Periphery To Perform In India

Coming to your new album Periphery II, why is it personal this time?

It’s our strange sense of humor. It’s like the shitty Eighties action movies sequel, like “Periphery II: Cruise Control” or “Periphery Harder”; they’re just all parodies of really crappy Eighties movies. It’s our shitty sequel to our first album. [laughs]. What I tell people is like, it’s not “Periphery II: This Time it’s Personal,” it’s “Periphery II: This. Time. It’s. Personal” [in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice]. You have to say it in a low voice, like you’re delivering a one-liner in the movies, pointing a gun at someone and right before you shoot them you say, “This time it’s personal.”

Yes. Periphery II starring Bruce Willis.

[Laughs] Yep, exactly like that.

 

But musically, there also seems to be a very clear focus on melody on this album”¦

We don’t really have much of an idea of what our album is going to sound like or how we’re going to approach it. We just go for whatever sounds good and I think it’s more a reflection of where we’re at and what we wanted to do at that point in time, and what sort of mood we were in, because we’re never like, “Oh, we should write a heavy song now, or a melodic song.” We just kinda write songs and we’re like, “Oh it sounds really cool, we should use that.” So, it’s almost like a reaction more so than any sort of decision. And with Periphery, really, the only rule is that as long as it sounds good then we’ll do it. It’s a very subjective thing, of course, but we’re all on the same wavelength so it generally does sound good to all of us if it sounds good to a few of us. And that made it pretty easy to put the songs together. We wanted something that had a lot of facets to it and that would sound cohesive from beginning to end but it didn’t really take too much work to choose the songs that we were going to use and put it together for the album.

I saw you were getting some flak on YouTube for the new single “Make Total Destroy” that you just put up, for Spencer Sotelo’s clean vocals”¦

Oh yeah, that’s YouTube [laughs]. That happens to just about anything on YouTube; we’re used to it. We’ve always been a pretty polarizing band ”“ like, the vocals have always been a polarizing aspect. But Spencer has developed a lot in his vocals since the first record and he’s really done it for himself too. He’s got probably some of the thickest skin I’ve ever seen in the industry, with all the criticism he’s got. I’ve got offended [on his behalf] in the past, but he genuinely doesn’t care, and he just cares about improving for himself. So he actually has full reign over his vocals this time around. On our first album he came in so late into the game that all he really had time to do was record the vocals that had already been written, and a lot of them had been written by me and my bass player at that time because our vocalist before him never did anything. So we wrote stuff that was not necessarily what a vocalist would sing. It was a guitarist’s approach to it. So this is the first time that our vocalist has been able to express himself through the vocals and we’re really happy with the way the vocals turned out; they’re probably the most improved aspect of our band as a result. But given that he’s got a very unique style it’s only natural that”¦ I’ll say it ”“ he’s either a love it or hate it kind of singer so, regardless, he evokes a strong reaction, whether it’s positive or negative.