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 After a furious three years on the high seas, reified hardcore heroes PARKWAY DRIVE have unleashed their latest full-length offering and are set to bring the celebrations home. CHRIS DRIVER shuts up and pays attention while vocalist WINSTON McCALL spills his increasingly ferocious guts.
If anyone has ever doubted the longevity of Byron Bay metalcore kings Parkway Drive, surely such nonsense has by now been brutally murdered, carefully sliced-up and buried in the backyard. While few could have predicted the impact of the band’s sophomore album Horizons, it seems fair to say that the boys’ most recent release – the wonderfully titled Deep Blue – has seen the band deliver in a way that only the real stayers can.
Furthermore, to say that the lads are the heavyweight champions of Aussie hardcore would be grossly ignorant of their overseas accomplishments. Having spent the better part of the last decade taking their particularly merciless blend of metallic precision and soul-crushing, mosh-tastic hardcore fare to the global market, it is by now no stretch to affix a more encompassing label.
But this is not to downplay the thousands of gruelling hours spent loading in, tuning down and pounding the highways in all corners. Indeed, if nothing else, Parkway Drive’s is a biography borne of little more than hard work and steadfast convictions. And, if it feels like only yesterday you marched yourself down to the shops and picked up a copy of Horizons, it’s only because the boys haven’t given you time to get bored.
“When we actually took the time to look back, it did seem like a long time between the records,” reflects vocalist Winston McCall. “But we toured that much and have grown so much as a band that people just aren’t getting sick of our songs. The shows just kept getting better and better, rather than just stagnating, and I think that’s why it hasn’t felt like a super long time.”
As the hotly anticipated news of another album dropped earlier this year, the collective intake of breath by hardcore fans shocked at the news long-time producer Adam Dutkiewicz would not be working with the band on their forthcoming record was matched only by its exhalation when the album’s first single Sleepwalker began melting faces as the winter release-date loomed.
“We were going to work with Adam again, but we just couldn’t get the timetables together,” explains McCall, anxious to clear up any misconceptions that their relationship with the Killswitch Engage guitarist had gone sour. “When that became apparent, we knew that we wouldn’t have a record that sounded at all like the last one, so we decided to make something completely different.”
With time to spare but decisions to make, the band opted to go back to the proverbial drawing board and enlisted the services of Los Angeles-based Joe Barresi, who had previously worked with Bad Religion guitarist and owner of Parkway Drive’s US label Epitaph Records, Brett Gurewitz. Though Barresi’s limited experience with heavy music only added weight to the anxiety of the hardcore community, it was, explains McCall, a significant factor in his ensuing recruitment.
“We wanted to make something that didn’t sound like it was cut from the same kind of metalcore cloth as everything else,” says McCall. “We figured that we’d get Joe because he didn’t have any preconceptions about how this music should sound.
“There’s so much that’s happened in metal over the last three years that it’s gone past the whole precision thing and ended up as something that sounds almost autonomic,” he continues, with the slightest hint of disillusionment. “We wanted to sound like a real band, like passionate people playing passionate music.”
“We wanted to make something that didn’t sound like it was cut from the same kind of metalcore cloth as everything else.”
All of this might provoke a writer’s sturdy distaste for cliché if it didn’t reek of genuine resolve. For all the miles on their airline loyalty cards, Parkway Drive have remained unwaveringly grounded in the culture of the bayside community that has given hardcore so much. This too is something not lost on McCall, whose lyrical contributions to the appropriately named Deep Blue recall the kind of perspective which was once inextricably entwined with what it meant to be from a place like Byron Bay.
“I definitely think that we’d write different music if we weren’t from the place we are – it’s a part of me,” he explains, squirming at his own emotional depth, “and it would be dishonest to say that it’s not.”
Images of the sea and its place in our lives have always featured heavily in the band’s songs from the very beginning, perhaps in no small part because the pilgrimage home is part of the creation process itself for the boys, who once again returned to Byron Bay for the writing of Deep Blue.
“It comes up in my lyrics so frequently because it is such a massive part of my life,” says McCall, speaking now of his affinity for the sea in particular as both a place and a lyrical device. “If you clocked up the amount of time I’ve spent in the ocean, submerged under this massive body of water, it’d be absolutely ridiculous. It has a huge influence on who I am as a person.”
In any case, it seems safe to say that the oceanic themes are presented in a notably more coherent form this time around, with McCall and the band making a concerted effort to more overtly politicise the narrative of the record. Together with a developed vocal ferocity and more-weighted composition than anything the band have previously laid to tape, Deep Blue’s thematic immediacy is as emotionally heavy as it is discursively complete.
“It’s an album that tends to focus on frustration in a world where it seems so hard to find any kind of real truth and meaning in the way we live,” explains the powerful vocalist, masking genuine dissent behind an almost awkward reluctance to really elucidate the metaphors.
“The ocean is the thing that kicks that into the mind so readily – about how puny we really are and how frustrated and tired you can be when you’re drowning. It can be a place where you feel so small and insignificant but, at the same time, it can give you a place to really reflect on things.”
It seems entirely inappropriate then that the boys have, for the first time, had to enjoy the reception abroad, from the (dis)comfort of their “less-than-luxurious” tour bus. Having spent the winter hurtling around North America on their sophomore billing as part of the famed Vans Warped Tour that tears the US and Canada to pieces in the summer months, it seems just a little angst is brewing.
“It is the first time we haven’t been home for a release and it’s a very strange situation to be in because it feels like nothing’s happened,” admits McCall. “We were over here when the record came out and kind of couldn’t tell because we can only judge from the Warped Tour shows, and those were going great beforehand anyway.”
When Parkway Drive hit the Riverstage in September, it’ll be the lads’ first opportunity to play the new songs live on home soil and it can’t come soon enough for McCall, whose excitement regarding their homecoming is only a little marred by the fact that the riverside stage remains one of the only All Ages venues open to the band.
After a couple of shows a few years back ended in a number of fans and police deciding it would be best to ‘go to the mattresses’, so to speak, the band have not been able to obtain a venue willing to risk said shenanigans.
“Luckily, we get to play the smaller venues overseas, but it is something I miss at home,” he says.
PARKWAY DRIVE play the Riverstage on Wednesday Sep 22 (AA) and Byron Bay High School on Thursday Sep 23 (AA), supported by The Devil Wears Prada, The Ghost Inside, and 50 Lions. DEEP BLUE is out now through Resist Records. Check out www.myspace.com/parkwaydrive.
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