Vex has been around for a while now, since 1999 or so, yet the band seemed to only really get going with Memorious in 2013, which is a brilliant but under the radar release. Why the slow burn?

It’s a good question, and thank you for the compliment on ‘Memorious.’ The short version is that, when the band began to be mainly based in the Austin and surrounding area, around 2003, we dealt with a few lineup changes, were negotiating with several different labels, and Ciaran was in grad school. We also had recorded a version of Thanatopsis, our first full-length, but were unhappy with our performances and the results, so we basically started over from scratch and recorded everything over again, which obviously dragged out the timeline for getting it released. We also sort of partied a lot back then, which never really helps, haha.  

Luckily since then our lineup and label situations have been more stable, so we have been able to put out records more consistently. So, from 2000 to 2010, we only put out a handful of demos and EPs, but since then we have put out three full-lengths.   

Horror Pain Gore Death seemed like an odd fit for your style even back on Memorious, but now you are on Bindrune/Eiwaz… is that the most perfect for your sound or what?

Our relationship with HPGD and our relationship with Bindrune/Eihwaz have both been hugely beneficial to us. In both cases, the people who ran the labels came onto our radar and believed in what we are doing enough to invest in getting the word out on our music. Both labels really stepped up our visibility in the extreme metal community and allowed us to do things like tour nationally with Agalloch, which likely would never have been possible without the gain in visibility we got from signing with a label.

We are perfectly content with what have at the moment. We have approached a few of the big underground metal labels; I won’t name any names. The answer we consistently get is that the music is great but it is not the kind of metal sound that is selling right now. You can’t blame them—they are businesses and they are accountable to much bigger businesses who own them. Being on a smaller, independent label obviously presents constraints in terms of distribution and promotion, but a big advantage is that we don’t have to worry about being pressured to sound like metal bands that are selling right now. That’s a great fit for a band like us that’s never really been interested in sounding like other bands.    

Your debut album came out in 2010, Memorious in 2013, and your latest, Sky Exile in 2016. Is the three year gap between albums intentional or something that just happened?

Well it’s weird, we never really noticed that three-year pattern until this record was released and some reviews and interviewers pointed it out to us. It’s just a strange coincidence.

In the case of ‘Sky Exile,’ a big part of the reason it took so long is that we knew this album would represent a pretty dramatic shift in our sound. There are stylistic elements that we only began to slightly hint at on ‘Memorious’ that we are really fully embracing on this record, and there are completely new stylistic elements as well. So we obsessed over every little detail of these songs from the first demo sessions to the final masters. It was really important to us that, if we are going to make such a bold, specific musical statement, we weren’t going to just coast on the weirdness of the songs and not worry about if they were actually written well or not. Experimentation in music is great, but experimentation just for experimentation’s sake often results in very boring music. The songs still have to be good, however weird they might get.

The other reason is more practical. We are not full-time musicians; we have jobs and relationships and many other musical projects, so we had to just fit in the studio time whenever we could—on weekends and after work and in between other gigs. That draws out the production process in a way that I think a lot of people don’t realize.

I have been reviewing albums for 16 years, and Sky Exile is one of the rare albums I had a hard time categorizing into a style or sound, care to describe your sound and influences for us?

Well, I certainly take that as a compliment. I think that need not to sound like any other band is something that has always been a part of the DNA of the band. I mean I think of some of my personal all-time favorite albums, something like Porcupine Tree’s ‘Fear of a Blank Planet,’ and stylistically it’s got a little bit of everything—it’s prog metal fused with electronic music fused with pop ballads fused with psychedelic space rock, but all somehow cohesive. I think that’s a great place to be as an artist. There’s of course nothing wrong with loving one specific genre and writing a bunch of music to celebrate that specific genre. Lots of musicians do that and produce great music out of it. But we’ve always been the kind of musicians who bristle at anything that seems even a little bit derivative. I mean, why write a bunch of Opeth riffs when the world already has an Opeth?

So to answer your question—and I have to say this feels like something that has become rather cliché for musicians to say—our influences are really all over the map as a result of that. The extreme metal center of what we do is heavily influenced by bands such as Edge of Sanity, Dissection, October Tide, and a lot of the great death metal bands of the late 90s and early 2000s. But as is probably clear from listening to the record, we draw in influences from a lot of things outside of the metal idiom as well—60s jazz, 70s jazz fusion, 60s and 70s prog rock, grunge bands, etc.   

