There’s deep, self-reflection, and there’s deep, self-reflection.
And then there’s Alan Averill “Nemtheanga”, of Primordial.
A band that need no introduction if you keep your finger on the pulse of Metal – or if you’ve been paying attention to the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards – Primordial have always been unwavering in their dark, hard look at the world and its ways. So how could I say no, at the chance to speak to frontman and underground champion Alan Averill, especially about their newest offering ‘Redemption At the Puritan’s Hand’?
Listening to ‘Redemption At the Puritan’s Hand’, it feels like a semi-autobiographical album.
Well, some of it is, but as with any other Primordial album it wasn’t written for me but for all of us.
Since you’ve referred to this record before as the “death album”, I’d like to ask something related to the subject right now – it seems that there’s a preoccupation going on with mortality in metal, which even stretches as far as musicians mentioning the end of the world. What do you make of this?
It’s inevitable that quite a lot of bands are going to get caught up into this “end time” mentality – the idea that we’re entering into a sort of “end time”, which you could add Megadeth and WASP into as well.
I don’t know – I don’t really pay that much attention to what other bands are writing about! By now I’ve written about ten albums worth of lyrics, and you have to find new angles and ways of looking at the world. While the last album was about nationhood, statehood and so on, this time I had to look a bit inward… I looked at the structure of faith that we place around ourselves to make sense of our fear of death, and that’s how it started to take shape.
Not all of the songs are about this – some at least have the shadow of the reaper hanging over them! (laughs)
If I may, when we look at this as a sort of progression – ‘Redemption…’ a more hardnosed outlook in comparison with Primordial’s first record ‘Imrama’ which feels more romanticised. In what way would you consider this a sign that you’ve changed – by means of getting your feet more firmly on the ground, as it were?
Honestly, I don’t know if I have! You know, ‘Imrama”s title refers to a Celtic spiritual journey, which at the time – 1994-1995 – seemed to make sense for the first album. Primordial as a band has never written about Celtic mythology or folklore; lazy journalists still think that “oh they’re Irish, so they must be into Irish folklore”, which shows that they’ve just never read the lyrics! We don’t write about mythology or pagan themes which other bands are interested in, since it’s not my thing. I never wanted to write about escapism or fantasy, which has a rather romantic view of the world about two thousand or five hundred years ago.
I’m still a musician at the end of the day in a heavy metal band, who’s still trying to make sense of the world through my creativity, so how stable that makes you, I don’t know!
You just have to deal with whatever state you’re in through any way that you’re able to, and this is how I personally choose to do it.
You mention lazy journalists – funny point, because even respected metal websites in the scene (I won’t name any names) say that Primordial sing about Celtic folklore!
Again, they haven’t properly read our lyrics. ‘The Coffin Ships‘ for one is fact and not folklore, though we do have songs like ‘Sons of the Morrigan’ and ‘Children of the Harvest’ which echo passages of Irish mythology on the Children of Lir. But they’re not written about that – they’re written to have a sort of purchase in the modern world as allegorical stories about the here and now. There are morality tales within those tales, which I find very interesting to use every now and again to say something in a modern sense but that’s enough for me.
The thing about the Children of Lir for example, is that when they’re exiled to the three different lakes for nine hundred years, they later return home to find a desolate kingdom – I used this as an allegory for immigration, which is the most defining state of being Irish in the last four hundred and fifty years! It’s an issue that’s had more effect on Ireland than anything, so that’s what I wanted to go along with.
As you have always looked to events from the past for your inspiration, how far would you even say that we’re doomed to repeat our worst moments as a human race?
You can see that the rate at which the world’s increasing, where the gap is growing between people at one end of the spectrum and those at the other end. As long as this is going on, there will still be a high level of inequality throughout the world. People will keep fighting over religion and who owns what piece of dirt they want – it doesn’t seem to me that at any point in time that civilization will be any different.
Suggesting otherwise would be a bit ridiculous; this is just what humankind does!
The second song on the new album, ‘Lain With the Wolf‘, certainly takes an unforgiving stance on this by acknowledging Man’s baser side as mere fact.
The baser side is exactly it – ‘Lain With the Wolf‘ is partly inspired by the book “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse and it’s basically saying that you’re a human being and fundamentally flawed with a beast inside of you. I also really liked the tones and lyrics of Old Country and Western (songs), from your Johnny Cashes of course, to your Hank Williams; I really like the concept of the redemption song, which says “I know I fucked up, I know I did wrong and there’s a beast inside of me, but I try and make peace with him.” At the end of it, you have to sit down and realise that no, this is just the way it is.
