THE MOON TOWER
After releasing their excellent third album Wick
earlier this year, Atlanta, Georgia four piece Royal Thunder embarked on their first European headline tour in November 2017. We spoke to founding guitarist Josh Weaver backstage at Mama Roux’s in Birmingham about Wick, the new tour, and his guitars, amps and pedals. Lots of pedals...
This is your first time back over here since supporting Baroness in 2013…
Yeah, that was a long time ago. We did some festivals in Europe here and there, but nothing in the UK.
So how’s it going?
Great, man, very good. It’s been great getting back over here and seeing so many great fans again.
Have you seen much of an increase in the crowds coming to gigs?
Yeah, sure. It’s been so long since we’ve played over here in 2013. It’s been our first headlining run, so it’s good to get out here and start doing that.
You’re touring at the moment in support of you new album Wick. There’s definitely an evolution of the sound between your first album, CVI, then Crooked Doors, and now the new album – how much of that was conscious?
We never really set out to do a certain thing, it just kind of happens, you know. I guess living life, and having experiences, growing as musicians, that really changes the music a lot.
The songs seem a bit more constructed on Wick, more of a ‘studio album’…
You know, we took less time than we did with Crooked Doors. It’s one of those things where we’d been playing so long, and I feel like as musicians we had refined it a lot. We didn’t intentionally do it, but a lot of the songs are shorter. Us as musicians know what we want more out of making a song, and can maybe get to the point quicker than we did earlier on.
Is the writing process quite collaborative? You split the writing credits evenly on each song…
Yeah, one of us will come up with a part or a structure of a song, usually Will (Fiore, guitar) will do that, and then everybody will write their parts around that. Mel (Parsonz, bass and vocals) will write her basslines and vocal melodies and the lyrics, Evan (Diprima, drums) will do all his drum parts. If I write a structure of a song, Will will write his guitar parts to it. So it’s definitely very collaborative.
Several of the songs on the new album, the title track especially, struck me as pieces that would lend themselves to some extended jamming and improvisation live. How much do you think about that when coming up with the songs?
You know, it’s the same with all of our songs really. You’ll hear tonight when we play stuff off the older albums, the songs are all constantly evolving. Even the older ones from the first EP will be different from how you’ve heard them on the record. It keeps it fresh and keeps us on our toes. It just keeps it interesting really.
Does some of that come out of having another guitarist now? I remember when we saw you with Baroness you were a three piece.
Well we actually started out as a three piece, it was an instrumental band. Me, my brother and my best friend. I played guitar, my brother played bass and my best friend played drums, and that’s all it was. We’d actually added another guitarist after CVI, Josh Coleman, who joined right towards the end of CVI, but he ended up having a kid so it didn’t really work out for him, and he couldn’t continue playing with us. Then we went back to being a three piece and ended up doing another album (Crooked Doors), and then found out Will was available to play.
Do you find you have to adapt much playing with another guitarist?
No, if anything, it’s not that I adapt, but I’m able to evolve and do a lot more. We were trying to do a lot with just one guitar before, and I always want to be able to pull stuff off live that we do in the studio, to make it interesting like that. So to have another guitar player on board is really nice.
Wick
is your first album for Spinefarm, how have they been as a label compared to Relapse?
It’s been good. We’re really happy with where we’re at right now. Happy to have a team behind us that really push the record. It’s been a good new chapter for us for sure, doing this new album and working with Spinefarm.
So onto guitar talk. You have a couple of custom Yamahas…
Yeah, they built a couple of guitars for me based off the Revstar model. They painted them to my spec, put the exact hardware on them that I wanted. Right now they both have the Lollar Low Wind Imperial pickups in them. Very low output, probably close to an early PAF. Kind of weak, but I like that, it lets you hear more of the guitar and the amp and the pedals. You can hear everything a little bit more as opposed to a hotter pickup.
Let the amp do the work when you need to rock out…
Yeah, I mean I use a lot of loud and clean tones, I generally don’t get dirt straight from the amp.
