Blistering.com: Loic is the new vocalist and brings a new dimension to the band. Is he the type of singer you always envisioned fronting the Ocean?
Staps: Yes, absolutely and in every regard. He is the one I’ve been searching for for years: extremely versatile and talented, with both a strong clean voice and powerful screamed voice, and a really good performer as well… last but not least, a cool dude. So yeah, it seems like he is the end of the line for us.
Blistering.com: How did you come across him and how does he handle the older material?
Staps: After we toured on Precambrian for seven or eight months, we all felt it was time for something new. We are not one of these bands that develops a formula for their sound and then sticks to it for the next five albums, just because it works… we wanna keep it interesting for ourselves and for our listeners and fans as well, and this is why we are continuously exploring new territory.
After Mike’s departure we were specifically looking for a vocalist who was not only following us in our musical development, but who was one step ahead. We still want to play our older material live, so we had to find someone who is a powerful screamer and a good singer at the same time. This proved to be really difficult. More than a hundred people wrote us and sent in tryout videos/audio for a few of our songs. After nine months, Loic came along and when we heard his take on our new material, as well a few older tracks, we knew immediately that the search was finally over. It was decided within five minutes.
Blistering.com: Are you prepared for any potential backlash that may come with having a predominantly clean singer?
Staps: Sure. There’s always gonna be people who complain when a band is doing something different. And it’s nothing new to us really: when we releasedFogdiver, people complained that it was instrumental. When we released Fluxionpeople were complaining about the brutal vocals. When Aeolian came out, people were lamenting about the lack of big orchestrations…
You see, I can understand how some people that only liked our Aeolian stuff feel let down now because the new material is not metal enough for them or not sludge enough or not intricate enough or whatever… but then again, those people who only like our heavy side never really understood what we’re all about in the first place. We’re trying to institutionalize change to some degree. Without delusions of grandeur and without comparing ourselves to any of these bands, I have utmost respect for bands that managed to reinvent themselves at one point in their career, and tried something completely different – bands like Radiohead, Breach or Refused, for example.
Blistering.com: As for Heliocentric, it takes a lot chances that perhapsPrecambrian didn’t (esp. the clean/piano songs). As a songwriter, was this something you’ve wanted to do for a while?
Staps:Yes. My listening habits have evolved over the course of the past few years. I still listen to Behemoth and Goatwhore, but at the same time I have become increasingly interested in clean vocals and a more song-oriented and stripped-down approach to writing music. Precambrian was the epitome of maximalism, if there is any such thing… huge, epic song monsters, and 100s of tracks. I still love that approach but it felt like we had already achieved everything that could be achieved in that realm. I was looking for new challenges, and the last song off Precambrian, a track called “Cryogenian” that consisted only of piano, cello and viola, already hinted in that direction. The addition of Loic all of a sudden made everything possible. There are no limits anymore.
Staps: Blistering.com: Surely the song(s) that will garner the most interest are “Ptolemy Was Wrong” and “Epiphany.” What were your thoughts when they were completed?
Staps:I was immensely satisfied, because it is something I had never done before. It was a great challenge for me to write songs with limited means… for the fewer means you allow yourself to use, the better the individual musical ideas have to be in order for the song to be convincing. When you have 20 string tracks in the back and 10 different guitars and a polyrhythmic beat, then maybe the vocal line isn’t all too important anymore. But when you just have a vocal line and a few piano chords, those chords and this line better be amazing!Tracks like “Epiphany” or “Ptolemy Was Wrong” pose an entirely different challenge, as compared to our older material. I was quite excited when I had written them, but in their initial raw stage it was hard to imagine what they would actually sound like in their finished version. We reworked them a lot in the studio with the classical players that recorded them, and once everything was taking shape I was exhilarated.
Blistering.com: What can we expect with Anthropocentric? Heavier? More epic?
Staps:It will be a bit heavier maybe, a bit more technical as well…but anyone expecting us to do another Aeolian, don’t buy the album, because we won’t do anything twice!
Blistering.com: The storyline regarding questioning religion/Christianity is nothing new, so how did you go about compiling the lyrics and making them relatable?
Staps:Trashing Christianity is indeed a true metal hobby. The typical approach is upside-down crosses and Satanic symbols, but that’s not what Heliocentric is about. We are not trying to offend anyone, but we are not afraid of voicing our opinion either. This is not a battle-metal album. We are expressing our opinions on this topic, but we are not “at war” with Christianity, but rather in an intellectual dispute.
I do believe that Christianity is probably the last great evil of mankind which eventually will be overcome by man’s “egress from its self-inflicted immaturity,” as Kant called it. This process still lingers on, and my point is that in contrary to common thinking, we are still in the historical period of enlightenment until the day that Christianity will be defeated.
The fact that Christianity has not yet been overcome by cultures which in every other respect are grounded on trust in the rational mind is fascinating. Islamic cultures, for example, have not been transformed by the process of enlightenment as occidental Christian cultures. Our societies have witnessed the rise and the impact of modern natural science. The sets of values and ideologies brought forth by the process of enlightenment dominate our daily thinking and are the foundations of our societies, yet at the same time we still uphold the superstitions that in no way are conformable with the findings of modern science. Because of the prevailing historical influence and power of the church, our culture
is based on the peaceful coexistence of preclusive sets of values. It’s time to break this cycle of incoherence, and Heliocentric is our contribution: a reminder of Charles Darwin’s legacy.