By Carl Begai

Back in July, vocalist AMANDA SOMERVILLE spilled the beans on her first official metal solo project, TRILLIUM (interview available here). With the release of the debut album, Alloy, only weeks away she shot a video for the song ‘Coward’, and we got together the following morning over tea to delve a little deeper into the new album.

It’s safe to say Somerville efforts will surprise a lot of fans – in a good way – and earn her some new ones along the way as Trillium plays out. And while it’s a no-nonsense metal album, anyone that’s followed Somerville’s decade-long non-metal career will wonder if some of the songs were consciously tweaked from a singer / songwriter / acoustic state to the tough-as-nails tracks we’re hearing now. Take away the distortion and the tracks in question would easily fit on her 2009 solo album, Windows.

“It was very conscious, actually,” Somerville reveals. “Songs like ‘Path Of Least Resistance’, ‘Purge’ and ‘Mistaken’ were pretty dark, and I’d planned to put them on my next solo album, which was going to be darker and heavier than anything I’d done before anyway. I had all this material that was building up, and since I’m a piano player and not a guitar player, it was clear to me I’d have to work with someone who played guitar as their main instrument like Sascha (Paeth / producer) or Sander (Gommans / HDK) so they could metal it up. That was the idea from the start, and the way things progressed led to those songs being on this album.”
“The songs that I wrote with Sander – and he’s a prolific songwriter, cranking them out like crazy – we already them had in mind for this project. Sander was totally into it, and every time he sits down with his guitar a song comes out of it. The way we typically work, he writes the instrumental parts and then I come in and suggest whatever changes I think should be made. Then I take the song and write a vocal line and lyrics to it. Sander likes a good challenge as well, though, and when he heard the piano / vocal demo I had for ‘Machine Gun’ he asked if he could work on it. He came up with the big main riff, which really supplements the running theme through the whole song.”

Somerville officially stepped out from behind the background vocalist curtain with the HDK debut in 2008, System Overload, a full-on metal experiment with Gommans. With that in mind, were there any left over ideas that were transformed into Trillium songs since Gommans was also involved in the songwriting for Alloy?

“No, because the stuff that Sander does for HDK is so extreme that… I don’t know if it would have worked. There were no leftovers anyway, and the things that he’s written since then, they wouldn’t have fit. I definitely have a vision of where I want my metal stuff to go.”

Folks that are expecting Somerville to follow a similar path to the work she’s done for EPICA and AVANTASIA on Alloy are in for a shock. Some tracks are attitude-laden cousins to melodic rock, others are heavy-edged and bordering-on-Black Sabbath dark. The album is almost completely devoid of orchestral arrangements and features no neo-classical bombast whatsoever, carried through numerous twists and turns instead by the vocals and some almighty riffs. Bottom line: Alloy is loaded with plenty WTF moments.

“Which is a good thing (laughs). Nothing about what I do is contrived; it all comes out the way that it comes out, and sometimes it needs to be a little more conformed, I guess. Literally, as cheesy as it sounds, the music pours out of me the way that I feel it. I don’t like following formulas. My songs have a typical song structure – verse / pre-chorus / chorus – and that’s just in me, but in terms of trying to fit a certain formula, that’s not a conscious thing for me. It’s not something I want to do, either. That’s why there are no Latin choirs on the album (laughs).”
“I’ve actually gotten comparisons to Epica and After Forever. In fact, one guy made the After Forever comparison before he knew that Sander was one of the songwriters on Alloy. That kind of surprised me, but Sander does have a signature sound, but I don’t hear the similarities.”

Click here for more, including Somerville discussing working with Sascha Paeth and Avantasia bandmate Jorn Lande (MASTERPLAN) on the song 'Scream It'.

Alloy will be exclusively released in a lavish digipak CD edition and will include the following songs:

'Machine Gun'

'Machine Gun'

'Coward'

'Coward'

'Purge'

'Utter Descension'

'Bow To The Ego'

'Mistaken'

'Scream It'

'Scream It'

'Justifiable Casualty'

'Path Of Least Resistance'

'Into The Dissonance'

'Slow It Down'

'Love Is An Illusion' (bonus track)

Trillium lineup:

Amanda Somerville - Lead and backing Vocals, Keyboards

Sascha Paeth - Guitars, Bass, Keys, Drums?Sander Gommans - Guitars ?Miro - Arrangements and Keys

Olaf Reitmeier - Acoustic Guitar

Robert Hunecke – Drums

Simon Oberender - Keys

Jorn Lande - Guest Lead Vocals on 'Scream It'

Somerville unveils the CD is the clip below: