#maybe hes a switch ...... things il be thinking about while i fall asleep tonight but power bottom is winning the electoral vote

[xxplastic-cubexx]

As much as I am a top Charles truther, Krakoa Charles is a bottom. A power bottom at most. That guy gets Obliterated in bed

(. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)

[doomedandstoned]

The Great, Big

MONOLORD

Interview

~Words & Photos by Angelique Le Marchand~

This afternoon, I am catching up with Gothenburg’s finest doom import MONOLORD at the iconic Royal Albert Hall for an interview, just before they take on the stage. They will be opening for Black Label Society, concluding a European tour of twenty-one dates with the Californian metal legends. I arrive at 5pm, taking time to admire the stunning dome-shaped Victorian concert hall, exquisitely decorated by an opulent mosaic frieze. Inaugurated by Her Majesty Queen Victoria in 1871, the 5000-capacity concert hall is a true iconic London venue and a special treat for any concertgoer. The fact that tonight Royal Albert Hall is indulging in a doom and heavy metal program is very unusual, as it is normally known for its opera and classical music concerts.

I walk past a respectable number of hirsute gentlemen dressed in bikers’ leathers and denim sleeveless jackets covered in BLS patches, who are already lining up hours before the show to get in front of the stage -- a surreal slighting outside this opulent Victorian building. I make my way to the stage door where I am greeted attentively by an older gentleman in a Dickensian 3-piece suit who fits comme-il-faut in the plush Victorian reception area and I am quickly granted access. Drummer Esben Willems arrives to our interview suite first, followed by bassist Mika Häkki and vocalist and guitarist Thomas V. Jäger. Monolord immediately come across as a very warm bunch with gentle manners, too, as each courteously knocks on the door before entering the room.

We promptly break the ice by discussing our love of coffee. As coffee connoisseur myself, I am curious to find out how they cater to what, for me, are essential needs while temporarily living on a tour bus. I express relief as Thomas tells me that they have a proper coffee machine on their current sleeper. The band recall with good humour having to power-up solely on a disappointing light-brown substance served in gas stations on their recent tour in the States. "I don’t know what it is," says Mika. "It looks brewed, but it tastes like something completely different." "It’s not coffee," adds Esben. "It’s hot and it’s light brown, that’s it. It tastes horrible!" Following along with the topic of bare essentials on tour, I am curious to hear what Monolord have on their rider, if they have a rider at all, and keen to find out if they have any strange items that could somehow get us to know them a little better. My curiosity is instantly met with a witty comeback.

Thomas: "We don’t have such strange things; we have a framed photo of Bill Ward."

Mika, protesting: "But that’s not strange!"

Thomas: "No, but that is to others."

Mika: "Ah! To others. Ok then, I got ya."

Doomed & Stoned: "Some people have fresh socks!"

Esben: "We should have fresh socks. People have told us this. We should learn to have that."

Thomas: "But we might not get the framed photo of Bill Ward. And the expresso."

Esben: "That’s right! So we have to choose."

Mika, laughing: "We have to prioritise!"

Esben: "Bill Ward over socks."

Road Stories

Monolord are a band that spends a lot of time on the road, touring extensively since the release of their first album Empress Rising in 2014, with the past twelve months being particularly frenetic. While all three members of the band agree on missing their home life, Mika explains he is also missing his two dogs left in the caring hands of his wife, while Esben expresses being apart from his 3 year-old little boy is the roughest part. Living on a tour bus for such extended periods of time can take its toll on your body as it’s near impossible to get uninterrupted sleep between two dates due to bumpy rides constantly waking you up as soon as you manage to drift off. Thomas recalls driving through Northern France to get to London being a particularly rough one, while Esben compares crossing through parts of Poland to "driving through cornfields." "It’s like all the roads around Berlin. You know when you’re arriving in Berlin, because it’s jumping all the over the place," Mika recalls. Thomas adds that you might just finally manage to fall asleep when the bus stops, in which case you may have arrived at the next destination. "But then it’s time to go up and eat breakfast, so you can’t sleep anyway. So, you have to choose between eating or more sleep." In light of the fact that Monolord have been on the road for nearly a month now, it is understandable that sleeping would come up so high amongst home comforts the band are missing the most. "So that’s why we need Bill Ward," laughs Esben.

