Orpheus Omega reveal new Portraits

By BRIAN GIFFIN

MELBOURNE five piece death metal band Orpheus Omega have just released a very special EP.

Portraits is a unique project that showcases the songwriting interests and abilities of each individual band member. The band allowed everyone free rein on style and structure, and the choice of guest appearances from other artists – which include members of Caligula’s Horse and Omnium Gatherum. Bassist Leon Monaco talks us through the concept, how their non-guitar playing drummer wrote a ridiculously hard song for them to interpret and how his own impending nuptials influenced the track he wrote for the EP.

Hot Metal: Tell us a little bit about Portraits, because this is a different kind of release from Orpheus Omega.
Leon Monaco: “Usually albums from Orpheus have been very collaborative, everyone will have their own say, especially on their own instruments and throughout the process everyone will get into it and it’s hard to say who’s written which song. With Portraits we took a different approach and went, ‘What if we showcase every individual member’s writing ability?’ Because we all consider ourselves pretty decent songwriters, so we all took a stab at that. Within about a month or two, we all came up with a really good song each and we all just went, “Oh my God, let’s just run with this. Let’s just go for it”. And we made Portraits. We not only got into our favourite songs or genre, but even our favourite colour was included in each song that we’ve done. We’ve also got a lot of guest vocalists and guest artists to help out with the process, and they were chosen by each individual person – “This is my favourite band, I want that vocalist!” So it’s been a very, very fun creative process.”

HM: Which song is yours Leon?
LM: “Mine is ‘Edge of Forever’, the – unfortunately – very, very long one. I’m a bit of a prog head, so once I joined and started writing for the band, everyone was like, ‘Great, we’re going to have 10- and 20-minute Dream Theater-like songs now, aren’t we?'”

HM: You brought Jim Grey from Caligula’s Horse in on that one. I love Jim as a vocalist and as a frontman. As a singer he reminds me of a heavy metal Jeff Buckley, so I think you’ve got everything there, bringing him in on that.
LM: “Definitely. Jim and Caligula’s Horse are one of my favourite bands, regardless of them being Australian, so it was an absolute dream to have him showcase on a song. It’s just been unreal, to be honest.”

HM: If each song is from your own perspective, what’s the theme behind that particular track?
LM: “I haven’t had much songwriting experience in the past, so this is probably my first successful go at it. Around the time we were doing Portraits and I was writing lyrics to this song, I was drawing on the emotions I was feeling, and I was getting ready to get married at the time. So I had all the external parental pressures, the aunty pressures, all of this pressure about what a wedding should be like and we’re like, No this is what we want to do. I know it sounds simple, but I took that emotion and drew on that – Everybody go away, I want to do this my way, our way. We’re going to do this our way! Stop shackling us. We want to break free. I used a lot of that kind of energy and motif, and I cathartically put it into words, and that ended up being “Edge of Forever”. It sounds like a run away together song!”

HM: No matter how prolific bands can be, they often focus around a songwriting crux, so something like Portraits is fairly unusual. What is the usual process for writing a song in Orpheus Omega?
LM: “The usual process will be that someone starts an idea, and sometimes it’s an entire song or just a chorus, and then everyone will offer suggestions about what to try or how to change it. It’s a good building block, but usually with our band the person who plants the seed writes about 50 percent to all of the song, and everyone just piles on and adds their bits. Everyone gets creative and we have about ten different writing sessions where we don’t really write anything, we just critique everybody’s stuff and we all have this ‘producer role’ where we all get our hands dirty with it and we try to craft it into the absolute best possible song. Funnily enough, we actually did that a lot through COVID and lockdown, so we’ve got some back pocket stuff to come out in the very near future, hopefully, and that was all written electronically via Zoom meeting and Discord and sending files through Dropbox. We did that all through COVID, all through 2020, and we’ve got so much to give, we’re just waiting for the right moment.”

HM: Do you think that COVID has forever changed the way that bands write songs now?
LM: “As far as the way people write songs, I think it’s just another tool in the tool belt. I don’t think it’s going to change traditional song writing. I think people standing or sitting in a room just playing their instruments has the best creative energy that I’ve ever felt, however, there’s always something about the new wave of writing music getting comfortable in their bedrooms and doing something creative, chucks it into au audio workstation and gets to try new effects, and do things you’ve never done in a band space before. That’s interesting I think that’s just a new addition and makes for more creative opportunities in the future.”

HM: So what happens next? Are you taking this on the road?
LM: “We’re doing a show at the Evelyn Hotel in Melbourne on May 6. We’re headlining a Portraits show where we’ll be playing it in full. As for other places in Australia – we might have some more announcements later in the year.”

HM: I imagine you haven’t played these songs live before, so is it going to be a challenge to play this EP in full?
LM: “It’s going to be interesting. We’ve been lucky in that the first two of the five songs which we released towards the end of last year, we did get to play them a couple of times. One of them was on our national tour with Be’lakor, so it was good to start showcasing that and people responded really well to that. So now we’ve got three more songs as well as the two we’ve already performed, one of which is going to be very interesting. Kes our keyboardist… she’s going to singing one of them completely on her own. She’s usually been the back-up vocalist, which has mostly been screams, so this will be a very big dynamic change to our stage performance and something we’ll be working very hard on in the lead up to that show.”

HM: How was it looking into other people’s songwriting process?
LM: “It was really interesting. It was fun to see how people started their seed of a song and then grew upon it, and what their methods were individually. Mine was probably the most complete before it hit the band. I sat at home one day or weekend, I don’t remember, and just wrote the song with drums, bass, bits of keyboards and guitars – a whole band – and sent it to the band. I think about 30 seconds of it got cut, and that was the only change musically to the song on the recording. Whereas some of the other members had one guitar riff, and nothing else. So we were like, ‘We’re going to sit together in the studio and work on it, build upon that, but it’s all going to be your decision’. Probably the funniest thing was Matt, our drummer, he doesn’t play guitar but he goes, ‘I understand music, I know what sort of music I want and where’. He actually wrote his whole song [“The Prophecy”] on a program called Guitar Pro, which is where you tabulate out guitar parts using a Midi. He wrote his whole song out in Guitar Pro saying, ‘I want this note, followed by this note, and wrote out melodies and riffs and all this cool stuff…’ The issue came when actually playing it on the instrument. The result was very interesting and different and no guitarist would have ever thought of playing those notes in that sequence and in that hand shape. Luke, our rhythm guitarist, says he’s now developed a double joint in his hands to play some of the hard bits that Matt wrote.

HM: When that happened, did you have to change it around so it could be played?
LM: “No, we just decided that we’d figure it out. We would bend over backwards to make this happen as humanly possible, and it ended up being individual notes within a riff that got changed. The structure was perfect, we didn’t have to change anything, even though the final chorus goes for five minutes! It’s part of his creative vision. Every part of this project has been, Yes, you want to do something? Let’s do it. We’re not going to stand in your way. We’re all just going to be fun enablers and we’re all going to express art. We’re just glad everyone’s enjoying it so far, that have heard some of the songs so far, and been along on this ride. It’s been very fun.”