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There’s an old saying in boxing: it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up. In 2020 Caligula’s Horse defied the prevailing mood of doom and gloom with the uplifting Rise Radiant, and lead guitarist Sam Vallen told Prog about the beauty of human fragility, becoming a dad – and how a control freak trusted someone else with the mixing duties.
At a time when the world is in turmoil, optimism feels like an act of defiance – and
with Rise Radiant, Caligula’s Horse celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and mankind’s capacity for picking itself up and getting back on its feet in the face of adversity.
The new record is the Australian band’s most ambitious and diverse thus far and, in a break from its 2017 predecessor In Contact, it’s not a concept album. That was a deliberate choice, explains lead guitarist and producer Sam Vallen, who founded the group with singer Jim Grey in Brisbane in 2011.
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Always eager to keep moving forwards, they were determined not to repeat what they’d made in the past; so as they began pre-production the quintet discussed how to approach what would become their fifth album.
“We take stock of what we’ve done,” says Vallen. “Maybe with the previous album, but more likely it’s a larger take on the things we’ve done since the very beginning of our career. We try to work out how we can position the next record as being a bit of a contrast. From Bloom [their 2015 third release] to In Contact, we went from having this very austere and direct album to a record which was much more dynamically intense and much more of a concept album. When it came time to do Rise Radiant we said, ‘How do we break away from that without repeating what we’ve done with the other non-concept albums?’”
They decided to write music that feels more personal than ever, expressing its messages without the need for a cast of fictional characters. “Each of the songs should embody something totally different; rather than talking through mythology or an extended metaphor, a lot of it instead is ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘me’.”
CALIGULA’S HORSE – Slow Violence (OFFICIAL VIDEO) – YouTube
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However, Vallen continues: “The problem with us is that we’re prog wankers and we immediately start moving towards similar thematic ground. When we did start on the lyrics and the meaning, we realised there actually was a shared theme – not enough that you could call it a concept album, but enough that you could trace it through the different songs. That theme, when we uncovered it, was what that I’d call
human experience.”
This led the band to drawing on their unique lived experiences in writing the lyrics. “As we started to delve into that more, we realised there is one particular human experience that this album embodied: what we referred to as ‘getting back up again.’ It’s really easy for an artist to preach about strength, power, love – things that are very positive and very lofty and, I would argue, safe. We thought, ‘What about how beautiful human fragility is?’ It’s not about what you overcome, it’s about the very fact that you’re willing to get back up and face another challenge.”
The idea resonated with Vallen and Grey from their own histories, dealing with changes in the band’s line-up, enduring tough times on the road, and facing transformations in their lives offstage. “Oceanrise is a musing on your own mortality and saying there’s a beauty to the idea of legacy, the idea that you are temporary,” reveals Vallen. “The Ascent and Autumn are two parts in this longer examination of fatherhood that Jim and I were both really fascinated by, because we’ve both recently become fathers.
A demo – even if it doesn’t have the liveliness of the performance – is evidence of whether something works or not
“We wanted to explore the idea of being a prospective father, knowing this is coming, knowing there’s a big change, knowing you need to overcome that change. In other words, looking at it almost selfishly, as you do when you approach fatherhood.
“But then The Ascent takes over immediately after that and you realise that, the moment you have a child, your life is no longer about you in a really beautiful way. Your ego is nothing, because what’s much more important is being a guiding light for a new soul, someone whose legacy far outstretches your own.
So we wrote it using this mountain metaphor: instead of approaching it as this summit you must scale, it’s about creating some beacons as far up as you can and accepting that you will never finish the climb. Maybe that’s a more beautiful part of the story, knowing you have set as much up as you can for those who follow.”
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In addition to his guitar-playing and songwriting duties, Vallen is also his band’s producer. In that latter role he’s a stickler for making detailed demos of songs. “I teach production and a couple of other things at university,” he says, “One of the things I always tell people is, when you’re with your bandmates and everything is playing at deafening volume, everything sounds exciting and amazing and perfect – but when you record all that and listen back to it, suddenly it doesn’t sound so perfect any more.