‘Lain With the Wolf‘ and ‘Bloodied Yet Unbowed‘ are kind of a bit connected in that sense… they’re a bit more human, which is what’s coming across to people with this new album. Instead of looking outside, I’m looking inward a bit and writing about things that other people can see themselves in, so it’s got a more “human” element to it which wasn’t quite there on our last record, ‘To The Nameless Dead‘.
There’s also more of your usual look at the issue of Man’s love/hate relationship with spirituality, on this album.
Many of the things that I’ve found to do with spirituality and faith, as I’ve been observant of people with faith when I have none, is that it seems to add an extra dimension for others to their existence.
The album itself is about growing old, as you can’t control death anyway! At this point, it’s just about trying to find different angles to say things that are relevant for people to see themselves in. I just thought, ‘you know, I’m not going to write in metaphors or in such a complex way’; making the lyrics just slightly easier to read as compared to about ten years ago, if the audience didn’t speak English.
I also liked the idea of making the words a little bit like the style used by Bon Scott (AC/DC) or Rose Tattoo – the “classic rock” kind of lyrics, which also partly inspired the song ‘Bloodied Yet Unbowed‘. I wanted to write a song that people can look back on, and go “yeah, that’s me! I do the same thing” and not something about the development of the nation’s state during the last century or something! (laughs) You can’t keep doing that.
Primordial have always focused on universal themes, and I like how how you’ve looked around the world for your scope including with ‘The Black Hundred‘. You’ve mentioned in an earlier interview that the track is about Stalinism, so what led to the decision to do this song for ‘Redemption…’?
Well, you could say that I picked Communism simply because I hate it! It’s partly inspired by this phenomenon in Ireland, where we have middle to upper-class, college read intellectuals who have this strain of Marxism running through their political ideology; this leads them to almost try to rehabilitate on a utopian, idealistic view of the Soviet Union though many of them have never visited Eastern Europe.
I found myself speaking to these people during my university years, and realising that they should actually go to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to name a few – even East Germany – which were under the Iron Curtain. Those academics have never been to these places to see what Communism has done, and still insisted on holding a romanticized view of a Marxist nation.
You go to a country that’s lived under the rule of Stalin, and ask them what they think of Communism. These academics will say, “oh, that’s not real Communism, etc.” but then, no “-ism” is a real “-ism“. Real “Satanism” isn’t Satanism, real “Fascism” isn’t fascism, and so on.
It’s a human structure where people impose their own flaws, power and hungry greed – it’s obviously never going to be the exact same as Marx and Engels wrote about it, but I knew that if I criticised this ideology others would transcribe a political stance which wasn’t there.
When writing this particular song, I actually chose to make it from the perspective of faith (of the Russian Orthodox priests being persecuted) for the album. It also draws on the idea that Pope John Paul II had much to do with bringing down the Berlin Wall between 1989 to 1990. No matter how much Communism had suppressed the Poles, as he was Polish, they never lost their faith which almost in the end brought them back around afterwards.
This reminds me of what I was told about Communism’s presence in Latvia, by Skyforger’s Pĕteris “Peter” Kvetkovskis.
In fact, I also noticed a quote in ‘The Black Hundred’, by Latvian poet Vizma Belševica.
This will tie in a bit well for you – I’ve been on holiday in Latvia, and I know the Skyforger guys quite well. I’ve even been in Peter’s back garden!
Yeah, the was written above the door of the Museum of Occupations in Riga, Latvia. I took a photograph of it while I was there on holiday, and asked the band’s manager Andy (Andis Mikainis) to write it down for me:
“I want to burn, give me the funeral pyre
Long was life, but my life’s waking short
The highest of my father’s sacraments
To climb towards heaven on a towering flame
And scream out the injustice by which
My nation with fiery iron was beset and slaughtered”
Tying all of this back with your look at spirituality on the new album, while you’re not necessarily condemning it you’re still pretty critical of this as a concept.
Well, I wouldn’t say that ‘Redemption at The Puritan’s Hand‘ even has a criticism of spirituality! It’s not a judgmental record with the typical anti-Christian heavy metal rhetoric – I wanted to examine why we feel the need to put the structures of belief into our lives, our fear of death and how it puts it into perspective.
I’m not essentially criticising this either, since I could even be talking about the guys in Watain as well [who are Satanists]! If this is what makes sense to your life, and you sought revelation and redemption before finally finding it then it’s just a sense of structure.
The take on faith on this album isn’t judging one way or another – it is stating as fact that you’re going to end up the same way, though it’s not in the typical style that I’ve mentioned.
As a man of science and logic, I can’t take this journey for faith with you albeit we all do search for a revelation. I can understand why people value these structures of belief, but as I’m standing on the outside, I can’t do the same.
K. Ann Sulaiman would like to thank A.A. Nemtheanga and Metal Blade Records for this interview.
Art (c) K. Ann Sulaiman, 2011
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