Q & A: Olof Mörck (Amaranthe)

By PAUL SOUTHWELL

THE international profile of Swedish melodic metal band Amaranthe has been steadily rising. Now, with their seventh album The Catalyst adding even more musical crossover to their current setlist, together with a slew of classic tracks, the band are finally in Australia, for their first ever tour.

The band’s sound has been tweaked slightly with a recent line-up change, adding new male singer Mikael Sehlin, assisting the powerhouse vocals of long-serving Elize Ryd and Nils Molin. Amaranthe combines musical styles ranging from death metal vocals to slick, power pop harmonies, backed by heavy guitar riffs from Olof Mörck, a tight rhythm section of drummer Morten Løwe Sørensen and bassist Johan Andreassen, with some additional keyboards, and a dash of electronica.

The core songwriters of Ryd and Mörck add spice to their music with musical flavourings from other genres, some of which originate in Sweden, to create an unmistakable sound. Shortly before Amaranthe made their way to our fine land, we tracked down Mörck for a discussion about all things Amaranthe, and what makes them unique.

Hot Metal: Your most recent album, The Catalyst, has been out for six months. So, how is it sitting with you and how do you find the new material has set in for live performances?

Olof Morck: “It is usually when you start a tour on an album that it really starts to come to life for real. We don’t do a lot of compromises for the live settings in terms of how to perform things but it should always be in the back of your head that at some point, you’re going to perform these songs live. The songs should be entertaining and should fit in with the rest of the set. But how the audience will respond to the songs is always a little bit of a surprise when you finally see it. It is really up to how you will perform them, or how they speak to you live, because something that sounds in a certain way in the studio might have a very different feeling once you actually perform it live. Usually, it is a nice surprise. Sometimes it is not exactly what is expected. But now that we’ve been doing The Catalyst tour, it really feels like a new era for the band. We have a new visual concept, a big stage set up, a new light show, and most of all, adding all these new songs to see how people are enjoying them and singing along to them. It really is the audience that makes the songs come to life. It has been nice to see how these new songs have been slotting in with previous Amaranthe history.”

HM: Did you find that going on the road with Sabaton partially informed how you perform?

OM: “That tour was definitely influential for us, absolutely. We did that tour right before we were going in to record our sixth album, Manifest, and we actually rewrote a bunch of songs because we realised, on a better level, what translated into engaging and entertaining a bigger audience, and also how these songs transmit throughout big rooms, basically. Sabaton is a great live band in their own right so we were not necessarily notes, but it is always really inspiring when you see people that you’ve known for a long time. The first time I played with Sabaton was back in 2006, in a very small venue in Belgium. So, when you see people that you’ve known for a long time reach these kinds of heights, it is always inspiring. That was definitely a key part of history.”

HM: I saw them play with Amon Amarth, and that was a massive contrast.

OM: “Yeah, it’s two bands that are great live. Big bands that bring a lot of paraphernalia upon the stage, but they do it in two unique and different ways. It is a nice contrast.”

HM: On The Catalyst album you covered the Swedish pop sensation Roxette’s “Fading Like a Flower”, which was a massive global hit. Was that a challenge or naturally done out of wanting to appreciate their legacy?

OM: “Yeah, it is a little bit of both, in the sense that when I was growing up just listening to music in general. I started to listen to Metallica at a very early age. But at the same time, I heard everything from ABBA to Roxette, and then later on Swedish Eurodance, and then what it later became with songwriters like Denniz PoP and Max Martin. Yes, there is a huge legacy and I think the way that we think about music, and the way that we approach songwriting is very based in that kind of sound. People have rightly pointed it out throughout the years. So, it is a little bit of an homage. But at the same time, we were kicking around ideas for covers during the pandemic. At some point there was even an idea that we should maybe do a cover album just for kicks and giggles, basically, and this was a song that came up several times because it is very close to something that we could have written ourselves. I’m not saying that we’re as good songwriters as someone, but more in the stylistic sense. It was a very exciting thing to arrange this kind of (thing) quickly. And also, we already had the song structure in place. So, to translate this to Amaranthe music, was surprisingly easy, because it was just a question of arrangement. It was a lot of fun to do, and proper little match.”

HM: Yngwie Malmsteen has covered “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” by Abba, a band which obviously represent the highest echelons of Swedish pop. Do you ever think Amaranthe might take a chance with Abba, so to speak?

OM: “Nice little pun there. Yeah, I absolutely don’t think it’s impossible. It’s not something that we have lined up as in specific plans, but you’re not the first person to ask. Of all of the Swedes in the band, and even our Danish drummer, that we all love, have some song ideas that would fit us really well. I wouldn’t be shocked myself if we get the idea that this could be a cool thing. So, let’s see what happens down the road.”

