The Vintage Caravan: Monumental Endeavours
It’s no surprise that THE VINTAGE CARAVAN are continually breaking expectations. Five albums in before they’re thirty, we caught up with guitarist and vocalist Óskar Logi Ágústsson about their latest album Monuments and the ways they’ve pushed not only their sound, but their emotional connection with their fans and the ways they recorded the album.
“It’s pretty strange to have grown up in this band,” Óskar admits, thinking over the past sixteen years since he started the band. “I’m turning twenty-seven this year and I’ve played a lot of shows in a lot of places, so I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to do this in this time.” The guys have achieved an incredible amount for their age, and they wholeheartedly admit having that ability to trailblaze definitely came with the resilience of youth. “We played like a hundred shows a year for three years straight and just drove ourselves everywhere,” Óskar smiles. “It was an incredible adventure, but I wouldn’t want to be like forty-seven and doing that!” he laughs. “I’m so happy that we managed to establish ourselves like that early on. I moved to Denmark when I was like nineteen, so I could sleep on a concrete floor and then do a two hour show and could keep doing that and it wouldn’t bother me. I think it would bother me now! We really had a burning passion for this band. We’d do anything for this band- we did and we have!”
While there’s no denying that the ethos of THE VINTAGE CARAVAN has remained consistent, the nature of their music has grown bolder and more confident. That’s evidently due to the bands back catalogue being so strong, and resonating with their audience. “When we’ve opened up more in other albums, we felt that that struck a different nerve with the audience,” Óskar explains. “People come up to say ‘this song helped me through a tough time’. That’s the highest praise you can give a musician. I have been inspired by that and motivated by the fans to take these songs that we’ve written, that mean a lot to them, and to delve deeper into ourselves. I think the relationship with the fanbase made this album possible, with the context of the lyrics and just being open.”
The record boasts ferociously high energy, emotional valleys and layers of expressive rock and roll. It’s chock-full of bangers, as well as revealing a lot of personal and imaginative storytelling through its soundscapes and lyrics. When we asked if there was an attachment to any particular songs, Óskar muses. “It differs from day to day for me, but for a good time listening, Dark Times. There’s something about that take that felt so alive when I did it. It’s also the only solo that I did live on the album too. Normally I do it a little in the overdubs, but this time I really wanted to do it as it is. Also, This One’s For You, which is a pretty personal song. Overall, lyrically the songs on this album are very personal, but this song is about my brother who passes away back in 2018. It was strange to kind of open up about that now. It’s quite cathartic, to say what I wanted to say and to close a chapter on my grieving process. I feel most attached to that song; it’s the scariest song I’ve ever put on to an album for me personally, because it’s so open.”
Not to give themselves a break on the music front either, THE VINTAGE CARAVAN played themselves to the brink on Monuments. “It was pretty extreme; we were doing like 9am or earlier and then staying at it until 1am the next night, for three weeks,” Óskar recounts. “There was one point where I completely burned out. I was tracking guitars for Whispers, after being two weeks in. It’s a fairly aggressive, fast song, a lot of down strokes. I was desperately trying to catch the train of being in the pocket, but it wouldn’t happen! I had to go faster! I spent like two hours in that state of straining urgency, and I had to just say, ‘I’m…going home!’ I left and I woke up like sixteen hours later.”
There’s so much that comes with time and experience that THE VINTAGE CARAVAN have managed the hone into on this record in terms of exactly what they wanted from their sound. “With this album we wanted the drums to sound a little warmer too,” Óskar tells us. “I think the sound generally on the last album was a little colder so to speak. This time, we really felt a bit more at home in the studio we used for Monuments. It’s the oldest studio in Iceland actually, in the next town over from me, and a lot of my favourite albums were recorded there, so it was amazing to be there.” On top of that, it’s the little elements that result in small tips of the hat to the band’s influences that make their sound feel fresh in modern music. “I do quite a few acoustic overdubs, which I don’t feel a lot of bands are doing in the rock scene, it’s just electric guitars. It’s on Crystallized and Hell, where I doubled with the acoustic guitar and it gives it a percussive element. It kind of reminded me of 2112. [Also], we doubled pretty much everything, the vocals, guitars, all of it, so it had that [John] Lennon feel. We have the same mentality as those classic bands, I think.”
Monuments is out now via Napalm Records.
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