It’s rare for a band to have a renaissance 25 years in, but it would also be unfair to state that Germany’s Caliban ever really had a dip. However, their 12th record, Dystopia, out now via Century Media, is a beautiful encapsulation of what has endeared fans for all these years, as well as a shining reminder that Caliban’s future is still bright.
Dystopia is almost an homage to all the things that made Caliban a pioneering melodic metalcore band, as well as a mission statement that these Germans haven’t forgotten their brutal roots. The blend of career retrospective and future focus started during last year’s German-only re-recordings album, Zeitgeister, which found the band taking some of their favorite back-catalogue songs and wholesale rewriting them. First, they took the original English and translated to German (which was harder than expected), and then they found ways to pay homage to their musical past while pushing their modern groove and industrial influences to the forefront.
For guitarist Marc Görtz, that previous experiment was central to the success of Dystopia:
“I took some kind of a time travel when I was writing this record. I mean, the German EP is old, rearranged, reimagined songs from the past with just one new track. And while we were digging through all our albums in the past to pick the songs we would like to reimagine or rerecord or whatever you want to call it, and I got some kind of a vibe from the old Caliban stuff. I thought it would be cool to (take that) vibe from the past, days, like the heaviness, the roughness, and then still mix it with the atmosphere from the last couple of albums.
“That’s also why and how we chose our feature guests because they’re also friends from the past, bands from the past we played with and stuff like that. One other, actually, unfortunately didn’t work out; Brian from Shadows Fall was supposed to do something, but he was traveling with his kids, so he couldn’t make it in time until we had to deliver the master files.”
“I mean, that was really a long, long kind of process to get with the Zeitgeister where we wanted it to be. That was actually harder than writing a new album. Our goal was to completely just pick the basic idea from the song and make it into something new which fits in the modern world somehow in our music taste right now and how we would write that kind of song today. For the lyrics, the first plan was just to translate the English lyrics to German. But that all completely didn’t work because the phrases, they’re way too long or way too short, and the rhythm patterns didn’t match.”
“While I was working on Zeitgeister,” he continues, “and then went back to writing the album and Zeitgeister was done, I really transformed some of the stuff I have written before, and also threw away the pretty good amount of songs, because I wanted this other vibe, what I just described, and to fit into this kind of concept that people from the past, people who listened to us (decades ago), that they get this kind of aggression and this kind of vibe we were known for in the past.”
With an album of such amazing features—including Job For A Cowboy’s Johnny Davy and Annisokay’s Christoph Wieczorek, which one was Görtz’s favorite?
“That’s is an unfair question,” he says, laughing. “That is really, really hard to say because they’re all so different. Our closest friend is, of course, Marcus (Bischoff) from Heaven Shall Burn because both bands grew up together. That was something special somehow because also the song he’s singing on is, I don’t know if you notice that when you listen to the song, it has a really strong instrumental vibe from Heaven Shall Burn as well. The song is more like a real, old-school Caliban song mixed with Heaven Shall Burn vibes, and that was the purpose.
“Of course, we mixed some new elements in it to fit to the album, but it’s really an old-school kind of track. And if Marcus wouldn’t have been singing on that song, the song wouldn’t be like that. If Marcus didn’t or couldn’t do the feature, I would have changed the song most probably.”
Watch the video for “Alien” here:
For more from Caliban, find them on Facebook and their official website.
Photo courtesy of XOXO Photography
