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An Interview with Andy Deane, Gopal Metro, Tony Lechmanski, Micah Consylman, and Jordan Marchini of Bella Morte
Posted: Sunday, December 17, 2006
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

Grey skies might bleed black, but the skies are looking sunny for Virginia gothic rock band Bella Morte. Founded as a two-piece nearly 10 years ago by singer Andy Deane and bassist Gopal Metro, Bella Morte has been steadily adding members to their ranks and styles to their repertoire. Guitarist Tony Lechmansky joined after the 2000 release of Where Shadows Lie, bringing a hint of good old-fashioned glam and metal to Bella Morte's sound, and live drummer Jordan Marchini and keyboardist Micah Consylman became official band members around the time of the band's 2004 release, As the Reasons Die.

While Bella Morte have incorporated a number of styles into their sound—ranging from modern dark punk on As the Reasons Die and metal on their most recent release, Bleed the Grey Sky Black—they also show plenty of love to old school goth purists, as evidenced by appearances at New York's Drop Dead Festival and the release of two CDs of Misfits-inspired zombie punk rock, The Death Rock EP and its follow-up, Songs for the Dead.

It's their most recent album, though, that shows the band at their most coherent. Though less slick than its immediate predecessors, Bleed the Grey Sky Black is perhaps the biggest-sounding album the band has released. Much of this comes from the band's collaborative attitude toward songwriting and whirlwind approach to studio recording, as the band told ReGen during their recent U.S. tour.

Your last full-length album was very modern, with elements of dark punk and even a little New Wave, and you followed that up with an old school death rock EP. What does the new album sound like?

Lechmanski: It's a good mixture of both, I'd say. It's real guitar-heavy, but still synth-heavy. It's a lot more rock. There's a lot of drums on this one. It's really solid all around. It takes all the elements of what we've done with all our different recordings and melds them and brings it up a level.

Metro: It's a lot more representative of how we are live. There's no one song that's just a synth song or just a guitar song. It's more live-sounding.

Deane: It's definitely a heavier, darker, deeper sound than what we've done in the past.

When you started out, it was just Andy and Gopal, and you've been adding members ever since. How has the addition of all the new members changed how you approach music?

Metro: It's a lot more energetic, and a lot more aggressive than it used to be. It was primarily synth-based, and the guitars were just there for a melodic element, whereas now the guitars are very active in our sound. This being the first full-length with live drums also makes a lot of difference. Overall we're a lot more energetic and a lot angrier—the music is, anyway.

Have you had to change how you go about writing and recording in the studio, too?

Deane: Unintentionally in a way, it did for this new album. As the Reasons Die was a very processed album, very edited.

Lechmanski: And we all did separate sessions, whereas this was more of a live thing.

Deane: The new album is very much like the first take. If it's good, no need to do it again. We ran with that mentality through the entire thing, and it really worked.

Lechmanski: It was my favorite recording process that I've ever been involved in, in any band.

Consylman: We did a lot of writing as an entire band, as opposed to individuals doing parts or whatever.

Metro: It reminded me a lot of the recording sessions for Where Shadows Lie. It was very similar to that in feel, at least for Andy and I.

Speaking of Where Shadows Lie, are you going to re-release that at some point?

Metro: It's here!

Lechmanski: The reason that we hadn't released it is that we didn't own it. It was still Cleopatra's. We bought out the rest of the contract or whatever, however it worked.

Deane: We bought the rest of the stock. The contract expired.

Lechmanski: Now it's ours again.

Metro: And it will stay in print, for the most part.

What are the typical Bella Morte fans like, since you play such a mixture of old school and modern-sounding stuff?

Metro: There is no typical Bella Morte fan. It's been very apparent on this tour; we'll go from city to city, place to place, we'll have skater kids, metal-heads, it's just across the board. Moms and dads coming out and bringing their twelve-year-old kids, and it's the parents that are there for the show, not the kids.

Consylman: Goth kids, metal kids, punk kids, rock 'n' rollers...

Deane: I love the skaters. They're so fun! They're a lot more energetic at shows, these metal-heads and skater kids.

A lot of mainstream bands that have a dark aesthetic, like AFI and My Chemical Romance, are big right now. Has that brought in more fans?

Lechmanski: It definitely helps.

There has also been a big resurgence in the old school death rock, with festivals like Drop Dead in New York. What is your opinion of the current death rock scene? What relevance do you think it has, compared to 25 years ago?

Lechmanski: It's not the same, but it definitely still holds up in the underground.

Metro: I'm happy it's there.

Lechmanski: Nothing, even the punk scene, holds the same relevance it did when it started, because it started as a movement and just carried on from that. But it's still very much a real thing and an alive thing, and that's definitely appreciated.

What are some of your favorite bands?

Metro: I don't think any of us are actively listening to goth and death rock right now, honestly.

Lechmanski: I grew up on Motley Crue and Guns 'n' Roses, and these are bands I love. The reason I play guitar is because of people like Slash and Nikki Sixx. I always hear a lot of punk and rock 'n' roll.

Consylman: Old Man's Child! That's a black metal band no one listens to.

Deane: Iron Maiden, Faith No More, and I love the new Chili Peppers album.

Metro: I'm listening to The Kominas a lot right now. They're awesome.

Looking at your album art and hearing songs like 'Dead Will Walk,' it's clear you guys are horror fans. What are some of your favorite horror movies?

Deane: I'm going to start recent, and go with stuff like Gingersnaps and May. There are so many good directors coming out of the woodwork right now. I think that Lucky McKee's stuff, like May and the Masters of Horror he did for Showtime, is incredible. I think that Eli Roth is doing some great stuff, like Hostel, and Takashi Miike rules!

