and
I never got to."
The problem with some bands getting signed to a major label (as
Into Eternity recently has) is they lose touch with what got them
there, and for Tim and company, it’s important to remember
where you came from amid new and more comfortable surroundings.
"We have the same work ethic, and we actually work a lot harder
now, because we want to get to that next level because right now
we’re strictly in the underground. I’d love to get up
to big clubs one day. I told the people at Century Media that to
get more press for this album I’d enter drug rehab or something,"
he laughs, "but they kept telling us we were the good guys.
That’s the problem with being Canadian; we’re too damn
nice."
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