On Wednesday 2nd September, American sludge metallers KYLESA will play Montreal’s Petit Campus alongside Sweden’s CULT OF LUNA.
The band has undergone several mutations since forming in 2001, but founding members and vocalists Phillip Cope and Laura Pleasants remain.
We caught up with Laura ahead of Kylesa’s gig in the city and the release of their new album, Exhausting Fire…
Montreal Rocks: For anyone who doesn’t know your band, explain Kylesa’s sound.
Laura Pleasants: The most obvious thing is to mention we have 2 drummers. It’s quite wild, it’s quite heavy and quite psychedelic. This creates a certain energy we try to evoke on stage and share with the audience. It’s bits of heavy metal, bits of sludge, bits of old school punk and a fresh take on old psychedelic. There’s a blend of male and female vocals. It’s pretty much awesome and if you’ve never seen us, you should come because it’ll be life changing.
MR: The psychedelic theme comes through in not only your music, but in your artwork. What are some of the things outside of music that have influenced that side of your creative process?
LP: There are so many. Lyrically, it depends on the record, but I generally write from a stream of conciousness and then form it into proper lyrics. We work with themes; the theme for this record is about rebuilding. Where artwork is concerned, I work pretty closely with Shaun Beaudry who did the illustration for this record and has done a lot of work for us in the past. We talked about using the themes of light and dark, hot and cold, different seasons, different moon patterns. Then we started talking about Saturn and it’s prevalence in ancient civilizations as far as archetypes and symbolism. We landed on a sun goddess image for the front and back covers, exploring the yin and yang of life and energy.
MR: Is there a common thread that links it all together? One source at the heart of the mythos?
LP: The only constant is a book by Carl Jung called Man And His Symbols. It’s been a great source of inspiration for me over the years. It’s such a fascinating read. It delves a lot into dream analysis and what’s going on in the unconcious soul and where that energy comes from.
MR: This band does seem to take the artwork assossiated to it pretty seriously. One of your quirkier habits is to release a limited edition of every album with very unique packaging. What can fans expect for Exhausting Fire?
LP: I worked with the folks at Season Of Mist and Sabian, their head of production. We came up with the idea of having an old school matchbook packaging for the limited record. Numbers aren’t finalized yet, but it’s bound to be quite limited.
MR: You are coming to town a full month before the release of Exhausting Fire. For fans coming to the show who are already familiar with your older stuff, what can they expect hearing new songs for the first time live?
LP: We tend to do things differnetly on every record, this album is a continuation of some of the darker and denser themes and the layers we did on Ultraviolet. It’s also a lot riffier than previous records. We have two singles released that you can stream.
Kylesa will be at Petit Campus with Cult of Luna on Wednesday Sept 2nd. PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
Exhausting Fire will be in stores and online October 2nd.
Interview – Richard Brunette
Share this :
