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 Maroon - Raging Till the End of Days
By Laura Wiebe Taylor
A thin line separates musicians who inject their music with a message they feel passionately about and those who beat you over the head with their beliefs. Germany’s Maroon has a passionate message, but what the band beats listeners over the head with is the ferocious hardcore/metal fusion exploding on latest release, Endorsed By Hate. The message is just one integral part of Maroon’s relentless assault on the senses and the mind.
Formed out of a New Year’s Eve multi-band jam session, Maroon has been raging since 1998. Vegan and straight-edge, vocalist Andre Moraweck, guitarists Sebastian Rieche and Sebastian Grund, bassist Tom-Eric Moraweck, and drummer Nick Wachsmuth combine a social/political conscience with personal expression and a soundtrack of intense speed and concrete-heavy sludge. Incorporating veganism and straight-edge issues seemed a logical step, but it wasn’t the motivation for founding Maroon, and Tom explains that it’s important to mix weighty issues with other topics to keep from preaching to people or telling them how to live their lives.
“I don’t want people to think we want to force them to think in a certain way with our lyrics, because this just deters people. I mean, I hate nothing more than people who want to tell me what to do. So I think it’s better to show people what the consequences of their (or our) behaviour is. There is no doubt that some of the biggest natural catastrophes are caused by deforestation and that a lot of violence and aggression is caused by the wrong and brutal behaviour towards animals. It makes more sense to me to show people what is going on in this world and how much pain we cause everyday for the animals, mother earth or other people. I want them to think about it, to start thinking again, and then in the next step they might get interested in veganism because they start to understand what our aim is. But if I write about all the negative aspects of life, about pain, diseases or suffering, I try to show people that there is also hope, and hope for me lies in things like veganism, straight-edge or the power of love. If I write a song about the end of days and that this world is slowly going insane then I also try to say that we have the power to change it, if we just would take more care, and stand up and just start to speak our minds. People should start thinking for themselves again.”
Despite the fact that straight edge and veganism are most often associated with hardcore, Endorsed By Hate has deep roots in the metal tradition. Metalcore might then seem like an appropriate label for Maroon’s music, but Tom isn’t interested in labels and feels there are “a lot of bands with no quality” making music under the metalcore “banner.” He explains the development of Maroon’s fused metal/hardcore sound.
“As kids we were all die-hard death/thrash metal heads, but at one point we got bored of it and we wanted something fresh and new. And then we discovered Earth Crisis. They were metal to us but so different then the rest. We never quit listening to our old metal heroes, but this new scene attracted us a lot. So we definitely lead a hardcore lifestyle but we mostly listened and still listen to metal stuff; that might be why the new record sounds more metal. But anyone can call us like they want to. We make extreme music and that is all. Anyone is welcome and if you like the music it’s fine no matter where you come from—if you are metal or hardcore, I don’t care.”
Tom adds that metal, punk and hardcore have more in common than many people seem to think, admitting it makes him sad to see barriers between the scenes. “We are all part of this kind of extreme music and our scene isn’t as big as the pop scene, so it doesn’t make sense to divide it all even more. And how our music culture differs from pop is that we still should have something to say, and that is the same in death metal, in hardcore, in punk or in black metal. All these genres have strong views and place themselves outside of society a bit. We all listen to unique music, have unique views on life, and of course we all have our opinions, which aren’t always the same. But this shouldn’t be a problem because we all like music and we have a lot of things that unite us. We all want to act against the compulsion and the prejudice of society, so we should get along.”
Maroon has been busy touring—and promoting unity and individual thought—but the band has still found time to start working on the next album. “We already have two rough songs, but I think it would be too soon to say something [about what to expect]. Maybe these two songs won’t be on the new record, who knows? I just can tell that we are now trying to include more hip hop and dance music,” Tom laughs. “No, just a joke, it’ll be an acoustic jazz record...” Acoustic jazz? Probably not. The world’s not about to save itself overnight, and Maroon’s not likely to stop raging about what’s wrong and what we can do to change it".
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