Lechmanski: I'm a huge fan of the old Universal monsters like Frankenstein, and all those old school movies.

Deane: And '70s grindhouse horror. You've got to love Texas Chainsaw.

Consylman: The Devil's Rejects was a good one, as far as new movies go.

Marchini: I like Friday the Thirteenth, the whole series.

You've also been in a comic book. How did that happen?

Deane: Yes, on Tokyopop. Ross Campbell is a fan of the band, and he came to a show in South Carolina. I sat around and talked to him that whole night, and we just hit it off so well as friends that he sent me a bunch of his Wet Moon graphic novels. They're amazing, and they have all these Bella Morte references in them, like posters on the walls and lyrics in the chapter stops. We've been friends ever since. I don't go a month without talking to the guy.

Lechmanski: In fact, we just saw him the other night in Canada.

Deane: Yeah, he came to our Toronto show because he lives up in New York. We're actually talking about doing a book together sometime.

Lechmanski: He said we'll have a part in the third series of Wet Moon.

Deane: When I get home from this tour, I'm getting a tattoo from his book The Abandoned, where we do a little cameo.

Are you guys comic book fans in general?

Deane: I am, big time! Everything from Preacher to Bone, of course the Sandman comics, and any of the Ultimate Marvel stuff.

Lechmanski: Andy has a huge collection of toys and comics, mint condition, all of it in packaging. It's like a museum.

Consylman: I like Frank Miller a lot.

Lechmanski: I never got too into comics, but my older brother used to be really into Spider-Man and stuff like that, and I remember seeing Ghost Rider and thinking, 'That is the toughest dude I've ever seen! He's on a motorcycle, he's got a leather jacket, and he's got a skull for a head and it's on fire!'

Besides that, I never could get into it. I may be too boring when it comes to that kind of stuff. I like biographies. I like reading about rock 'n' rollers with drug problems. I'm trying to find a book on Little Richard right now, because I've heard some crazy stories.

While we're talking about comics, is there a story behind your skull logo?

Deane: Kind of a funny story. Our old guitarist Ben was the best artist of the three of us, and he drew a skull for each of us (we were a three-piece at the time): an Andy, a Gopal, and a Ben skull. Well, Ben knocked up his old lady and had to leave the band. At that point, me and Gopal were like, 'Three skulls is too much for a simple band logo, so let's pick the one we like the best.' The one we picked was Ben, who was no longer in the band. It's stuck around, and its name is 'Skully Guy,' and it really doesn't represent Ben anymore.

Lechmanski: Ben's doing good, though. He had a band called V8 Pussy for a while, and now he's got a band called Blur the Lines.

Consylman: I'm actually recording and producing their album right now. It's sort of indie rock, with lots of good guitar and drum sounds and almost like old school country-style vocals. It's pretty good.

What are your plans for after the tour's over? Do you have stuff in the works, like another death rock EP?

Metro: Actually, I think we're going to start on another full-length almost immediately.

Deane: Yeah, when we get home, we're taking a week off, and then we're writing the new album. I want to have it written by January.

Lechmanski: I want to have it written by two weeks after we get home. We can take a week off, take a week to write it, and then record it.

Consylman: I've actually got the whole album written already, actually. It's already done.

Do you write while you're on the road?

Marchini: Everybody's been writing a little bit.

Lechmanski: We definitely get ideas. Actually, with the song 'The Forgotten,' we were on the road, and Andy was fooling around with my guitar and said, 'Hey, listen to this riff,' and I said, 'Well I had this riff that was kind of similar,' so we sat and wrote it. A lot of Songs for the Dead, too, like 'Dead Will Walk.' I was standing on stage in San Francisco working on a riff, and we decided to just run with it and work on it when we got home. We're always having ideas.

Consylman: There are a couple of songs on the new album that were written on the road. I wrote the synth stuff for 'The End Ahead' on the road. We're always writing together.

Lechmanski: This new album is definitely the most collaborative, though, and there's nothing on there that we can't just stand up and play live.

Metro: This is the first time where we've ever had an album we could just play straight through, start to finish.

Lechmanski: And we always write as a band, but usually they'll write their parts, I'll write my part, and we'd slap it all together. On this one, I'd write a guitar line and we'd all work on it together, someone would have a suggestion, and we'd check it, and if it was good we'd keep it, and if it wasn't, we wouldn't. It was very much a group effort, which is a really nice thing. There's nothing any one of us can listen to at this point and say, 'That sucks.' Everyone's pretty happy, which is an important thing.

Deane: The biggest thing we did when we were writing is the idea that if you bring something to practice, don't be married to your idea. If everybody says, 'This chorus sucks,' don't get in a huff about it. Just go with it and listen to everybody, and that's what we did.

Lechmanski: Another thing that we did that was really nice is that if someone brought in a song that had programmed drums, we'd tell Jordan, 'Don't listen to the drums that are done. Listen to the song and do your own thing.' Then we'd just kill all the synthetic drums and let him do his own thing, because in the end he's going to be better than anything we can program. That was another huge thing on this album; we'd hear a song one way, like with a dance beat or something, but we'd give it to him and he'd completely make it his own.

Are you going to bring that same approach to the new album?

Metro: I think so, because it worked really well.

Lechmanski: I know with myself if they bring in a sequence, I'm much better if I take it home with me, work on it by myself, and then bring it back in and say, 'This is what I got out of it,' and then we all kind of attack it. We all definitely write our parts together, and I think that's the just best way to do it. I think this album proves that it's the strongest way to make a record.