Periphery – Spencer Sotelo

Periphery is one of the few groups which scream musical superiority at first glance. The Meryland metalheads have been on the cutting edge of song composition and musicianship since they released their debut self-titled album in April, 2010. Their next album Periphery II, set for release on July 3 2012, is about to be unleashed upon the ears of metal fans across the globe – something which vocalist Spencer Sotelo believes will bring about a new era for the band.

Metal Obsession’s, James Brady, had the opportunity to sit down with vocalist, Spencer Sotelo, to discuss Periphery’s forthcoming new album, ‘Periphery II’.

Metal Obsession: You guys have just finished your album, how’s it all gone?

Spencer Sotelo: We’re really proud of it and can’t wait for everyone to hear it.

MO: Have you been touring since you guys finished?

Spencer: We’ve been touring off and on for the past six months straight only time we’ve had off was to finish up what we needed to do in the studio, so there hasn’t been much rest for us lately, but I wouldn’t have it any other way – that means that things are going good. If you’re busy things are good, you know.

MO: Have you played any of the new songs at shows yet?

Spencer: Oh, yeah, yeah, we’ve played Face Palm (Mute) we’ve been playing that one for like the past year, we’re actually about to release a track in about a week, maybe a little over a week, that we’re about to start playing live next week actually, before it even hits. That track’s called Total Destroy, if you’ve listened to the album.

MO: Fantastic, I haven’t had time to memorise the names but I’ll go back and listen to it.

Spencer: They’re quirky out-there names, so they’re kind hard to stick on, you gotta drill them into your brain (laughs).

MO: Is that a sign of you guys not taking yourselves too seriously, or is that just how you roll?

Spencer: A little bit of that, it’s a little bit of us just not giving a shit and letting our own personalities come through the band, very transparently. A lot of bands, I feel, take themselves too seriously nowadays and try and uphold this whole mystique aspect – you know? I feel like that used to work before the internet was around, but that doesn’t work anymore so we just like to embrace it, we like to embrace the quirkiness of the band, we’re not going to hide it, you know?

MO: The internet’s obviously helped Periphery rise to fame, are you guys still using it as much as you were?

Spencer: Absolutely, all of us we try to stay in touch with our fans as much as we can online I feel like a lot of bands are starting to catch on to that and do that now I feel like making the frans feel like you’re there and readily available to answer questions and even chat sometimes, fans really, really take notice of that and will latch on. We have crazy hardcore fans man, I don’t know if it’s because of that or not but our fans are nuts man, they’ll like fight to the death for us.

MO: You’ve been with the band for almost three years now, through that are there still times where you’ll get up on stage, look at a crowd and be blown away?

Spencer: It’s kinda a normal thin for me now, I don’t get nervous – I’ve done it hundreds of times and it doesn’t get me like it used to, but I will say when we play giant shows they’re the most breathtaking sights. I’ll walk out and see a sea of heads, you know. We played this festival called the Pulp Summer Slam over in the Philippines about a month or a few weeks ago and we played to over 20,000 people – that was the biggest crowd we had seen to date, that we had played to, we actually played to that many people. It was an insane feeling, you know, I was just speechless, after one of our songs I usually talk to the crowd but at one point I was just speechless, I was just shocked at like how many people are out there enjoying our music, it’s an insane feeling, you know?

MO: Going back to the album here, it will be released in the next month or so, what was the goal with this one – I notice it’s slightly different to Periphery I?

Spencer: The goal with this album was to destroy our last album and make it larger than life, the whole tunes from sound to sonically all the way up to song writing, i feel like we did a really good job with it – my goal with this was to make people not remember the first album. When people listen to this I want them to just want to listen to this one, not the old album ever again [laughs].”

MO: There’s a few guest guitarists – you’ve got Petrucci, Guthrie Govan, even Wes from The Faceless – that’s huge man.

Spencer: Oh, yeah, yeah – Wes is a good buddy of our’s, he’s only been in the faceless for a couple of months and he’s been a really dear friend of our’s, of the whole band, for a couple of years – he used to work for a guitar company that Mischa works tightly-knit with, that’s how we met him. He’s just been a huge supporter of the band and has been a really good friend of our’s for a long time, so we asked if he wanted to do a guest solo but he just, he rips! He’s one of my favourite guitar players and the solo he ended up writing for the album is just breathtaking.

