The best laid plans of mice, men and progressive rock musicians can often go awry. When Prog speaks with Earthside, on the eve of their return to European stages at Euroblast in Germany and ProgPower in the Netherlands, they’re only a handful of weeks on from the news that singer/ guitarist Jamie van Dyck has been diagnosed with testicular cancer. Today, Jamie looks and sounds in good health and is less interested in bemoaning his lot than in enthusing about his band’s return to the festival circuit, and their absolutely colossal new album, Let The Truth Speak.
“We delivered the mastered album to the label in May, and then I got the testicular cancer diagnosis [in September],” he notes with a shrug. “It’s all happened very fast. It was as simple as just removing the cancerous testicle, and if it had healed up well enough I could go to Europe as planned. It did make rehearsing and preparing feel very last minute and very rushed. While I was recovering, I didn’t want to stress myself out too much, so we didn’t rehearse nearly as much as I think we would’ve wanted to.”
Jamie van Dyke
He grins broadly, clearly just happy to be back.
“Luckily, when I write the music, I give the hard parts to everyone else!” Released in October 2015, Earthside’s debut, A Dream In Static was an instant hit with fans of modern, progressive heaviness. Van Dyck and his comrades clearly knew their way around a djent riff, but epics Mob Mentality and Skyline were anything but generic. With a gift for lavish arrangements and skilful genre-blending, Earthside stood out as something special. Van Dyck admits he was taken aback by the enthusiastic response to the first album, but that a few lingering frustrations with how it turned out had taught the band to be ruthless in pursuit of their loftiest musical ambitions. Let The Truth Speak outstrips its predecessor on every level, veering from the snappy post-djent throwdown of Pattern Of Rebirth (featuring AJ Channer from Texan rap-metal crew Fire From The Gods) to the absurdly exciting prog-funk crossover sprawl of The Lesser Evil, which features soulful vocals from Larry Braggs, formerly of both The Temptations and Tower Of Power.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/s6DjUy_wf1703851786574/0412444473.jpg]
“Yeah, it is a much bigger album. Whether that was a wise choice or not, I don’t know! But it definitely played a role in why it took as long as it did,” says van Dyck with a laugh.
“Also, how layered it is, how collaborative it is, and the scope of people involved in making this record. It was a quest to find some of these people, some that we didn’t know existed, but we got to a point of desperation where it had already been almost five years since we released A Dream In Static and we had barely any of the guest vocalists lined up.”
They got it sorted in the end, it seems. Among the other notables chipping in on Let The Truth Speak are TesseracT frontman Daniel Tompkins, Canadian singer-songwriter Keturah and, brilliantly, former Georgia’s Got Talent contestant Gennady TkachenkoPapizh, who sings alongside Tompkins on the indulgent grandiloquence of the title track.
“One of the advantages of being Facebook friends with progressive music fans is they know a lot of music, and they’re music lovers who love music and musicianship in general. They love great composers and they love great playing, so it’s not just limited to the progressive music genre. So I wrote this post, asking for recommendations and asked everyone to focus on people outside of the prog names we already know, and I got over a thousand comments. Some were just recommending themselves or their bandmates, but some of them were recommending people from far corners of the music industry, like Gennady. Somebody had seen him on …Got Talent, and we wouldn’t have known anything about that. Finding him completely gave an X-factor to a song that we thought was probably the best song on the record. We realised we could add that ingredient to it and it gave the song extra character and emotional weight.”
Earthside are a generous lot. Let The Truth Speak is 78 minutes long and absolutely full of moments of audacious cross-pollination. Earthside are still a thunderous prog metal band at heart, but their second full-length has expanded their remit to include, well, just about anything that takes their collective fancy. From The Lesser Evil’s startling foray into funk, to Denial’s Aria’s somnambulant trip-hop odyssey, Let The Truth Speak is what happens when great musicians stop giving a shit about the naysayers and aim as high as possible, and damn the consequences.
“People say, ‘You’re never gonna achie...
“We delivered the mastered album to the label in May, and then I got the testicular cancer diagnosis [in September],” he notes with a shrug. “It’s all happened very fast. It was as simple as just removing the cancerous testicle, and if it had healed up well enough I could go to Europe as planned. It did make rehearsing and preparing feel very last minute and very rushed. While I was recovering, I didn’t want to stress myself out too much, so we didn’t rehearse nearly as much as I think we would’ve wanted to.”
Jamie van Dyke
He grins broadly, clearly just happy to be back.
“Luckily, when I write the music, I give the hard parts to everyone else!” Released in October 2015, Earthside’s debut, A Dream In Static was an instant hit with fans of modern, progressive heaviness. Van Dyck and his comrades clearly knew their way around a djent riff, but epics Mob Mentality and Skyline were anything but generic. With a gift for lavish arrangements and skilful genre-blending, Earthside stood out as something special. Van Dyck admits he was taken aback by the enthusiastic response to the first album, but that a few lingering frustrations with how it turned out had taught the band to be ruthless in pursuit of their loftiest musical ambitions. Let The Truth Speak outstrips its predecessor on every level, veering from the snappy post-djent throwdown of Pattern Of Rebirth (featuring AJ Channer from Texan rap-metal crew Fire From The Gods) to the absurdly exciting prog-funk crossover sprawl of The Lesser Evil, which features soulful vocals from Larry Braggs, formerly of both The Temptations and Tower Of Power.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/s6DjUy_wf1703851786574/0412444473.jpg]
“Yeah, it is a much bigger album. Whether that was a wise choice or not, I don’t know! But it definitely played a role in why it took as long as it did,” says van Dyck with a laugh.
“Also, how layered it is, how collaborative it is, and the scope of people involved in making this record. It was a quest to find some of these people, some that we didn’t know existed, but we got to a point of desperation where it had already been almost five years since we released A Dream In Static and we had barely any of the guest vocalists lined up.”
They got it sorted in the end, it seems. Among the other notables chipping in on Let The Truth Speak are TesseracT frontman Daniel Tompkins, Canadian singer-songwriter Keturah and, brilliantly, former Georgia’s Got Talent contestant Gennady TkachenkoPapizh, who sings alongside Tompkins on the indulgent grandiloquence of the title track.
“One of the advantages of being Facebook friends with progressive music fans is they know a lot of music, and they’re music lovers who love music and musicianship in general. They love great composers and they love great playing, so it’s not just limited to the progressive music genre. So I wrote this post, asking for recommendations and asked everyone to focus on people outside of the prog names we already know, and I got over a thousand comments. Some were just recommending themselves or their bandmates, but some of them were recommending people from far corners of the music industry, like Gennady. Somebody had seen him on …Got Talent, and we wouldn’t have known anything about that. Finding him completely gave an X-factor to a song that we thought was probably the best song on the record. We realised we could add that ingredient to it and it gave the song extra character and emotional weight.”
Earthside are a generous lot. Let The Truth Speak is 78 minutes long and absolutely full of moments of audacious cross-pollination. Earthside are still a thunderous prog metal band at heart, but their second full-length has expanded their remit to include, well, just about anything that takes their collective fancy. From The Lesser Evil’s startling foray into funk, to Denial’s Aria’s somnambulant trip-hop odyssey, Let The Truth Speak is what happens when great musicians stop giving a shit about the naysayers and aim as high as possible, and damn the consequences.
“People say, ‘You’re never gonna achie...
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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 146