Originally written by Dean Brown.
In May of this year, In The Silence re-released their debut full-length A Fair Dream Gone Mad through Sensory Records. An album of deep-set emotion and displaying an astute progressive flair; for the lack of a better narrative, this hack described the album for another publication as being, “…rich with the same melancholy that burdens Katatonia, the spritely bursts of Anathema-hopefulness amongst the dour downpours of reality, Opeth’s stately progressive twirls, the songwriting nous of Steve Wilson, and a plethora of other progressive influences too protracted to detail.” But despite the best efforts of Sensory, the fine folks at Earsplit PR, and the band members themselves – who, led by Josh Burke, self-financed and self-released the album the year previous – the wider world hasn’t heard the thirst for greatness In the Silence present on their first full-length outing.
The reasons for this are unclear. Musically, In the Silence are on-point and individualistic enough to avoid accusations of being blatantly derivative. The band have recently toured the West Coast of America with Secrets of the Sky, played at the ProgPower USA’s four-day festival, and have had their album stream over at Decibel‘s blog. They have received plenty of critical acclaim in the same country that heralds David Hasselhoff a musical marvel, Germany, as well as pockets of America and other European territories. But what of the UK market (where the band’s name has hardly been mentioned in print) or the more exotic ends of the globe? Answers for the lack of chatter and deserved applause around In the Silence are elusive overall, but a cursory glance at the band’s own Facebook and Twitter accounts reveals a possible reason: In the Silence currently lack a forceful presence on social media. (Recoil in horror, Internet minions!)
The year 2013 will go down as the year when everyone promoted every little thing they achieved – from making discernable art to making a manky sandwich – through as many different avenues as the Internet could spew up. Sadly we now live in a world of nauseating self-promotion where only the loudest and the most obnoxious receive the bulk of attention, and their whiney voices can be heard through every tweet and Facebook post. It’s not all inane drivel, though. The social media side of the modern world is a useful and essential tool, if you have something useful and essential to say/promote. And as far as music goes, sites like Bandcamp have been an invaluable aid for bands trying to heist their artistic efforts – often without the need for label backing – upon the fleeting attention spans of the screen-entranced public. Surely then, not spending every waking moment pushing the mediums at hand to breaking point amounts to sacrilege and is an acute form of self-silencing in the digital age all of us – for better or worse – now live in?
“Well, I think [social media] is vital in this day and age, and it’s incredibly useful in terms of being able to engage people,” acknowledges In the Silence’s leader/songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Josh Burke. “I mean, we have our Facebook page that we run, and I used to post a lot more often but lately life has been a bit distracting… We’re also on Twitter, but I just don’t have much to say in one hundred and forty characters or less – I suck at tweeting – and our following on there is pretty small. Honestly, we could probably use someone to just run this stuff for us…”
It seems that the pain of real life has played a major part in In the Silence’s self-promotion constraints. So perhaps their lack of presence online has hamstrung the promotion of A Fair Dream Gone Mad across the globe, even though, as Josh duly notes, self promotion did get the band signed in the first place. “Maybe we do suck at promoting ourselves… I don’t know, man,” he laughs. “Like I said, we do have an online presence, and we got where we are now because we were online and promoting an album we released ourselves. Since the Sensory release we’ve received a lot more press via Dave [Brenner] at Earsplit PR, which has helped, and a lot of European stuff. I think honestly we just need to be out on tour with some bigger name bands, which I think will be happening in the future. ProgPower USA was a huge boost for us, so the more things like that we can do, the better.”
The future does seems bright for In the Silence, and should they hit the right ears through the right avenues, tours in support of well-regarded bands within the progressive metal sphere seems likely. And although the band’s growth is currently slow and steady, things are much better than they were when In the Silence self-released their debut in 2012 and began at ground level. According to Josh, a lot more media attention, both online and print magazines, has been received compared to the initial release, with more reviews from “reputable people, versus some dude on the Internet with a Youtube blog.” But Josh doesn’t knock such press and he still gets excited by it, even if it doesn’t have the same critical clout: “All that stuff is great, and we deeply appreciate anyone who wants to say something nice about us and share our music, but you can’t really put all that stuff in your press kit. So it’s given us a lot more legitimacy in terms of people taking us seriously. But it’s kind of funny, it was all so new when we first put the album out, we couldn’t believe people were listening to it – or that anyone even found it in the first place – so every review or mention anywhere was like a huge deal. By the time Sensory put it out, we were starting to get used to it a little bit. But I still get excited any time someone writes a nice review or leaves a positive comment on our Facebook page.”
