Just recently dropping their first part of two albums in 2024 in the spring, Amiensus have since released the second half of their impressive Reclamation album. Those seeking anything in the melodic extreme metal avenues would be wise to not miss Amiensus at their strongest form with Reclamation Part I and II. As we spoke with the band for Part I, it seemed like a prime time for the follow up after taking in the entire two-part release as a whole and seeing what the band managed to achieve with such lofty intentions. James Benson and Todd Farnham are back to discuss the album as a whole, more of the concepts behind splitting the release and the Spotify/streaming singles aspect, and we even get into a little bit of anime talk before the end of this conversation.
Dead Rhetoric: Is there a sense of accomplishment to having the entire release finally available?
Todd Farnham: I would say there is definitely a sense of accomplishment. It’s nice, obviously it’s a bummer to have to wait for an album to come out, but then to have to wait another three months for the rest of the album to come out. But sometimes that space is nice, to be able to better appreciate what we have made. So that has been nice, to visit these songs as people are hearing them for the first time and listening to those and appreciating that stuff. When you are in the process, you get sick of the songs because you hear them so many times, so it’s been nice and I’m excited for everyone who hasn’t heard Part II to hear it and hear the whole thing together.
James Benson: It’s definitely like Todd said, like rediscovering the songs again, in a sense. We finished mixing it last September, so about a year ago we finished it. That’s when we listened to it a ton, because we were getting mixes back and was about four months of sending back mix notes. At this point, it’s done and I’m at the point where people are going to listen to Part II and I’m seeing the reviews come out and I’m like, “listen to the whole thing. Start with “Blink of the Moment” and finish with “Orb of Vanishing Light.” That’s a huge task, but now people are going to listen to just Part II and I’m cool with that too. That’s okay. It was intended to be 15 songs in a row, and I hope people do experience it that way at some point, but if they don’t, that’s fine too. It’s like getting an extra piece of pizza at a work party when you should be getting a raise, but you get an extra piece of pizza by releasing a second album this year.
Farnham: I’d say the good mark of a double album is that both sides can hold up on their own. I think that counts for something too.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s it like seeing both fan and press feedback for something that you recorded all at once with half of it still to drop. Is there ever a part of you that’s like, “oh man, if only we could somehow tweak something before Part II drops?” Like, I guess these people won’t like this element of Part II either…
Benson: Absolutely. There was far more positive comments when I was like, “just you fucking wait, Part II is going to have some crazy shit in it!” But at the same point, especially like people that we know through releasing music that I sent early copies of just a digital copy of…some of them I respect and wanted to hear some of their feedback because they have been real critics of us.
Farnham: In a good way, like pushing us in a good way.
Benson: Todd probably knows who I am speaking too, but it’s more than that person. There was some feedback in that, which I was like, “hmmm.” It was definitely eye-opening on their interpretation in terms of what elements or styles they heard/saw in Part I versus Part II, even though they listened to the full thing. I don’t think I can really recall any specific comments where I thought they wouldn’t like something, but I knew going into this, once we knew we were breaking the album up, that there are two categories of Amiensus. There’s the Restoration/Ascension people and there are people who like All Paths Lead to Death and Abreaction. Those people are used to the darker sound, and they probably wouldn’t like Part I, but the older fans would. The newer fans were going to like Part II more.
Farnham: That’s kind of the hard part about having to split it in two. As a whole, it’s an encapsulation of all the musical journeys on every release and all the influences. So it’s weird to be like there’s this one part, and then there’s a second part.
Benson: We tried to mix it up. The tracklist, we did try to give each side a bit of adversarial play of lighter and darker passages. I feel personally that Part II is just heavier and somewhat of a darker mood. At the same point, it isn’t specifically darker, but there’s more straight-forward, heavy tracks to Part II. There’s less acoustics and less singing, even though there is one song that is basically all clean singing. That’s my perception though…
Dead Rhetoric: That makes me think, when you split the album, was there a conscious decision to divide up the tracklisting to make it coherent both separately and if you listen to all of it together?
