Interview By Ed MacLaren

 

Norway’s Madder Mortem has never coloured inside the lines when it comes to playing metal. Their music consistently defies expectations by pushing boundaries and sending journalists scrambling for their thesauruses with every new album. It happened with 2009’s "Eight Ways" and will surely happen again in May with the release of their new EP, "Where Dream and Day Collide". Madder Mortem’s powerhouse vocalist Agnete M. Kirkevaag recently had a candid conversation with Femme Metal about "Eight Ways", singing in a “male-backed” metal band and life in metal after 15 years.

"Eight Ways" has been out for over six months now and it's a fantastic evolution to the Madder Mortem sound. What's been the general response from critics and fans? Has the CD opened any new doors from a touring perspective?

Thanks! The general response from critics and fans has been great – as it usually has, actually. Those who are interested in what we do seem to enjoy following our wild ideas and quirks. As for touring, I don’t really think so – at least there have been no opportunities this far, unfortunately.

Madder Mortem sounds and plays better with each CD. At the risk of putting your music in a box, how would you describe your sound on "Eight Ways"?

Heh heh… music outside the box, but that’s a bit too slick, I guess. It's toying with genres and tonality, very organic but also very well produced, and slightly tongue-in-cheek, but also deadly serious. And groovy, melodic and emotional, as always.

Regardless of the labels attached to Madder Mortem, your music is unique regardless of genre. How well do you fit into the today's metal scene?

Heh, I’d say we don’t. Metal is increasingly about genres and subgenres which is exactly what we are not. But I think bands like us are good for the metal scene – all subcultures in danger of settling into a traditionalist community needs a prankster band who kicks the rules in the groin and does their own thing, regardless of norms and customs.

As 15-year veterans of the European metal trenches, you've seen a lot of musical styles rise and fall from popularity. Have you ever felt any pressure to adapt to what's current or squeeze yourselves into any of the popular genres like "female-fronted metal" to let your music reach more people?

We haven’t really felt any pressure… or perhaps more correctly, we’ve never really taken notice of any pressure that may have been there. And we’ve never ever even considered changing our music to fit anybody else – that would sort of defeat the purpose of what we do. It’s really cool when other people like what we do, but the main thing to us always has and always will be that we do exactly what WE feel like at the time. That may also mean that some day our music might coincide with the trends, but that’ll be the trends catching up to us, not the other way around. And strictly speaking, we are female fronted, or as BP once said, “male-backed” metal, but that’s perhaps one of the silliest labels of them all. It all depends on whether you listen to the music or merely look at the covers …

Obviously, metal is at the core of your sound but when listening to "Eight Ways" there is a sense of anticipation - a feeling that something different is going to be added to the mix but you're not sure what it will be or when its going to happen. It's great to experience this as a listener. Does the band feel the same anticipation when sitting down to compose new music?

I’d say that is what composing new music is all about – never knowing what will come up. And doing things we’ve never done before is one of our main hobbies, as most Madder fans probably know. Metal is at our core only in the sense that we grew up listening to metal bands, and we really like distorted guitars. I think what is at our core is much more a love of music in general, which might go a long way to explain our range of expression.

In some of the arrangements, I can visualize the music as part of the soundtrack to a Tim Burton or David Lynch movie - something off-kilter but at the same time intensely atmospheric. Does film play a part as inspiration for your music?

Yes, definitely, and particularly Lynch – "Formaldehyde" was purposely produced to fit in with our idea of a Lynch-esque atmosphere, and his movies are a frequent point of reference for us, as sort of a definition of a particular kind of eerie, fleeting mood we often return to in various ways.

 

Given the contrasting styles and musical structures in your music, what do you see is the common thread that holds all of these diverse influences together?

The people. No matter what we play, we each lend our personal tonal language and style of playing to the song – the sound of it, if you will. And all the songs are written by the same people, which means that there will be some kind of kinship between them, even though they may seem superficially very different.

Does the diversity in your music give you a lot of latitude when writing lyrics? Where does the inspiration come from? What is your approach?

