This summer I have had the opportunity to meet the Italian band Methedras from Monza during the Fosh Fest in Bagnatica Italy.
They had just played their part and their gig had been awesome, an adrenalin shake made of powerful melodies, pungent lyrics and great stage presence. Really a lot going on during their performance!
In the past two years the band has changed a bit the line up and this has also contributed to push their sound on a different level. Said all of that I was really happy to finally get to meet them all. In fact all the members of the band took part in the interview, Andrea Bochi, Daniele Colombo, Tito Hate Listorti, Daniele Gotti, and also Claudio Facheris, the former singer, who has an unbreakable bond of friendship with the band. We sat down around a table not so far from the stage area and without further introductions we talked a lot about new and old members, new and old sound, Methedras plans, ideas and expectations.
This summer I have had the opportunity to meet the Italian thrash metal band Methedras from Monza during the Fosh Fest in Bagnatica, Italy.
They had just played their part and their gig had been awesome, an adrenalin shake made of powerful melodies, pungent lyrics and great stage presence. Really a lot going on during their performance!
In the past two years the band has changed a bit the line-up and this has also contributed to push their sound on a different level. Said all of that I was really happy to finally get to meet them. We sat down around a table not so far from the stage area and without further introductions we talked a lot about new and old members, new and old sound, Methedras plans, ideas and expectations.
Me: Hi guys, it's really nice to be here and talking to you, are you ready?
Let’s start with three main points: the change in the line-up, the support act to Overkill and finally your last released album: System Subversion.
Andrea: The new band is all here, sitting around you right now, I am Andrea Bochi one of the founders of Methedras, the band was formed in 1996 so next year we are going to celebrate our 20th anniversary. At the moment we are working on new material and I can already anticipate that it's going to be a fucking blast! We are all super excited!
Me: I know that in the last period Methedras went through a change in the line up
Andrea: Yes the new members of Methedras are Daniele Colombo and Tito Hate Listorti.
Daniele Colombo is the new guitarist. He has been actually our session man during the 2014 tour with Hirax and Evil Invaders so, when our original guitarist Eros Mozzi decided to part from us due to family problems, Daniele's choice sounded pretty natural to us.
He is a great songwriter who has worked with many bands of different genres, some even outside of heavy metal and with our great appreciation and satisfaction he has made himself quickly available to work on our new pieces as well.
He entered the Studio with our drummer, Daniele Gotti, who is with Methedras since 2008, and they quickly found each other on the same track. I noticed it myself because the new pieces were coming alive almost naturally. Now we have already three and a half songs on the way, we need to add up the bass line and finally Tito will complete them with the vocals.
Tito, as I mentioned already, is our new singer. He was actually a very old and good friend of mine. He was the singer of the band Endless Pain from Brescia and I had been following him artistically a lot in the past. I really liked him from the beginning.
When Claudio Facheris leaved us in 2014 we found ourselves in a difficult situation. We did not have any good name in the market to choose from and we had a very important tour starting up.
Initially we asked the help of a girl from Rome who had a great will power, but unfortunately did not have the right experience and the right voice for our music.
After a while I found myself in front of Tito asking him to be with Methedras almost on my knees and finally he accepted.
He is with us from January 2015 and in only two months he managed to prepare the tour with Overkill. He has been great. He is the right man for us, with a lot of experience and a great stage presence which makes him able to sing comfortably in front of seven, eight hundred people every night. Exactly what we needed.
Me: Daniele, you have brought a great deal of technical contribution in the band, what can you tell me about that.
Daniele Colombo: Well my influence in the sound of the band is certainly noticeable if you think about my background. I am a technical guitarist always interested in modern guitarists such Steve Vai or Satriani and I worked on my technique with the intent of using it in different styles like for example thrash metal.
I knew Methedras from before, I liked a lot their music and their style, so when they asked me to be part of the band I felt very honoured and I liked even more the opportunity that they gave me to start writing for them straight away something very special, because I know, we are definitely working on something great here!