HM: The second part of the album, I find it a little bit heavier and, based on my own tastes, more engaging. How do you find working with an external producer when they might be suggesting angling your sound more towards a pop side of things?

OM: “Well, that actually never comes from the producer side. Typically, what we do before we go into the studio is that we demo out the songs and usually most of the arrangements are done, or they are finished in the studio. But they are usually finished by myself and also the other songwriter in the band, also our singer [Elize Ryd]. We have a very strong idea what we want the song to be, and there can be sometimes small suggestions from the producer to balance a part differently and these kinds of things. But generally, what we do is very rooted in our vision of what the band should sound like, essentially. We’re always working with contrasts and balances. Sometimes the shade can be a little darker, as you mentioned, and sometimes it’s a little lighter, and usually it’s up to what the song dictates, in a way. Because once you have the structure of the song, you can arrange it in a hundred different ways, which could be everything from something super poppy to super metal. But it would still be the same core of the song; the same melodies, the same chord progressions and whatnot. The songs have a tendency, or your subconscious has a tendency to speak to you kind of strongly, not gently suggesting, but telling you that this is the direction the song should be going in. I tend to follow that gut instinct as far as I can.”

HM: Oh, certainly. And you’re very quick to get to the chorus. Is that something that has become a subconscious kind of event in your songwriting?

OM: “Yeah, I mean, it hasn’t been like that before we started this band, which has obviously been around for 13 years. But I like to do long songs with complex arrangements and these things come to me quite naturally. I have another band called Dragonland where we do that stuff a lot. But I think it’s when you’re writing for different projects and for different contexts, then I approach it in completely different ways. For Amaranthe, there is a certain level of intensity that should be kept at all times, even if it’s a slow ballad that is really emotional. If we drag it out too long, it loses something that is kind of a key part of our sound. And that doesn’t mean that we won’t do 10-minute songs, or something like that in the future. But it’s what that subconscious dictates: ‘this is the band I’m working for, and these are the emotions and the creativity that I want to get out’. So far, this is how it’s just ended up because this is the most fitting way to do it for this band.”

HM: A lot of metal nowadays has entered the digital age, relying on digital amplifiers and effects processors. So, given your involvement with the synthesiser electronica, have you found that guitar technology changes have enhanced your ability to use synths?

OM: “A very interesting question, one that I never been asked before, but I guess so, yes, in terms of when you’re arranging things. I used to work with Kemper and then a Helix [guitar processor]. These days I’m using a [Neural] Quad Cortex [amplifier modeller], so it makes it possible for you to have a much better guitar sound when you’re arranging songs already, if you have something that is much closer to what the final product will be. Obviously, when I’m in the studio, I work with real amplifiers, and it is typically Engl Powerball amplifiers. An Engl Fireball is usually my ‘go to’ amplifier, but you can get a lot closer to it. I used to work with plugins back in the day, like AmpliTube and stuff like that, 20 years ago. I’ve been working with amp simulators for a very long time, long before I started to use that kind of technology live. If I listen to old demos, from back in 2004 or something like that, it’s pretty crazy how far it’s actually come. What it really informs you of is how the guitars are going to interact with keyboards, and also with vocals, and the drums. Since you can make accurate demos a lot quicker these days, it really helps out with the arrangement parts, because I always arrange all of the keyboards myself and also produce the EQ, and mix them separately. And it’s making my job a lot easier when I have a clearer, better idea of what the guitar sound will be.”

HM: Do you feel that it provides, some kind of link with the industrial metal scene, because they’ve always been pushing technology?

OM: “Yeah, exactly, I suppose so. I never thought about it like that, but I think there’s links in the way that we approach it and also a lot of my fellow musicians. Right now, we’re in the middle of festival season, so everybody is meeting up and discussing gear. You’re usually not meeting so many of your colleagues on a daily basis or even weekly basis or monthly basis. But as soon as the festival season starts, this is when you reconnect with all the other hundreds of bands that are in your genre. So that’s a very cool factor with playing the festivals. At this point, almost everyone that is using some kind of guitar device, and everybody has different opinions, different ideas of how to use it, and some people refuse to use it, which I totally understand and totally respect. But at the end of the day, it’s really about making things easy and quick. When you’re at a festival and you have changeover of 20 or 30 minutes, even if you have a really good crew, that’s going to be a challenge to quickly set everything up. These amp simulators make life a lot easier for everybody, and you also have a much less unpredictable or a much more predictable end result because you know exactly what’s going to come out of that PA, once you plug it in. But in terms of how it connects to the industrial scene, yes, I guess so because you always had that amount of predictability with industrial acts that actually perform live like Nine Inch Nails and to a certain extent, The Prodigy also. They’ve been relying upon sounds that will come out in the way that they picture it, and you could say that we are now finally there also with guitars. So, I guess these things connect together. It’s an interesting perspective, actually.”