The diversity of the music naturally opens more approaches for the lyrics as well. My way of writing lyrics is to first try to figure out what the music of the song means and is about to me personally, and then coach that meaning into words that sound right with the song, and that hopefully have some literary merit as well.

"Formaldehyde" is a standout track on "Eight Ways" due in no small part to the lyrics. The track seems to have a different type of imagery than the rest of "Eight Ways". It's a vivid metaphor and a little twisted - in a good way. Do you experiment with lyrics in the same way the band experiments with the music?

To a certain extent. Actually, "Formaldehyde" deals with pretty much the same topic as for instance "The 8th Wave", but from different perspectives, the common theme being Time and Change. I do experiment with lyrics, definitely, but it’s more important to me that the lyrics are right (right for the song and feeling true for me to sing), than that they are super-innovative or experimental. But that also goes for the music – experimentation is all well and good, but in the end, what matters is that the song ends up being right and true in our opinion.

Vocally, tracks like "A Different Type of Hell" show you can belt it out with the best of them - male or female - but some of your best vocal moments on "Eight Ways" come in the softer passages of tracks like "Armour" and "The Riddle Wants To Be". Have you thought about any side projects to focus on those more controlled aspects of your voice or do you just channel everything into the Madder Mortem sound?

Well, I’m sort of toying with the idea of doing a sort of half-jazzy solo project, but at the moment there’s just no time for that. And to be perfectly honest, Madder Mortem gives me all the opportunities I want voice-wise, it’d just be fun to be able to do some covers of old crooner-style songs and such. Madder Mortem were never too good at doing covers, we always seem to have so much of our own material on the boil that we never get around to doing cover songs.

When Madder Mortem began in the 90s there weren't a lot of female singers in metal - at least not to the extent there are now. Nowadays you can find many female fronted metal bands in just about any country. Were there difficulties as a working band with a female singer at that time? Has it changed?

It was easier being a female singer then – the stereotypes weren’t as set as they are now. The whole gothic-thingie has set gender equality in the metal scene back by half a century. Sure, when we started out, female musicians in metal bands weren’t common, and always got commented on, but still I didn’t feel like I was expected to behave or dress in a certain way. My much-used example is of the German writer who reviewed a gig we did, and wrote only about the terrible shock of seeing a female singer wearing pants on stage…

As a woman in metal who has been there through much of its development, do you ever think perhaps that by you just going out there and doing your thing for so long that you've helped a group of women find an outlet in an area of musical expression that they might not have had an opportunity to do otherwise?

I don’t know – it’s a nice thought, though! But I think a general issue for many women is that they feel that they need somebody to make a path for them, and that’s not really how it works. The opportunities are always there, it just depends on whether you’ve got the (metaphorical) balls to go for it.

You've been a band with your brother for 15 years and unlike the Gallagher siblings in Oasis your band is still together. How has being in a band with your brother affected the relationship between the two of you over the years?

I’d say we’re closer for it – it’s meant that we’ve always had the same interests and a lot of the same friends. And also we’ve been each other’s support through difficult times for the band, like line-up changes and such. But sure, when the Kirkevaags really disagree, the rest of the band usually goes into hiding, heh heh … But that’s the good thing about family, you can have a proper fight and then be friends again, blood is much, much thicker than water.

Time to get out of Europe and do some touring! What are your tour plans for 2010? Any plans to come to North or South America?

I’m the wrong person to ask about that at the moment – I’ve got my head full with my Master’s degree at the moment, so I’m leaving all the administration to the guys for now. But I’d love to tour again, and finally getting to the US, for instance, would be fantastic. And it’d be great to play in South America, we’ve only been in Mexico, but there’s so many more countries I’d love to play in.

A new decade is here! What were you favorite CDs of 2009 and what made them stand out to you?

Heh heh … I’m the kind of person who is a complete idiot when it comes to which year what record came and so on, so I’ll just sneak out of that, I think. Or I’d have to go through my entire record collection to try to figure out which albums were released when and so on… I guess the truest and most embarrassing answer would be the Madder Mortem albums – they’re definitely the ones closest to my heart, anyhow!

 

Photo Credit 

Photos By Mona Nordøy

 

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Links

Madder Mortem Official MySpace

Madder Mortem Official Site

 

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