Dean Edington: Funny story, actually. James [Sizelove, guitar] hit me up one day while we were both working a show at Liberty Hall and asked me if I knew anyone who would be interested in singing for Wrath and Ruin. I get asked that kind of question a lot due to all the time I spend out working shows, so I replied with the usual "Hmmm, I don't know offhand but I will keep my ears open for you" kind of response.
Well, later in the evening, he approached me again and said something like, "So, earlier when I was asking about if you knew anyone that wanted to sing for the band, I was really seeing if maybe YOU would be interested."
I hadn't been in a band since high school but inwardly jumped a little at the request. I had seen the band a couple times before and really liked what they were doing, plus James and I have always been kindred spirits in terms of our musical likes across a vast spectrum of styles, so I decided to go for it.
Wrath and Ruin plays out rarely. Is there a reason for this, or just happenstance?
DE: Well, the band was fairly active live before starting work on Mouth of Oblivion, but a series of setbacks and coincidences brought that to a bit of a halt while working on the record. I wouldn't count on it staying that way for too long.
Matthew Khomsi: We chose not to play very many shows as of late primarily for a couple different reasons. The first being finishing our record was the band's top priority. While we enjoy playing shows, the album was at a point where it had a finite list of things it needed before completion, and we did not want anything distracting us. Secondly, we have been incredibly productive in writing new material and feel propelling that is more important than the playing out. Consequently, we are near halfway finished with material for a second album and are very excited about where the band is going, creatively.
DE: Here's where the real story is — it has been a fairly unorthodox experience for all of us, I think. The band, minus myself, started work on the album's recording two years ago in late August/early September of 2009. Once the skeleton of the recording was laid down, the guys were basically just waiting for the old vocalist to come in and record his parts to be finished with it, but for some reason or another that never happened. After something like five or six months of waiting, and some live appearances sans vocals, the guys decided to go out looking for another singer.
Flash-forward to, like, May of 2010 — there are no lyrics or vocal parts for any of the songs and a couple of rough vocal demos James and Troy had worked on over the winter. I laid the vocals that are on the song "Lifeform" in the studio with Eric Graves as my 'demo' for the band, and I was in. Most of the summer was preoccupied by a couple of the guys getting married, my intense summer concert schedule and other things, so we didn't really get to work on writing new parts until September of 2010, a full year after they had originally started recording.
The whole time I'm writing parts, the Khomsi brothers were in the studio with Eric tweaking all the recordings, arrangements and such, sometimes reworking entire songs from what they started out as. "Arkenu II" on the record is vastly different from the original "Arkenu," and both "Ritual" and "Contagion" were shorter instrumental interludes originally that we expanded based off of some of my vocal ideas.
I basically recorded my parts as I wrote them … demo'd parts, wrote the lyrics and then recorded the songs one at a time ... VERY slow. We had a couple shows there early on where I only had half a set's worth of stuff solidified and kinda bluffed my way through a couple songs to fill out the set, haha. I think I wrapped up vocal recording for the most part in early January 2011 and went back in March to add some extra backing vocals.
So here it is, two years later, and this thing is finally done … not quite Chinese Democracy but damn close (and WAY better, haha). The good news is, we're already several songs deep into writing for the next album!
MK: The recording process was a fun and interesting learning experience. The wide range of frequencies which the band covers made it difficult to apply traditional methods of mixing. Several new approaches had to be discovered if this record was going to sound the way we wanted. After several attempts, we finally discovered the ideal method for mixing this album. Overall, we are very proud of the recording and look forward to getting started on our next record because many of the lessons learned from this recording process will immediately translate into hastening the entire process next time around.
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