Way back in BW&BK; #102 – when it was still possible to actually print a mag without losing your shirt and a vital organ while paying the bills – we ran a story on London, Ontario’s all-female upstarts and their album, Funeral For Yesterday. Members of our readership that knew who Kittie were thought we’d lost our collective mind, as the band was known for their grating alterna-sludge babydoll sound. There was meaning to our madness, however, and folks that were paying attention discovered that Funeral For Yesterday was in fact a decent metal-oriented platter. With that first stone cast, Kittie followed-up two years later (in 2009) with In The Black, an album that crammed the band’s metal mindset down people’s throats, choking off the protests once and for all. This quite naturally flattened any remaining rough patches and opened things up for Kittie’s latest full-on assault, I’ve Failed You.

“I think it helped a lot of people’s opinions of the band,” vocalist Morgan Lander says of In The Black. “It was the beginning of something new and completely different for us. For me, it felt like a completely different band compared to the albums before it; much more focused and more mature. It definitely satisfied the creative aspect of things. But, the industry isn’t really what it used to be, so having the same expectations that we had in 1999 or 2000 of how many albums we’re going to sell aren’t realistic. We’re just happy we’re still able to do this, and we appreciate the fact we were part of the good old days (laughs).”
“I’m really proud of In The Black, and I feel like it was the foundation for building things to come, and that’s what we did with I’ve Failed You.”

As we delve into I’ve Failed You, Lander’s enthusiasm for the new material and the next chapter in Kittie’s career is readily apparent, which makes the morose oddball album title even more perplexing. She does her best to explain it:

“The album is… I don’t want to say it’s a concept record, but pretty much every song is about the same thing. It’s about things that happen in your life that you have no control over, the feeling that you’ve let someone down. It’s weird; I didn’t put too much thought into what I wanted to call the album. I guess I wanted to be as honest as possible. A lot of the lyrics that I’ve written in the past are very veiled, and I guess I tried to leave them as open to interpretation as possible so people could read into them whatever they wanted. I didn’t want to be too personal in the past, but this time it was a bit different. I wanted to put all my cards on the table and say exactly how I felt.”
“It’s been a difficult few years. I lost my dad (in 2008), so obviously that took its toll. And, a very important relationship in my life ended after almost a decade, so a lot of the songs are about that. I guess it’s normal to feel that you’ve let someone down when you’re in that sort of situation.”

It’s a cliché for a press hack to say a metal artist’s latest album is his/her/their heaviest and/or most aggressive work to date. Depending on what you’re looking for you, can probably stamp I’ve Failed You with both, although Lander and her bandmates focused on improving on what they accomplished with In The Black instead of trying to crush it.

“In a lot of respects, while I think In The Black is sonically superior to everything we’ve done in the past, I think it was also very one dimensional,” Lander admits. “With this album we went into the studio with a lot of the same approaches, but we really tried to use different dynamics and different layers. We wanted to give it a more three dimensional feel vocally and guitar-wise, so that you’d get the full experience hearing little things here and there when you put on the headphones; interesting things that you pick up on even though you’re not quite sure what it is. I can’t really say I’ve Failed You is a heavier album than In The Black, because for us it’s hard to go heavier without becoming a death metal band (laughs).”

Evolving from album to album must get harder, especially when you’re looking back on a career and albums that span more than a decade…

“Absolutely, but it’s sort of like trial and error. You learn from every album about what works and what doesn’t, and looking back there are things from each album that I really like and things I dislike. On Funeral For Yesterday, since you touched on that one, I love the songs and the way they were written, but I think they were a bit overdone compared to what our fans are used to. The songs are strong and the melodies are great, but the production wasn’t really what we were going for. That’s about the only thing that puts Funeral For Yesterday in our bad books.”
“When we went into the writing and recording of In The Black, we approached it as ‘Let’s try to undo all the things Funeral For Yesterday did.’ We wanted an over-the-top metal production, we wanted the guitars to be really prominent and have tons of solos – hey, we had two solos in ‘Forgive And Forget’, which was total guitar wanking (laughs) – and not a lot of vocal harmonies. Once we got that out of our system we were able to find a nice balance, and I think I’ve Failed You has it. There are harmonies, the vocals and guitars are prominent… we’ve gone from one extreme to the other and found that middle ground. We’re comfortable being where we are right now.”