I don’t suppose you have ever heard of an obscure little band called Cales? A Root side project. When I heard the opening riff to “To Anacreon (Strangling the Muse)”, it totally reminded me of them.

I haven’t! I’ll have to check them out. It’s always fascinating to me hearing what music people compare our stuff to. Interestingly, the opening riff of ‘To Anacreon’ was originally inspired by the Yes song ‘Close to the Edge.’  

Is there any significance to the song August 11th? I read the lyrics but cant really discern anything, beyond something bad happening?

Well, the lyrical narrative of the album as a whole was inspired by the drought of 2011 here in Texas. People in Texas are no strangers to hot weather, but there was something especially torturous about that summer. It wasn’t just that it was hot as balls; people we know got sick, died, lost their jobs, relationships fell apart. The world just piled it on to everyone that summer. It really felt like the end times, in a lot of ways that go way beyond how hot it was.

So Ciaran wrote the lyrics based on this idea of a yearning for escape from that drought and all the hell that it brought on. That’s the narrative that frames the lyrics on the entire album. As far as ‘August 11^th‘specifically, I couldn’t really say as I didn’t write the lyrics and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent the intention. Sorry I can’t answer the question more directly. I stick to drum parts so lyrics are a little out of my scope! 

Are there central themes throughout all of Vex’s albums are do they very between albums?

There are, but they are very general. The lyrics on all of our songs tend to explore themes of memory and history, the passage of time, mythology, civilization, metaphysics, loss. The concept of death, the Thanatos, is at the core of the extreme metal gestalt and iconography, so that naturally plays a major role in our lyrical themes as well.

These themes are explored through more concrete narratives on each of the albums. The narratives are diverse, but the themes that run inside of them tend to be rather consistent from album to album.

How much have you and the band changed since 2010s Thanatopsis?

I perceive that we have changed a great deal, but I suppose it’s ultimately for other people to decide whether we really have or not. When I listen to Thanatopsis, and even Memorious to a lesser degree, I hear a very ambitious band that has not yet learned to be comfortable expressing those ambitions.

I think the trajectory that a lot of bands track, at least ones that have been around as long as we have, is that you start out by simply mimicking all of your biggest influences in rather obvious ways. We were really bad about that in our pre-Thanatopsis days—“here’s our In Flames song,” “now here’s our Morbid Angel song,” etc. But over time, you learn to fuse those influences with things that genuinely come from your own personality and your own headspace. And that becomes the work of creating a distinct sound—figuring out ways to still celebrate your influences but to ultimately make your music an expression of those unique concepts that flow spontaneously from within. 

Musicians talk about this a lot, because I think individual musicians develop along the same trajectory. Part of it is you have to have chops, part of it is that you have to listen to a lot of heavy players and absorb what you can from them. But you don’t really get to the next level until you learn to emote on your instrument. And that part of it has to come from you and you alone. That’s how you begin to play things that will give people an emotional reaction rather than just playing a bunch of flashy shit.

The really interesting thing is that that work never really stops. There is no end goal, no point where you get to just sit back and say, “we did it—no more tinkering cause that’s our sound now forever.” Usually with us, barely a week after we put out a record we are already thinking of things we want to do differently on the next record. We still have a lot to learn.

You guys seem a bit out of place in the Texas metal scene. Any thoughts of relocating?

We’ve never really thought about it. Texas has been great to us so I guess we’ve never really had a reason to consider leaving. The metal scene in particular in Texas right now is really exciting with so many bands doing really interesting things—Oceans of Slumber, Id, Divine Eve, Solitude Aeternus, Absu. It’s very inspiring being around all these bands that are doing such innovative things, and for the most part the Austin metal scene is a great community of musicians that support each other in lots of ways.

What’s next for Vex? Hopefully not another 3 year wait?

Well, we’re focusing on promoting Sky Exile in the near term. We’re doing a short run of regional Texas shows to promote the new record and they have been great so far. We also have a management deal in Europe and are shopping for a deal to sell and promote the album over there. We hope to tour, either here or in Europe, but nothing has yet come along that would really make sense for us at this point.