Benson: There was a conscious choice to split it where it was split, based on knowing the track order for 1-15 and looking at the best point to say, from this point on, these songs will stick together and hold up well. I think we had maybe two or three track arrangements total, and this was the first one. We ended up going back to it. The same when we split it. It made sense to split it with “Transcendence Through Grief.”
Dead Rhetoric: What’s your process for when you write longer songs? How do you recognize a song needs to be longer versus knowing you need to make a cut or trim? From my perspective, it seems like you guys do a really good job of understanding that element compared to other bands.
Benson: In the past, there has definitely been a lot of headbutting when it comes to a song being done and then someone coming in with another 2.5 minutes to add. I’m speaking specifically back to 2015 with Ascension when we did “Towards Horizon.” We had the original ending, which is the ending riff in the song, but someone ended adding another minute and a half before that, then we tacked the outro back on. So I know we have had some struggles. We have learned a bit, and there’s definitely a ‘less is more’ approach. We start with a shit ton of tracks to a song, then we start peeling back to flesh out dynamics. So it doesn’t get super saturated.
When it comes to song lengths, and maybe I said this in the last interview, but specifically, when I write guitar riffs, I know what kind of song structure or vibe I am going for. So my strengths in this band are the folky, Agalloch-style guitar riffs, and I’m generally good at the intro-verse-chorus-verse 2-chorus-outro sandwich songs, as we call them. The other guys, like if Kelsey [Roe] is here recording with me, we will vibe it out. Do we start electric or acoustic, and I’ll start putting riffs together while he is recording. Alec Rozsa and Joe [Waller] are machines that just write insane stuff out of their ass all the time. They probably have hundreds of unreleased songs each. So usually it’s like, “Here’s 5 songs, which ones do you like?”
I definitely jam a bit more with Kelsey and Aaron [McKinney] and Todd. Alec when he was in town as well, he used to come over quite a bit. But that was more on the vocal end. He was usually here for that. Aaron, Todd, Alec and I all write together pretty frequently for the guitar stuff. It’s like, ‘we are going for an acoustic-based song’ or ‘a proggy, longer song’ like “Sun and Moon” on Part I. The longest song on Part II is “Acquiescence” and it’s one that Kelsey originally wrote most of. Alec probably wrote some riffs too. That one, was where the original demo was like 7-minutes, and then it ended up near 10-minutes. That was another one where we had riffs hanging around and we threw them in different places and made it more of an epic prog, Opeth or Agalloch-styled song.
Dead Rhetoric: Given what you did with breaking the album up and making it more digestible for people, how do you feel about the Spotify singles approach, when it comes to metal? I get that there are a lot of people in the genre that will still listen to albums, but there’s a growing faction that focuses on singles as soon as they become available.
Farnham: I feel like that’s a tricky one. I feel like people go through different phases, at least from my personal experience. I went through different phases with that. When I was a kid and listened to music with my parents, we did full albums and that got me into different bands like Linkin Park and stuff like that. I think when iTunes came around, I kind of felt like it was the immediate access but I felt drawn to singles. Like one song was perfect, so I would listen to that to get to the one song instead of listening to the whole album. But now I have come back around too. For metal, I listen to full albums. Some of the pop stuff I listen to, I listen to singles, but for metal I mostly listen to things in their entirety.
Benson: Totally agree there. We did try, in splitting the album, we did try having 5 singles in both, total. We spaced them out 6-8 weeks so that there was some constant release with the streaming services. It would constantly hit our audience, and people who listen to a new single, then they would hear a new song as they got sick of the last one. We tried to release a variety, and it’s hard not to for us, because every song sounds different, at least to me. But we did choose a wide array of styles for the singles.
