Guitar One
TRIVIUM
Ride The Lightning
The buzz surrounding metal’s hottest act has been slowly building for the past few years, but at this moment it’s actually audible. “Just in case you were wondering, if you hear a buzzing noise it’s because I’m getting tattooed right now,” explains Trivium frontman Matt Heafy via cell phone from a stop on the band’s U.S. headlining tour. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, sensing the hesitation in our reply. “I just did another interview a second ago.”
Although he still isn’t old enough to drink, the guitar team of Heafy, 20, and Corey Beaulieu, 24, have already been hailed as next Metallica and/or the world’s greatest living thrash band in addition to having their praises sung their idols like Pantera and Iron Maiden (the latter of which they just directly supported in Europe). However, with the Orlando, Florida band’s third album The Crusade, the band made a conscious decision not to make any conscious decisions at all. “When we were writing this record, we didn’t care what it came out as,” Heafy explains. “When I was writing this record I was listening to Kelly Clarkson; obviously it doesn’t sound like Kelly Clarkson, it’s just the idea that to me good music is good music, you know?”
However American Idol comparisons aside, if there’s a red thread that runs through the Crusade, it’s that it borrows equally from every rock and metal subgenre equally. The album’s breakneck opener “Ignition” recalls …And Justice For All-era Metallica; the glam-heavy “Anthem (We Are The Fire)” sounds like a power metal version of Ratt; and “The Crusade,” the band’s first ever instrumental track, goes through more movements in its eight minutes than most orchestra pits do in the course of an evening. “That song came along a lot quicker than I expected,” explains Beaulieu—who joined Trivium in 2005—about the epic nature of the album’s title track. “We really wanted to make sure that every part in ‘The Crusade’ wasn’t just blown by; we wanted to make sure they were all memorable and flowed in a way that people could follow it easily.”
While most bands spend progressively more time on each album finding tones and experimenting with sounds, Trivium actually had less time to work on The Crusade than they did on 2005’s Ascendancy due to the band’s grueling touring schedule. “We didn’t really think about [the time crunch] because we knew we could get it done in that amount of time,” explains Beaulieu. “Once it was done it was like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe we did it that quick,’ but as we were actually working on the album the thought of not finishing didn’t even cross our minds.”
The guitarists’ no-frills set-ups also helped cut down on wasted hours on in the studio. Onstage, both guitarists exclusively use Dean guitars with Seymour Duncan pickups through Marshall heads and cabinets and, aside from a Maxon OD808 or MXR ZW44 Zakk Wylde overdrive, they largely shun effects. “In the studio we used everything we use live plus a Bogner Uberschall and Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier,” Heafy explains. “Once we found the right sounds, we’d stick to that for the whole CD. It was a really simple recording process; all you hear on every song are four guitar tracks, a bass track drums and vocals. That’s it.”
And although the guitarists’ set-ups are nearly identical, Heafy and Beaulieu insist they don’t have a problem differentiating their guitar tones. “We just use what we like and what we feel comfortable with,” Beaulieu explains. “If I was playing through the same rig as Matt, I’d sound different anyway. Most of the tone and the way you sound comes out of your hands and the way you play. Eddie Van Halen can play through a shoebox speaker and it still sounds like Eddie Van Halen,” he continues. “We just go for a plain simple set-up that sounds good; it’s that simple.”
However, despite the lack of superfluous studio tricks, Trivium managed to step up things up with The Crusade in just about every category, from the vocals (Heafy actually worked with a coach this time around) to the lyrics to the arrangements and, most notably, the extended—and often jaw-dropping—solo sections. “On Ember To Inferno a lot of the leads were really long and then on The Ascendance they were just really quick trade-offs,” Beaulieu says. “But on this album the solos just came out longer. It’s cooler because you can actually develop an idea and have a song within the song to make the solo be something that has peaks and valleys instead of playing something really quick for ten seconds.”
Granted, the harmonized arpeggio-madness on songs like “Becoming The Dragon” is guaranteed spin plenty of heads, but the band are acutely aware to make sure that each note has a distinct contextual purpose. “For us, the song always comes first and that’s the most important thing,” says Heafy. “For example, my solo on ‘Detonation’ is just a bunch of squeals; it’s really simple but it fits the song just right,” he explains. “But on that song Cory shredded for his solo and it sounded right, too. We just wanted to experiment and have a lot of fun with the solo sections on this album.”
While Heafy still runs through John Pettuci’s Rock Discipline instructional VHS companion booklet every day with a metronome (at last count he’s up to 202 sixteenth notes) and both of Trivium’s guitarists practice daily on a mini-Marshall Stack in the back lounge of their bus, both Heafy and Cory credit their touring schedule as the catalyst behind the intense fretboard acrobatics on The Crusade. “I can’t stress enough that playing shows every night really gets you in shape,” Heafy responds with a laugh when I tell him that we get tired just listening to some of the galloping riffs on the album. “Since we’ve been playing pretty much every night, the fast riffing eventually becomes totally second nature to us.”
And although the band insist that they take their constant comparisons to Metallica as complimentary, with The Crusade it seems as if they’ve finally distanced themselves from the Metallica Jr. tag that has seemed ubiquitous since the release of Ascendancy in 2004. “Yeah, it’s like when we were younger—fuckin’ a year-and-a-half ago,” Heafy catches himself, realizing how ridiculous that sounds, “we were saying that whole Metallica thing. But growing up since then, we’ve realized we want to our own thing and create our own legacy,” he continues. “I get the vocal comparison a lot, but James Hetfield is the most recognized voice in heavy metal so people are always going to compare you to what’s popular.”
“I think there’s definitely influences from them, but I think if you actually listen to our records there’s definitely a lot of uniqueness to the way we play compared to Metallica,” Beaulieu explains, stressing that he’s as influenced by players like Alex Skolnick, Dave Mustaine, Marty Freidman, Dimebag Darrell and George Lynch than he is by Kirk Hammett or James Hetfield. “I think it’s inspired by that genre, but I also think there are a lot of differences if people just listen [to our music] instead of jumping to conclusions from the first ten seconds of the song.”
However, regardless of journalists and critics’ attempts to pigeonhole Trivium, the band insist the validation by their heroes supercedes all the trash talk. “Whenever someone who calls us cocky assholes, I just remember that Maiden and Metallica fans are recognizing the fact that these Trivium dudes are alright guys who make decent music,” Heafy continues in his characteristically modest tone. “That means a lot for me because those are people I grew up idolizing. It’s the greatest feeling in the world to have these types of people behind our music.”
With the band making seemingly monumental leaps on a seemingly daily basis, the only thing that Trivium can assure fans about their next release is that it will be even more versatile than The Crusade. “You can compare ‘This World Can’t Tear Us Apart’ to ‘The Wrath’ and it’s basically like comparing a love song to an angry thrash metal track,” Heafy says about the band’s latest disc. “On the next record, I want to take that even further: more catchy and melodic in one direction and even more inaccessible and technical in the other direction. It’s just all about diversity and not doing what people expect us to do.”
So, forgetting about the hype and the haters for a second, where do Trivium think they fit into the metal spectrum?
“We literally don’t care,” Heafy replies without hesitation over the steady buzz of the tattoo gun. “With this record we didn’t want to be thrash, we didn’t want to be speed, we didn’t want to metal—we just want to be Trivium.”