Earlier this year, at HRH Doom Vs Stoner, we caught up with the wonderful OHHMS, just as they were on the cusp of releasing Exist. Gathered around a table, in a press area so loud, we struggled to make sense of the recording, were Chainy (bass), Marc and Daniel (guitars), who took some time to talk about the evolution of the band’s lyrical themes, the role of prog in their list of influences and, errr, spandex. So distorted is the recording, that only rarely could we make out who was saying what; so, for the purposes of the write-up, OHHMS have become one, multi-headed entity…
As far as I understand it, OHHMS didn’t really have much in the way of concrete plans for the year, but then Paul (I think) started developing some lyrics around animal rights issues and that then led to the tour that you did at the start of the year, is that right?
Well, we started writing the album two years ago. Some of the songs… Yeah, this wasn’t an out of the blue thing… But… yeah, we were planning to do one tour each year, so, there has definitely been a big build up to this year. We knew there was going to be an album a year after we did ‘the fool’. What form it took and what it would sound like… Well, we didn’t really know, but Paul had that spurt of animal rights stuff and it morphed into this thing.
Things do seem to have been speeding up – You had the two EPs, each of which featured just one incredibly long song, then the fool – which was a double LP and then, since then, there’ve been quite a few tours and festival appearances…
There are still incredibly long songs on this one, don’t get me wrong – there’s a twenty-two minute track (our longest song) but yeah the pace of the records and the way we put them out is quite quick. The style has altered slightly, although it’s fundamentally the same. I think we want to move away from really long songs… apart from this one… yeah – we’ll do a really, really long one and then no more long ones. Paul says he wants the next album to be five-minute songs. I called him a sell-out, but he’s too old and deaf to have heard me.
Is that just because he has to write reams and reams of lyrics?
You’d think there’d be lots of lyrics but, if anything, he just writes less. There’s more in the shorter songs!
So, you did a tour at the beginning of the year…
Yeah, the Animal Rights, we had all the Animal Aid stuff – we got in touch with Animal Aid and they gave us some stuff for our merch table. We’ve always kind of hinted at that side of our band, but we didn’t want to be too in people’s faces about it, but now we don’t care. It was a bit of a build up to what the album’s actually about, which is animal rights. No one would have known that at the start of the year, so I guess it’s a little bit of a teaser. Even on the posters it said “Exist” which is the album title. The artwork on the poster isn’t the artwork we’re using for the album. It’s still… a part of the release in a way. We started off with animal rights, eco stuff and only ‘the fool’… well, that was as well, but disguised in a way… but now we’re going to take away the metaphors and just be in your face… “this is the meaning of the music!”
It’s a fine line to tread, I guess between keeping the entertainment angle that comes with music and maintaining a cogent socio-political message…
You just can’t be too preachy about it. It’s like any controversial topic – you say “this is what I believe and you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want”. We obviously just say what we want in a friendly sort of way, I guess. Our drummer, he’s a meat eater! You know, he’s thought about becoming a vegetarian but thought is about as close as he’s got! But, we’re not, like, angry vegans! Only two of us are vegan – Marc and Paul (they’re the angry ones!) So, we have a message, but it’s not like “if you’re listening to us, you have to follow our message!” There’s a message there, it’s up to you to follow it if you want to; but if you don’t, you don’t. We’re not going to be against people who don’t want to be vegetarian or vegan.
The artwork for the album, though, is much more confrontational in a sense and the cover is a harsh, unforgiving image than on previous works…
It’s a different artist, to start off with, on this album, as opposed to the others, so it’s going to be from a different angle. But yeah, in a way, all the albums all have the same topic, but it’s a different person doing it. The original person, he had a different way of portraying the message, but the people we’ve gone with this time, it’s more… you can tell what it’s about just by looking at it.
I think the lyrics as well… they’re more open and less shrouded in metaphor and that sort of thing, so it’s a bit more clear… or clearer what they’re about. We thought the art reflects that, or at least that’s what it looks like – he probably accidentally did it! Yeah, there’s a lot of accidents! We pretend it’s all deliberate but… we didn’t even know this was going to be a vegetarian-based album until we listened back to it, we just accidentally wrote loads of lyrics about it!
Do the lyrics feed the music or vice versa?
