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Floridian metallers Trivium have a hectic tour schedule. As of publication, they would have already embarked on a trek through Canada with Slipknot then hopping over to Japan before touching down in Australia. Although the norm for places such as the United States and Europe, Trivium’s headlining tour comes with two other overseas bands, namely Germany’s Heaven Shall Burn and thrash metal neophytes Black Tide – a band with an average age of only seventeen. Talking with Corey Beaulieu, guitarist for the heavy metal hegemons, insists that he won’t do anything to corrupt their innocent minds while in Australia; he’s already done it for them.
“Well, we had them open a few shows for us back home a couple of years ago”, Corey reflects. “That was their first kind of mini-tour; we popped their ‘tour cherry’ in a way.
“We’ve seen them at various music awards but we haven’t toured with them since then, so they’ve come a long way since we played with them. It’ll be fun to play with them again. They’re Florida boys so it’ll be like ‘Florida reunites in Australia.’”
Despite a legion of vehement armchair-bound, Facebook toting detractors, Trivium have won over many metalheads in Australia with their latest record, Shogun, finishing with a peak ranking of #4 on the ARIA album charts; a feat that many metal bands could only dream of accomplishing. Corey says that he’s “really excited” by all the press and fan reaction to such a stellar result and their first ever Australian headlining tour.
“We’re really pumped to do a headlining tour for the record for the first time and Australia is one of the places where we’ve never done this sort of stuff before, so our fans haven’t seen the full, super-long Trivium set so its going to be fun to be able to do that because we’ve got a really killer set going too. Hopefully everyone has a chance to make it out to the show.”
Even though the set may be lengthy, Corey insists that fans may never get to hear the “sheer volume of material” in their vaults as Trivium’s well of inspiration seldom runs dry. Corey believes that the state of the music industry is changing and Trivium needs to lead the charge.
“Instead of recording 12 songs per record, we could easily go in and record something like 20 songs and then put out the record,” Corey muses. “Every three months or something or throughout the tour cycle we could put out a new song online. We could constantly feed people with new music, keep people involved.”
“We might write a record with a bunch of songs that don’t typically fit the tone of the [album]; we could put out a song that’s a little different from the record – you know, just to put out music that’s cool. We don’t [necessarily] have to put it on a record.”
“With the industry sort of suffering, you have to have a fresh approach on music and keeping people’s attention spans up.”
Will Corey weep for the decline of the humble compact disc? As a fan, yes. As a guitarist in a constantly touring metal band, seemingly not, as he revealed to me.
“When I was a kid I fuckin’ loved going down to the record store and buying new music – you know saying ‘that has a cool album cover, I’m going to buy it.’ But now out of the necessity of what I do and my traveling around, I started using iTunes. I got hooked on it; its just so easy, I click a button and I buy an album that I want. Sometimes some of the stuff I want to buy, record stores won’t even have because shelf space is declining. People can’t get the record they want unless they special order it or some shit.”
iTunes may have killed the CD star, but Beaulieu thinks that artists will get their just reward if they choose the digital route.
“It doesn’t cost a lot – well, any money to put a record up on iTunes. There are a lot of benefits to it but what you miss is the actual, physical product. But truth be told, the CD is kind of dying out. People just aren’t buying music any more and its hurting the whole business.”
Even though music is essentially being stolen via the internet, Corey doesn’t believe that Trivium will have to make their music “louder” as people move away from listening to music on their stereos with powerful speakers to iPods with the now ubiquitous tiny white earphones.
“Well, I’ve got the little earbuds that came with my iPhone, and they sound fuckin’ killer for their size.” He says, surprisingly.
“The technology that goes into what you’re listening to and to keep it at a really high quality is really advanced. It depends on what you’ve got. If you’re listening to a record via shitty equipment it’s still going to sound shitty no matter how good the production of the album was. I don’t think we should ‘dumb down’ or change ourselves sonically during recording to match what people are listening to us through.
“People should want to listen to music on high quality sound systems. It’ll just kick ass more.”
Those with the cash to splash on high-end sound kit should take note of the guitar tone on Shogun; the production into creating such an inimitable sound was meticulous to say the least.
“The reason it sounds so different is because there’s just so many angles of sound going into it,” Corey explains. “our producer [Nick Rasculinecz, also currently producing the new Alice in Chains album] knew a lot of old school tricks and would mix and match between ProTools and stuff used before then.”
“We might have been sitting there going ‘what the hell is he doing?’ when he was setting up an old studio trick from back in the day instead of using a plug-in tool or something like that. He’d actually go out and do something in the room to create the sound we wanted. He brought some different approaches to the record that we had never seen before.”
Was the band happy with the result?
“Oh yeah. We would never have been able to get some of the sounds we got without someone with the kind of experience he had. It was a lot of fun seeing him do some of the stuff he did.”
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© Tom Valcanis / Crushtor Media Services, All Rights Reserved. Posted with permission.
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