If you take a look at the actual worldwide power metal scene, you would see bands escaping their roots like Stratovarius or Sonata Arctica, also historycal bands like Gamma Ray and Helloween losing freshness time after time, or bands tracing new ways for this genre in a nice way like Dragonforce. At last there's bands like Black Majesty doing their best simply by using a “ beeing true to yourself” attitude . The Australian act is arrived to its third album “Tomorrowland”, an album demonstrating how good could be learning the lesson of the classic heavy metal sound perfectly to mix it with straight power metal rules. In order to have a more clear idea about this, I kept in touch with Steve Janevski (Black Majesty guitar player), who's answering to the following interview from the downunder Australia .
Hi Steve, welcome to A DREAM IN STEEL metal webzine, it's a pleasure for me having the possibility to ask you some questions, in particular regarding your new album “Tomorrowland” released in Europe on June 1th. . So, after several hearings spent on your new album, the main sensation was of a constant growing …to me this is the proof that since “Sands of Time”, every time you release a new album, the quality you tend to reach is higher. I suppose that your attitude to mix classical heavy metal elements with power metal tunes helps your songwriting to be fresh everytime and focusing on different reference point . What's your feelings about that and obviously about “Tomorrowland” ?
Thanks for the nice words! This time around we got to take more time in pre production and we had a good idea of what we wanted to put down proper in the studio. We were confident in the songs and we're as happy as we can be after recording the album.
I think that Tomorrowland is the natural progression from Silent Company. It was our next step forward. We built on what we had by writing some speedier tunes yet at the same time kept our melodic sound. I actually think Tomorrowland shares elements of some of the more straight ahead power metal stuff what's on Silent Company and also has some slight progressive parts which were more apparent on the debut Sands of Time.
We love classic metal/traditional metal - whatever people are labelling it these days. We grew up on bands such as Deep Purple, Rainbow, Judas Priest, Dio, Iron Maiden, Helloween, early Queensryche. That's where our roots are from.
How are first media judgements (webzines, journals etc..) going ?
So far so good! We always like to read as many reviews we can and so far the early reviews have been very favourable. Most reviewers have accepted the fact that we stay true to our sound and are accepting the album for its songs rather than how much we have changed from the previous two albums. We're very happy with the initial reaction from the press!
What can you tell me about the main steps (recording sessions, songwriting process etc..) leading to the birth of “Tomorrowland” ? Is everything gone smoothly ?
Things went rather smoothly because we gave ourselves a bit more time to live with the demos we recorded. The only things that changed was the reworking of the song Forever Damned. We rewrote this tune a lot and funnily enough it ended up as the album opener. Apart from this Hanny (Mohamed – guitar player) and I changed a few solo parts here and there but that's pretty much it.
Where is the idea to to insert Deep Purple cover “Soldier of Fortune” coming from ?
Our singer John (Cavaliere) would soundcheck his voice with this tune for years since we started the band. When we started chatting about doing a cover for the album I brought up the idea and we all immediately said yes. But the main reason we chose this was because we thought it was such a ‘great' song. It's timeless. We didn't want to change the song too much arrangement wise but rather give it more of an updated sound and feel. Having said that I still think we put our own stamp on it. Well I hope so! LOL
Soon you'll start a short tour in Europe , with appearance on several festival, Waken Open Air among others. How important is going on tour for Black Majesty ? and since you live in Australia , what's to be done to conciliate Black Majesty members personal activities or work with music career?
Touring to promote a new album is always important. We were really disappointed we didn't get to tour our first album Sands of Time but we were really happy about getting over to Europe back in 2005 to help promote the Silent Company album. I guess this coming tour for the Tomorrowland album will hopefully help launch it and keep spreading the word on our band.
Yes coming from Australia is harder than for people living within Europe but we do our thing and do the best we can. We all love music full stop and we're happy to be able to record and put out new albums for our fans. We play quite regularly in Australia so we're quite busy which is a good thing!
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