Arve Isdal is a really busy and impressive guy. Playing guitar in Norwegian hard rockers Audrey Horne, Isdal is known sometimes as “Ice Dale”. Most people know him from his regular gig as a member of the legendary band Enslaved. With his side band’s new album, Youngblood (Napalm Records) just released, Ghost Cult caught up with Isdal to pick his brain about the new album, album art work and how a guy with so many projects going on at once, manages to keep his head together.
Please tell us about the process of making of the new album.
This time actually, the process of making the album, was different than we did before. We have taken a long time to just try out a lot of stuff. We got a new member in our bass player Espen Lien, who joined the band after our previous album was finished. So he has played with us since then. Before it was me mostly me writing the music and the other guitar player Thomas (Tofthagen) and Toschie (Torkjell Rød). We would usually write the albums ourselves. This time we wanted to approach it a bit different and get everybody involved in the writing. Everybody doing the arrangements. So we just started to jam out together at the rehearsal room and get everybody’s ideas together. We took the time to really discover ourselves again musically. I think we took almost two years of writing together before we recorded. It was a long process, but it was worth it, to get to the depths of each song, to rearrange them and make them as great as possible. Somewhere in the middle we felt like we were young again, like we felt when we were sixteen years old. We had a lot of spirit and a lot of fun playing with each other. It was cool.
The album sounds great, but I’m curious about choice of Magnet as a producer. What made him stand out as opposed to going with someone more established in the rock and metal tradition?
He is an old friend of Toschie’s. I think they grew up together, basically. He stopped doing a lot of rock n roll and metal and now he is known as a pop singer/songwriter. He is actually a really gifted musician and a great guitar player. We all like his music too and like Toschie says he is a great guitar player. It’s kind of a strange choice to people who don’t know him, but he is really an old metal dude himself. Like I said we were really going back to our childhood and even he was saying he was really starting to feel heavy again, doing the album with us. And also we wanted to make an album in our hometown. We mixed it there and mastered it there. I think that was kind of cool. It makes it a more untypical album production, than the usual modern rock albums of today, like the American sound or the British sound.
How do you decide to split up all of the harmony leads with Thomas Tofthagen, when writing or in the studio?
I think it comes naturally when we jam the songs at rehearsals and write the songs. We never sit down and say you play this part and I’ll play that. The fact that we now have a permanent bass player in the band really helps, he and the drummer can hold down the basic rhythm section. It gave me a Thomas a lot of space to fool around with the guitar parts and playing melodies and stuff. That is where all of the melodies and harmony parts came from.
‘There Goes A Lady’ and ‘Show And Tell’ are really interesting tracks. They almost sound like 70s Deep Purple with the keyboard parts. Was that on purpose?
Well, all of us really did grow up with Deep Purple and ‘Smoke On The Water’ was the first riff I ever learned on guitar. Deep Purple has always been a natural source of inspiration to us. We didn’t decide to record a Deep Purple song and make a song sound Deep Purple-ish, but it came out great.
In addition to the obvious influences on the band, who do you think are some of the more underrated names in rock history that Audrey Horne pays tribute to?
I’m sure there are a lot of them. The main influences are what everybody in the band grew up with. And I think especially on this new album you can hear the influences each one of us likes. I don’t think there are any secret bands really. The album was definitely influenced by the typical bands we all like such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sababth, Rainbow, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden and Kiss.
It’s funny you mentioned Kiss, because the album cover really reminds me of some of those great illustrated KISS album covers from the 1970’s
I agree! That is where we stole the idea from! (laughs) Toschie is a painter and he draws funny caricatures of us all the time. So I said he why don’t you draw something, like one picture of us with our full bodies and one with just our heads. I thought maybe it would be something magazines would use. And then when he made the painting that became the actual cover, we said, hey let’s use that as the cover! It’s almost like the old Rock and Roll Over cover. I thought somebody would arrest us or something, saying ‘Hey c`mon guys… that is Rock and Roll Over and what are you doing there’. But no, not too many people have pointed that out to us. I think you are only the second person to mention that to us. I was sure more people would have noticed.
Thanks! Has the band ever considered doing some more covers either live or for an EP?
We actually did a special edition for the first album where we did a few. The label actually said to us that we needed some extra material, and we said ‘we haven’t got any!’ (laughs). I think we did some acoustic sessions, where we covered a KISS song, “Nowhere to Run”, and some Stones. It wasn’t serious and just for fun. We talked about doing some more covers, but maybe for the next album.
You’ve had a busy last few years between Audrey Horne and Enslaved. How do you manage to split your time up?
Basically, I am playing all the time. (laughs) Now I am playing two shows in Norway with Audrey Horne, then I go on tour with Enslabed in the US. Then I get back and have one or two days at home before I go to Europe with Audrey Horne. Then more touring of Europe with Enslaved and then more shows with Audrey Horne. We’ll see if there is time for anything else this year music wise, but who knows. It’s quite hectic, but it’s a lot of fun!
Keith Chachkes