Battle Circus

It's been a number of years since the concept album has carried the kind of validity it once did. In fact, it's really become something of a derided art-form - one that carries with it the baggage of the excesses of '70s prog and '80s metal. But does that mean it can't be done? Certainly not, says Marcel Bellve, guitarist and vocalist with New Zealand 4-piece Battle Circus.

"We use it more as a device to write stuff," he explains, "instead of doing something and calling it a concept album. It's a means to an end."

The band's debut EP, 'The Half-Light Symphony', is only 4 tracks in length, but sprawls an epic 42 minutes. It wasn't originally intended to be such an expansive project, but once the band started rolling in the studio, what emerged at the end was something a lot bigger than they'd intended to produce. "It sort of just ended up turning into that," Bellve says. "It started off as one song - one very long song - and then we decided to break it up into two songs. Then we wanted to try and give it a symphonic structure, which it doesn't really necessarily have, but we tried as much as we could. So it ended up as four songs. After that, while recording it, we started writing a segue for one of the songs, and then for symmetry's sake we decided we needed them in between all of the songs. And so it became this expansive thing."

"This just started as an EP," he adds, "and now we've got people calling it a concept album, which is the fun part. It's taken that [moniker] from other people. And no one has come to us and has said that we've overdone anything. That's the biggest negative associated with concept albums."

It wasn't a quick process though, by any means - the EP took the band "the best part of a year" to finish with producer Dave Holmes, in between tours and other commitments. In addition to that, Battle Circus also ended up relocating to other studios to record the album's drum and string parts, which Bellve comments dryly was "kind of annoying." Still, he notes, Holmes' studio space worked well as a "really good think tank", and Bellve feels that the producer was responsible for the EP ending up as coherent as it has - something that could possibly be attributed to Holmes' tastes in music. "He's a huge fan of 'The War Of The Worlds', the [Jeff Wayne] musical," Bellve says. "One of the first things I saw when I walked into his studio was the LP on the wall."

The story of 'The Half-Light Symphony' also played a part in keeping the EP coherent, so that "everything always felt in context, or at least had one that it could fit to". The overarching narrative is one dealing with nuclear holocaust, with the blast taking place during the first song, and the world's population moving underground from there. "During the second movement, Love In A Fallout Shelter, there's this thing called the founder effect, which is when the species gets separated from itself and starts to split in terms of evolutionary paths and develops into different species," explains Bellve. "We thought that if the human race was split into different species, when it comes back up - which is what happens at the end of the EP - it would be fragmented. It's sort of based on stuff that [sociologist] Dr. Phillip Mossman has written, which touches on all those things."

Sadly, while the band has been known to play the EP in its entirety in live shows, the trouble in setting something like that up - using illustrative projections and backing tracks for the string sections - means it's not something you'll see them doing when they come to Adelaide. "It was a bitch to bring it all together," Bellve says. "We'll be playing a lot of new stuff, and a few songs off the EP. We won't be playing it straight through."

"Maybe we'll start doing that again once we bring out the movie," he laughs.

Alistair Wallis

Battle Circus play at The Wheatsheaf Hotel with The Priory Dolls on Wed 27 Feb and as part of the Fuse Festival's Ignotion Showcase at The Austral Hotel on Thurs 28 Feb.