Monolord recall their tour Down Under with Ufomammut in 2016, which is amongst their favourite. Monolord and Ufomammut met in New Zealand, immediately hit it off and very quickly decided to go organize a short co-headlining tour. "They were super sweet, really nice guys to tour with," remembers Esben. "We met them on a few other tours when we crossed their paths in Europe after that. It was really good!" Mika finds it hard to pick his favourite tour or show, as on every one of them, something he will never forget happens. Amongst his personal highlights are their first tour in the States, playing at London’s Koko in May 2016, and their show at the iconic Gramercy Theater in New York, which was a particularly unbelievable experience, in his opinion. Esben recalls viewing the footage on YouTube since. "I just remember the feeling whilst getting to the US for the first time, the first show -- and the first show was there. It’s a great feeling watching that," he says. "I haven’t actually seen that!" Mika pipes up, surprised, "I’ll have to look it up!" "You haven’t?" Esben replies. "It’s great! It’s all grainy and it looks like it’s 1991!"

Aside from being an important milestone in Monolord’s touring career, the show at the Gramercy Theater also sounds like a rather hectic experience. "We were dead when we got there," remembers Mika. "We had the whole long process of applying for the visas and got them early morning on Tuesday. Early morning on Wednesday, we flew to New York. We landed at 2pm and at 4pm we had to be at the venue." "For sound check," adds Thomas, "and then we were the first of three bands, so I think we played at seven. I don’t think we had any time to even eat. Then we played the set and met a lot of people, as we were selling merch ourselves. I think at the end of the night, everyone bought us drinks and so we were just standing there like bluuuuhhhhh," concludes Thomas, miming being completely zombified. Monolord only recall finding themselves in a nightmare situation once on stage, with Mika’s bass amp breaking down halfway through their first song at a festival in Portugal. While Esben and Thomas continued jamming, it felt like an incredibly long ten minutes for Mika, with nothing at all coming out of his amp, despite trying to switch bass to no avail, and while the sound engineers couldn’t figure out what was broken.

So what do Monolord listen to on this tour bus that has temporarily become their second home? What kind of music is going to lift them up when they battle the effects of sleep-deprivation and get them onto those stages, sparky and refreshed night after night? Monolord do not do tour bus playlists, as they don’t tend to listen to music in that way, although Thomas says that they will occasionally play some slow, mellow acoustic songs. They are, however, very serious about their equipment load-out routine. "We’ve got a load-out playlist," declares Thomas, dead serious in a soft-spoken voice. "That’s George Michael and Gerry Rafferty. Just two songs, going over and over again to make load-out easier." Mika interjects, "Because everybody loves saxophones," giving the statement about "Careless Whisper" and "Baker Street" a little more substance.

The band had no hesitations when Black Label Society contacted them regarding opening for them on the European leg of their tour. "We thought about it for about one minute and said yes," Thomas remembers, "or maybe two minutes, but we didn’t wait that long!" he laughs. "I only heard half of the question!" adds Mika, "and I already made up my mind!" I speak about the BLS fans I spotted already queuing up outside the venue upon my early arrival. "When they open the doors, there’s like fifty people running to the front of the stage, and that’s where they will stand the entire evening," says Mika. "Every day!" supplements Esben. As a Monolord fan, I find it inconceivable that some of the people attending the dates on this tour would merely stand at the front to wait for BLS to come on stage and let Monolord’s set wash over them, and I’m surprised to hear that this can be the case. I’m curious about the reception from BLS fans that might possibly be hearing Monolord for the first time, and whether or not they are a tough crowd to win over. "For some, I think it’s way too far away from BLS. They’re just, I love BLS, this is my stuff, I really don’t like this at all," observes Esben candidly. "But also, every night there’s somebody emailing us and saying, Oh, I’d never heard about you, you guys are awesome! which is great," Mika adds.

