Raunchy

With their debut in 2002 RAUNCHY kicked of with a bastard of modern thrash & industrial metal combined with catchy melodies and great vocals. Now, approximately two years later, they are back with their sophomore album Confusion Bay. Reason enough to find out what is going on in their camp...

Clemens: Hi, guys! Congratulations to your new album. Confusion Bay (CB) is a real killer, although it needs some circulations to really kick off. Where do you see the main differences compared to Velvet Noise (VN)?
Jesper: Well in general I just think that everything is better this time. The songs are better and played a lot tighter and the production is definitely a lot better than on Velvet Noise. I think the album is more extreme because it has songs that are a lot more brutal than anything on Velvet Noise but at the same time there are also a couple of songs that are very mellow. Besides that I don’t think that we have changed our style that much except perhaps that we have a more thrash metal approach on a lot of the songs than we had on the last album.

Clemens: CB is actually a lot heavier than your debut. Sometimes it even reminds of Slipknot or the new Machine Head. Was it planned, a natural step or just the way everything developed within the songwriting?
Jesper: We never planned to make the album harder and I really don’t think any of us realized that the album was going to be harder than Velvet Noise before we had finished recording it. I guess that this sounds a bit weird but VN had a couple of songs that were quite brutal like Twelve Feet Tall and Out Of Sight and Confusion Bay has some very mellow songs like The Devil and the title track and since we were all focusing a lot on these songs I think that most of us thought that we were making an album that was less heavy than Velvet Noise.

Clemens: Compared to VN you are not that catchy any more. Actually I hoped for an a bit more “commercial” release with songs like Leech or Bleeding. Did you try to work more sophisticated this time?
Jesper: No, not really. On a few of the songs we just wanted to try something new and different but in general we actually did out best to make some good and catchy melodies. Personally I think that there are a lot catchier melodies on Confusion Bay than on Velvet Noise which is also what I have been told by most people who have heard the album.

Clemens: What is the connection between Bleeding and Bleeding 2?
Jesper: There is no connection except for the lyrics. As far as I know the two songs deal with the same subject but I actually don’t know what any of the songs are about.

Clemens: How long did you work on the songs?
Jesper: It was a fairly long process since a few of the tracks had been in the works since we recorded VN. Even so, only one track was a 100 percent finished when we started recording, the rest were lacking most of the vocals, but Lars really stepped up and actually wrote the majority of the vocals when we were in the studio!

Clemens: Are you an actual democratic “band” or do you have a main songwriter?
Jesper: Well in a way I am the main songwriter in the band which means that I am the one who writes most of the riffs and brings in the ideas for the tracks. However besides that we are a 100% democratic band and everyone makes their own contributions to the songs and usually the songs end up sounding very far away from the original idea.

Clemens: A real surprise is The Devil, a song that is sounding more Tiamat-like than RAUNCHY-esque. Don’t you think it differs too much from the rest and makes you lose some of your identity? Why did you use the deep vocals instead of the ”usual” ones?
Jesper: Personally I think that it is cool if an album has one or two songs that differ from the rest just to break the album up and keep the listener awake. However we did consider if we should put the track on the album or not because we knew that a lot of people would probably think that it was a bit too weird. The reason why we used the deep vocals on this track is actually that on a lot of the songs the vocals are dubbed by a deep voice and on The Devil Lars started to record the deep voice with the intention to record a higher voice also but when we heard it we thought that it sounded great and decided to leave it like that.

Clemens: Actually the production is blowing me away. It is crystal-clear but nevertheless heavy as fuck. Where and how long did you record? Are you pleased with it?
Jesper: We recorded the album at Jacob Hansen Studios in Denmark and we are all very pleased with the result. Jacob also produced Velvet Noise but I really think that he has stepped up big time with this album. We used three weeks to record and mix the album and although this is a lot more time than we used to record Velvet Noise we still had to work very hard to make it. When Jacob went home about 5 in the afternoon we would continue to record to 5 in the morning before we went to bed so it was quite stressful but also a lot of fun since we drank a lot of beers and partied hard most of the time.

