Caskets On Their Five Influences Behind ‘Reflections’
Yorkshire melodic metallers, Caskets, have announced their new album, Reflections, for an August 11 release on SharpTone Records. To mark the announcement, the Leeds quintet have released a new single, More Than Misery, featuring a guest appearance from The Word Alive’s Telle Smith. Benji Wilson (Guitarist/ Songwriter) and Craig Robinson (Guitarist) discuss their fives influences behind Reflections.
Eclectic Tastes & Formative Influences
Craig: We’ll start by saying there’s no key influences because everybody in the band listens to completely different music. I mainly listen to country and The Weeknd. That’s basically all I listen to. As for Benji, you’re a shoegazer, aren’t you?
Benji: I hardly ever listen to any metal. In my spare time, I’ll listen to chillstep, electronic music, and a bit of John Mayer.
Craig: I think if you go back to the roots of when we started playing music, I used to listen to the classics and I got a lot of influence from what my dad used to listen to, Status Quo, Thin Lizzy and stuff like that, mainly for the guitar work. But it’s like you don’t wanna listen to what’s on radio – listen to this! This is real music. And you don’t really appreciate that when you’re a kid. But now you do because they have those iconic guitarists and stuff like that.
Benji: And I think that has gone into the album because there is a lot more guitar work in Reflections than the last one, stuff that’s layered that you probably won’t hear on the first listen – but you’ll hear it as you progressively listen to the album.
The Weeknd + Electronic Elements
Benji: The Weeknd’s a good influence to include because we’ve always been like: we want synths, we want piano, stuff like that. And that’s definitely gone in there, there’s lots of electronics.
Craig: There can be demos sometimes that get thrown in. Whether they get used and all is another thing. But they’ll just be mainly synths and midi-based that’ll go in as an idea. It’s like no guitar working in whatsoever, not even a hint of a lead melody for the singing. Just like: right, this is the kind of idea. I’ve sent stuff to Benji before and it’s come back and it sounds nothing like it did when he went in. But the chord progression is the exact same, he’s just done it in a different way. It’s nice to see how some things start and then when you get to the finished thing at the end – it sounds nothing like it, but it came from that initial kind of thing. Which a lot of people obviously don’t hear, they don’t hear the demos, but we know where it started.
Acoustic Beginnings
Benji: Matt [Flood] listens to a lot of acoustic artists. In fact, By The Sound on Reflections was actually just an acoustic track that Matt wrote. And then he sent it to me and I just ripped it apart. It was really slow as well, I was like: we’re gonna need to speed this up, like double the speed. But that whole idea came out of an acoustic song straight into my lap. And I’m like: we need to change this (laughs).
Cinematic Flourishes
Benji: We listen to a lot of soundtracks from films, we love John Williams, Hans Zimmer and a lot of score music. And on the album we actually got a chance to put real strings on it. Better Way Out, which is the album closer, that’s all real strings at the end. It was all done in America, we’ve got a guy that we work with called Randy Slaugh, he does a lot of our synth work. So I’ll send him the notes and how long they are, and he’ll mess with them a bit and pull them through his process and stuff. He recorded all of the strings and it turned out great. And I think because they are real, you can actually hear that they are real, even if the digital ones sound great now, you can kind of hear the emotion in the playing.
Inspiration Beyond Music
Craig: A lot of the songs on Reflections also have heavy personal experiences behind them.
Benji: Yeah, lyric-wise on this one we opened it up more to the band. On Lost Souls, it was more Matt’s kind of experience. But we opened it up for this one and every song is pretty much something that we’ve each gone through personally. It’s from different people this time, so I’d say it’s a bit more ranging.
Pre-order Reflections here.
Reflections Track Listing:
- Believe
- More Than Misery
- In The Silence
- Too Late
- By The Sound
- Six Feet Down
- Silhouettes
- Guiding Light
- Hate Me
- Better Way Out
