Crankbox-music

Control The Storm

Interview by Chris Koppers/images and mp3 courtesy of CTS

Passionate and unfiltered, please welcome Control The Storm from the UK. 

Gareth Arlett, the man who controls the drums, had some moments to tell us more about Control The Storm. 

"As for our plans for the future.........up until the end of 2012, as you can see from the biography, we are really busy with live shows across the UK and we are hoping to continue this well into 2013.

We are building a nice nucleus of fans who communicate with us regularly via Twitter and Facebook and, who turn up to our shows......wherever they happen to be. We want to continue growing this fan base as well as help build a larger fan base for female fronted metal in the UK in general. There are some awesome bands in the UK that get little to no recognition because they wouldn't fit on extreme metal bills or promoters don't see that female fronted bands would pull a crowd. We aim to change that.

It would also be nice to get on one of the bills for a bigger, European act next year and maybe even venture across and play some show in Europe. We all recognise that this form of Metal is incredibly popular in Europe and that the majority of the bands flying the flag in this genre are European (Scandinavian or German). Therefore, to continue to build our name we should aim to get out and spread as wide as we can. 

We already have fans in Germany, Holland and Sweden! We will also start looking for a new 2nd guitarist sometime over Christmas to bring us back up to a full complement of 6 souls.

We aim to start demo recordings of some new tracks in the next month or so with a view to recording, perhaps, another 3 track CD or 5 track EP to go along with the recent re-brand and the t-shirts we have had done recently.

All in all we hope to still be working hard for the next 6-8 months building the name and reputation of the band and getting to a point where hopefully we would be signed"

The interiew:

How would you describe your music? What is the typical feeling after listening to Control the Storm?

Control the Storm is a female fronted metal band. We use the terms Power Metal or Melodic Metal but we have so many influences, on an individual basis, that contribute towards all elements of the song writing that it does is quite difficult to pigeonhole us to one specific genre. Melodic is probably the closest we come to a specific ‘term’ as melody is a big part of our songs but there are so many bands out there classed as ‘melodic’ that sound completely different to what we are doing and vice versa!

We would like to think that after listening to Control the Storm, whether that is live or from a recording, any fan would not be disappointed with what they see or hear. Each person will interpret the music, lyrics and images in a different way to the next so I guess we hope that the typical feeling is that they have enjoyed it and feel energised towards what we do.

How would you describe your performances on stage? What can your audience expect from your band as soon as start playing?

We like to put as much energy into a show as we possibly can. We want the crowd to enjoy the show as much as we enjoy playing the songs. We like to the crowd as involved as possible whether that be clapping along or banging their heads. At this stage in our musical journey that can be quite difficult given the sizes of venue and the stages (or sometimes lack of them) we play on.

Rich (Guitar) is very influenced by the likes of Yngwie Malmsteen and all the guitar virtuosos so he likes to bring a bit of this into the live shows which is sadly missing now across the scene. Most bands we come across just stand still giving little or no energy to the crowd so we want to hark back to the likes of Iron Maiden where the term ‘show’ meant just that!

How did you meet the other members of your band? How was the progress in "in the early days"?

I met Rich and Raedon (Keys) a few years back when I joined a band that they were in called Neverwinter - very much more a symphonic band than Control the Storm. Daryl (CTS’ original rhythm guitarist) also plays guitar in my other band (Gore Metallers Amputated) and he suggested that I join as they needed a drummer. The band lasted about another year and then split with all of us going our separate ways.

Then in 2010, after a drunken night out with Daryl, I decided to tap up Rich and Raedon again about reforming. We all sat down and talked about it and decided that, as we were older and wiser, it would be worth a shot however we agreed that we didn’t want to go down the symphonic metal route. We wanted to use heavier riffs incorporating more melody and progressive elements, using Evergrey (Swedish Metal band) as a template. We had plenty of ideas and semi written songs left over from the Neverwinter days that we could work on and these mutated quite quickly and it wasn’t long before Becky and Hayley (Lead Vocals) joined to bring us up to strength.

Once we had a full line up progress was quite rapid and before long we had enough material to record and to fill a 35 minute set. We included 2 covers but quickly ended up dropping one unless we were asked to play longer sets. In 2011 we recorded and released our Demo EP which has 3 tracks on it and this started to get us noticed via Internet Radio however gigs were pretty hard to come by…..the UK is not a particular hot spot for female fronted metal. However, the hard work paid off when we played the New Blood stage at Bloodstock Open Air this year. Since then we have teamed up with a number of other, similar bands so that we can all gig together and showcase the talents of all the bands on the UK scene.

Can you tell us somewhat about your upcoming songs?

We are continually writing new material or new ideas and are already working on some new songs that will hopefully see the light of day sometime in 2013. We also play a number of songs live that we haven’t recorded yet. Hopefully, these will also be part of an upcoming CD release in 2013 as well. We are currently recording ‘Frozen’ originally released by Madonna that we are going to release as a free download track as we have had many people asking us to record our version of this song. We play it live and it’s always well received.

 We also may put out some teasers for people once new tracks are demoed and we are happy with them however, at the moment, our gig calendar is pretty full so this is taking a back seat. As with any band still in its infancy, the music is always mutating and the newer songs we are working on are more composed, however that is not to say that they are a complete departure from what we have made Control the Storm now.

We like to challenge ourselves with what we play and with the broad range of influences each of us brings to the band one idea very often transforms into something else once the drums or the keys are added.

What do you need to compose a stunning full length album with the "Control the Storm" factor?

Every band would like a multi-million Euro budget like Nightwish have had but that isn’t particularly realistic for us – hopefully it will in the future, who knows! At this moment in time we are quite realistic with what we could achieve with modest resources. Ideally, we would want to work with a studio and Engineer/Producer that understands the genre and can ensure that the recording is powerful yet crisp sounding……not just loud guitars, loud vocals and everything else getting drowned out! We are our own worst critics so we would need to be 99.9% happy with any recording that we expected fans to buy.

How do you see the future of Metal?

I can see it getting bigger on an international level….not necessarily becoming mainstream (unless you go for the whole Blackveil Brides thing) but growing in popularity. We already see it within Europe and in America with bands gaining bigger fan bases and the number of festivals increasing, but in the UK the scene is shrinking. More and more venues are either shutting down or are not willing to put on Metal gigs of any description. It’s quite a sad state of affairs when we have to say in interviews that ideally we want to be playing in Europe but that is where the growth continues to be.

On the whole, I think the future of the Metal genre is bright and that is only a good thing.

Thanks a million for taking your time, Gareth.

Special treat for you, my lovely readers: No chance at all by Control The Storm (click the video and enjoy listening).

Get' em on the net!

www.myspace.com/controlthestorm

www.facebook.com/controlthestorm