Protest The Hero Talk Silverstein Fan Haircuts And Triangles

11/03/08 1:56pm

by Jill Langlois (CHARTattack)

Canada's fastest emerging metalheads lose the concept, keep the conceptual

Whitby, Ontario's Protest The Hero have grown musically since they came together when they were just 14 years old. They might not believe in genres, but the band's newest record, Fortress, is definitely a progression from their beginnings with 2003's A Calculated Use Of Sound EP. Bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi and singer Rody Walker talked to Chart the morning after their last show of 2007.

How did the mini tour in southern Ontario go?
Rody Walker: We always do something around the Christmas/holiday season, try to keep people interested and whatnot. This time we wanted to play a bunch of new songs to see how they went over, and we got a pretty positive reaction.

Arif Mirabdolbaghi: Whenever we do mini-tours in southern Ontario, we kind of try to end in Barrie because the owner of that club, Foundation, really takes good care of us for some reason. I don't know if it's something in the water over there. We're all feeling kind of rough this morning because of it, but it was a nice way to end off the short little mini-tour that we did. And we dubbed it our Christmas Bonus Tour, actually. We play a few southern Ontario shows, have a good time, get rip-roaring drunk and then save all that money for New Year's.

So how did the Canada/U.S. tour with Silverstein end up happening?
AM: We'd done touring dates with Silverstein before, and we knew we got along really well with the guys. And then they offered us this tour that really coincided well with the release of our new record that came out in January. I think there's a portion of our audience that's a little bummed out that it's really a Silverstein tour, but I think another portion of our audience is just thrilled. We're ready for a really good time.

RW: We've done a couple tours with them. We've done the Warped Tour with them a few years ago. I think we did one of their headlining tours a couple of years ago, too. They're friends of ours. We love those guys. Little children with bad haircuts might not like our music, but they'll get the option to decide if they do.

What made you want to divide the tracks on Fortress into different sections?
AM: It was just remnants of our desires to do a conceptually driven record like our last one, although we think that this one is sort of superior in terms of songwriting and the actual tracks themselves. But we did that just to separate some of the lyrical themes and even to an extent some of the musical themes. We still think that the songs stand out on their own. They're not necessarily meant to be listened to in these chunks.

It's dramatically less of a fictionalization, but there's still an element of fiction involved. I think it just had a lot to do with storytelling rather than it is itself telling a story. There are some songs that are contributing to a fiction, from abstraction that we're talking about, particularly this one story of "Conquest And Captures," yet there are other songs as well that are just attacking one issue and communicating one point, I'd say more of a traditional songwriting approach.

RW: It's definitely a musical thing for me. "Conquest And Captures" is more aggressive, more blazing metal. And then "Isosceles" is a little tamer, a little more rounded — even though it's a triangular shape.

The following feature is from the March 2008 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, head on over to the Chart Shop.