Andrea: I actually didn't know Daniele before and I went to listen to him live under the suggestion of one of my friends. I looked at him on stage and listened to his guitar and I have been very impressed. I found him a remarkable guitarist with a great stage presence and a broad technique. He plays solos and riffs and for us, having only one guitar, this is an essential quality. He is a 360 degrees musician, but what I liked even more is that, by having played different genres throughout the years, he has developed a flexible and open mentality which suites perfectly our aims.
Me: Mostly through the vocal lines you have been often considered quite similar to Testament. With the entrance of Tito in the band the things seem to have changed. What can you tell me about this?
Andrea: Well we are a band thrash-death metal and we have always moved between these two styles. Sometimes the American thrash prevailed and in this case, of course, our sonorities were quite similar to those of Testaments. The voice contributed a lot to enhance these similarities, Testaments are one of the bands that Claudio Facheris loves and of course his voice and his artistic background was strongly influenced by them.
Initially we liked the idea of being matched with Testament, but after a while we started to feel quite limited, almost shut in a cage and we felt the need of moving on and differentiate us.
We did not longer want to be considered as the “Testament cover band” and we did not want to affiliate us to another matrix which was already started by someone else like for example the Scandinavian d eath metal, we wanted instead to sound modern and to create something that was really ours.
Tito knows what to do and thanks to him we definitively managed to go one step forward and find our own style.
Tito: Thank you very much. Well, personally I liked the idea of joining Methedras already from the beginning when Andrea asked me in 2014, but I could not do it right away because I had some other matters in the way that needed my attention. However I had been listening to System Subversion previously and I got really excited since I liked the sounds and Claudio's voice was great. I am a death metal singer anyway so I tried to add to that something that was really mine. It looks like it worked.
Me: Yes it looks like it's working pretty well, but I have also noticed something else in your new melodies, your sound has become quite contemporary. I could grasp some electronic influences for example, are my impressions correct?
Andrea: Yes, it's absolutely true.
Me: In which Studio have you recorded System Subversion?
Andrea: We worked at the Domination Studios of Simone Mularoni in San Marino and you are correct saying that our sound has been modernized. Actually we are very happy to hear that the changes made are perceptible because a new sound is exactly what we had in mind.
The voice has certainly contributed to the change, but apart from that the thing that makes the sound more modern is the addition of electronic bases.
Methedras is a thrash-death metal band with American thrash and Scandinavian death background so in the composition of the new songs we did keep the direct, open death footprint, but we also blended the classical death-thrash sound with these electronic samples that follow us throughout all the album.
However we don't use them all the time, sometimes we keep them behind because of course we want to give space also to the musical aspect of our pieces which is our peculiarity.
Me: Talking about electronic influences there is a song, between the others, that has impressed me particularly.
Andrea: yeah, that must be “Brawl” for sure.
Me: yeah exactly, “Brawl”!
Andrea: Anyway we are definitively evolved and it's exactly what we wanted since a long time. With the old singer and guitarist, Claudio and Eros, this unfortunately was not so easy to achieve because they were old school musicians and did not welcome easily new sounds out of the box.
The evolution has been also helped by a change in some of the instrumentation.
Before we used a Mesa system and our sound was brutal, too mushy and pretty much closed. Now we use an EVH and a Peavey and our sound has become more open and crystalline.
This is a good thing because before you could maybe hear 10% of all the riffs that we used to write and they were really a lot, now you can actually enjoy all of them and understand that it's good stuff indeed.
Me: What about the instruments, what do you use exactly?
Andrea: I use an Ibanez SR300 bass, American limited edition and an Anpeg SVT3 Pro to emphasize medium and lower frequencies.
Daniele Colombo: I use a Shelter guitar and I am proudly user of the best made in Italy amplifying system, Dv Mark.
Daniele Gotti: my drum is a Mapex proMseries. Normally the phonic is satisfied of how it sounds and if he is happy we are all happy.
Andrea: Yeah that's true and we try to work as much as possible with our personal phonic, Federico Pennazzato, who is one of the best in Italy. He makes everything much easier for all of us so we can relax.
