Death and black metal generally offer promises of intense showmanship on the live stage and lead guitarist and singer Tommaso Riccardi promises Fleshgod Apocalypse fans will experience no less from the band. “A huge amount of theatre and extreme music. That’s what we’ve got,” Riccardi says.
Fleshgod Apocolypse’s Australian tour coincides with their tenth anniversary. A decade into their career as a band, Riccardi’s reflections speak of every moment, in different ways, as having been a highlight. “We have been doing crazy things during the years. Playing three different mainlands in a couple of weeks, driving 4600 kilometres in 53 hours, risking to be trapped in Russia with expired visas, playing more than 120 shows in a year, starting a world tour on a cruising ship, playing Wacken Open Air, opening for bands we’ve been listening to for years, playing in front of 25000 people,” he says. The list goes on.
“Lessons? I wouldn’t even know where to start. Yes, we’ve learned many lessons. The most important is that life is a great adventure and dreams have to be the fuel to go on, in general.”
Last year’s studio release King received massive acclaim for the group, and now that release is largely considered a staple in metal, one that every headbanger must own. “We simply feel glad about that,” says Riccardi. “We put ourselves into this work, more than ever, and that’s why we can be grateful for this amazing result. It’s not about fame, it’s about feeling that, in some way, we contributed to building a little piece of music history.”
Making music history indeed, there are many elements to Fleshgod Apocalypse that make their brand of metal stick out like a welcome sore thumb, Riccardi preferring not to restrict any description of the band’s work to the obvious mixed elements of death metal and classical music. “I think that you can mix thousands of genres and try to discover infinite musical formulas to be original, but being original is always a wrong term, in my opinion,” he says.
“You can’t be original, you can be yourself. We try to be ourselves and I guess many people do a lot to not be themselves, and that’s really bad. We are who we are and our music surely reflects that, like it or not.”
In being themselves, Riccardi says he doesn’t feel there’s much of a difference between the Italian take on metal compared with that of, say, American or Nordic metal. “The Italian heritage is pretty solid,” he says. “Of course we have been extremely influenced by northern Europe and American death metal music, no doubt about it.
“But the music someone produces is inevitably influenced by his own soul and heritage and you can actually hear it. Also, considering that we have a big history in classical music, I can totally say that yes, if you know something about this genre, you can totally guess we are Italians.”
That refreshingly strong tie to their heritage is one small part of what has enabled the seemingly never-ending and flexible creative directions they take. How much more can Fleshgod Apocalypse come up with to continue surprising and impressing? “Here we are getting into the Top Secret area,” Riccardi laughs. “We have ideas and we are working to bring them to life and I am proud to say that even this time, believe it or not, you can expect the unexpected.”