We’ve started rough demos for the next album as well, so hopefully this time we will break the ‘three-years-between-albums’ cycle!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vex-official/149190691803216

Vex’s style is hard to sum up. At its heart its a sort of soaring, melodic, proggy, death/black metal. Structurally, it’s not unlike bands like early Opeth, Agalloch, The Living Fields or Wayfarer,  and one could feasibly hear former label mates Nechochwen and  Obsequiae in the tangled but majestic, naturalistic riffs, and that’s only a very loose comparison, as Vex are a shifty, skillful bunch that refuse to be locked into a style or category. Vocally, things are as varied as the music with big deep growls, high pitched scream and some solid clean croons and a nice robust production that’s big, earthy and jangly yet clear. And it all comes together perfectly.

After an intro, the aforementioned “To Anacreon (Strangling the Muse)” gets things going, and boy is that opening riff a doozy. A big, rollicking, rolling riff to sway your luscious locks to. And it’s set between equal parts atmospheric black blasts and some heartfelt clean vocals. After another interlude, “Empyrean”, “Antiethical Age” delivers  a nice slower, saunter with more graceful  clean vocals, such a hard thing to nail in metal, but they balance perfectly with some nice deep growls amid the song’s more laid back delivery.

The nine minute “Nowhere Near” is a sumptuous, sprawling number that’s hard to digest in one sitting, but if you wait till the fall, throw on some headphones and go for a walk, I imagine, the song and its mesmerizing mid section, simply comes to life. “The Cygnus Light” is a shorter, more digestible melodic death metal track,  that’s daresay, catchy in the big scheme of things., even with its atmospheric close. The shifty, meandering “Solar Sacrament” might be the only song on the album that does not truly hold my interest, but “Dark Skies Painted” gets my attention back and realistically could have ended the album. However, we get three more songs  (“30 Miles from Here”, more stern “August 11th” and instrumental closer “Astral Burial”) that push the album close to an hours duration, and frankly they seem a bit extraneous, as  albums early brilliant tracks are hard to overcome.

Maybe influenced by the video above for the excellent “Dark Skies Painted”,when I listen to Sky Burial, I cant help but picture lush rolling fields edged with meadows and thick, vine overrun woods but with a grey sky filled with impending storms looming over head. It’s a perfect balance of warm/tranquil and foreboding, but elegant, dreamy  and beautiful all at once, and one of the more engaging albums of the year.

Vex was originally formed in San Angelo by Bill and Ciaran many years ago under the name F.U.K. Back then, it was sort of crust punk I guess you’d say, but I don’t want to completely trust my childhood memories cause I was still a kid the last time I would have heard them. The band spent years gigging in San Angelo, and gradually started to embrace more extreme metal influences right around the time I joined. We’ve been jamming with our current lineup for about two years now.

Lets talk about the weather. You’re in Texas. Where I live it hits 35’C, in your terms that would be the 90’s.

Yea that would be a normal warm day for us, a little low for the summer probably. in 2011, we had the worst drought on the state historical record–I wanna say it was over 100 days straight of 100+ degree weather. Really hellish. But the weather is getting really ugly everywhere recently, so I guess we’re no worse off than anywhere else is really.

Have you been compared to Amon Amarth much?

Yes, several times. That’s a comparison I enjoy hearing, because I think Amon Amarth is a great band, but it’s one I don’t really agree with. It’s hard for me to hear other groups in Vex’s music, but I know we’ve all spent a lot of time with Amon Amarth records so I’m sure that influence makes its way into the sound whether we intend it to or not.

I kinda hate when that happens, but I get sent a lot of stuff to listen to, and majority of the time the bands end up ‘sounding like’. Depending on frame of reference most people will compare. But in the case of Memorious, the approach to arrangement would be the only similarity to Amon Amarth.

Yea, I see what you mean in terms of the arrangements. I don’t mean to sound like I have a problem with people comparing us to Amon Amarth; I certainly don’t. In fact, I think it’s a pretty generous comparison. It’s just that it was never a conscious thing on our part–we never sat down and said “let’s make our arrangements kind of like Amon Amarth for this record.” But we’ve all been fans of Amon Amarth at one time or another, so their music certainly informs what we do whether we’re aware of it or not. And it’s fascinating to me to hear that kind of thing from other people–hearing about the music Vex reminds people of, hearing what bands they compare us to. As you say, everyone has a different frame of reference.

Well, I hear a bit of a Ghaal era Gorgoroth atmosphere in there as well. And both take their names from LOTR.

