Interview with The Contortionist vocalist Michael Lessard | By Kit Brown
Indiana’s prog-metal stalwarts, The Contortionist, have never been a band who make the same album twice. Whether it’s the mathematical brutality of their 2010 debut, Exoplanet, the dizzying rhythmic experimentation of 2012’s Intrinsic, or the lush atmospherics of 2014’s Language, they have constantly evolved as an unmistakably focused unit.
On their latest offering, Clairvoyant—due out Sept. 15 on eOne Music—the chilling and somber soundscapes show the band at their most barebones yet. Instead of relying on flashy fretwork, vocalist Michael Lessard and company seem much more intent on capturing the most emotional and cohesive ideas of their career.
“I don’t think any artist is ever truly happy [with their art], because you never want to stop working on it. There’s always something to fix,” Lessard says, “but everybody’s happy with how everything turned out. We had a few goals in mind as to how we wanted to go about this album, and it’s a collaborative effort: you take six dudes and put them in a room, and you kind of get what they’re all thinking.”
Clairvoyant is the product of both isolation and this true collaborative spirit. “For half of the writing process, most of us lived together. We’ve lived together for about two years,” Lessard says. “Well, everybody but our keyboardist Eric [Guenther]. We all work together, but we all work on our own as well. We also spent a month up in Maine. We’d rented out a cabin with all of us, so we could focus on all of the songs that people brought in and then have everyone working together on them. Then, we went home for a month, sat on them, and then headed to the studio for about a month and a half.”
For the first time, fans won’t hear a single scream on an album from The Contortionist. This may not be particularly shocking to those who have watched the band’s gradual move toward post-rock and ambient influences—versus, say, bands like Cynic and Between The Buried And Me, with whom The Contortionist will be touring in late September through October. While they still have that metal spark within them, the band simply didn’t feel as though their current take on that sound was up to par with the nine songs that ended up on Clairvoyant.
“We wrote probably 16 or 17 tracks for the album, and we chose the ones that we thought were the best songs,” Lessard says, “and it just happened to be that the ones that got chosen just weren’t very riff-heavy. I think some of that was due to the fact that we’ve done riff-oriented albums as well.”
Clairvoyant is another unexplained concept record and a continuation of the lyrical themes on Language. According to Lessard, if Language represents growth, then Clairvoyant is meant to represent death. Other than that small clue, the band remain adamant about not publishing lyrics or explicitly explaining their concepts.
“I like the listener to have to listen,” Lessard says. “I don’t want to put that all out in front of them, and I like active listeners and [want] to force our listeners to actually listen. I don’t even necessarily want to them to ‘figure it out;’ I want them to make their own story, and I like to leave it a little more open-ended so the listener can fill the pages with whatever they see fit.”
Regardless of how you end up interpreting the lyrics, Clairvoyant is not an album you will want to pass up.