Tito: I use a Shure C58, but generally I use whatever is provided.
Andrea: And he does not use distortions or effects of any kind. What you hear is his plain voice. Great stuff. Very talented indeed.
Me: Let’s talk about the new album, the one that you have already started to work on with Daniele and Tito. What can we expect from that?
Andrea: It will follow what we have already started with System Subversion. Actually with System Subversion we have started a course, but with the new album we are working to expand and improve the concept.
Daniele: We would like to create a proper Methedras trademark which blends together simpler and more immediate choices and more complicated ones. We would like to create a mix between some catchy melodies easy to remember and riffs which are special and technically complicated.
Me: Finally the lyrics of your songs. Let’s talk a little bit about them. I read the texts of all your previous songs and my attention is drawn by a general social criticism. What is the meaning behind that? Are you going to write similar lyrics for the new album too?
Andrea: Here we have also Claudio Facheris, our old singer and great friend, and I think he can definitively answer your question better than anyone else since he wrote all the lyrics himself up until now.
Claudio Facheris: Well as you read from the title, the last album is about the total Subversion of the System.
A subversion that is certainly antisocial, but I hope that the listeners will not consider it only a verbal anti-social subversion, but truly a subversion from a practical point of view. We should put our life against what Society offers.
I have always written very personal lyrics and I can imagine that initially it could have been hard for Tito to feel them as his own. However a loud applause to him that managed in such a short time to interpret skilfully what I meant.
I say that the Society imposes on us rules that are totally unconstitutional, anti-social, anti-humans, and what I wanted to transmit in my lyrics is the great distortion that exists between these anti human rules imposed by the System and the reality where we live daily.
Actually, by knowing Tito, I can assume already now that the lyrics that he is going to write for Methedras will follow this theme and maybe he will even amplify the concepts by making people understand that if they did not wake up yet, it's time for them to do so.
Andrea: Yes, if I may add something to that, by Society we mean the group of those who rule us, such the political, economic and the financial side of Society. The System. Those who provide us with unconstitutional rules and laws that millions of people follow blindly as sheeps for most of the times. About the new lyrics of course they will be responsibility of Tito.
Me: Tito do you have any idea?
Tito: Honestly not. I did not have time to think about them yet.
Andrea: The things is that he has been working with us only from a few months and his main priority has been learning our songs for a live set. I can also say that even if Tito is different from Claudio he is also very personal and equally poignant. I like a lot what he writes and I am sure that his new lyrics will work for Methedras as well as Claudio's. It will be a great album. An album different from all others.
Me: Well the time for us is almost over, I really appreciated talking to you guys, there is a lot of energy and talent here and I am sure that your new works will be amazing.
I would like to live the last words to you all, anything that you would like to add in conclusion of this interview?
Claudio Facheris: Well I would like to give my impression around their performance here at the Fosh Fest. It has been incredible. After seventeen years of sharing the stage with them, I was standing on the other side, the first time I saw them playing in an environment that is much bigger than a club, on stage in front of so many people and I heard them playing fucking amazing!
They were able to transmit perfectly what they call the “Methedras trademark” and I am sure that as soon as they put their talent and ideas in a new album they will be able to make an exceptional work.
Andrea: Yes we strongly believe in that and I can already anticipate that if we can, next year we will release a demo with three songs to have something to present immediately, if not, we will focus directly on a new album trying to finish it always by next year.
We want to take advantage of the moment and of the freshly made changes in the band's line up and release an album without waiting five years as we did between Katarsis and System Subversion.
Methedras have been touring and participating to festivals for the rest of the summer and they are about to start a new tour with Night Rage, a band that is half Greek and half Swedish; with them they will be touring in France, Spain and in Italy and when I asked them what their hopes for the future are, Andrea did not hesitate a minute, they would love, one day, to be able to organise a little tour as headliners in Scandinavia.
The guys are enthusiastic, full of energy and very talented and I am sure it won't take long for them to see their wishes come true. Thank you Methedras for the time and the interview.
I will see you in Sweden.
Interview by Eir
They had just played their part and their gig had been awesome, an adrenalin shake made of powerful melodies, pungent lyrics and great stage presence. Really a lot going on during their performance!
In the past two years the band has changed a bit the line up and this has also contributed to push their sound on a different level. Said all of that I was really happy to finally get to meet them all. In fact all the members of the band took part in the interview, Andrea Bochi, Daniele Colombo, Tito Hate Listorti, Daniele Gotti, and also Claudio Facheris, the former singer, who has an unbreakable bond of friendship with the band. We sat down around a table not so far from the stage area and without further introductions we talked a lot about new and old members, new and old sound, Methedras plans, ideas and expectations.
This summer I have had the opportunity to meet the Italian thrash metal band Methedras from Monza during the Fosh Fest in Bagnatica, Italy.
They had just played their part and their gig had been awesome, an adrenalin shake made of powerful melodies, pungent lyrics and great stage presence. Really a lot going on during their performance!
In the past two years the band has changed a bit the line-up and this has also contributed to push their sound on a different level. Said all of that I was really happy to finally get to meet them. We sat down around a table not so far from the stage area and without further introductions we talked a lot about new and old members, new and old sound, Methedras plans, ideas and expectations.
Me: Hi guys, it's really nice to be here and talking to you, are you ready?
Let’s start with three main points: the change in the line-up, the support act to Overkill and finally your last released album: System Subversion.
Andrea: The new band is all here, sitting around you right now, I am Andrea Bochi one of the founders of Methedras, the band was formed in 1996 so next year we are going to celebrate our 20th anniversary. At the moment we are working on new material and I can already anticipate that it's going to be a fucking blast! We are all super excited!
Me: I know that in the last period Methedras went through a change in the line up
Andrea: Yes the new members of Methedras are Daniele Colombo and Tito Hate Listorti.
Daniele Colombo is the new guitarist. He has been actually our session man during the 2014 tour with Hirax and Evil Invaders so, when our original guitarist Eros Mozzi decided to part from us due to family problems, Daniele's choice sounded pretty natural to us.
He is a great songwriter who has worked with many bands of different genres, some even outside of heavy metal and with our great appreciation and satisfaction he has made himself quickly available to work on our new pieces as well.
He entered the Studio with our drummer, Daniele Gotti, who is with Methedras since 2008, and they quickly found each other on the same track. I noticed it myself because the new pieces were coming alive almost naturally. Now we have already three and a half songs on the way, we need to add up the bass line and finally Tito will complete them with the vocals.
Tito, as I mentioned already, is our new singer. He was actually a very old and good friend of mine. He was the singer of the band Endless Pain from Brescia and I had been following him artistically a lot in the past. I really liked him from the beginning.
When Claudio Facheris leaved us in 2014 we found ourselves in a difficult situation. We did not have any good name in the market to choose from and we had a very important tour starting up.
Initially we asked the help of a girl from Rome who had a great will power, but unfortunately did not have the right experience and the right voice for our music.
After a while I found myself in front of Tito asking him to be with Methedras almost on my knees and finally he accepted.
He is with us from January 2015 and in only two months he managed to prepare the tour with Overkill. He has been great. He is the right man for us, with a lot of experience and a great stage presence which makes him able to sing comfortably in front of seven, eight hundred people every night. Exactly what we needed.
Me: Daniele, you have brought a great deal of technical contribution in the band, what can you tell me about that.
Daniele Colombo: Well my influence in the sound of the band is certainly noticeable if you think about my background. I am a technical guitarist always interested in modern guitarists such Steve Vai or Satriani and I worked on my technique with the intent of using it in different styles like for example thrash metal.
I knew Methedras from before, I liked a lot their music and their style, so when they asked me to be part of the band I felt very honoured and I liked even more the opportunity that they gave me to start writing for them straight away something very special, because I know, we are definitely working on something great here!