HM:  It’s also intriguing. Your guitar solo in the song “Find Life”, is very much in the progressive metal style, in my view. Would you agree?

OM: “Absolutely, I’ve been into this kind of guitar playing for quite a long time, and I really love Opeth. That is something that you can probably hear a little bit in that solo, even if it’s such a brief moment, and also when it comes to, obviously, Dream Theater and these kinds of things. It’s a little bit of a different solo for me, but I would just say, yes, I agree. It definitely has a little bit of that touch.”

HM: It is the way that the notes slide and you’ve got a sense of conviction on those outside notes that people wouldn’t normally play.

OM: “Yeah, exactly. When you listen to Opeth classics like “Windowpane”, you get a little bit of a sense of where that stuff comes from, basically.”

HM: When the singles for this album were released, how did you see the initial reaction? Did people see it as Amaranthe expanded their repertoire because you’d obviously had a lineup change?

OM: “Yeah, I think that early on we wanted to represent the fact that this is a more outside-of-the box album, and it has some new sides, some new influences, and I think people weren’t expecting a band like Amaranthe to do something that symphonic. “Damnation Flame” was the first single, so it was a little bit more symphonic, a little bit more gothic, and we did this vampire video at a castle in Poland. So, it was a really nice way to subvert expectations a little bit, because people were probably expecting something more, like the fourth single, ‘Re-vision’, for example, which is a little bit more traditional Amaranthe. We also want to retain that sound that we feel is working really well. But we also wanted to slap people a little bit in the face and say ‘hey, this might not be the Amaranthe album you’re expecting’.”

HM: Have you found that getting three vocalists musically intertwined, presented difficulties? Iron Maiden worked out how to have three guitarists quite nicely.

OM: “The reason why we had three singers in the first place is so we could paint with a lot more of a varied palette, if you will. It gave us a lot of options to go from something that is really dark and metal to something that is outright poppy, because it would be impossible to get someone to do the entire spectrum of things. And in between those worlds, you also have an extremely talented rock singer in Nils [Molin – male clean vocals]. There are a lot of opportunities there, with contrasts. I wouldn’t say it can become difficult but it can become challenging in the way to find the perfect way to balance things. Elize, who writes all the vocal lines, let’s say that she comes up with something that sounds really poppy when she sings it, but when this is sung by Nils instead, it could sound like Dio or old school Whitesnake because of his phrasing and his way of singing it. He has a huge vocal range, so he can sing most of the super high notes so once you get the stuff into the studio, it’s not always 100 percent decided who’s going to sing what. It can surprise you in a really nice way that you actually divide these vocal duties in a way that you didn’t necessarily expect.”

HM: Have you found that the different vocals sit noticeably within the different spectrums of the guitar, bass, and drums during mixing?

OM: “Absolutely. I mean, it can definitely influence how you perceive a certain part, because obviously, if you have a voice that is much more raspy, it can sit a little bit in the same range as distorted guitars, for example, which sometimes might be excellent, and sometimes might get not muddy, but not as crisp as you would like it to be. It depends very much on the keyboard arrangements and how everything is arranged. So, when I arrange things, I tend to think about it in layers, that you should leave space in the different spectrums as much as you can, instead of putting all the keyboards, vocals, bass, and guitars right in the same spot in terms of frequencies. So, this can absolutely inform decisions. But, I mean, with these things, mostly, we go with our gut feeling, because once a person sings a certain part, you get a good idea for what the optimal way is, basically.”

HM: I understand, but most bands generally have to cater for one vocalist.

OM: “I mean, it is. Let’s say, for the latest album, it wasn’t at all obvious exactly, for all the songs, of what we were going to go with, but I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily a super lengthy process. It’s something that is kind of organic, together with the recordings themselves. This is when it’ll become final, when it’s actually on tape. So that’s usually a really exciting process, because this is, I would say, besides the mix, which is the mix and master, which is the very final part, this is like the penultimate part, when the songs really start to come together. You think you know a song because you’ve been working on it and arranging it for, weeks, months, sometimes even years, and you think you know exactly what the song is supposed to say and how it communicates with you, and then you have all these different changes in who sings what, and it all of a sudden becomes something else and something much better. So, it is a very exciting part of the process.”

HM: Yeah, it’s not a bad thing. It makes it far more interesting than most bands, so it’s certainly something to be enjoyed. How has your approach to songwriting changed these days?