No, I think the music… we fit bits of the lyrics about the music but they are very separate, I think. From my perspective anyway… in the writing process. Paul does his own thing on the lyric side and brings them pretty much to the table and we incorporate it all. But they are initially quite separate. Paul doesn’t say “here are my lyrics, write music to it…” Yeah, I guess any song could be about anything before you put lyrics to it, I suppose. We could have written a grindcore album and it still would have been about animal rights. The music mostly comes first, so it’s then fitting the lyrics vocally around what’s already been created. A lot of it is in the studio as well – it comes to life in the studio and we mess around and double track things then realise “oh fuck! We’ve got to play this live!”
You could go the Guns ‘n’ roses route and have spandex-clad singers at the back.
Yeah… they’d have to do it for free..
[To companion] Rich? Spandex?
Does he bring his own spandex, or do we have to provide it?
Rich: It’s just something I haven’t thought about before – I appreciate the offer…
It’s good to bring new ideas to the table.
Within the press materials, there were references to proggier bands – I think Floyd and Genesis got mentioned… was there a conscious prog influence on the new record?
I think it was more a case that we had to explain why we were still doing long songs. We had to blame it on something.
Blame Peter Gabriel…
Yeah, blame it on someone else. The progressive elements have always been there in our songs from day one. It’s not a new thing. They just wanted to… pigeonhole. But then, I think it’s hard to pigeonhole anything, unless you go into something saying you’re going to be that sort of band. If you draw in five people, you’re not all going to have the same influences, so I think that’ll probably be reflected in the music anyway and that’s where there are, like, elements of this and elements of this. If someone’s never heard it before, they can go “I sort of know what they’re going for…” but they obviously have to listen to it to see how we’ve mashed it together. I guess the longer songs is a good reason to say “prog”. Also, perhaps, because ‘Subjects’ is broken up into seven or eight sections – just like Genesis. They used to do stuff like that. We’re doing the same thing. We’ve progressed ourselves, but we haven’t all of a sudden ‘gone progressive’. We’ve always been pretty progressive. We didn’t get together and say “let’s write long songs” just because Pink Floyd did. It just happened. We like to make long songs.
How long did it take to track the album?
About a year. But that’s only because we did weekends. We did the first two songs – they were completely done – quite early on. Then we sent it out to management and other labels and things like that. Then the rest of it took a bit longer. It’s just that any time off we’re allowed from work, we tend to take for touring; so, if we’ve got to go to the studio, then it’s like weekends here and there and evenings – that’s why it took a year.
Is it more challenging to get a contiguous whole when you have to come in and get in the right mind-set for recording again?
I don’t think it’s ideal. The guitars and bass were all done in one session, so it’s not like we did half and half… It wasn’t that you do a track and then you come back and re-find your tone. So, it is quite consistent in that respect. Vocally, it’s over a few days and drums took a few days. Max had two sessions. For bass there were two sessions six months apart. The guitars as well… we did the two songs and then… we re-recorded one track. ‘Shambles’ was recorded six months before the rest of the album, but that’s because we recorded it with another song we ended up re-recording. So yeah, just the drums. We recorded two songs, then six months later we did another two songs. I don’t think it’s really affected the feeling of the LP. It’s all mixed and mastered by the same person in the same studio with more-or-less the same gear, so. It’s quite easy to capture that feel.
Was it the same people who did the last album?
It’s the same person, yeah. The only difference is that this time he mastered it, instead of just recording and mixing. Last time we sent it to a guy called Brad who runs a studio called Audio Siege. He usually does it, but we decided to go with Ian this time. He did a good job. It’s a lot louder, this album. That’s my personal, biggest worry because we’re going with someone else and the albums need to be either louder or the same volume and, luckily, it’s louder than the last one. So, it’s not going to be dipping in quality. It’s a bugbear – our albums can be a bit quiet.
So, you have to keep getting louder… in ten albums time…
That’ll be too loud! Yeah.
Getting the mastering right, particularly if you’re putting out vinyl, is a bit of an unsung art…
Yeah, they had to do like three different masters. One for vinyl, one for CD and one for digital. It’s a ball-ache.
Exist is out now via Holy Roar Records.
https://ohhms.bandcamp.com/
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