“If music is the machine, Cohesion are the engine. They drive fast, hit hard and have no need for brakes.”
The band’s own words sum up the energy, intensity, and force of their industrial scented alternative metal . With their latest single a major wake-up call to the UK outfit we got to look in on their background, heart, and roar with the band…
Hello and thanks for taking time out to talk with us.
Can you first introduce the band and give us some background to how it all started?
We’re Cohesion, straight out of London. We play loud Alternative Metal with a splash of Industrial. It all started on the back of a solo experiment with some songs, and since expanded with a constant rotation of the line-up, music and settled into what it is now: a machine ready to charge through to the top, borne of musicians who want to play, write and work together to create something new and powerful that gets heads banging and bodies rolling.
Have you been involved in other bands before? If so has that had any impact on what you are doing now, in maybe inspiring a change of style or direction?
Yeah of course we all have something else going on, from Gypsy Punk to Blues Functions. Certainly hasn’t changed our style or direction in any major way, most of them are meal tickets but all the nuances and tricks from other genres we do feed into Cohesion when we can, a rip roaring blues solo can sound sick in the right place, and some fast punk beat really helps to break up a song every now and again. I think by the fact all of us are always playing music in some form it really helps us to be as good as we can be.
What inspired the band name?
Pushing aside any possible pretentious answer, I really have no idea. I had a list of possible names, I umm’d and ahh’d for ages and one day Cohesion just stuck; it wasn’t even on the list!
Was there any specific idea behind the forming of the band and also in what you wanted it and your sound to offer?
Of course…I started with writing something that I could get my rocks off to, and that expanded into us writing music that we could get off to. We want to play what we want to hear, what there is not enough of out there or what there is but we want to put our own spin on it. Really we just want to rock out and enjoy ourselves, if anyone else likes it and can enjoy our shows too then that’s just awesome.
Do the same things still drive the band when it was fresh-faced or have they evolved over time?
The overall goal and drive is still there but now we aim for little victories, getting that recording done by this time and getting that gig there. Things get a lot more focus and the productivity goes up when you do this.
Since your early days, how would you say your sound has evolved?
Heavier…yet softer, weird answer I know but before we had a few things we wanted to do that just didn’t quite come out as we wanted, maybe we were too scared? Bit teenager but you get that with any band really. Now we’ve decided to just go for it, no matter what we want to do, just do it.
And has it been more of an organic movement or more the band deliberately wanting to try new things?
Again, bit of both. We’ve made some very deliberate choices to do certain things in our music, maybe it’s things we thought wouldn’t work or would work and we’ve learned our lesson; sometimes it’s just one of us has been listening to certain bands and some new influences come in where we go, oh hey that is cool, do that again!, which really helps drive the organics!
Presumably across the band there is a wide range of inspirations; are there any in particular which have impacted not only on the band’s invention but your personal approach and ideas to creating and playing music?
Definitely bands like Puscifer and Meshuggah, for different reasons. We ceased caring about that perfect 3:30 long song and just say fuck it, let’s write a 9 minute epic or a song that never gets to the chorus. Bands like Puscifer just show a certain maturity in their writing which we can only begin to attempt to emulate.
Is there a general process to the songwriting?
The process is so bog standard; riff gets written, or a beat, gets sent round, jammed on, smashed out from there really. But I do find lyrics are always last, I’ve tried so many times to start with them but by god it just doesn’t work for me! I have to hear the song first before I even know what I’m gonna start singing about.
Where do you, more often than not, draw the inspirations to those lyrics?
Pick a place. Lobotomies, aliens, religion, war, greed, sex, violence, love (yes, really), depression and everything else you can think of really. It’s usually something I’ve experienced or seen in the news and I’ve gone damn, that sucks and then lyrics ideas start creeping through. I wish I could write about something positive once in a while? That’d be a change.
Give us some background to your latest release.
Avarice…Oh man it’s a great song, we love it. It’s got groove, it’s got some sick riffage, bangin’ chorus, and it’s all about greed, the kind of greed that fucks up the world. We’ve got this crazy time in politics on the world stage full of all sorts of shit and everyone trying to put themselves first and it just sucks, so this is kind of our answer to that.
Are you a band which goes into the studio with songs pretty much in their final state or prefer to develop them as you record?
Definitely the former…Everything is done and finished in a rehearsal room, there’s just no time to dick about in a studio these days, not enough money, not enough time, we want to go in and just nail what we’ve already spent ages crafting and concentrating on getting that sounding as good as it can, not rewriting and working on parts that are recorded when only half thought out.
Tell us about the live side to the band?