OM: “I would say it’s more similar to how we started than how it’s different, because even if you develop and grow as a band and as songwriters, and you also learn from your own craft, and you also learn what kind of works for you, also what works with the audience; all these things. Then the process of sitting down together, myself and Elize, and sketching out song parts in the way that we bring little ideas to each other, that’s something that is fairly the same. I think what a lot of people do these days is that they send little clips back and forth. Initially, I was maybe a little bit more sceptical to this way of working than Elize. She’d say, ‘I have all these ideas. I can just send them to you,’ and I’ll say, ‘Maybe it’s cool if we just listen to it together and we can jam on it immediately?’ But I realised that she was actually right, that when she has sent these parts, then it’s in the back of my head, and it kind of ferments, and I get maybe a few days or sometimes even weeks to kind of figure out as a background process where I want to go with this idea. It is the same thing for her with the little intros and the little guitar parts that I send, as then she gets some time by herself to kind of digest it, and then we go and sit together and work on the parts, to flesh out the core structure of the song, basically. So, I would say this is a small change, but the basic idea that we sit in my small studio, where I’m sitting right now, where we write all the music. We used to sit in a similar small, little room, which was the entirety of my apartment back then with relatively small speakers, a fairly basic setup in terms of technology and such, because we’re not recording the end product here. So, it doesn’t need to be top of the line studio gear. We work on it as friends, jamming rather than sitting in a big studio and having a lot of pressure. It’s a method that works really well for us, and it’s also really cool to see how it goes from the small apartment that I used to sit in where we wrote a song called “Drop Dead Cynical”, and then ten years later, you’re performing this at Wacken [Open Air Festival in Germany] in front of 55,000 people. So, it’s really cool to see the journeys of your ‘little babies’, you know, as they go on.”

HM: In that light, when you’re creating music, when is the cutoff point with the song? 

OM: “Yeah, I would actually say in our case, it’s definitely when it’s mixed. I would even say we usually don’t muck around so much with the musical arrangements once they are done, but it’s not unheard of, in order to adjust something to vocals, or to the mix that I go and make little changes or embellishments on the keyboards or, add some extra guitar parts and whatnot.

But the vocals, they go through a lot of changes. We usually spend a lot of time recording vocals because we are still working on it at the same time. So that’s a really exciting part of the process. So once the mix is sent, you know, the masters are sent to the record label, that’s also when the songs are done because there can always be some small changes at any point until that time.”

HM: How did you get into Caparison guitars?

OM: “Ah, interesting. It was back in the day. Let’s see, if I remember correctly, I think it was in the late nineties. I saw this band called Freak Kitchen performing in Gothenburg and they have a guitar player who runs the band who’s called Mattias [Eklundh], and he was the first guy to here in Sweden to play Caparison guitars. He’s a mind-blowing guitar player and this was a guitar that I’d never seen before which had this very different look and different vibe to it. It was not an ESP or an Ibanez or a Jackson guitar, which are great guitars of course, but I got really curious about it. Later on, then you had all these Swedish bands like Evergrey, Soilwork and also Nocturnal Rites – it was mainly Swedes that were playing these guitars, and they all had these things in common, that it was only spectacular guitar players that were playing the Caparison guitars. So, a lot more people got really curious about these guitars, that they must be something else entirely. And after the recording of the second Dragonland album, Holy War we sent a demo of our third album [Starfall] back in 2004. We were just very humbly asking if they would be interested in doing a co-operation or endorsement deal. I don’t think we were expecting them to be positive about it. But there was a lot of guitar playing on this third album and we were really happy with it. The Japanese guitar luthier [and head designer, Itaru Kanno], who was running the company back then, was into it. So just a few months later, they sent me my first Caparison guitar [Snow cloud finish Horus], a 27-fret guitar. That was a mind-blowing experience to play it myself for the first time. Really, really fantastic guitars.”

HM: Cool. 27 frets, is kind of pushing the pickups towards the bridge, right?

OM: “Yep, exactly. It wasn’t necessarily your normal neck pickup there. It was kind of a single coil with the humbucker in it, that kind of did its job really well considering how small it was, so it was kind of working, but there was a small sacrifice. It was cool, just as a small example, to get an extra pentatonic box in E minor, for example, and you can get really high notes.”

HM: Finally, since it’s the first time you’re coming to Australia, what can we expect from the set list that might well be different from what Amaranthe has been touring of late?

OM: “Yeah, we actually saw it from two different perspectives, and one perspective was that we should give something unique to the Australians wow that we are coming there. We are really excited about it so let’s reflect this a little bit in the set. At the same time, we never performed in Australia, so we don’t want to come with a bunch of weird songs that people haven’t necessarily heard. So, we did a little bit of balance there. We’re adding in our gift couple of songs that we haven’t played in a really long time. While the majority of the set is a well-oiled set that is, you know, well-rehearsed and played very many times this year that the band is really comfortable with, but also, with something extra for the Aussie fans, and something to make it more interesting for ourselves. But in general, the band is in really good shape, and we played a million shows this year, and I think it’s going to be phenomenal shows. We’re greatly looking forward to it.”