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TRIVIUM – Doing things differently (Interview with Corey Beaulieu)

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New album, signature guitar and a spot on Soundwave Festival in Australia – Trivium’s Corey Beaulieu expresses his excitement to HEAVY the night before a 12-week tour with DevilDriver.

Trivium spent the first half of 2013 in the studio with Disturbed/Device vocalist David Draiman, recording the follow up to their 2011 album In Waves. Corey sounds very satisfied with the work that Draiman did on the album. “We had a great working chemistry; everyone was in the same boat, so we all had a really fun time making the album. David definitely brought a lot to the table from his experiences in Disturbed and Device that he was able to share with us, and he also helped us grow as musicians. We’re excited to work with him again on the next album.”

Like all of their previous albums, the new album – titled Vengeance Falls – was mixed by Colin Richardson. Trivium was happy to have Colin on board again, but at the time, he was working on the return album by grindcore legends Carcass. Jeff Walker [Carcass] claims that Colin quit working on their new album Surgical Steel to mix the new Trivium album. You can imagine that might not have gone down too well, and their general fan base would be smashing their keyboards about it. But Trivium had nothing to do with Colin’s decision. “We had someone else mixing Vengeance Falls, but it wasn’t working out the way we wanted it to.” Corey says, “We asked Colin if he wanted to mix the album and he said ‘yeah, I just have to re-arrange my schedule’. All of the other stuff that happened had nothing to do with us. It was a decision that Colin made.”

When you watch a Trivium video on YouTube, if you read the comments, you’re bound to see people commenting “misheard lyrics” of vocalist Matt Heafy. However, Corey assures HEAVY that it won’t be as easy to pick out misheard lyrics on the new album. “A lot of the stuff that people misheard were the lyrics that Matt was screaming, and for this record, majority of the time he’s clean singing, so you can understand what he says. The misheard lyrics are always fun to read though. We’ve never been offended by them. As long as they listen to the record and enjoy it, then what they interpret is cool with us.”

Leading up to the release of the albums first single Brave This Storm, Trivium decided to do something that no other band would have thought of – send transmissions to their fans. If you visited the website trivium.fm on your computer in August, it would give you a code to enter into the same website on your mobile browser. The Internet app on your phone would play a creepy, alien-sounding voice inaudibly reading lyrics from the albums title track (there were sub-titles on the computer browser), followed by a short preview of the new song. After that, arrows came up on the screen on your phone, which you would use to navigate the zoomed-in album artwork showing on the trivium.fm website on your computer. The second transmission they did was the release of the single.

“We were just thinking of a cool way to roll out the record.” Corey says, “We didn’t want to do what a lot of bands do, where they just put out a press statement saying ‘this is the record, the title’ or anything like that. The management company and their tech-department brainstormed the transmission idea, just to make a fun way to release information and get people excited about the record.”

Corey continues, “Seeing movies that go viral on the Internet, it gets people talking and builds excitement. Not a lot of bands incorporate that thinking into putting out music. We wanted to do something that no other band has done before.”

Corey has been a big fan of Jackson Guitars since he was young. Although he signed a 3-year endorsement with Dean Guitars after the death of the late great Dimebag Darrell [Pantera / Damageplan], Corey signed a new deal with Jackson in 2010. He’s a big fan of Jackson’s ‘King V’ model, and 2013 saw the release of his own signature King V, available in 6 and 7 strings. “I’ve been working on a signature Jackson guitar for three years. I went through a couple of different designs, but there was always something that made it not happen. I came up with this new design though, and once we built the first prototype, I knew that this guitar was the shape that I was going to move forward with.”

Trivium amazed large audiences at Soundwave Festival for the first time in 2010 and once again in 2012. Since they played the festival in 2012, the rumour was that they were doing a headline tour next time they came back, but their plans changed, and they’re coming back in 2014 to rock Soundwave Festival for the third time.

“We were planning on doing a headline tour, but AJ [Maddah, promoter] offered us the Soundwave Festival instead! We wanted to come to Australia sooner rather than later, and because of other tour obligations, our only option was to play Soundwave. Hopefully we can do some headlining side shows during the tour though.”

It’s interesting to know what younger bands that all the bigger bands are listening to lately. Corey is familiar with some good bands that are getting big and deserve recognition. “One of the last CDs I bought was Revocation’s new album, which is killer. Sylosis are also really good, but they’ve been around for a little longer.”
Corey also mentioned an Australian band that a fellow Trivium member showed him. “There is a newer band from Australia that Matt [Heafy] introduced me to, they’re called Be’lakor. I have one of their CDs that I was really impressed by.”

Corey tells HEAVY their plans before Soundwave comes around as we finish the interview. “Tomorrow we’re heading out on tour with DevilDriver – who are also playing Soundwave – for twelve weeks, so we’ll be hanging out with them a lot before we even get to Soundwave! As for Vengeance Falls, it will be released on October 11. We hope that you dig it, and we’ll see you in February!”

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