No-one would begrudge such small pleasures, considering the financing of their debut album came from the band’s own pockets. Given the global financial strains at the time, this must have been an extremely hard venture to fund? “Not too hard,” replies Josh. “We just did what any self-respecting would-be rock stars would do: We sold crack and worshipped at the altar of Satan to make it happen! I’m kidding of course,” he clarifies, much to Last Rites’ disappointment. “The truth is a secret. Why spoil the mystery here? It wasn’t hard at the time because of circumstances – I was making good money at the time – but it took a long time to get to that point.”
And from “that point” the band’s manager Claus Jensen (Intromental) highly recommended Sensory Records. Helmed by Ken Golden (“A guy who really loves this kind of music”), the signing to Sensory gave In the Silence great peace of mind knowing a “small but dedicated label” believed in them and had their back. “It was a relief to know someone was going to cover the cost of printing CDs and do some marketing for us,” Josh admits, “and give us some legitimacy and street-cred, so to speak. And Ken is really easy to work with. As of right now, I have no idea how many albums we’ve sold or anything, so I can’t tell you much beyond that.”
Album sales have been at an all time low in recent years, and bands/labels have had to re-evaluate their base approach; thus the rise in the use of social media. With some insane marketing ideas being thrust in our faces, as well as some beautiful packages worth your hard-earned monies, it really is a buyers’ market. Yet it seems like pageantry (an essential trait of heavy metal over the years) still manages to sell, and anything out of the norm perks the ears of even the most hard-nosed metalhead. But Josh doesn’t think such gimmickry matters down the line, even if bands without aesthetic bombast, like In the Silence, struggle to compete for attention at present: “It does kind of seem that Ghost B.C. can come out of nowhere and tour with Metallica. But I don’t know if it matters in the long run. Metallica didn’t have a gimmick when they started – they just kicked ass.” He continues: “Opeth doesn’t have a gimmick. I think it’s more important to be original, and write good music. But sometimes the gimmick is cool! It’s all part of the show. With bands like Ghost B.C., or Gwar, or even to some degree, Cradle of Filth, it’s part theatre. It’s entertainment and spectacle. Nothing wrong with it, but that’s not who we are. I wouldn’t know where to start as far as doing something gimmicky, though I’d like to have an extravagant stage show some day!”
Josh drops Opeth as being a band free from gimmicks and one that writes good music, and the stylistic parallels between Opeth and his own band are noticeable, as mentioned at the very outset of this piece. Alongside Opeth, Katatonia’s penchant for sumptuous, soaring vocal melodies and their marriage of darkness and light can be found throughout A Fair Dream Gone Mad, from “Ever Closer” to the closing wail of the dimly lit “Your Reward”. In fact, if Katatonia released A Fair Dream Gone Mad this year, you can rest assured it’d be making a sizeable dent in every reputable “Best of Metal 2013” list.
“It’s a huge compliment when people put us on that level, because those are all the bands I love and that I would hope to tour with someday,” Josh replies when questioned about whether such comparisons are frustrating or a nice compliment. “You know, it’s like if Mikael Åkerfeldt someday said ‘I really love that new band In the Silence, they’re like Katatonia but different.’ Would I be upset? No, I’d crap my pants with boyish glee! And as far as Katatonia goes, the thing is I had heard them before and liked some of their stuff, but never really got hooked and bought their albums until Night is the New Day. And then I got the entire back catalogue after that. But it’s not like I bought Viva Emptiness 8 years ago and said, ‘I’ve gotta start a band like this!’
“I actually was obsessing over Opeth when I started In the Silence,” Josh goes on to admit. “But why try to sound like them? The best I could do would be a band that sounds kind of like they’re trying to sound like Opeth, but not as good. Somehow, with my other influences – Type O Negative, My Dying Bride, alternative-y, goth-y stuff like The Cure, Depeche Mode, Dead Can Dance – I ended up writing stuff that kinda sounds similar in style to Katatonia. And Niko’s drumming and Nate’s riffing and melodies really added to that end result. Go figure!”
According to Josh, he and the rest of In the Silence, both individually and collectively, are currently busy writing for their second full-length. And apparently there is a lot of new material in the works and it won’t be A Fair Dream Gone Mad Part 2 but it will still sound like In the Silence, just with more…everything: “It’s going to be heavier, more progressive, more acoustic, more GuitarViol, more mellow, and more metal. I would hope we can start recording in spring and have it out late next year or early 2015. Time will tell!”
Time is indeed, the great leveller: making or breaking dreams with little care for how fast your broadband connection is, how many followers you have on Twitter, how many likes you have on Facebook, and how many gimmicky products you intend to schlep to the baying congregation. Does Josh believe the longevity blessed upon the Opeths and Porcupine Trees of this world is attainable for a band like In the Silence? “[Longevity is] exactly what I hope for; that would be a dream come true! Anything is attainable with perseverance and a little optimism… And some good music!”
Amen to that. All In the Silence really need right now is for the rest to the world to hear and heed their call.