Monolord have a very tight thirty-five minute slot on this tour. We laugh at the thought that all the band need is to play a couple of their longer songs, such as "Empress Rising" and "Forgotten Lands," and that could be their set pretty much over. "We have a well-oiled machinery to be on time every night, so we can’t change it up much, we go with the same songs," says Thomas. "All it takes is a malfunction of something like a cable, or whatever, and we have to shorten some parts of some songs." Both "Empress Rising" and "Rust" seem to provoke a particularly strong reaction in the audience during the shows. "The first time we played in France on our last tour -- our headlining tour, people were singing a lot on 'Rust'," explains Mika. We realised, What’s going on?!" "Rust" has a very catchy melody, coupled with horror-fueled lyrics -- an interesting contrast that might be the reason why it seems to grab the band’s followers so strongly, despite being a relatively new piece within their discography.

In The Beginning

The band chose their name after meeting Christer Ström of Mammoth Storm. He damaged his hearing in one ear, which sparked discussions about him being only able to hear in mono. As he plays in a prominent band in the scene, this earned him the nickname of "Monolord." The name stuck, and the Gothenburg trio adopted it for what was initially a side project. Very quickly, the venture progressed to becoming Monolord as we know it. "The side project was when we had kind of a break from the band it was a side project from," Esben says, explaining that both he and Thomas more or less only worked on the new venture once they felt they needed to play their new material. "So Mika came on board and we just felt right, almost immediately," continues Esben. "When we started to work on it, that was it!" Mika agrees. As Monolord covered "Fairies Wear Boots" by Black Sabbath, I ask them if they feel that being compared to the legendary band started with this release. "I think that all bands in this genre are compared to Black Sabbath," Esben remarks. "Sooner or later!" adds Thomas. Esben suggests that any interview with the band would usually come with a customary, "What’s your favourite Black Sabbath album?" We do agree that being compared to Black Sabbath is hugely complimentary, nonetheless.

The release of Monolord’s new album Rust was met with considerable critical acclaim and viewed to be their best offering yet, both amongst fans and the press. I’m interested in finding out what the most complimentary milestones have been for the band since the album came out. "There’s been a lot of reviews and kind words, and it’s always good to hear. Someone that gives your record a really good listen and can make note of small things, that maybe I’m the only one hearing, this small piece here," says Thomas. "When people notice those small things, I think it’s great! It’s like the record is well-produced and well-arranged. It’s really great to hear." Esben evokes a particular review of Rust by a writer who had followed the band from the beginning and had given complimentary reviews of all their previous works. "He really didn’t think that anything could top the previous ones, but he thinks that Rust did. That made me really happy. It was beautiful reading it."

The fact that Monolord released Rust only seventeen months after their previous full-length album Vænir and thirteen after the release of single "Lord of Suffering" and "Die in Haze" is hugely impressive, considering they have spent a colossal amount of time on the road, and I enquire on how they have found the time to work on their new material. "We rehearse quite a lot between tours," Mika tells me, "so we always bring out some new stuff and we always have some stuff that we didn’t finish, so we continue working after the next tour. The work never stops." "I think we had some ideas and riffs that we didn’t feel we had time to arrange for the record before this one," adds Thomas, "so, some parts of that we can bring in again and some of it is just new stuff. We try to, even when we’re rehearsing for a tour, throw in a new song to feel it. And maybe in six months' time on some of the tour, we might place some new material live to see how that feels before we record next time."

RUST by Monolord

A good picture is worthy of a thousand words, goes the common adage. This certainly proves to be the case when it comes to the photograph selected for the art-sleeve of Rust. As a photographer, I found it not only stunning, but I became fascinated by the story behind it. It depicts two cars planted vertically into the ground to prevent helicopters landing, in an undisclosed and troubled region somewhere the Middle East. While I was conducting my research, I was unable to track down the artist or any other photographs of helicopter traps in that region, despite being thorough and trying my luck with different and lesser-known internet search engines. Interestingly, this subject proved to be neither very accessible nor well documented -- possibly too sensitive or too disturbing a symbolic representation of our times.

