Cemetery Skyline – interview met Markus Vanhala (guitars)
Markus Vanhala: “Accidentally and surprisingly, during these four years when we already formed Cemetery Skyline, some gothic stuff has been on the rise. So maybe we accidentally hit the sweet spot of this nineties nostalgic trip.”
Cemetery Skyline mag dan een nieuwe naam zijn, deze Fins/Zweedse band herbergt een aantal rasmuzikanten uit de Scandinavische topklasse. Denk aan Markus Vanhala (Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum, I Am The Night) als componist/gitarist en Mikael Stanne (Dark Tranquillity, Grand Cadaver, The Halo Effect) als (enkel cleane) zanger. Deze band speelt dan ook eerder rock dan metal en laat de duistere sfeer van jaren negentig gothic herleven. Dat doen ze voortreffelijk op dit debuut ‘Nordic Gothic’! We hebben het genoegen om met gitarist en initiator Markus Vanhala te spreken vlak voor hij naar Japan vertrekt voor een tournee met Omnium Gatherum.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 14 oktober 2024
I am very glad I can speak to you now, because you are leaving for Japan tomorrow. I hope I don’t disturb you too much…
No no no. I am just packing. Day after day, nothing but packing for leaving to Japan tomorrow.
With which band are you going?
Omnium Gatherum. Three weeks in Asia, Japan and China. Usually we have only been playing Shanghai and Peking, but now it is more. It’s always been good, a lot of people surprisingly, because there is billions of people.
First of all, have a fantastic experience over there…
Thank you.
Now we are going to try to focus on Cemetery Skyline. First of all, fantastic record! It is also a style I really love…
We were feeling that there is a lack of gothic metal and nineties nostalgia in the metal scene nowadays. That is pretty much the thing behind Cemetery Skyline. Everyone in the band has been fans of this music style in the nineties. Everyone listened to Type O’Negative and Sisters Of Mercy and Finnish gothic bands and even Paradise Lost is gothic. Even Moonspell used to be gothic. We loved all that music back then, even if we were death metal fans in the nineties, but secretly everyone was in love with this music style. It has been dead for many, many years now, so…
It vanished in the haze. Suddenly it was not trendy anymore…
Weird enough… we actually formed this band already before the pandemic, in January 2020. So it has been already a while, but back then there was nothing in sight for the gothic music to raise its head again. It is weird now, during these four years some bands have decided to play more gothic music. Last year we had this Netflix TV series ‘Wednesday’ which was a huge hit, Addams family style gothic and Unto Others is playing gothic music. I just noticed that even Tribulation has changed their style into the gothic direction. Accidentally and surprisingly, during these times when we already formed Cemetery Skyline, some gothic stuff has been on the rise. So maybe we accidentally hit the sweet spot of this nineties nostalgic trip.
That is funny, but I think you took the initiative for the band…
Yes, I was in the first row forming this band. Actually I was talking at 70,000 tons of metal with my buddy and he said that ‘I should form a gothic band’ then. After two seconds of thinking I was thinking that it was a good idea. I would say three of my biggest heroes in metal music, they would be Iron Maiden, Death and Type O’Negative. That is my musical metal DNA.
How did you manage to gather such prominent artists and musicians and singer for the band?
I feel it is a little bit annoying that… of course all the labels and Century Media are calling Cemetery Skyline a super group, which I actually totally get, because if you watch the band members, you see a nice amount of bands in the line-up, but in the first place I was just thinking of gathering this band from my friends. So Cemetery Skyline for me is a band of friends down the road, bands we have been touring with years and years and get to know these guys and know their musical tastes and know how they work and so, that is more how this band came into being.
You could expect that the press would headline about a super group…
Of course, but at the same time forming a super group is a bit stupid, because the schedules are insane. Like now, there would be so much demand for Cemetery Skyline to play shows. In the first place we were thinking that we probably won’t be playing live. We already did one show in Finland at the John Smith Rock festival, because they invited us. That went so well that we decided ‘this is too good and too nice to be wasted’, so let us do some shows and you can guess how difficult it is to schedule, but we are ready for the thing, but the agency will get grey hair (laughs). We already have like ten shows for next year.
That is interesting. That was also one of my questions: will it not be hard to combine this with all your other activities? That is a logical question of course.
The best things in life are usually not easy, so…
The music should also fit in the regular charts, surely in Finland, because there were less catchy metal bands storming the charts in the past…
Yeah we definitely have a great history in Finland with gothic metal, like Sentenced – from which we have a drummer in this band which is great, because I used to be a huge Sentenced fan – I still am. I adored Sentenced in the nineties when I was a teenager. Of course HIM is a big Finnish gothic band, probably the biggest Finnish band ever I think.