Did you use some pickups recently that looked like P90s?
Yeah, one of the Yamahas they gave me had Seymour Duncan Antiquity P90s in it. Great pickups, but all the clubs we play can be a bit noisy, so I picked up a pair of Lindy Fralin hum cancelling P90s. I actually got the pair with the alnico rods, so they’re a bit cleaner and clearer, more Fender-esque like a Jazzmaster pickup, but they’re great.
Amp-wise, when we saw you last year with The Sword in Las Vegas you were using a Marshall full stack…
Ok, yeah, I remember that one, that was the JTM45/100. They only made 250 of them in 2004/2005, I think. Great amp. The cabs had the proprietary speakers in them - the top cab was partially open, but they all had the 25 watt Celestion Silver Alnico speakers in there. They were the replicas of the early Alnicos and I don’t think they've even made them since then. I love Alnico speakers. At home I've got a ’72 (Marshall) Super Lead which I use with an open back 2x12” that has the new Celestion Creambacks in it which are 90 watts a pop and they’re just great sounding. We’ve actually been working with Marshall for a while now. Me and Will have both got two of the 1987x 50 watt reissue heads. He’s got a Greenback cab, and I've got one of the handwired G12H-30 cabs.
What amp are you using tonight?
Tonight, I’m playing a 1959 Tweed (Fender) Bassman 4x10" reissue. It’s got Eminence speakers in it, I didn’t really look which ones they were, but it’s good and clean. Obviously I’d have preferred a higher headroom 100 watter, but it sounds great now I’ve got it dialled in.
Effects-wise, I know you have a lot of pedals, are you using a cut-down version of your usual board on the European tour?
No, I brought the whole shebang.
I won’t ask you to list everything, but what are some of your favourites?
No it’s ok, I’ve got a photo here for reference… I’ve got a Crybaby Mini Wah for space saving, that sounds great. A ProAnalog Dual Drive, that’s a two stage overdrive which is just great, probably one of the best I’ve ever played. I just got a new Barber Exacta Fuzz, it has three different circuits in one – a super bender, a triangle Big Muff and like a flat mids Muff, I’ve been really digging that one. You can really just get it really tight, really fuzzy, or really boomy, you can really tailor it. I always have a ZVex Fuzz Factory on my board, I love that pedal.
What else….. a few Electro Harmonix pedals – a Pitchfork, a Micro Synth, and I just picked up the Synth 9, that’s great, really awesome. Mr Black, I got two of his pedals, a GilaMondo, which is an eight stage phase, really awesome, and a Deluxe DeluxePlus. One side of it’s a tremolo and one side is a reverb. I’ve got two Empress pedals – the Nebulus, which is a multi-effects modulation unit – flanger, chorus, rotary – and a tape delay. And lastly, I got the new Transmisser from EarthQuaker devices.
Who are your main guitar influences? I hear a lot of blues and hard rock in your playing, but also some more ambient stuff, bands like The Cure…
I mean, it’s funny, I don’t even think about it, but there’s times that I catch myself playing things which sound like certain players. You don’t even realise how much subconsciously you’re influenced by something. When I was a kid, I couldn’t really play anyone’s songs. I had a guitar, but I didn’t even try to play anything else, I just picked up the guitar and did my own thing. Even on some of these later records I hear The Cure, The Cult, some of those delay, chorus kinda sounds. Some of the stuff Billy Duffy does was a big influence for sure. Those two bands use effects so well in their music, and I think that was always a bigger influence than I probably realised.
So wrapping up, what would be your all time fantasy band that you could play in or see?
Probably….. I never got to see Nirvana or… shit, the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Probably Zeppelin, the original lineup back in the day. I cannot imagine how explosive that was.
And lastly, if you’re out on the road and want some Mexican fast food, would you go for Taco Bell or Del Taco…
You know, I used to have Taco Bell near where I lived. Then I went to California, they had Del Taco and I thought it was really good, but last time I went to Del Taco I didn’t like it, so Taco Bell.