Yea, I guess it’s sort of the same thing with Gorgoroth. I know we used to listen to ‘Destroyer’ and ‘Incipit Satan’ a lot back in the day. But in terms of directly influencing the song arrangements and atmosphere, I think these days we probably take a lot more influence from weirder, kind of non-metal influences. Ciaran is always talking about taking songwriting and arrangement ideas from Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland,’ or Thin Lizzy or Weather Report–not in the sense of writing music that sounds like these bands but in terms of using their techniques for building tension in the music and structuring songs.

I so passionately dislike that Graceland album. I’m in South Africa, we had that album rammed down our throats because ‘Ladysmith Black Mambaso’ sang on the title track, like they invented acappella choir music or something, and it was mostly produced here. But then I grew up listening to Simon and Garfunkel.

Haha–yea I see what you mean. I guess it was different for Western audiences who felt that that music was so exotic, but it’s interesting to hear your perspective on it. Actually the other night I saw a documentary on TV about the political controversy in South Africa that followed the release of that album–that some members of the ANC felt that Simon’s going to South Africa and working with South African musicians was a violation of the UN cultural boycott.

It helped create a lot of awareness in the outside world. In the 70/80’s, South Africans traveling overseas were shocked at what was in the news about their own country, because we were kept in the dark at the time. But screw that, people should be able to express their creativity regardless of politics.

Absolutely. That was ultimately Simon’s argument in the documentary–that it’s not the role of musicians to be enlisted in political conflicts on behalf of one side or the other. He had found a group of musicians that he loved and wanted to work with, and celebrating that collaboration was above all of the petty political conflicts. That’s a viewpoint I’m inclined to agree with. In ,en though we all follow politics and have strong opinions, as a band we end up being more or less apolitical. To me, making music is so much more important that whatever petty political conflicts dominate this age or the next age or whatever else.

Would you feel obliged to deliver to the expectations of the fans?

Not in particular. I often find it kind of strange when bands put pressure on themselves to deliver music that their fans will expect or that they will find palatable, like when you hear a band say something like, “we finished our new album but it’s not what our fans expect or deserve, so we’re gonna scrap it and write something else.” I think that’s kind of a cop out in a way, because people expect of musicians that we will deliver an artistic experience that will give them an emotional reaction. The only way you can really give that to people is by expressing yourself honestly and genuinely–not by trying to tweak your music according to what you think your fans may like or dislike. It would be disingenuous of us to go out and make a typical grindcore record or a typical black metal record or whatever else, because that would mean ignoring all of our other influences outside of metal. So instead we just present our ideas in all of their weirdness and people can either take it or leave it. That’s true of any artistic medium, I think. A genius chef isn’t going to sit around and only cook food that she thinks her demographic won’t be too weirded out by. She’s going to put her whole personality into it so that it’s a complete and honest statement of her personality and her passion.

Do you feel you have enough freedom to experiment or is extreme metal a restraint?

I think as a style extreme metal provides excellent opportunities for musicians and bands to be experimental and unorthodox. It’s such an enormously diverse genre. I mean when you consider that Katatonia, Marduk, Dying Fetus, My Dying Bride and Cynic could all be considered as belonging to the metal idiom. I mean I think jazz is really the only style that’s as expansive and diverse as metal. That means that bands like us have a lot more space to get weird and explore some of our musical eccentricities without losing the emotional intensity and the immediacy that makes metal music what it is. That’s one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about playing in Vex. As a rule, we try to never put any constraints on ourselves stylistically. If a part feels right and doesn’t sound like shit then that part belongs in the song, no matter how metal or un-metal it might seem.

You did your first east coast tour toward the end of 2012:Which band member got fall off the stage drunk?

We were all pretty hammered in Knoxville. It was a small venue built onto someone’s house. The owners were completely accommodating and great; they promoted the hell out of the show but the weather turned shitty and there was another metal show across town so we ended up playing to three people and a dog. We had gotten into town so early in the day that we just picked up a case of the cheapest beer we could find and made a night out of it. I wanna say we ended up playing ok, but we were shit faced so who knows.

Who missed the bus/van?