Like you said, even the guys from Paradise Lost, they never lost their love for gothic, because they have the band Host now, a project…
Yeah Paradise Lost has always been a bit bouncing with their style, but some of the stuff they did, was amazing. The ‘Icon’ album is my big favourite and ‘Draconian Times’ and maybe the most more gothic stuff was like ‘One Second’ and ‘Host’ when they mixed Depeche Mode and gothic music. That is also in our plate quite a big thing, that we all like Depeche Mode. Especially Mikael’s singing is having a lot of resemblance with Depeche Mode.
He is doing an amazing job. Of course I liked him singing clean always, but now that he has the opportunity to do it on an entire record, it is something special…
Yeah I noticed that the world has been waiting for a clean singing album from Mikael Stanne, because people are saying that they have been waiting since the ‘Projector’ album of Dark Tranquillity – which is released like 25 years ago – so people had to wait 25 years for Mikael to do a full clean album. I think he is such a great storyteller, such a great, unique, emotional voice which is perfect for this kind of music and he was so restless and stretched out for this project, because he’s never been doing this kind of music, so he was really restless, but he managed to do so well from the first demos on and when we agreed to do this one festival show, he was like six months falling apart and wondering if he could do this and it was so great. I knew it from the scratch because his vocal parts in Dark Tranquillity are so nice and we have been touring so many tours together with Mikael. We always end up sitting in the bus lounge downstairs, listening to some good music and Mikael always sings along a bit tipsy. So I have been spying during the years that he is such a great singer (chuckles).
‘The Coldest Heart’ reminded me of Type O’Negative and even The Doors, Jim Morrison in the beginning of the song…
That Doors relation, that is cool to hear! The Type O’Negative thing, that is quite natural, because ‘The Coldest Heart’ is one of the first songs I composed for this project. At first we thought about doing a Type O’Negative tribute song, so it is a tribute to Peter Steele. But the story is not about Peter Steele to be honest. It is a real story from Mikael, but not from Mikael’s life. He is a storyteller, like I said. It is this kind of unhappy love affair belonging to the gothic.
The lyrics are in gothic style, but there should also be a kind of northern solitude and melancholy woven in it…
Yes, there are not so good ending love stories on the album, but at the same time the term ‘northern gothic’ means this thing. It is a great concept that Mikael built around this album. Sweden and Finland are rated as the happiest countries in many polls and at the same time loneliness here up in the north is like a daily common thing. People even chose to be alone and they love to live alone. We don’t have like that kind of Mediterranean culture of families always being together. People in Sweden and in Finland are often alone and lonely and the downside of that thing is that I think Sweden has the biggest rate of people dying alone in their apartments and they are not going to be found. That is the downside of the happiest countries in the world. So this is one big thing on this album also.
That is nice… I mean ‘nice in all its sadness’ of course…
That is a really gothic lifestyle… Self chosen gothic loneliness…
Did this other style demand another way of working in the studio?
Yeah, different of mind set at least, because everyone was working in different studios in Finland and in Sweden, so we did this remotely and I can only speak about my share. I just only wanted to use old guitar stuff, like my old guitar stuff from the nineties and I have bought some old equipment and amps too. This is played with different stuff than I would do in the Insomnium and Omnium Gatherum world in order to get that kind of early nineties vibe to what I am playing and then of course the production. We mixed the album at the Fascination Street studio in Sweden, which is like a really famous metal studio, but we tried to keep the metal to the minimum, not too much metal production, like a nineties sound but with a modern view. I think Alexander Backlund did a very good job on mixing this album. He is like the boy student of Jens Bogren. Alexander is working a lot with Jens Bogren. He mixed the new Soen album and the Marty Friedman album. He is up and coming.
It is nice that you have a longer track at the end of the record. ‘Together Alone’ is a marvellous song!
I think that sums up the global feeling of the album pretty well…Yeah that is my personal favourite track, back on the whole album. It really gives a tribute to old gothic stuff like HIM, Type O’Negative and even Duran Duran. I wrote that song in a really weird mood and a weird time it was. It was somewhere in 2020 when the pandemic was the hardest and we had to be isolated in our homes. We could not go anywhere. I composed that song during that weird era of the world and tried to get that kind of vibe to the song that is like a stagnant waiting style and then Mikael definitely understood what I was after and he wrote really great lyrics. If you read them and think about them, the most difficult pandemic times, then you get the point, but nobody knew what was coming and everybody was feeling alone. At home and isolated. It’s been a few years since it happened now, it already seems like ages ago, pandemic times.
When I go to festivals, I still wonder you don’t see any traces anymore of that time…
Yeah it came really fast towards us and it also left fast (nothing really because it was two years) but suddenly all restrictions were gone. I actually remember, pretty much the only festival we did abroad Finland during pandemic times was in Belgium at Alcatraz. We played there with Omnium Gatherum and it was great, because all the other festivals were closed and then Alcatraz was just like a glimpse from the old world. I had to do a lot of tests. I remember straight after our show, I had to go to covid-19 test. I was holding a beer in my hand and the doctor was taking that sample from my nose (laughs).
