We’re a “Powercore” band based in Brisbane, Australia. We formed and started playing shows in late 2010 and haven’t looked back. We recorded our debut album in January 2012 with Fredrik Nordstrom from Sweden and released it independently in June ’12. After playing our local scene and sporadic shows here and there all over Aus, we were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to be signed to Eclipse records in the months after our album launch and have since released our debut album, Dead or Alive through them on October 1st 2013. We’ve recently been touring our country with international bands such as Born of Osiris, Upon A Burning Body and Adept, and can’t wait to get overseas and tour the globe 🙂
Bio: A Beach Of Silence started in a share house between friends. Hungry for a different sound to the separate bands that we were playing in, we started writing and trying new things. After many months playing shows, and add a couple line-up changes, we think we’ve found our style of predominately metalcore styled riffs with and added element of power metal thrown in. I guess that’s why we jokingly (not jokingly haha) call ourselves “Powercore”.
Genre: Our genre is a mixture of all of our tastes. As anyone who listens to a lot of heavy metal will attest, there’s a HUGE gap between power metal, death metal and metalcore. We’re an extremely diverse bunch of guys who draw influences from ALL the spectrums of the metal scale, and since we were all quite stubborn about how we were going to develop as a band, i guess we were forced to try and make the mixture of them all work well. We had to; otherwise people would’ve thought it was the weirdest thing they’ve heard. Luckily we’ve mostly heard good things, so we’re happy 🙂
Evolution of the initial musical and thematic elements: Through a lot of trial and error. The only way you’re going to know if something sounds good is if you lay it down and see. We had some songs from the beginning that we had changed at least 6 times before we finally recorded them on Dead or Alive. Some didn’t even make the cut! I guess we needed to find the elements that we were good at and stick to them.
Lyrics, themes and concepts: We seem to have an underlining theme to all of our songs. It’s basically the positive way of thinking that in life; you’re only going to get somewhere if you do it yourself. Quit whinging, quit saying no, quit taking crap from people you don’t need to and drive your own ship. Our song, There Will Be Blood is a good example of this. The chorus basically means that in life, there’s going to be struggles (there will be blood), so man up and face them (so no remorse). Another song, Circles sets the scene of a break up. The verses goes through the dark places that your mind can go through such a time, but then the chorus melodically takes you to the places where everybody finds their inspiration or drive to push through it and move on.
Ideas about the album: The majority of the feedback about our album we’ve received thus far has been positive. So for the next record, we’re definitely going to play to our strengths. Vocally, we believe we’re quite diverse in the way we approach the transition between our verses to our choruses. Most of our choruses are melodic, and we draw hugely from our power metal influence for this. We haven’t heard too many (if any) other metalcore bands do this. So we’re running with it haha 🙂
Also, most of our songs start out as riffs on the guitar, as opposed to lyrics on a sheet of paper, so we’ve found that a lot of our songs are written around cool riffs that flow into one another, rather than ambient chords that compliment an epic piece of poetry.
Reception: We’ve had a fantastic response since we released the album. After touring around Australia a few times, we have been blown away with the support from our fans. On our last tour with Adept, we had people on the other side of the country screaming our lyrics back at us as we sung them! Definitely a positive milestone for us! Through the help of our label, Eclipse, in the States, we’ve been able to turn a few heads over there as well. We’ve had many album reviews done by American based people now, and we’re really happy with the response. We can’t wait to get over there and tour!
Preference; live or studio: They are both awesome for different reasons! Personally, i love touring. What’s better than playing music with your friends in a different city or town each day?! Seeing the sites along the way. It’s great for creating those awesome memories and stories that we’ll tell for years to come.
Recording, for us, has been a fantastic learning curve! I think we all learned more in the 2 weeks that we recorded with Fredrik than we have learned in the past 10 years! It’s a really creative time that opens your mind to so many different techniques and ways of thinking that leaves you coming out the other side as a better musician and person.
Next step; live or studio: DEFINITELY! ALL OF THE ABOVE haha! We’re recording our next album in February with Fredrik Nordstrom again. After that our focus is going to be touring overseas. Although nothing has been set in stone yet, we’re currently working on a couple opportunities to get us out of Australia and start touring overseas after the record is done.
Future plans: We’re doing what we love to do, so we’ll always play music. We’ll keep setting our goals high and do everything we can to make sure we achieve them. Based on our passion and good work ethic, i guess the future looks great!
Composers: We all actually play a part in the writing process of our songs. Our 2 guitarists, Kerrod and Mat write most of the riffs and guitar parts that start the songs off. From there, our drummer, Andy writes most of the drum parts to it, while I and Rhys or screamer writes most of the lyrics. We all play a helping hand into all the parts though, but from a writing point of view, we all basically handle our own parts.
Inspirations: As I said before, we draw a vast influence from many different styles of music. Our guitarist, Mat, has always listened to metalcore but from growing up in the country, he also throws in a country and western influence to the way he writes his riffs. I’ve always loved power metal bands like Blind Guardian, Edguy, Iced Earth and Iron Maiden, so i like to bring that out in the majority of my writing. Andy has listened to mostly Industrial metal bands like Fear Factory, Devil Driver and Machine Head, and we think he stays true to this style in his drumming. I guess with all of these thrown into a song, we somehow make it work haha.
Preference; cater to the audience or music for its own sake: I think that when you find your style, you need to stick to it. You’ll create an audience through hard work and loyalty to your fans. So i guess they go hand in hand. Over time, you can stay true to your loyal fans, by staying true to your music. So they’re both as important as each other, but the music comes first. You can’t have fans without music first.
Greatest Accomplishment: My music career has only been a short one. I guess our biggest achievement thus far would be our debut album. As a band just starting out, we somehow managed to convince Fredrik, one of the world’s best metal producers to fly half way across the world to record our album! We focused ourselves, applied our knowledge as best we could, combine it with his, and we’re unbelievably happy with the result!
You can visit their Facebook Page, Twitter, and Eclipse Records Page, and buy the album from iTunes or Amazon!
Photograph by Matt Donaldson.
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