Clemens: IMO the (clean) vocals lack a little bit due to heavy use of effects. Why didn’t you put them a bit more into the front? Lars has a voice he doesn’t have to hide...
Jesper: Well we all agreed that the vocals on Velvet Noise might have been too low in the mix and therefore we decided to make them higher this time and not use so many effects. Personally I think that this worked out perfect and I don’t think that the vocals should be any higher than they are on Confusion Bay but of course this if a matter of taste.

Clemens: What do your lyrics deal with?
Jesper: Lars V writes all the lyrics and it really isn’ anything the rest of us meddle in. He mostly writes about thoughts, experiences, girls, the band or just about life in the big city in general but actually there are a lot the songs that I don’t even know what are about.

Clemens: Though RAUNCHY is a quite “old” band, your breakthrough eventually came in 2002. For how long have you been pursuing the way RAUNCHY is like now? What did you sound like before? Have you ever thought of giving it up throughout the band’s history?
Jesper: We actually started playing together already in 1992 but at that time it wasn’t anything we took very serious and we only played covers for the first couple of years. When we started writing our own songs it was more or less a primitive version of the style we have now except that we didn’t use keyboards at all in the beginning. From 1995 to 1998 we recorded three demos and played a lot of concerts near our hometown. After we had recorded our third demo we all had the feeling that if we weren’t able to get a record-deal with this we were probably never going to get signed. In the two years that passed by before we in 2000 were signed to Mighty Music we more or less didn’t play at all and even though we never talked about quitting the band I think we all knew that if we hadn’t been able to get a deal this would probably have been the end.

Clemens: Is there any goal you’d like to achieve with the band?
Jesper: Well besides getting a record deal we have never had any real goals for the band but of course we would like to take it as far as we can and sell a lot of albums and play a lot of concerts. Besides that it is a bit hard to make any realistic goals since we never know what will happen next or how people will react to the our music.

Clemens: The Cover-Artwork for CB is really astonishing but somehow there’s no way of how to interpretate it. What should it represent? What is the “Confusion Bay”?
Jesper: The artwork was done by Lars Christensen (our other guitarist) who also did the artwork for VN. We just wanted something that looked killer and spacey but besides that Lars was free to do what he wanted with the cover. I have never talked to him about if it is supposed to represent anything but I actually think that you are right about that there is no way to interpretate it – it is just supposed to look great which I think it does. The cover was finished before we decided to call the album “Confusion Bay” so there really isn’t any connection between the cover and the title but I think that they match quite well since a lot of people think that the scenery on the cover is the confusion bay. The reason why the album is called Confusion Bay is that it is the title of one of the songs on the album and besides that we have always been told that we were confused about our music style and therefore we thought that it would be funny to call the album CB.

Clemens: I use to attest you a “Fear Factory meets Depeche Mode”-feeling. Sometimes you also sound like Strapping Young Lad and the Devin-Townsend-Band mixed together. So what are your actual influences?
Jesper: Well the bands you mention have definitely inspired us when we made Velvet Noise but when we made Confusion Bay I don’t think that any of us felt that much inspired by Fear Factory anymore. I think that our main influences for this album have been Marylin Manson, Rob Zombie, Entombed, Soilwork, Killswitch Engage, Pain, Korn, In Flames, 30 Seconds to Mars, Devin Townsend and Spineshank.

Clemens: Your name sounds a bit “strange”. Why did you choose this name? Are you still glad about it since your musical direction is nearly the opposite – sterile and quite “clean”...
Jesper: We chose the name about the time when we recorded out first demo which was in 1995. One of the main reasons why we chose that name was that we didn’t want one of the traditional blood/evil/death/hate metal bandnames. When we recorded Velvet Noise we had been using the name for so many years that we thought it would be strange to change it. Personally I still like the name but if we had known who many times we would have to hear in reviews how stupid our band name is we might have chosen to change it.

Clemens: Any touring plans for 2004?
Jesper: We don’t have any touring plans yet but we hope to be able to support this album with a decent tour which we didn’t do with Velvet Noise. However we all have fulltime jobs or studies so there are a lot of things that will have to fit in if it is going to work out.