Interview
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Can you tell the readers a bit about the band's history ? H: The idea of April came in year 2004, when MG aka MikkoM (guitar) and me (Hakim, vocals) were doing a demo in Sweden just for fun. I lived in Sweden for a few years. Soon after that it didnīt take long for me to move back to Finland. Meanwhile Mikko had collected a nice crew. He found Jaakko Pulkki (bass) and Mikko Huovila(drums), and half a year later came JFatal (guitar). We did two demos in 2004 and 2005 before we got signed to Spinefarm. The last demo "The Power Of One" was the one that Spine liked before they took us in there family. April has played over 50 shows in the last two years in Finland and that is one of our strenghts. I recommend You to come to see us live.
H: Tidelines is a record that looks like April. It is versatile, hard, emotional and aggressive. It contains uptempo songs aswell as a couple of ballads and everything inbetween.
H: The main writing comes a lot from me, MikkoM and JFatal. But everyone has their own part in April's music. Jaakko is really good in fitting different things together and he always comes up with parts that we didnīt tought about. Mikko H. is the soul that many people donīt think about. Without his drumming this wouldnīt be April.
H: We get songs together on our rehearsal studio, and when they start to take shape, we try to perform them live a couple of times. There You at last will see, if a song is good or not.
H: It was really fun. I loved it a lot. It was my first time in a big studio and felt really, really nice. I had some problems in the beginning, but Tero Kinnunen (producer) was really chill and he knew how to handle me and probably the rest of the band too. The recording, mixing and mastering took about three months. We were recording in the summer, and summer of 2006 was extremely hot in Finland. The studio was brand new and air conditioning was not yet installed. So it was damn hot. :)
H: The lyrics are about (unsatisfactory) love, anger, hate, hopes dreams, common everyday stuff. In a couple of songs MikkoM sought inspiration in movies and literature. For example the song "Colourblind" is loosely based on the movie "Soldier Blue", which is a violent 70's western about a us army soldier, who doesn't know on which side to stand when he sees his army kill native americans. In general the song is about prejudice, about discrimination, about the fear of "the other" in all of us.
H: Right now I think that "Time Is Up" is my favorite, because of the different mood in that song compared to other songs on the album. But I like "Weakened to Speak" and "Two Steps" very much too.
H: Living Colour, Faith No More and Thin Lizzy are big things to me. The bad part of them is that I have never seen them live. That makes me angry :) But April are influnced of many bands. like Iron Maiden, Deftones, Van Halen... There are so many and, everyone in this band has their own favoritesof which I donīt even know about.
H: There are so many big bands, and many good bands too. If You really wanna be something, You have to do a lot of work to make it happen. There are also some things that I donīt understand about the metal scene, but we ainīt gonna go into that!!
H: Hmmm. We are probably the most boring guys in the world. We are getting too old. :)
H: We hope that we tour around Europe still within this year. But nothing confirmed on this matter yet.
H: Play in April and tour as much as possible
H: April says Cheers from Helsinki, Finland to all You listeners and keep it real!
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