Can’t go wrong with a gig…Even when everything goes to shit and your bass player gets snowed in and can’t make it and the kick pedal explodes in the intro of the first song (both happened at most recent gig)…we love it. Just energy and rocking out and cranking it, it’s what we love and we only ever want to do more of it!
It is not easy for any new band to make an impact regionally let alone nationally and further afield. How have you found it?
We’re based in London so it’s kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time: there’re so many more opportunities here but that also means the competition is much fiercer, and sometimes the wrong people can get the right gig which is always frustrating but hey, just gotta keep your head down and crack on.
How has the internet and social media impacted on the band to date?
We have a bit of a love/hate relationship with social media, it sucks the energy and time out of you and there’s nothing worse than planning bloody Instagram captions to destroy what could be a nice afternoon but at the end of the day it’s just a tool, like everything else; it used to be magazines, now it’s blogs, same stuff has always been there it just takes on a different form these days and you just have to learn to live with it (and to use it to your advantage!)
Once again a big thanks for sharing time with us; anything you would like to add or reveal for the readers?
A guy once asked to have some of our guitarist’s underwear after a show once, gross right? Otherwise, check out our new single Avarice – it’s awesome!
Check Cohesion out further @ https://www.facebook.com/cohesionhq/
Pete Ringmaster 10/05/2018
Copyright RingMaster: MyFreeCopyright
From the moment the EP’s title track looms right up from its distant entrance attention was not only hooked but chained to what was to follow. Wiry tendrils of guitar wrap around ears immediately, senses slapping beats alongside and once the first track hits its voracious stride and the vocals of Targett unleash their incitement, the deal between lust and the devil’s music roaring from the speakers was done. Swiftly the singer impresses with a throat abrasing attack and venomous delivery but it is when she breaks into a glorious clean delivery that realisation at her talent is inescapable. Before then guitarists Callan Hughes and Jay Bacon gnaw at and chew on the senses, twisting and turning with grooves as their hooks pierce with imagination as the swinging rhythms of drummer Willem Mason-Geraghty infest body and spirit just as potently. The track is immense and no better way to succumb to the first abusive seduction of VNDTA.
It is a potent and enticing start Dead On Arrival continues with its bristling and irritable but fiercely infectious attack. Leading up to its virulent chorus, the song commands eager attention but grabs it like a puppeteer with a focal point which has neck muscles and fists as involved as vocal chords. Around that beast of a chorus, the guitars weave a web of enticement as rhythms again prowl and pounce with anthemic prowess, the track real evidence of the band’s growing and evolving sound whilst stirring up the senses and attitude with prime thrash volatility.
The punk infested My Dog Will Piss On You follows, its metal ferocity rabid and addictive with its death, alternative, and groove metal collusion matched in nature by the varying and richly enjoyable vocals, singular and united. The track is superb, a glorious nagging on the senses arousing attitude and spirit with every raucous exploit before Deathbeds calms things with its melodic, slight Latin spiced croon. Anthemic beats and melancholic strings respectively drive and wrap the song’s emotive stroll, Conrad and Flauder vocally magnetic as Hilpert and Kieffer lay down their own virulent bait. Both tracks are magnificent, instinctive bait to ears and quickly matched by the catchy seduction of A Trois, a song which arouses involvement like a puppeteer.
The following Guillotine is just as fevered in its attack, maybe more so but unafraid to slip into less intensive examinations of the listener as it conjures its own web of salacious grooves and rapacious enterprise. Bywater’s voice and riffs infest ears but even more so his grooves and sonic espionage manipulates body and appetite already caught by the primal claws of the rhythms.
References to the likes of Paramore and Don Broco seem to crop up more often than not and it is easy to hear why but as fourth track Ghost of Letting Go steps forward, Orestea only establish their own individual character upon thought and sound. The song is a fiery ballad built on the metallic strains of Quinn’s bass; a song with irritability in its roar and harmonic grace in its calm which only captivates before Alive or Just Existing shows the band is just as adept at kicking up a storm though that attack is unsurprisingly bound in an infectiousness which has the body bouncing and energies rising. It is pure pop rock ‘n’ metal mastery and another pinnacle upon the already praise stamped proposition.
Nudisease is just as appealing and intrusive as its predecessors though with a more tolerant nature, riffs and grooves to the fore from its first breath. The intensity of the first two is pulled back in the third though its fire is as pyre like but turned into a hook carting swagger which has the body bouncing. Slips into calmer passages are fluid and magnetic, the track revealing a bolder adventure than the previous two if less of their greed inducing savagery while successor Through Your Eyes also embraces mellower climes in its more mercurial atmosphere and proposition. The song though has a volcanic temperament and heart which fuels its melodic and aggressive sides, creating an unpredictable and rabid but ultimately restrained trespass which maybe teases more than fulfils but still leaves pleasure stuck in its previous high.