Andrea: I actually didn't know Daniele before and I went to listen to him live under the suggestion of one of my friends. I looked at him on stage and listened to his guitar and I have been very impressed. I found him a remarkable guitarist with a great stage presence and a broad technique. He plays solos and riffs and for us, having only one guitar, this is an essential quality. He is a 360 degrees musician, but what I liked even more is that, by having played different genres throughout the years, he has developed a flexible and open mentality which suites perfectly our aims.
Me: Mostly through the vocal lines you have been often considered quite similar to Testament. With the entrance of Tito in the band the things seem to have changed. What can you tell me about this?
Andrea: Well we are a band thrash-death metal and we have always moved between these two styles. Sometimes the American thrash prevailed and in this case, of course, our sonorities were quite similar to those of Testaments. The voice contributed a lot to enhance these similarities, Testaments are one of the bands that Claudio Facheris loves and of course his voice and his artistic background was strongly influenced by them.
Initially we liked the idea of being matched with Testament, but after a while we started to feel quite limited, almost shut in a cage and we felt the need of moving on and differentiate us.
We did not longer want to be considered as the “Testament cover band” and we did not want to affiliate us to another matrix which was already started by someone else like for example the Scandinavian d eath metal, we wanted instead to sound modern and to create something that was really ours.
Tito knows what to do and thanks to him we definitively managed to go one step forward and find our own style.
Tito: Thank you very much. Well, personally I liked the idea of joining Methedras already from the beginning when Andrea asked me in 2014, but I could not do it right away because I had some other matters in the way that needed my attention. However I had been listening to System Subversion previously and I got really excited since I liked the sounds and Claudio's voice was great. I am a death metal singer anyway so I tried to add to that something that was really mine. It looks like it worked.
Me: Yes it looks like it's working pretty well, but I have also noticed something else in your new melodies, your sound has become quite contemporary. I could grasp some electronic influences for example, are my impressions correct?
Andrea: Yes, it's absolutely true.
Me: In which Studio have you recorded System Subversion?
Andrea: We worked at the Domination Studios of Simone Mularoni in San Marino and you are correct saying that our sound has been modernized. Actually we are very happy to hear that the changes made are perceptible because a new sound is exactly what we had in mind.
The voice has certainly contributed to the change, but apart from that the thing that makes the sound more modern is the addition of electronic bases.
Methedras is a thrash-death metal band with American thrash and Scandinavian death background so in the composition of the new songs we did keep the direct, open death footprint, but we also blended the classical death-thrash sound with these electronic samples that follow us throughout all the album.
However we don't use them all the time, sometimes we keep them behind because of course we want to give space also to the musical aspect of our pieces which is our peculiarity.
Me: Talking about electronic influences there is a song, between the others, that has impressed me particularly.
Andrea: yeah, that must be “Brawl” for sure.
Me: yeah exactly, “Brawl”!
Andrea: Anyway we are definitively evolved and it's exactly what we wanted since a long time. With the old singer and guitarist, Claudio and Eros, this unfortunately was not so easy to achieve because they were old school musicians and did not welcome easily new sounds out of the box.
The evolution has been also helped by a change in some of the instrumentation.
Before we used a Mesa system and our sound was brutal, too mushy and pretty much closed. Now we use an EVH and a Peavey and our sound has become more open and crystalline.
This is a good thing because before you could maybe hear 10% of all the riffs that we used to write and they were really a lot, now you can actually enjoy all of them and understand that it's good stuff indeed.
Me: What about the instruments, what do you use exactly?
Andrea: I use an Ibanez SR300 bass, American limited edition and an Anpeg SVT3 Pro to emphasize medium and lower frequencies.
Daniele Colombo: I use a Shelter guitar and I am proudly user of the best made in Italy amplifying system, Dv Mark.
Daniele Gotti: my drum is a Mapex proMseries. Normally the phonic is satisfied of how it sounds and if he is happy we are all happy.
Andrea: Yeah that's true and we try to work as much as possible with our personal phonic, Federico Pennazzato, who is one of the best in Italy. He makes everything much easier for all of us so we can relax.