“Reverie” to me is Restoration. That intro-verse-chorus sandwich style. Then we did “Vermillion Fog of War” which was this melodic blackened death metal song. Then “Senses Amplified,” which isn’t super proggy by any means, but more atmospheric metal. Then in Part II we had “The Distance” with Lars from Borknagar and that one was more epic and proggy. The last one was more of a metalcore/deathcore blackened style. It jumped around pretty drastically. The only songs, to me, that were similar would be “The Distance” and “Senses Amplified.” So we did try to hit the singles. I’m down with that, but we always have to release albums.
Dead Rhetoric: Would you ever do a show or small tour where you would just play it all from start to finish?
Benson: I don’t think I could physically do it [laughs]. I don’t think my voice could handle it, and Todd, I think your hands would blister. Maybe not, you have played a lot of bass.
Farnham: I go through phases where I don’t play and then I have to rebuild the blisters. Unless it was a taped studio thing, I am guessing we wouldn’t do something like that, just in terms of it being complicated with us living far apart from each other. Practices aren’t easy to get everyone together. We might get one good practice and then the morning of tour get another good one, and that’s kind of it. I think if we had more time, but we have never played more than 35-40 minutes.
Benson: Part of that would also be the amount of instruments that we would have to bring for playing everything. We would need acoustics and stuff. We brought some acoustics from Good Will just to set up in the bus and just jam on these 15 dollar acoustics that we fixed just enough to be kind of not terrible, but we have talked about for next year with our 15th anniversary doing a bit of a short run and trying to get all 7 of us on this album together in a room to play, or at least 6 of us. Joe and Aaron…Joe is on Part I and Aaron is on both, they have only played one show ever. It was with Fail to Decay, and it was when I lost my voice, and I played bass in the other band, so I didn’t need to sing, but I was going to do a double set. I lost my voice a week before the show, and Aaron and Joe were local at the time so I helped them so that they did all the vocal parts instead of me. So the only show I have never performed, so it was a pretty special show.
Farnham: I feel like it’s a bummer because I feel like we have the worst luck when it comes to special shows. That night was a show where we were told we could run the sound for the night and that’s all we got. So it wasn’t the best sounding show ever. It would be nice to have more people who have had helped us co write in more.
Dead Rhetoric: With next year being 15 years, when you look at the band in that perspective, what do you feel you have gained in being a part of Amiensus?
Benson: A lot of good friends. Todd I met in 2012, I think technically. He joined in 2013.
Farnham: Yeah, definitely meeting new friends, and being able to endure with all of the line-up things. Just being really proud that we have this collective that we are all contributing to. I think we have grown as musicians. It’s been nice to see and I think we probably work more cohesively. I think there was more butting of heads with Ascension than now.
Benson: I totally agree. I think also, in terms of what I have gained, I listen to our music sometimes. Every few months I want to take a trip down memory lane. There are so many good memories attached to the music itself and the creation of the music and the releases, and times we got together. I look pretty fondly on Reclamation and how many times I had Todd and Kelsey and Alec and Aaron or just a few of them over here in this room, with all of my four dogs trying to sit on their laps while we play instruments.
Farnham: I think a lot of us, being in your wedding, that was cool!
Benson: The party afterwards too, that was the best part!
Dead Rhetoric: What are some anime influences that you have had, and is there anything you have put into Amiensus or would consider doing?
Farnham: James, have you written any secret anime lyrics?
Benson: I don’t know that I have written any secret anime lyrics, but it’s a good question because I do throw some lyrics from the end of the anime YuYu Hakusho, a great ‘90s anime by Yoshihiro Togashi at the very end credits it says, “Forever, for never” and no one knows what it means. I did throw that in a Chrome Waves song on our third album. But I haven’t done that for Amiensus.
Farnham: I feel like “Forever, for never” is more of his description of Hunter x Hunter came out. He was like, “I’m gonna finish this” and then take a 5 year break, but it’s not actually done. Maybe that’s where it came from.