I saw the stream…
That was an important show, because it really gave us some hope. We entered the festival site and there was like ten or twenty thousand people and everything seemed normal. We were like: ‘what is happening here? This is so great!’ We missed this so much.
Another fascinating thing are the visuals for Cemetery Skyline, like the tower in cross format…
You mean the visualizer from ‘The Coldest Heart’? This is like a dystopian world. A great visual artist, this Metastazis! He is a famous metal visual artist. He made that video and he did the cover artwork for ‘Nordic Gothic’ and we were asking him to build this kind of dystopic world. Almost art like a tombstone, or tombcrosses. It is a dystopian world, which is not far away from the truth with us. For example Tokyo, it is a huge city with so much skyscrapers and ten million people living in Tokyo and then there is like a problem, that people are really alone. There is a lot of loneliness and even people who are living in buildings with thousands of people, but they don’t know their neighbours and they are alone in the middle of these ten millions people. That is like a kind of paradox and utopia, but that is something we are trying to symbolize on our artwork and the band name and stuff.
Yeah it is strange that you think about it as an utopia and yet it is already happening on our planet sometimes…
Yeah dystopia is here in many ways. Things we saw in old movies and looked like dystopia, that is happening already. It is scary. Movie makers have been like oracles. Another cool meaning for the Cemetery Skyline name is the next one. We had in mind this great cemetery in New York. It is a really big cemetery and when you watch the Manhattan direction from the cemetery, you can see the whole Manhattan skyline. It is also a weird place, because the cemetery is so silent, where you can go to catch a breath and next to that is Manhattan, it is crazy.
Is there still something special you like to tell about one of the songs?
‘Violent Storm’ was one of the last songs to create for this album, but we picked it as the first single. They are like the presentation of this band, because many of these songs or few of these songs were already composed before me and Santeri exactly knew who’s going to sing on this album. But when we wrote ‘Violent Storm’ we already knew that Mikael was going to sing those, so then we already had like a strong vision about how Cemetery Skyline would sound like. That is why we picked it as first single, like a perfect presentation of this new band, because it is always really an important and crucial song for a new band, when you are presenting the first single of a completely new band. People will remember it for the rest of the band’s life. It is important what you are saying when you are publicly announced. For example, in the first press release we said that Cemetery Skyline is a gothic band. When we said that, of course everybody is picking up the ‘gothic’ word. What would have happened if we said that Cemetery Skyline is like an occult rock band? Probably nobody would call us gothic, but occult rock. It is funny how important those few words that you say are when the band is announced publicly.
You did the presentation very well, because there was a huge introduction of the band by making so much video clips and they were spread over the months…
Yeah. I think the coolest thing about how we came out with Cemetery Skyline is the first place that announced our band. It was the John Smith Festival in Finland. I got the idea that this organizer insisted us to play his festival and play our first gig there. Okay we could do it, but let’s do it like that you announce the band name before we announce the band. Mister John Smith is a crazy guy and he said: ‘okay let us do it like that’, that is something different. John Smith announced the headliners of the festival and it was Behemoth, Amorphis, Testament and Cemetery Skyline, while nobody had heard Cemetery Skyline ever and there was no hint anywhere in google for Cemetery Skyline. We just watched people discussing the festival. People were a bit annoyed, like ‘what is this band?’ ‘Is this a joke band or is it a new formation of Sentenced or a new formation of HIM?’ We were just laughing, because this was exactly what we were after.
A great way to enter the scene! What are the plans for the future? Also playing live a bit you said…
Yeah! We have like ten shows lined up for next year, even ProgPower USA is just announced. So we will play in the US, one show and there is some more to come although it is really, really hard to line up everything, because Mikael Stanne is having three albums out at the same time. He is even more busier than I am. We want to keep this band like an important special guest which is really honest and fresh for us. We don’t want to see this band fighting the schedules of the main bands. Cemetery Skyline is probably not going to do long tours, at least not anytime soon, so we try to play every now and then one or two shows on festivals here and there. If you see our name on a festival poster I would strongly suggest you to come and see the band, because it is not everyday that you can see this band.
As long as you keep on existing and this was not a one time thing, I am very happy…
I know, this is too good to be wasted. We actually signed a record deal for a few albums and we have some stuff to be released after the album will come out. We actually recorded quite a bunch. There will be new stuff sooner than later. I have already been working on some new songs.
Wow congratulations! What a working horse!
(laughs) It is my disease, to work with music. If I try to stay away from the music I cannot. It is a blessing and a curse.
I know that feeling… Have a nice trip to Japan!
Thank you. All the best for you too, take care.
