2012.03.07 – LEVIATHAN – Tobias Dahs (Interview)

For god’s sake, why did you choose such name for the band. I remember some bands called LEVIATHAN. I even have cd of American progressive band. (I’ve checked, they even released new album last year).

Well the story of the name is quite complicated. When we started the band, we never really had the plans to get a record deal. For sure everybody dreams of it, but it was not like that was the purpose of creating the band. We just wanted to create our own vision of music and get to play it live. We actually choose the name at a stage where we were playing shows at local clubs and participating in a band contest. And we just kept it when we released our first EP. After this EP received a lot of good criticism here in Germany and brought us to the Summer Breeze Open Air, we decided to take the band to the next level. And it wasn’t before the first reviews for the album, that a writer mentioned this kind of name issue.
You also have to say that none of this other bands of the same name are very popular outside a certain scene, at least not here in Germany, and we actually only took note of them when that issue came up.

Don’t you consider problems with the name of the band in the future? (Or probably you can change the name to Leviathan of Fire ;)).

Up to now we didn’t have problems with the name. There might have been a few people up to now that got confused by it, but it’s not like we are really struggling with it. If it may bring up problem’s in the future, you can’t say that at the moment. But it would also be a difficult thing to rename the band at that point, after at least here in Germany a lot of people took notice of us. After all we will just see what the future brings.

Your debut album title is „Beyond the gates of Imagination Part 1”. So I guess you have plans to record another parts.
Are you going to continue lyrical theme in the future?



Actually we are currently in the process of demoing material for “Part 2” of the concept and we will soon be back in the studio to record the material. We have no release date planned until now, but we hope that everything will be ready for a release in fall 2012.
When it comes to lyrical themes and concepts, we will definitely continue in that area. We really enjoy to give an album or even an EP a lyrical context that is also reflected in the artwork, because it just offers a different dimension for the listener to enjoy the record. You can either choose to enjoy just the songs as they are, or you can dig a little deeper and explore the conceptual background.


BTW, what is your first album telling about?

The lyrical concept is actually a loose one, it’s not like the songs are telling a consecutive story. We would love to do that in the future, but in order to create such a story you really need a lot of time for preparations.
The concept behind the album is kept together by the social critical themes of the songs. Actually the album is like an imaginary journey taking you to different scenes that take a look at the condition our world and the human society is in. This goes from very “news-based” topics like the oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico in fall 2010 (Beneath A Blackened Sky) to more abstract themes like the misuse of power (Sway Of The Stars). So all in all each of the songs represents a certain theme and overall the album presents a view at our current situation on this planet.
The title also has another nice twist to it. Guided by the title everybody will probably think that the story of the songs is way beyond what one could imagine, but at a closer look you see that those topics are actually very real and that we probably already have gone wide beyond our wildest imaginations with the things that some parts of humanity have done.

And please tell me something about it’s construction (tracklist divided to acts).

The division of the whole concept into three acts is based on the fact that the songs in each act have a similar base topic that they are dealing with. While we were writing the album we actually had questions as headings for each of the acts. I’m going to explain that a little closer to make it easier to understand. The first act was headlined with “what do we do?”, the songs deal with topics like torture (Reaper’s Edict), war (Where Light And Death Unite) and with the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The second part has more philosophical topics and was headlined by “Who are we?”. The topics here deal with things like the abuse of religion or ideologies as an aid to control people (Servants Of The Nonexistent). And the last part was headed by “What are we striving for?”. The themes of the songs of this act go from envy and distrust (About Fangs And Feathers) to the quest to gain more power, rather be it political or economical (Sway Of The Stars).

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