Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Joe sat down with Rob and Tomm of The Oklahoma Kid to discuss their upcoming record, creation of their music videos and festival season.
Joe: On Tangerine Tragic, do you feel you’ve perfected your sound?
Tomm: It’s more of an experiment, Fred our guitarist, he’s doing 80-90% of the songwriting on instrumentals. He gets the inspiration from so many different other artists; metal bands, 80s/90s pop artists. It’s a challenge to get these styles to melt into eachother with the vocals, for the first time an album we have the soft clean vocals. It was new for us all to try and hear them on the new songs. I think it came out pretty good though and we’re all very satisfied with the outcome.
When it comes to the production, we wanted to go less digital and more organic with our sound. We recorded in the studio with Jan Kerscher and he did such a great job with the sound. His equipment and knowledge is so good and it was the perfect choice to go with him. I’m not sure it could have been done better.
Rob: Maybe, within our bounds and budget, which was pretty high for a band of our size. We are really really satisfied with the result in the end.
Joe: What are the main varying influences on there? Such as house, nu-metal, 00s rock etc.
Tomm: It comes down to Fred’s taste, I think he has listened to many artists and bands that he has so many inspirations that it feels infinite. On the vocals it’s similar, we have the vocal lines draw inspiration from some weird things that wouldn’t fit but we made them work.
Rob: For the record, he had a pool of 25-30 songs and we picked the 11 for the record. It wasn’t like we had to work to make the 11 songs, we had a big pool. Those were all put together by our main writer guy, Fred. We did an internal voting system, everyone picked their 11 favourite songs without talking to everyone. We concluded and saw everyone chose to be on the record. Nonetheless, the other songs aren’t bad either so they might appear on the next records.
Joe: When you’re method behind ordering the record with its variation?
Rob: It was the same way we did the song selection and as we did the song order. Everyone did a list with the song order of where they wanted it to be. There were some wild ideas, Dave our drummer, wanted our last song “Ohnmacht” to be our first song. That was the spectrum we were working with, the last song is good as the first song. We had to do an arc in how the songs feel and we did really well. The album is a strong mix of hard and soft songs, I’m a hard guy and come from death l and technical metal. I also like the chill tunes, half the record is chill post-punk, pop-punk and then we’ve got the metalcore bangers which I’m looking forward to. It really worked out well, our single selection is also really nice. We put our heads together to work out what’s best.
Joe: On the videos you work with Sven Inteen and Riot City Visuals, how did that come about?
Tomm: Riot City Visuals did the visual effects on the “Dye Black To Pink” video and Sven is a good friend of ours. He is always giving us input for the songs with vocal ideas and synths, while also doing music videos for many smaller bands around our area. He was the perfect choice for the “Dye Black To Pink” and “Velvet Feel” video, he comes up with such good ideas that aren’t too cliche for our genre. That was the most important thing to us, that when we do videos for the soft songs they shouldn’t look like metal videos. Then the harder songs “Melt Into You” and “Pale Tongue” have harder videos than we did before. On those we worked with Pavel Trebukhin, he’s doing a lot of videos for Imminence and other metal bands. He’s also an experimental guy and we give him his space to experiment, as we don’t come up with a bunch of ideas. We have visions in our head but it’s all up to him to come up with the video and he did a very good job on it.
Joe: What was the direction behind Tangerine Tragic’s album artwork?
Tomm: In the beginning I wanted to go for softer two tone portrait vibes, Jack of Acres did the design and a completely different thing. He worked with the ideas I asked for but it came out so perfect. The vibe of the artwork is perfect, it doesn’t look too new and has the millennium post-rock aesthetic to it.
Joe: Are you looking forward to returning to festivals around Europe?
Rob: We’re really looking forward to playing live again, our first upcoming festival is in July in Czech. There are also playing bands like Stick To Your Guns, Knocked Loose and Lionheart. We will hopefully get to see some label friends such as Imminence there too. That is the first one then we are playing in the Sound and Cultural festival after. The next couple of festivals are more in Germany, where there are a lot of metal festivals. In August we have a nice festival, “Rock the Fortress” is the translation. Our biggest festival will be the Summer Breeze festival in Bavaria, which has around 50k people. We’re not playing on the 50k stage, we’re playing on the smaller stage with a lot of good friends of ours. There’s a label night where all bands are from the same label, we hope to get in contact with a lot of our fans again. Of course the most important one is our headline this year coming up in October, that’s a big one.
Joe: On Arising Empire, do you chat to fellow bands and share ideas? Is it a good label to be on?
Rob: I would say so, there’s a lot of good bands. It’s a really cool label for modern metal which is what we are doing and it’s also a German label so in terms of communication it’s easy and handy. We are happy with them, it’s nice working with them together, we’re looking forward to seeing everyone. Some people who work on Arising Empire are also in bands, Robin is the singer of Venues who are on the label.
Many thanks to Rob and Tomm for sitting down for a chat with us, and you can read our review of Tangerine Tragic here.