“A simulation of the finished product – even if it doesn’t yet have the liveliness of the performances, the energy that all our interaction brings – is evidence of whether something works or not. I can start pulling on all those little threads to make sure they’re all perfect. In that sense, I could take or leave being an instrumentalist, to be honest. I enjoy creating that part and I enjoy the performing element of it all, but what I much prefer is that big picture.”
He picks out Steven Wilson as a source of production inspiration. “He’s always been a fantastic guitar player,” he explains. “Admittedly, the guitar solos in Caligula’s Horse are probably a little more flashy, just by virtue of the fact that we like this big exuberant progressive metal thing.”
If music is going to have impact, it needs to have a contour. It can’t just be a flat line of sound
But the main thing Vallen admires is Wilson’s visionary ability to create records that have a completely different aesthetic from anything else around them. “He’s reinventing himself constantly. I’m not even comparing our process to that, but Robert Fripp from King Crimson is another good example in the same style of music. Maybe our style tends to have an in for that type of personality – let’s call it the ‘control freak madman!’”
Control freakery notwithstanding, Vallen handed mixing responsibility to Jens Bogren, who’s worked with Opeth and Katatonia, and who also mastered Bloom and In Contact. One of the most outstanding features of Rise Radiant is the dynamic range of the music, from full-blown prog metal heaviness to moments where the volume drops from a torrent to a trickle. It’s an attribute rarely found in modern mixing, where everything is often heavily compressed in the wake of the loudness wars – but Vallen was confident that Bogren would bring out the full textures of the sonic landscape the band had built in the studio.
“He’s been one of my biggest audio heroes since the mid-2000s,” he says. “I remember hearing Opeth’s Watershed, but also albums like Katatonia’s The Great Cold Distance; he did a whole bunch of progressive metal albums in that period which sounded unlike anything I was hearing around them at the time, especially with Watershed. You’re not hearing a big snare trigger; you’re not hearing guitars that are always full and always huge. It had a contour I wanted on this album, where there’s all this variety in sound.”
CALIGULA’S HORSE – Valkyrie (Listening Video) – YouTube
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Vallen’s notes for Bogren included the direction that the album should sound raw, real, performative and dynamic, and the latter attribute was further intensified with input from Thomas Waber, head of InsideOut, who encouraged Vallen and Bogren to go further during the mixing process, making the quiet moments really contrast with the big, heavy sections.
“We were going through the mixes while Jens was doing them and Thomas was saying, ‘It’s too loud, it’s too loud.’ We’d say, ‘We thought it was really quiet, but okay, let’s bring it back a bit more.’ I remember letting that sit with me for a little while, listening to these far less compressed, very dynamically mixed songs. If music is going to have impact, it needs to have a contour. It can’t just be a flat line of sound; it must have a sense of ebb and flow.”
The album’s central messages about resilience, temporality and fragility seem to capture the zeitgeist of a world under the shadow of a pandemic. Caligula’s
Horse had scheduled an entire touring regime to support Rise Radiant, but all those plans have now been put on hold. However, despite the impossibility of going on the road, they were determined to press ahead with putting the album out into the world while the band themselves are staying home in Australia.
We made sure our fans didn’t feel like we were pulling the rug when everyone is already experiencing something kind of terrible
“We said, ‘It’s a really important time to release an album that has a positive message,’ It kind of foils the pessimistic views that so many people seem to be extolling about the music industry right now. It’s impossible to look at music forums and not feel this sense of apathy.
“So we thought it was important that we stuck to our guns. We made sure our fans didn’t feel like we were pulling the rug when everyone is already experiencing something kind of terrible right now. We’re still there offering that little piece of music that we uniquely offer the world, for good or ill.”
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