Webpage: www.appearanceofnothing.com
Video clip: Chains of History
Review: 91/100 @ PoM.dk (Patrik)
93/100 @ PoM.dk (Reinier)
Ever wanted to find out what inspired a particular song?

Was it based on personal experience or simply passive observation?

What happened in the recording studio or on stage to make one song sound different from the rest?

These are just some of the question bands and musicians attempt to answer in Line 'em Up - the newest page of The Power Of Metal.Dk.

This is where your favourite bands comment on their albums, track by track, because as someone once said, “Ideas are the building blocks of ideas”.

Enjoy!

Line'em Up with Marc Petralito, keyboardist in Appearance of Nothing.

Here’s a chance for you to tell our readers about your new release, ‘A New Beginning’. But could you please start off by introducing the readers to Appearance of Nothing?

Well we’ve started the band seriously around 2008. I was looking for some musicians that wanted to do some metal and found them in the other guys.  We quickly recorded a first demo in order to get passed the songs that the other guys have already written. We wanted to do something fresh.  I began to write songs for the first time ever and we recorded our first real studio album „Wasted Time“.   The album "Wasted Time" was followed by our second studio album "All Gods Are Gone". While on the first one we tried to follow some certain rules and stay within self given boundaries, we tried to push more towards different directions on "All Gods Are Gone". Therefore we worked together with Dan Swanö and Devon Graves.


And now onto ‘A New Beginning’ - track-by-track! What inspired you, which topics are you dealing with, what do you want to express with the songs etc.

01. Chains Of History
This song almost didn’t make it to the final album. We really had problems at first with the singing in the verse. And we had to decide between this song and another one (a rather 70s oriented tune). Finally we choose to go with this song and found a way to sing some interesting melodies.  Lyrically it’s about never-ending hate for generations and generations of people. Especially some regions on this planet seem to nurture on that hate, mixed with false politics and religion...


02. Without A Reason
Definitely the most complex song for us to play on the album, if not the most complex song ever for us. It begins with that rather happy melody part and pretty soon gets to some god old Opeth vibes.  I love the middle section of this song with its Jazz part and a really great jazzy guitar solo.  We recorded that solo by putting out the lights at my studio, only listening to the music. I basically told Peter (our Lead Guitar player) to just play along and go with the music. The solo you hear is its first take!


03. The Seer
Our shortest song (ever maybe). Anyway a really modern straight forward metal song. No big instrumental sections, no unisono parts. I wanted to have some more lightweight songs on the album. Even though I wrote the song, there’s almost no keyboards on it. I basically just realized that now while rehearsing it live.


04. A New Beginning
The title track of the album, of course the longest song (something around 14 minutes). It is the first song that I wrote with another technique. I just wanted to let the ideas flow and record them, never looking back what has already been written. Really a constant stream of creativity. There are so many different themes and influences in this song, I would have a hard time myself to recall everyone of them. It was also the first song where I completely wrote everything in my head. Means I only entered the studio when I had an exact idea of what I wanted to do next in my head.  The lyrical concept is a really personal one for me and dedicated to a couple of really special human being.


05. Forsaken
My attempt to tone done a bit in one song on the album. I failed miserably because there is this great death metal part in it, which I really love by the way. The most heaviest part we’ve ever done I guess. It’s the 5th song I’ve written for the album, but the first one where we had complete lyrics. So there’s some really old demo versions of it somewhere… Hopefully only on my mac… The lyrics are dedicated to a special person that unfortunately lost almost everything that matters in life. A shining star gone astray…


06. Echoes
The very first song I’ve written for the album. To me it’s a bridge between the previous album and this one. There’s a lot of orchestration going around. It has that really cool middle part with a great guitar solo.   It’s about a person who’s afraid to vanish before finishing his ultimate final creative output. Autobiographical I think… As long as an album is unfinished I always fear that something could happen, to  me, or somehow all my hard disks could get erased or whatever. I only get relieved when the album is finally out and I can hold it in my hands.


07. When The Glass Breaks
The last song is a rather quite one. Not in the sense of acoustic guitars but not to heavy. It has a great main mid tempo riff, the verses are build on a synthesizer pattern. Omar does a really great job on it singing. He transports a lot of feelings in this one with his voice. It is about the separation of parents from the view of a child. The influence of a divorce or something like that to a child. Although lyrically it’s kind of depressing for me, it ends with a great chorus and an even greater guitar solo. The perfect ending for the album.

Tell us a somthing about the great artwork?
It was the first time I tried to do some artwork and design stuff. Because it was really new territory for me, I spent hours during the night, finishing the artwork. It is based on the song „A New Beginning“. Every page is created around that concept from that specific song. There are a few references to the other songs, and some Easter eggs, but of course I would never mention them here…haha...


 

Patrik J Skoglund, February 2014