Caligula’s Horse: Vividly Colorful
For the world – and Australia specifically – 2020 didn’t really start the way many of us hoped for. With the bushfires devastating the Australian continent since June last year, the Melbourne prime progressive metal act CALIGULA’S HORSE were shaping what’s has become their fifth studio album entitled Rise Radiant.
“Funnily enough there’s this constant of coming up with significant moments for Rise Radiant while travelling,” reflects bassist Dale Prinsse on the origins of the group’s newest offering, out on May 22nd via InsideOut Music. “Oceanrise for example was written on tour in Europe, and that was really the initiating music for the album. The origins of the art can probably be dated back to wandering around Santiago, Chile. We’d tossed words around like struggle, overcoming, uplifting, persevering, and there was this moment where the myth of Sisyphus came to mind for us. Myself, Jim, and Sam had found ourselves in Melbourne waiting for our visas for that same tour a few months prior and had spit-balled in like a half-hour these same words, and we came out with Rise Radiant. The overarching themes of the album revolve exactly around this. Our message is to inspire, encourage, and overcome – in whatever manner that applies to you.”
The new experimentation saw the significant involvement by drummer Josh Griffin, bassist Dale Prinsse, and guitarist Adrian Goleby in the creative process. Griffin says, “while that hasn’t changed the process entirely for Sam and Jim, it gave them some different voices and perspectives to the material. We also had a little more time for production this time, not too much though! The biggest difference is we had the pleasure of Jens Bogren mixing the album.”
Slow Violence is one of the singles the band launched prior to the album release. “This was the song out of the original three, Oceanrise and Salt too, that were being written as I’d joined the band, and I’d just repeatedly go ‘PHWOAR!’, and honestly, I still do,” Griffin says. “The catchiness of the chorus and meticulous layering of the vocals in the end chorus-return sell this song for me. I really love the payoff you get in the climax of the bridge from the sinking breakdown riff too. I just visualise ourselves playing live every time I hear it, and me inevitably stage diving into a hole where no one catches me.”
On the other end, the uplifting Salt represented a challenge in terms of its placement within Rise Radiant. Prinsse admits, “I’ve fallen in love with a lot of artists that use drunk grooves tastefully in their music, and while Salt doesn’t quite go there, the quintuplet beat has this ebb and flow that feels really similar without being ‘sloppy’. Funnily enough the recording of this song was one of the easier ones for me because that feel is so natural (thanks Josh).”
During the creative phase, the band tossed around the idea for the album title being seasonally themed, landing on Autumn at one point. The song of the same name found on Rise Radiant represents so much about CALIGULA’S HORSE as individuals. Prinsse comments, “this watershed moment that we each have described as the band has effloresced into this incredibly functional and silly unit of friends connected by this music. More-so than the rest of the album, I find my identity as a musician in Autumn. Even despite the bass solo, developing the melodies throughout the bridge were some vividly colourful moments in the recording process.”
CALIGULA’S HORSE continue the tradition of having a prog epic on their albums. As Prinsse reflects, “The Ascent was so mammoth to put together, it really went through a lot of iterations to get the variations of the main riff right, as well as finding a way to connect what we’d written first (the outro) to the beginning of the song – sounds confusing, but the process of this song was hard. Some of my favourite moments on this track are Jim’s bridge lyrics during the acoustic section which resonate so profoundly with me on a personal level. Constructing a bass part around that section, specifically, was as much fun as Autumn.”
Given the state of the world at the moment, the value of music and the arts in connecting and elevating people today is significant. Prinsse adds, “Not to introduce an unwieldy topic out there, but my PhD in music is concentrating on an aspect of this question, what exactly does music mean to people? The more I uncover through my study, the more I see how it applies to CALIGULA’S HORSE. The convergence of scenes and communities around our music is inspiring, and to be a part of a larger picture of the music industry has its rewards as much as it does being a fan too. Given the nature of the world as it stands, music’s place, as it has always been, is to connect people.” The future of the band seems bright. According to Prinsse, “The future of CALIGULA’S HORSE holds shenanigans. More music-making. Stupid memes. More touring. Dungeons & Dragons. Having great chats about what we’re up to.”
Rise Radiant is out now via InsideOut Music.
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