Well the morning we left, we all piled into the van but didn’t do a headcount until we were already out of town. So we left behind our singer Joe and he had the whole house to himself. See, the night before he had gotten into a fight with his oldest brother Buzz so we sent him to his room–that’s why nobody saw him when we left. He tried after shave for the first time, but it hurt really bad. Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci tried to break into the house but he used his Talkboy and a bunch of contraptions and booby traps to stop them. In the end, we all reunited for Christmas. It was beautiful.

Who left their clothes behind?

As far as I know nobody, but Ciaran left a duffle bag with a bunch of stuff at our last gig in Charlotte. So if anybody finds a bag loaded with guitar gear, Irish literature and red hairs they should mail it back to us.

Do you practice the art of ‘pee bottle’. I understand Gatorade bottles are the best.

Actually I’m glad to say we never had to resort to this. Which is good, because we were all generating enough stench on our own so I can only imagine how the van would have smelled had we been pissing into bottles.

Moving on. For the next album I’d like to order more clean vocals please.

I think that’s likely to happen. We were cautious about using clean vocals for a long time, because I think it’s very hard to use clean vocals in metal in a way that doesn’t sound cornball and that hasn’t been done before. But Bill and Mike both have backgrounds in choir, and Joe has been developing his clean voice a lot, so we decided to kind of dip our toe in the water with some clean layers on a couple of tracks. We were really happy with the way they turned out, so I think we’re most likely going to explore that a lot more on the new record.

My only criticism of the new album is it’s a bit of a headphone mix.

Interesting. Do you just mean it sounds better through headphones than through speakers? I wouldn’t agree personally, but again it’s always interesting and instructive to me to hear other people’s reactions to our music and production and mixes and everything else. Overall, we wanted a mix that was kind of dirty–something that would stand apart from the super-compressed, over-produced, polished  sound that you hear on a lot of metal mixes these days. We wanted something a little more gritty and organic, like ‘Heartwork’ or ‘Blackwater Park.’

It does have a nice raw almost grinding sound when it’s rolling, and I especially like how the bass and drums sit in the mix, almost enhancing each other, but the vocals sit in a bit of an odd place that is typical of a headphone mix.

Thanks. Locking in the rhythm section was something we really wanted to focus on for this record, and I’m really happy with the way the bass and drums turned out. As far as the vocals, our guitarist Mike did pretty much all the mixing. I just did some engineering here and there, so I probably wouldn’t be the best person to talk to about the vocal mixing.

I did an interview with another band from Texas where I mentioned the ‘Bible Belt’, which resulted in a rant from the guy I questioned.

Yea, religion is a huge part of the culture here. It is what it is–religion and the political influence that it has causes a lot of problems, but of course it isn’t anything like the kind of power that religious groups have in places like Israel or Saudi Arabia. Parts of Texas (particularly San Angelo, where Vex first started) tend to be extremely religious and orthodox. That certainly had an effect on me growing up, and I would guess it did for everyone else in the band too. I remember in junior high when I was first starting to question religious doctrine, feeling pressure from my friends in school not to admit that I didn’t believe in God or go to church. But I was lucky to be raised in a family that didn’t push any sort of religion onto me or my brother, so it was easier for me than it was for a lot of people. Of course Texas is also a big state; it’s a lot more complex and diverse than people outside of Texas sometimes think. For instance most of us live in Austin now, which is a lot more liberal and less religiously conservative than other parts of Texas.

What is the current plan with the album, I see you’re releasing it via Horror Pain Gore Death Productions.

A: Yes. Our relationship with HPGD over the years has been great. They’re a small outfit, but they really bust ass for their bands and every experience we have had with them has been great. They released our first full-length album ‘Thanatopsis’ and a vinyl split we did with Divine Eve a few years ago. So it was an easy decision to go with them again for the release of Memorious. As far as plans, the album will be officially released on February 5th. People will be able to order hard copies from HPGD’s website and digital or hard copies from our Bandcamp site, which we are in the process of putting up right now. So in the short term, we are focusing on promoting the album and playing a few gigs around Texas to help promote the release. Hopefully we will be doing another tour this summer but that is still up in the air. In the meantime, we have just started demoing some new songs for the follow up to Memorious.

Where do we go to keep up to date with the future plans for Vex?

The best place right now is our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/vexhomepage. Or you can become an official Vex Loser by following us on Twitter: @VexLosers

We’re currently in a bull market, and the commodity of choice is metal, more specifically Vex’s new album Memorious. Release date set for February 5. Order your copy here.
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