EXCLUSIVE: Caligula's Horse Go Track By Track Through Their 'Status Quo' Challenging Album 'Rise Radiant'

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussion of mental health. If you are suffering from any of the issues that have been discussed or need assistance, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636. 

The Tempest

To blatantly state the obvious, album openers are tough. We’re always very aware of the manner in which the first track can influence the way that the rest of the record is heard. Our hope for that first impression was drama, triumph, and a spike in adrenalin. It’s been three years since our last record, so it was important to us that it start with a bang. The Tempest itself is about exploring our contradictory nature as humans - our fragility and our power and how necessarily connected the two are. It touches also on a theme central to the record: not accepting the status quo and striving for something more. One of the most pervasive themes on Rise Radiant is the idea of getting back up again. It’s easy to valorise the strength in being steadfast or overcoming, but what seems equally profound to us is the will that it takes to face again a challenge which has already bested you in the past. The Tempest is about finding this power in oneself. 

Slow Violence

Slow Violence is far less dense and layered than much of our music. We were fascinated by the idea of creating a song which has space all throughout, really highlighting the parts and performances of the band. We were inspired by the production on records like Metallica’s "Black Album" to try and raise the quality of the individual parts to make them stand on their own, less adorned by layers and affectations as they necessarily are in that setting. Slow Violence is also a great example of another songwriting approach we like to employ, namely threading a small array of motifs throughout all parts of a song. Doing so can be tricky but the outcome (hopefully) is that the song feels coherent even as it shifts in dynamics, key, or any other features which convey a sense of contrast. The song is about hypocrisy and blind acceptance, a theme which has only become more relevant in light of recent events and their management in Australia and throughout the world.

Salt

Salt might be my favourite song on the record. I hear it as a work which could have failed so easily given its ambition, but I adore how it works together in spite of these qualities (at least we think it does!). The song has a very unusual timebase, bizarre chords and harmony, and some deeply contrastive musical material. It also has some of the most musically challenging passages and parts we’ve ever played as a band – and a special shout out must be made for our drummer Josh Griffin! I hear the strange and diverse musical parts as tied together by the deeply personal lyrical themes on Salt. It is about an internal battle – a suicidal person battling with the idea that they might be alright if they can just make it until the morning.

Resonate

Resonate is about the fear of losing one’s artistic sensibilities through medication and treatment for mental health issues, and how such treatment can instead provide quiet and space to connect even more deeply with one’s creativity. It comes from a song idea which Jim (Grey, vocalist) brought to the band. The song had such obvious potential to us, but its presentation was a difficult challenge to overcome. I arranged and re-arranged the instrumentation of Resonate multiple times until happening across the soft electronic vibe that you hear on the record now, inspired by artists like Jon Hopkins and Kiasmos, if reframed around the band’s stylistic tastes. 

Oceanrise

Oceanrise was the first song we wrote for Rise Radiant way back in 2018. We actually put together the first full version of the song on the tour bus travelling across Europe, and in many ways it set the scene for the flavour of the record, even if much of it was written far later. The song is about mortality and legacy, and so the music is fittingly dark. However, we try very hard in Caligula’s Horse to not dwell on the darkness, to make sure that there is always a sense of hope and purpose to such themes. Oceanrise treats legacy as something to be celebrated – we achieve what we can in life to then leave behind for our loved ones in death. 

Valkyrie

If Oceanrise was first, Valkyrie was definitely last. We finished the song only days out from recording, even if we’d worked on it for some time before. The great thing about writing the last song on the album is that it has more context than anything else, and we were able to think of Valkyrie as an opportunity to push whatever musical atmosphere we felt was lacking to really round out the album. We decided we wanted something heavy! Valkyrie is one of our most riff-oriented songs and, for a song with a fairly simple structure, it’s also quite technical and intricate. Adrian (Goleby, guitarist) and I have a solo duel in the middle – the first solo he’s recorded for Caligula’s Horse – and the bridge, with all of its counterpoint, acts as a great feature for our new bassist (but very old working partner) Dale Prinsse. Lyrically Valkyrie came out of the idea of talking to a teenage version of oneself. Jim and I were both angry and overly ambitious kids, and the song explores the wish to remind those kids that it will work out – there’s no war; you’re doing fine.

Autumn and The Ascent

The final two songs work together in thematic sense. They are not a suite in the conventional meaning, but rather two different ways of thinking about a life changing event: fatherhood. Autumn explores the melancholic beauty of entering the next phase in one’s life, the transient nature of life and the omnipresence of change, and the manner in which one’s perspective grows through this change. The Ascent focuses, instead, on one’s role as a parent: to guide as far as your capacities allow you, and then to accept that the final steps are not yours to take. At their foundation these two songs are similar, but their perspective is accordingly contrastive. The music, too, speaks to this contrast.   

Autumn came out of Jim’s wish to write a ballad – something we really hadn’t done, at least to this degree. We wanted it to feel distanced in a production sense from the metal songs which surround it, and to have ample space for a lengthy and emotionally-charged dynamic build throughout. The Ascent, which battles Salt for my own favourite song on the record, is heavier and more exploratory in the scope of its arrangement. There were no limits to The Ascent beyond it working as a coherent song, and so it has a wealth of musical/performative ideas which fascinate us, from dark chords and riffs, to extended solo sections, to a (at this stage obligatory) Purdie shuffle, to a full choir of layered Jims at the conclusion. If I were to pick a single song that represents what Caligula’s Horse sounds like, it would be The Ascent.