AMON AMARTH Drummer Talks About Limitations Of Playing Straight-Ahead Death Metal

Metal Kaoz recently conducted an interview with drummer Fredrik Andersson of Swedish death metallers AMON AMARTH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Kaoz: How do you think AMON AMARTH is musically restricted?

Fredrik: Yeah, there is a certain plan of how AMON AMARTH should sound and what to do and what not. We generally try to follow this plan but this time we tried different things in the new album and it felt less limited in the songwriting process.

Metal Kaoz: Who has set this plan for AMON AMARTH?

Fredrik: It is something that was decided from the beginning of the band, actually, so it was the original lineup's idea.

Metal Kaoz: Have you ever felt restricted in your drum work by having to follow this plan?

Fredrik: Keep in mind that I found this plan and that I am the new guy even though I have been in the band for almost 13 years. (laughs) When I got in the band, the guys told exactly how I was to play. Even though they liked the style of Martin Lopez [previous drummer] they thought that it did not match the band's sound and they wanted straightforward drumming. So, they wanted from me to play hard and no fiddling about it. Obviously, this is kind of limited for a drummer and sometimes it feels like you are just the beat for the guitars to follow and not really expressing your musicality. And this is the hardest struggle for me especially during the last years that I feel I need to do more. But, on the other hand, this is the way to do it in AMON AMARTH.

Metal Kaoz: You have added some cover songs in the special editions of the album and I am sure you are getting a lot of questions about them. The most obvious is about the SYSTEM OF A DOWN cover. Why did you decide to do that? Was it just a marketing move to draw attention?

Fredrik: No, it had nothing to do with that since we did not think it would attract that attention. The cover songs were meant to be just on the special editions (fan package and digital versions). We did not think that the fans would be so angry (laughs)

Metal Kaoz: Angry? Do you get this type of feedback?

Fredrik: Yeah, we are getting a lot of anger for some fans. In fact I've heard people would stop listening to AMON AMARTH because of that cover song. Of course, I am not gonna judge anyone on this but the reason we did that was because people were calling us narrow-minded and that we are doing only one thing. So, we did this song to challenge ourselves and shock everyone by doing something that was not expected from AMON AMARTH.

Metal Kaoz: Did you have any other songs in mind to choose from?

Fredrik: Not really. The ACCEPT selection was kind of easy since everyone is familiar to that. The first thought was to do "God Of Thunder" by KISS since the title was close to AMON AMARTH's songtitles but while listening to the original we did not feel it was that funny to cover so we went with "War Machine". When we were in Japan for the Loud Park festival we went in a karaoke bar and we were singing the SYSTEM OF A DOWN song (laughs). So, when we returned we thought it would be a good idea to try that. But, we were totally shocked by the reaction we got with "Aerials". After all, we have been accused for being single minded and then the moment we did something different there were people reacting like that. You cannot please all the fans whatever you do; there will always be some who will not like what you do.

Read the entire interview from Metal Kaoz.