Interview date: November 19, 2008
MetalSteel, a heavy metal phenomenon from Medvode, Slovenia, are a real miracle by our standards. There’s no other band that started out as kids and had three albums out by the time they hit their early twenties. And we’re not talking about just any albums. MetalSteel bring music with that much-needed touch of recognizable, one-of-a-kind musical charisma and prove that wit, a hunger to experiment and pure musical enthusiasm always win out over formulaic predictability, inexperience and clichés. With their third studio album “Bad In Bed” (2007), MetalSteel have firmly cemented their place on the heavy metal scene in Slovenia. Their shows draw bigger and bigger crowds, backed by hordes of metal fanatics, and despite their youth the band has developed a rare and special quality you could call “rock-solid working chemistry”, a tightly knit bond that wins over their followers at every single gig.
RockLine: Your last gig was in Kranj at the start of this October. I heard through the grapevine that it was fantastic?
Matej: It was insane. It was one of our best gigs as far as atmosphere goes. We’ve had tons of good gigs, but this one will stay a special, really warm memory for me personally, and I think for the rest of the band too.
RockLine: What set this show at the Izbruhov bazen in Kranj apart from your usual MetalSteel gigs?
Rok: The energy was just right. The energy’s always good, but this time it was even more amplified and intense. The hall was packed to the max, and when you see that from the stage, it gives you an extra kick.
Matej: The sound was really good too. The promoter really put in the effort with the organization. We’ve always liked playing this hall, our gigs there have always been great. But this last one beat the previous ones in intensity and in how it felt. You can feel the difference. The crowd can be the same, everything can be identical, the sound setup and so on, but that day there was a really special energy in the air. It’s not about how many people are in the hall or anything like that…
RockLine: It all just came together perfectly.
Matej: Yeah. There was some kind of higher power at work.
Rok: At the end Sergej joined us on stage (once the singer of Requiem, now in the Iron Maiden tribute band Iron Median, ed. note) and sang Stare Device with us, and that was the cherry on top, right at the end of our set.
Matej: We also played a slightly shorter set than usual. Since we were limited on time, we put the set together to our own taste, so we played the songs we love most, and 50 bombastic minutes flew by.
RockLine: And at this year’s Metal Mania Open Air festival, you summoned an actual storm over Komen during your set.
Rok: That was a special experience too. Hats off to everyone who stuck it out with us in that storm.
RockLine: Personally I was shocked, but in a good way. The ambience that suddenly sprang up during your show at that festival felt downright “eerie,” apocalyptic. Lightning, pouring rain, wind, the tent canvas flapping over your heads, and yet a one-of-a-kind vibe. Tailor-made for heavy metal like yours.
Matej: After that show, for the first time ever, a whole lot of people came up to me afterwards to praise our gig. That had never happened before, that many people praising us after a show. People themselves actually said our set was something special.
Rok: Was that the first time you saw us play live?
RockLine: No, the second. The first time I saw you was way back on January 1, 2005, in Medvode, in a tent.
Rok Ohoho! That’s a long time ago.
Matej: Wasn’t that Alex’s last gig with MetalSteel?
Rok: Yeah.
RockLine: In the good seven years since you started seriously shaping and co-creating the Slovenian metal scene as MetalSteel, you’ve put out three albums, which is no small feat, especially for a Slovenian metal band and at your age. Every album is a new step up. There’s a noticeable difference between “Taste The Sin” (2005) and “Bad In Bed” (2007). In the music, in the approach to the cover art, in how you shaped your look, and more…
Rok: We didn’t plan any of it. Everything just kind of lined up and fell into place, the way it does. Totally natural. The new album is maybe a bit more progressive. We also went for a rawer production. The photo shoot involved quite a bit of improvisation, but it all turned out well in the end.
Matej: We left the whole look of the record to Emina Djukić, a designer and photographer, who then came up with the entire concept. We trusted her with everything. The concept for the booklet, or rather its design, was supposed to match our music on the new album, so we gave her our music to listen to beforehand. Actually, still raw material. When she listened to it, she tried to transform our music as much as possible into her own concept, her own ideas.
RockLine: I’ve read a couple of reviews of your new album “Bad In Bed”, two, to be exact, and noticed they say the new songs sound metal-stripped, more like a sleaze/glam rock gallop compared to the more orthodox metal approach of “Taste The Sin”. I haven’t heard the album myself yet. How much truth is there in that?
Rok: It really depends which song on the album you listen to. You’ll find typical thrash metal elements in it too. Then in other songs you might catch Motley Crue, or glam rock. It’s a varied album, with full-throttle, all-out songs as well as some slightly softer stuff.
Matej: We don’t worry much about how the songs sound stylistically. The idea you get as a musician is too important. If you tried to change it genre-wise, you’d ruin it and lose it. In MetalSteel all of us are musically very broad, and ideas bombard me from every direction. If I tried to force all of that into a heavy metal mold at all costs, I’d kill those ideas.
Rok: Our music has to include other influences too.
RockLine: Even though in a relatively short time you’ve given Slovenia’s metal scene, and the wider music scene too, a nice bundle of music and taken some radical steps in your evolution, we can still treat you as a very young band. Still, I’d ask whether you already have any ideas about maybe making some special album. For example, Judas Priest only put out their first concept album after 40 years together.
Rok: No, nothing. We’re not thinking about anything special. Right now we’re working on new songs here in the studio, at Matej’s and Beni’s. Heavy metal will remain the core of everything, but it will include other influences too. Like always. All four of us in the band listen to quite different music and have different tastes, but when you add it all up, it still sounds like heavy metal.
RockLine: The mere fact that you can run into Matej at Stuart Hamm’s bass clinic in Ljubljana, or into you, Rok, at a Laibach gig in Koper, answers many questions about this. Let’s go with a more standard question. How did the four of you in MetalSteel end up clicking so well? You’ve been together from the very start and you’re so consistent and reliable in what you do, while also building something concrete in Slovenia when it comes to metal.
Matej: People often ask us if we choreograph things in advance. That’s interesting, because we don’t know how we look and come across from the outside, people hold up a mirror to us. We often hear that we seem like we’ve all agreed on everything beforehand, in terms of how in sync we are in MetalSteel. The fact is that we really did grow up together from when we were little, and we know each other really well.
Rok: And we’ve always believed in what we do. We always had a dream of playing with some big band someday, I mean sharing a stage at a concert. That’s come true twice so far, and it gave us real momentum going forward. We’ve always gotten along really well. Sure, you have a fight now and then, but it has never affected the band.
Matej: We know each other as people and as musicians. We know exactly when somebody is going to do what, how everyone ticks, what can piss someone off and so on. That’s why we developed the band’s mentality together, all of us. Everything between us is deeply intertwined.
RockLine: Okay. So where did you all find each other?
Rok: Beni and I met on the street. We were total little kids. Beni had an electric guitar, I had an acoustic, and then there was Alex, our former singer, who originally wanted to be a drummer.
Matej: It all came about very spontaneously.
RockLine: On top of all that, MetalSteel are special for having a female drummer rather than a male one. I think Daša is a phenomenon.
Rok: In that respect Daša has definitely left her mark on the band. At first it seemed totally obvious to us that Daša was a drummer, nothing special really. Later we started to realize how unusual it was, especially when people pointed it out. But these days there are more and more women behind the drum kit in metal. Female singers have always been around, of course.
RockLine: Has the urge to break through abroad been tempting you at all so far?
Rok: We have distribution in Germany, Japan and Italy. We’re talking to Croatian bands about gigs. It’s kind of a favor swap. We set up some shows for them here, and they do the same for us in Croatia. That’s how we’re helping each other out for starters. As for the rest, we’ll see what time brings. So far we haven’t played abroad. But we definitely want to.