Tito: I use a Shure C58, but generally I use whatever is provided.
Andrea: And he does not use distortions or effects of any kind. What you hear is his plain voice. Great stuff. Very talented indeed.
Me: Let’s talk about the new album, the one that you have already started to work on with Daniele and Tito. What can we expect from that?
Andrea: It will follow what we have already started with System Subversion. Actually with System Subversion we have started a course, but with the new album we are working to expand and improve the concept.
Daniele: We would like to create a proper Methedras trademark which blends together simpler and more immediate choices and more complicated ones. We would like to create a mix between some catchy melodies easy to remember and riffs which are special and technically complicated.
Me: Finally the lyrics of your songs. Let’s talk a little bit about them. I read the texts of all your previous songs and my attention is drawn by a general social criticism. What is the meaning behind that? Are you going to write similar lyrics for the new album too?
Andrea: Here we have also Claudio Facheris, our old singer and great friend, and I think he can definitively answer your question better than anyone else since he wrote all the lyrics himself up until now.
Claudio Facheris: Well as you read from the title, the last album is about the total Subversion of the System.
A subversion that is certainly antisocial, but I hope that the listeners will not consider it only a verbal anti-social subversion, but truly a subversion from a practical point of view. We should put our life against what Society offers.
I have always written very personal lyrics and I can imagine that initially it could have been hard for Tito to feel them as his own. However a loud applause to him that managed in such a short time to interpret skilfully what I meant.
I say that the Society imposes on us rules that are totally unconstitutional, anti-social, anti-humans, and what I wanted to transmit in my lyrics is the great distortion that exists between these anti human rules imposed by the System and the reality where we live daily.
Actually, by knowing Tito, I can assume already now that the lyrics that he is going to write for Methedras will follow this theme and maybe he will even amplify the concepts by making people understand that if they did not wake up yet, it's time for them to do so.
Andrea: Yes, if I may add something to that, by Society we mean the group of those who rule us, such the political, economic and the financial side of Society. The System. Those who provide us with unconstitutional rules and laws that millions of people follow blindly as sheeps for most of the times. About the new lyrics of course they will be responsibility of Tito.
Me: Tito do you have any idea?
Tito: Honestly not. I did not have time to think about them yet.
Andrea: The things is that he has been working with us only from a few months and his main priority has been learning our songs for a live set. I can also say that even if Tito is different from Claudio he is also very personal and equally poignant. I like a lot what he writes and I am sure that his new lyrics will work for Methedras as well as Claudio's. It will be a great album. An album different from all others.
Me: Well the time for us is almost over, I really appreciated talking to you guys, there is a lot of energy and talent here and I am sure that your new works will be amazing.
I would like to live the last words to you all, anything that you would like to add in conclusion of this interview?
Claudio Facheris: Well I would like to give my impression around their performance here at the Fosh Fest. It has been incredible. After seventeen years of sharing the stage with them, I was standing on the other side, the first time I saw them playing in an environment that is much bigger than a club, on stage in front of so many people and I heard them playing fucking amazing!
They were able to transmit perfectly what they call the “Methedras trademark” and I am sure that as soon as they put their talent and ideas in a new album they will be able to make an exceptional work.
Andrea: Yes we strongly believe in that and I can already anticipate that if we can, next year we will release a demo with three songs to have something to present immediately, if not, we will focus directly on a new album trying to finish it always by next year.
We want to take advantage of the moment and of the freshly made changes in the band's line up and release an album without waiting five years as we did between Katarsis and System Subversion.
Methedras have been touring and participating to festivals for the rest of the summer and they are about to start a new tour with Night Rage, a band that is half Greek and half Swedish; with them they will be touring in France, Spain and in Italy and when I asked them what their hopes for the future are, Andrea did not hesitate a minute, they would love, one day, to be able to organise a little tour as headliners in Scandinavia.
The guys are enthusiastic, full of energy and very talented and I am sure it won't take long for them to see their wishes come true. Thank you Methedras for the time and the interview.
I will see you in Sweden.
Interview by Eir