The photograph fits ridiculously well with the themes running through the album: horror, destruction, war, misanthropy, and the ingenuity of humanity when it comes to obliterating its own kind. Esben tells me that the photographer is Arash Naghizadeh. He follows him on Instagram, and so do Monolord as a band. Esben kindly promises to send me a link to the photographer’s social feed. Both Thomas and I agree that it almost looks like it’s staged, although remarkably, it is not. "Our label guy suggested this to us. He had found the picture and we learnt about the history and the setting of it. It’s a beautiful photo of something really horrible," says Esben, encouraging me to look at Arash Naghizadeh’s portrait work, which he finds breathtaking, in addition to his documentary work. Mika chimes in that the band did find other photographs of this particular helicopter trap, but this one stood out as the most striking amongst them.

Monolord’s writing process has been largely documented over the years in interviews with the band, so I simply ask them how they feel they have progressed since writing Empress Rising. "Have we?" jokes Esben. He notes that it takes some time to find a band’s identity and become a unit. The process doesn’t happen overnight. "And we have toured a lot since then, spent a lot of time together on stages and in the studio," he comments further. "A lot happens in that process." "Empress Rising was more or less just when we started the recordings," says Thomas. "It was just me and Esben, and we recorded the album without goals. We just recorded the songs because we thought they were good songs and recorded some guitars and some drums. Then Mika came in and put on the bass, and then we felt like, Wow! This is something we need to focus on! But we became more of a band afterwards." Mika feels Empress Rising is quite raw. Thomas agrees, reflecting on how the raw feel of the piece may owe to the guitars and drums being recorded at the same time. "I think we got better at songwriting and also recording. We recorded ourselves, mixing and mastering it, so I think we’ve been getting better at everything as a whole process."

Monolord are planning to continue recording and mastering future works themselves, although they do not rule out potential collaborations with producers outside of the Monolord family. "I guess we just started that way and continued that way," says Esben. "It’s not been that we have to do things always this way and that this is the formulae, so let’s see what happens." Mika feels that being able to control all levels of what’s on the table by keeping production in house is a big advantage for the band, but he also sees the positive side of getting an external viewpoint thrown into the recording process. Regarding future works, the band is happy to allow a natural and organic progression, rather than considering aiming at specific directions. "It’s usually organic," affirms Esben. "We don’t make the decision that now we’re going to do this in a specific way, we just work with the material we have and that guides us. Cheesy as it sounds, it’s hard to force something into a frame. I think it doesn’t make sense." Mika concludes that there has to be passion involved and a clear sense of direction for all three of them, in order for their pieces to work.

Slaying In The Algorithm Dystopia

We are part of a modern ecosystem hostile to alternative culture. Streaming services and online file sharing have caused album sales to plummet. As a result, labels, promoters, bands, and pretty much anyone involved in the music industry is having to rethink how to distribute their meagre resources. As social media advertising reaches out to more music fans, it is favoured to the detriment of our music press, which is already under threat due to depressing circulation figures. In other words, the music industry has become codependent on the algorithm, but the algorithm is popular culture’s best friend -- and hostile to alternative culture. Throw into this head-spinner of a mix the slaying of our music venues, usually in favour of real-estate development (35% of music venues have disappeared in the UK in the past ten years), and you have to come to the conclusion that perduring as an underground band has become no short of a miracle. As Monolord are a relatively fresh band, and are achieving just that, I’m eager to find out not only how on earth they survive, but thrive.