Matej: On MySpace we have a “flag counter” that shows where people visit us from. We’ve also sold our albums to many countries around the world. At least one or two copies. Metal is the kind of subculture where you can always count on real music nuts and collectors. They find you on their own and get in touch themselves. You send CDs abroad to these people on trust. And so far nobody has ripped us off. They’re honest. These are people who truly support musicians.
RockLine: When Alex left, you didn’t even have to look around much for a new singer. Your guitarist Beni simply took over.
Rok: Thinking back, even I’m not always totally sure how that happened, ha, ha, ha… We tried out a ton of people and nothing worked. Then Beni came up with the idea that he’d try singing. At first I was very skeptical. He went to take singing lessons. What was the name of the guy he went to for lessons again?
Matej: Oliver Antauer.
Rok: Right. He came back from those lessons and suddenly he could sing. And really well, too.
Matej: With Beni becoming the singer, we saved a huge amount of energy. Usually when you bring a new member into the band, you’re never completely sure what’s going to happen. They can feel like a foreign body and be hard to integrate. With all the auditions and the dragging on of the search for a new singer, we were getting more and more skeptical. It wore us out, and then the whole thing got solved with Beni. In Slovenia it’s really hard to find a proper musician, whatever instrument they play, never mind singers.
RockLine: MetalSteel won your uniqueness and recognizability on the Slovenian music scene precisely through this principle you live by and believe in.
Matej: Being a trained musician doesn’t mean you’re good. Or rather, you can be a trained and good musician, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be useful. You can play Bach on keyboards and plenty more, but it’s hard to find someone who’ll actually play your stuff for real. No sheet music, no other crutches, with a proper touch of improvisation on top. And even fewer people can come up with something of their own. That’s one of the qualities most valued in a musician lately. Today you can disguise a huge amount of stuff on computers, but at the end of the day what still separates you from a machine is your idea and knowing how to write a good song.
Rok: Nowadays you also get new bands claiming they’ve invented something new, but they play exactly what bands were playing twenty or more years ago.
RockLine: It’s possible that young bands have simply lost touch with the roots of rock and metal, with the bands that wrote the first bible of it.
Rok: Totally possible. Or they’re just lying to themselves. I think that’s very much a thing today. You go around saying you’ve figured out something new, when really you’re playing old music.
RockLine: What’s it like being part of the Slovenian heavy metal crowd? How do you get along with our other bands?
Matej: We don’t really worry about that. Some people take the metal scene way too seriously. The fact is that Slovenia is the kind of market, I’m talking about heavy metal here, that you can’t make a living from. You can’t expect to live off touring in Slovenia. Then certain bands create some kind of politics and try to push that politics, and it hurts the music. Because of that there’s less music on the Slovenian scene. Sometimes it looks even worse than competition for market share between companies.
Rok: Honestly, we could put all that time into writing music or playing gigs, but instead you get the feeling that for some people everything else matters more than the music.
RockLine: Okay, I’ve never asked this before, but here goes. As musicians, how do you take reviews and criticism from the media? Music journalists have their own musical frustrations too, and sometimes we can be uncollegial toward bands with our attitude. Has any “journalistic” jab ever stung you?
Rok: No. Never. It doesn’t even matter whether the journalist is a musician, they can just be a journalist, as long as they know what they’re writing about and know the music.
Matej: I used to get worked up about it, but not anymore. In MetalSteel we know what we’re doing, we’ve set goals that guide us. Every criticism is welcome.
RockLine: So how does MetalSteel’s music come about? Who brings the ideas?
Rok: Beni and I handle the music together. The lyrics I write alone. We make songs by having one person bring in ideas, or an idea, and then all four of us shape the song together.
RockLine: And what are the plans for MetalSteel going forward?
Rok: On December 25 we’re playing the Božični Rock Festival in Postojna. Also, a new club called MKC is opening in Medvode, and we’ll be playing at the opening. New material for the next record is already coming together, and I hope it’ll come out sometime toward the end of next year. We’re by no means rushing the record. But quietly, we’re counting on it coming out next year. On top of that, we’ll be trying to get gigs abroad and organize some shows there.
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