Art by Danique

Tales From The Dark Side

From the depths of hell come Chicago based dark power-punk band, ALKALINE TRIO with latest album Crimson. BIANCA caught up with drummer DEREK GRANT.

Sitting at an airport with an hour to go till he and fellow band comrades board a plane from London to Japan Grant explains in a slightly nasal voice through a couple of coughs, “I’m a little sick but I’ll live.” The ‘Trio are in the middle of a world tour to promote their latest record, Crimson the follow up to effort to 2005 release, Good Mourning.

“I think in some aspects it [Crimson] makes up for Good Mourning,” starts Grant. “Good Mourning was bit of a confused effort. There were a lot of things going on that made that a difficult album for us to make. I think the songs are good but they just didn’t turn out as well as they could have for a variety of reasons. Crimson is a very redeeming album for us. It is definitely the album to make to get us back on track creatively.”

Feeling excited about being back on track the drummer continues telling how the band feel that Crimson is a more ‘cohesive’ work than it’s predecessor. “We took every song we had available to us for Good Mourning, we had only written that many songs so, we felt like we were forced to put the songs on the album for better or for worse. With Crimson we had twice as many songs as we needed. When we went in to the studio we could pick the songs that we felt best, that was something we couldn’t afford to do on Good Mourning. It was definitely one of the nicer things about this album. We were able to pick and choose and make it the best collection of songs.”

Around the time the album was in the creative stages front man Matt Skiba broke his wrist and arm. “It was a little bit of a wake up call to Matt primarily because it threaten his career,” says Grant of the situation. “Thankfully the injuries weren’t server enough to have any real long term effect. He broke his wrist prior to us going in the studio so it set recording back about a month which ended up being a good thing in the end because it gave us a little more time to prepare. He broke his arm again immediately after we finished the album. Neither situation really had that big of an impact on the actual recording it was just a matter of him being bummed because he couldn’t play guitar for a while and us of course being concerned for his health.”

Sneakers art by Simpriel

In the studio this time around Grant felt that he really, for the first time since joining the group five years ago, got to contribute equally to the writing of the album. “There was some creative growth on my part,” he tells. “It was the first time during the writing I felt like I could make an equal input. That was mostly something that I had imposed on myself though. I was restricting my input to the band because I knew that Matt and Dan had been doing it a lot longer than I had and I didn’t want to miss with any sort of chemistry that might be there. It took me a couple of years before I felt I had a good understanding of where everything was at and where I could safely interject ideas without messing with the formula too much. It was a real exciting time for me.”