Film by Billy Goate of Doomed & Stoned

The relationship between Monolord and social media is very positive, which is refreshing considering the current concerns regarding social media working against cultural undercurrents. Over the years, social media has enabled the band to reach out to a consistently growing audience. "I think social media is the biggest reason we’ve had this success at all, through Instagram and Facebook. I mean, it’s our biggest platform of all," Esben observes. Monolord have a very deep connection with their fans and are very enthusiastic about social media giving them the opportunity to interact with them. "We try to respond to everything," says Thomas. "Some nights, people send us pictures from during gigs, such as Instagram stories. They tag us and send us videos. Some nights there is pretty much a lot to go through, but if you take your time to just say thank you, I think it means a lot to them." "And it means a lot to us!" Esben adds. "It’s great. It’s a way to get a Thank you, it was a great show. Thank you! Glad to hear it, always! That’s why we do this, that’s why we get on stage." The band also welcome fans using their phones at gigs and we discuss how important it is for music fans to take personal memories of shows away with them. Mika recalls an amusing anecdote of someone standing in front of him at a Black Angels concert in Berlin with a laptop at arm’s length, recording the entire gig until he was asked to move, only to trouble somebody else who was too shy to complain. We do, however, agree that things are changing and most people have a better awareness of using their electronics in a more tasteful manner these days.

With their growing success, Monolord increasingly find themselves in a position where they are solicited to support new bands starting out. They are usually contacted via social media or by email for advice and asked for their impressions on those fresh bands’ new material. "It’s so easy to send material to everyone on the internet," Thomas observes. "We sometimes receive iPhone recordings of a young band that want us to listen to their music," adding that demos recorded that way are sometimes of poor quality, which impacts opinions on whether or not the songs actually could work. The conversation takes an unexpected turn, and I feel for those guys upon hearing that some of the bands contacting them can be a little pushy in their communications, as Esben explains. "They contact us and they expect us to do a lot of things, like sending us an email and expecting us to land a contract with our label and getting really angry if we don’t." It must a little tricky to find the right balance between being willing to show support and being able to take a step back in those cases where you do not feel passionate about the material received in that way. "That’s the base of the music business: contacts," Esben feels. "Always." As much as he listens to a lot of music and will gladly give new bands a play, humility and honesty are important to him.

Regarding my concerns about music venues closing down at an alarming rate, Mika confirms that this is not an issue confined to London and the UK. It is also affecting the music scene in Sweden indeed. He tells me the fascinating story of Truckstop Alaska, a great venue in Gothenburg currently under threat by plans to build the tallest skyscraper in the Nordic Countries within its vicinity. Truckstop Alaska is perceived by developers as an eyesore, and already rehearsal spaces for local bands situated nearby have been shut down. "It is a problem, especially for underground music for smaller venues," Mika relates. "They keep disappearing, because the city doesn’t think of them or that audience as anything they can gain from."

The story of Truckstop Alaska’s battle against an invisible enemy who simply want them out of this part of town is nothing short of the myth of David and Goliath. Truckstop Alaska is a cultural association with a very respectable fifteen years of putting on shows under their belt. Their venue has been established at its current location for ten years. Things were running smoothly until the 20th of April this year. The association had only gone ahead and booked North Carolina Stoner legends Weedeater to perform that night, when the venue was raided by the Police flanked by local authorities. With no prior warnings, they declared their bar illegal and confiscated all their beer. The situation is pretty dire for Truckstop Alaska, with uncertainties resting above their heads regarding the future of the association, together with concerns that may no longer be able to rent their premises from the landlord.

Despite coming full frontal with extreme obstacles to continuing the showcasing of bands from our scene, the Gothenburg iconic venue is soldiering on with their initial plans of putting on another show in June, even though they are no longer allowed to serve alcohol. A show that, no doubt, will now turn into a "two-fingers up" at the establishment since the events that took place at the Weedeater show. "If you come to these shows," write the members of Truckstop Alaska on their Facebook page, "Take the situation for what it is. Take care of yourselves and each other. And don’t forget to have a little bit of extremely fucking fun while you’re at it! We (as in us and you lot) are Truckstop Alaska and we are going to make these shows a part of Gothenburg’s music history worth remembering!" All hails to those guys and good luck fighting the good fight!

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