Benson: Musically, I do listen to a fair amount of city pop. A lot of early 90s and 2000s OSTs and stuff. Who wrote the song off of Full Metal Alchemist? The song “Rewrite?” Asian Kung-Fu Generation? I love them quite a bit as well, and they are more like rock stuff. OST-wise, on Part I in “Blink of the Moment,” I downloaded this free keyboard program and I swear to god its the same keyboard as the Toonami edition of Dragonball Z that Bruce Falcouner used for all of his stuff. He wrote all of it on keyboard, and it wasn’t just him. He had other people working on it too. But I swear I used the intro of the DBZ theme songs wind sound for the intro of “Blink of the Moment” and then there were a few bells that sound exactly like Cell Saga era bells.
Farnham: Was it the wind or was it the nimbus cloud?
Benson: It’s like the nimbus cloud sound that Goku rides on.
Farnham: I would say, personally, just what music I liked to the point that it stuck around in my head, maybe not directly into the project, but I definitely remember going through the newer Berserk movies, which might not be people’s thing since it wasn’t the hand-drawn stuff like the first Berserk, but I think by the third movie they got it dialed in with the use of CGI in it. But “Blood and Guts” from that soundtrack was a piece that stuck in my head forever. It’s fantastic. And not quite in the anime realm, but the first Dark Souls game, the final boss fight – that instrumental just blew me away.
Benson: One direct link to me with video games is “Disconsolate” from Part II. I wrote that specifically to sound like the New Tristram theme from Diablo III. The working title of that song was literally “Diablo IV” before it came out, because I wrote it like four years ago. It was before Diablo IV came out last year.
Dead Rhetoric: Amiensus is a group that tends to have a strong, devout following but deserve more reach. What’s a band that you feel the same way about?
Benson: Oak Pantheon, honestly. It’s the first band that comes to mind for me. We have known them for 11 or 12 years now and our first split with them was the first time Todd had played with us. Those guys write some really fucking good songs. Kelsey brings it up all the time, like, “I want to write a riff like Oak Pantheon.” They have maybe three full lengths now. They have released a little less music than we have over the years, but they are so deliberate in their songwriting process in what they haven’t released that I have heard, and they just threw away. I have always been like, “you fuckers, that would have been my favorite song!” They don’t get enough attention. They have a fair amount of Spotify plays because they hit an algorithm with their acoustic album a few years ago.
But they don’t have a massive following really. Now that they are playing shows, they are starting to get more of a regional following. I’m glad. They are around our age, in their thirties. They have a really loyal fanbase and our splits really grew both bands at the same time. They just didn’t put out as much music or start touring. They are playing shows in the midwest here and there more recently, so I think they have the chance to grow more. Everything they do is so well thought out and dynamic. They have cool riffs and they put a lot of time and effort into their shit. I really respect them.
Farnham: I would like Ashenspire from Scotland to get bigger. They are playing avant garde black metal. I would love to be able to see them without going to Scotland. I love their Hostile Architecture album. I think another band that I always feel flies under the radar is the band Exist. I think they are super cool musicians, and it feels like they get pockets on tours but I keep hoping that they will pick up some more so I can see them live too. Most of their tours have gone around Minnesota. They have been around for at least 10 years. It would be cool to see them get bigger.
Dead Rhetoric: So now with both albums out, what’s next for Amiensus?
Benson: We are back to writing mode. Next year we will explore if we want to do some live shows again. I don’t think there’s really any intent to tour, like for 2-3 weeks but before we get too old, I want to do an in-studio live session. That would be super awesome. It’s been a dream since I was a kid. I grew up watching a lot of live music concert videos. We will broach that. It’s probably years out.
Back to writing, there was more of an effort to just do the live band again. We have all of these writers, why not put music out faster? We have a rough outline, like 10% out there. We have a good group of demos out there already. Some of them are more complete than others. Then probably another bunch of song ideas and riffs as well.
Farnham: I think we are loosely talking about what demos we might push to be on a potential next record, but I think that is the extent of where we are right now. It would be good to play a show here or there again. I’m excited to get that going next year. I think it is mostly a week or two here concentrating on listening to the reviews of Part II and people listening back to Part I. Then we will focus on more writing and solidifying things.