MO: People like Tosin Abasi, obviously both The Faceless guys and the guys in Periphery as well, it seems like there’s a new edge coming to this kind of music.

Spencer: We’re trying to bring it back man, bring back the good song writing. I feel like so much metal nowadays is just watered-down shit man and I get it, I get why certain people like certain styles of metal that are very, uh, not reserved, but they just don’t have that edge. Metal used to have an edge back in like the 80’s early 90’s and somewhere in-between now and then it lost that edge, it almost got like a cookie-cutter sound to it, everything sounds the same. We’re trying to just bring that edge back and that originality back, you know, we’re trying to lead that movement for people in the metal community to start writing original stuff again, you know?

MO: I noticed as well, your vocals are awesome on this album, was that something you wanted to do, to get a different sort of sound?

Spencer: This album is more my sound because I didn’t really write much the vocals for the last album, I joined the band around the time that it needed to be recorded and most of it was witten – I only wrote a couple of the songs on the last album. Just touring and practising and recording just made me a better singer and I wanted to experiment with a different type of singing and I feel like I’ve really started to come into my own in the past year and I wanted to incorporate all the new styles that I’ve picked up over the years on a record. I don’t want to just pidgeon-hole myself to just one sound and do this because the fans like it or because I think this is what people are going to like, I wanted to do it because it felt right to me and I experimented and I’m really happy with the way the singing came out on this album. I think it’s one of the stronger points on the album, the last album I felt like the vocals were cool on it but it just felt like this thing that sat over the music and it didn’t really feel like it worked as a whole, it just felt like these songs with vocals slapped on them. With this album the vocals feel like they’re driving the song, you know?

MO: I’ve read a few interviews here and there and reviews and whatnot, there were some people that were criticising your work, has that been hard to deal with?

Spencer: I’m ok with it man, you’re going to have haters no matter what you do. You could be the most awesome, greatest singer who ever walked the planet and you’re going to have haters man, that’s just how it is. There’s always going to be somebody out there who doesn’t like what you’re doing and wants to stifle you but you can’t let it get to you, because at the end of the day the people out there that are saying that are probably at most like 5%, maybe not even that, of your fans. Chances are most of your fans don’t post on the internet a lot of the people don’t post their opinions, there are hundreds of people looking at your page that don’t post. You just gotta brush it off your shoulder, take it with a grain of salt and give it the flick, don’t let what people say affect what you do, because if you do then you’ve lost, you know?

MO: From what you’re saying it sounds like you’ve had some pretty good support from the rest of the band?

Spencer: They hired me as potential, you know, they knew I wasn’t  the best singer in the world when they hired me but they liked that I could write and they liked aspects of my voice that they knew were going to… I guess they looked at me like a diamond in the rough where they knew I was going to buff out in time and start to shine and I feel like that’s what’s starting to happen now. They had faith in me from the beginning and that was the plan, for me to just keep working on what I was doing and I did, I put in the work and like with anything, if you put in the work you’re going to see the benefits.

MO: Well, what about the singers? We always hear about the guitarists that have inspired Mischa but what about you, who are your idols?

Spencer: I listen to a lot of different things man, I don’t even really listen to much metal but the things that influence me are the things that inspire me, not necessarily things that I’m hugely influenced by. I’m taken more by inspiration rather than influence. If something inspires me to write I don’t go `I want to sound like that’, or `I want to sound like this’, it just inspires me to do what I do. I always try to be as original as possible and not try and copy anybody else’s style or anything like that – I just like taking inspiration from other things, I guess.

MO: What were you doing before you joined the band?

Spencer: I used to be a car detailer (laughs) in my spare time I worked in my friend’s studio, helping him record things and kind of interning under him and studying under him, learning how to navigate around in a recording studio but yeah, I used to wash and detail cars for my secular life [laughs].

MO: We’re coming close to time, but when are you guys coming to Australia next?

Spencer: There’s been some talk with our people about trying to get there asap, nothing written down yet but we are trying to work it out right now but I’m sure there’s going to be an announcement in the next couple of months about next time we hit Australia. I want to get back sooner than later because I love it down there. `Down `undah’ [laughs].

Check out Periphery‘s new album, ‘Periphery II’, available  June 29th via Roadrunner Records Australia.
http://au.roadrunnerrecords.com