Riverside will take everything they can
Riverside is back with a brand new album, ‘Love, Fear and the Time Machine’. RockMuZine spoke with Piotr Grudziński, guitar player of the Polish band about their album, released via Inside Out Music and Mystic Production on September 4th, 2015.
There were speculations about the main idea of the album. People were saying it’s about love or it’s about hate, with topics about social situation and whatnot. Piotr doesn’t agree: “You know, love and fear actually are quite main subjects in our lives. Most of decisions we make is choosing between really difficult situations – good ones and bad ones. And the main idea of the lyrics was to put guy who has a really difficult decision to make, this decision is really difficult for him and it takes, let’s say, like an hour of the whole album to make a decision. And during that process he has, before his eyes, things from the past, which are connected with the time machine. Those two main feelings which are love and fear give birth to other things like hate or attachments and they are connected with time. So, actually, three words describe idea like that.” So, judging by that, the new album will continue to highlight some social issues of humanity, just like the previous album.
Before the release of the album, the fans have already heard two songs and seen a trailer. The trailer was quite mystic, because we could only guess whether it’s about the ‘Love that died’ or about ‘Love of deceased people’, who are no longer here, but still the memory remains. “I can only have my own impression about what artist who did the trailer thought. I think it’s simpler, because it’s about two people who are connected somehow, I don’t care if they are dead already or they have split up. In the trailer you can see only two people in big love with pictures of them. In all situations they are together – clothes of one, things of other. I think it’s simple – they love each other so badly that they want to be with each other all the time.”
Songs on the new album have a little bit more mainstream sound in them. “The songs are a little bit different than on previous albums,” Piotr continues, “we decided to record a really good quality album and there is not a lot of hard rock inside, there is more space, the songs are more airy. And I think you are always scared about something like that happening, scared that you lose something, but currently we think that we may also find new fans. For us being progressive is to be progressive as a band, not to stand in position we are good at. Sometimes, you know, it’s essential to find something new, and I think it is the main meaning of progressive word when you look at Riverside. So, I’m not objective, because I know the album and I was listening to it for like couple of months, but I think it’s a good album.”
There will be some optimistic moments in the album, which were never in Riverside before. “Honestly, I have to say that Mariusz wrote very good lyrics and sang very well. And good melodies are present on this album, so all the things Riverside album should have. Of course, for sure there would be like a lot of people saying that maybe it’s too main-stream or they don’t like it because we don’t have 12-minute songs. When we talked about the album, about the musical side, we decided to put this album a little bit into 80s and we tried to do some sounds, to use some riffs or patterns we know from let’s say ‘The Cure’, for example, and this kind of bands. And actually when we started doing the songs, with most of the songs being composed by Mariusz, we were not thinking “this song has to be 12 min or something”, we were just composing it and this was the moment the song should stop, otherwise it would be too long or boring or something. Actually we wanted to run away a little bit from being progressive. But I have to say – still, when you are listening to whole album, I think it can be heard it is still the same band.”
The latest album gave us more bass, more Mariusz. “Like I said before – it is a little bit influenced by 80s, the space melodies were like main melodies back there. And Mariusz of course has aspirations to be a great bass player and wanted to show it somehow.”, Piotr said. Riverside toured South-America for some promotion of the album as well. “I have never been there, I read some comments and a lot of people say all the time “come to Chile, come to Argentina” and this kind of things. But actually until we were there and we saw how many people were present on the show – we knew nothing. So we’ve had the same problem as promoters have. We were trying to get there – and there were not a lot of propositions. Probably the band needs to play for the first time somewhere and needs to show how many people can attend our show, and then promoters will know. So, it is all the same everywhere, but the problem is – South America is quite a distance from Europe, and it took a lot of money to get there, to rent back-line stuff, so the costs were bigger than travelling over Europe.”
Riverside made a progression sinds the former album. “We are just doing step by step progression and songs are just results of that. I think each album has to be a step further and I like it very much, it’s not like going back. We got used to this situation and we like it. Of course, we hope to be bigger and bigger, but what happens – you never know. We don’t expect it to be like this or be like that. We will take everything that we can have.”
