In 2007 multi-national rockers Eden’s Curse exploded onto the metal scene with their debut self titled album. This was the surprise album of the year for me and from that moment on I knew Eden’s Curse were destined for great things. The follow up album, Second Coming in 2008 and a third release, Trinity in 2011 confirmed my belief about this band, but then the band started to go through line up changes and I wondered if Eden’s Curse would live up to the expectations I had. After a long exhaustive audition process the band found a new lead singer, v included a new keyboardist and released their fourth offering Symphony Of Sin. I have been waiting a while for new material from the band, but it has been worth the wait, frontiernews so with that I gave bassist, songwriter and founding member Paul Logue a call to discuss the roller coaster that has been Eden’s Curse and the new album.
Rock Man: Hey Paul, the last time I spoke to you, the band had just released the second studio album Second Coming, yourself, Michael Eden and the rest of the band seemed to very positive about the future, then you released the third album, Trinity, which was another brilliant piece of work, localletter but then it all went wrong and suddenly Michael was out. Since then you have been working hard to get the band back on track, you now have a stable line up and you must be pleased with where the band is, at the moment?
Paul Logue: Yes I am absolutely delighted with it, I mean, it took a long time to get the band back onto stable ground. So basically, it was a difficult period there is no getting away from that, we toured with Dream Theater just after we released Trinity, we did two absolutely outstanding shows with them in the U.K. in small kind of, not arena size, just under arena size, it is the biggest shows we have done as an outfit. So our stock could not been higher at the time and unfortunately after that we started to get a broader demand by Michael [Eden], a financial demand which we just simply could not meet as a band, I mean, we are a multi-national outfit and there are travel expenses and logistics and everything that goes with putting that together are very tight and it took us, I would say, around about 6 years to get to a point where we broke even. Just so everybody knows, we all have full time jobs, there are no “Rock Stars” in Eden’s Curse, we all have mortgages and families just like any kind of normal people. You know, it is something that we are very proud of to have gotten it to that stage on a balance sheet and really rock bands should not be about balance sheets, but unfortunately in this day and age and with the kind of set up we have, as a band, it is a very important piece of the jigsaw. So when someone comes forward with a demand, that you just simply cannot financially afford to do, I mean, we would have been putting the band into the red and we talked to Michael, “Listen nobody wants you to leave the band, you have done great, the record is great”, we were actually in the initial stages of planning a tour for Trinity with some dates in the U.K., newspoke some dates in Holland, you know, there was nothing booked it was just a case of actually we had spoken to a lot of agents and gotten a lot of great feedback and unfortunately he just decided he was not going to withdraw his demand and it was something we had to meet, from his perspective, and we just said as a band this just cannot happen. We would end the band in order to continue it, after all the hard work we had done we simply had to say to Mike “Please just continue on the road we have been going on for the last couple of years” and he chose not too. It was quite an acrimonious split actually and we moved on, so we found an Italian lad, Marco Sandron who is an unbelievable singer, one of the very best going around and unfortunately, you know, we did a single, we did a video, we were doing great, came out great, fan base loved it but unfortunately for us Marco’s personality did not click with the other band members and it was a constant struggle. Marco was not happy, we were not happy so we decided to draw a line in the sand and move on without him and at that point we decide to come out with public auditions to find a singer, they went great and we had 40 odd applications and Nikola [Mijic] was one of the people, he sang with a Hungarian band called Dreyelands. Pete [Newdeck] our drummer was hugely influential behind him getting the gig because he heard something in his voice that was different from everyone else out there, so now that we are here we have a bit of stability, we could not be happier, things are going very well.
RM: As you mentioned, Nikola Mijic is the new voice of Eden’s Curse, has he taken long to settle in and is everyone happy with his inclusion to the band?
PL: Oh very much so, we appointed him unbeknown to everyone in December of last year, he has been in the band for 7 months or so, maybe more than that now. So we really got to know Nikola through, the audition process was quite lengthy and unfortunately for him that was the down side, from his perspective, but because of what we had gone through the personality was probably a higher priority than the voice. I had been quite public in saying that finding a voice was no problem because we had so many good singers come forward, the personality had to be 100% spot on, so that was something we took a long time to really get to know and once we had got Nikola and we were fairly comfortable with him as a person we went to AFM [records] and said “What do you want to do with us?” and they gave us some great advise which was “People have waited long enough for the new voice, why don’t you just go record the new record, get into the can, it is done, you will have an opportunity to get to know Nikola even further and it builds up the anticipation that when you come back you are coming back with a new singer, by the way, we have a new fully record album”. So we took that advise and it was great advise because it did allow us to get to know Nikola, which we obviously got a chance to bring him over here to record with him, shoot a video and really get to know him as a person and he has settled in wonderfully well. He is very much the same type of personality that we are, he is a professional sound engineer, topicals he has got his own recording studio in Serbia he also specialises in live sound for bands, so he is extremely verst in what we do and he does it for a living which is great, he brings a professional aspect to what we do and in terms of being a musician he can play 5 or 6 instruments, extremely gifted singer and a lovely human being.
RM: The new album is Symphony Of Sin, do you think this is your best work to date?
PL: I think if you compared all of the records side by side this is a much more cohesive bunch of songs. I think as an artist when you sit down and listen back to your material and you go ‘right okay, that’s really great, that’s really great, that song there… hmm, I do not know if it really should have made it’ but with us on this album, for me, there really is not a weak moment on it what so ever. I’ll give you an idea, when we had the 22 songs written, Thorsten, myself and Pete were the main nucleolus of writers there, we had such a large kind of heated debate about what was going to be whittled down to the final 14 and then choosing which of those 14 were going to make the record and which was going to be the bonus track. So that shows you the strength of the songs and the reason for that is that when we were writing as a team together, you know, Break The Silence, for example was always very strong from the outset, but the opening guitar riff just did not knock your head off and instead of just going with what we had we said “Listen this just needs to be better”. It is track number two on the album it is up-tempo it needs a riff that is just going to take heads off and instead of being that protective songwriter with an arm around it, we said “Yeah, we can come up with a better idea”, we are just so open and honest with each other now and so used to what each other brings to the table you just say “Thorsten go give us a killer riff” and he immediately came back with the opening riff that opens Break The Silence and we were like “Wow! That is meaty”. So same kind of things when you are working on another idea you come to choral point, I would not even start to work on a chorus because I knew if I gave it to Pete Newdeck I would get absolute gold back and that is how comfortable we are as each others songwriters and if everybody did not buy into the first initial idea we just say “Right, no problem let’s see who can better it” and that was a long drawn out process. Some of these songs took months to write and some of them took some real heated debate between each of us as writers to convince each other that this needs another part or this needed another part, and I think when we heard the songs back we were just over the moon with every single part, bridge, riffs, verse, the whole lot and that is why these songs are so strong. So obviously I think the vocal upgrade is massive too, no disrespect to Michael, I loved Michael’s voice, I always will love Michael’s voice but it is a different kettle of fish, this is like going from the Premiership to the top of the Champions League in soccer terms, you know, there is a lot more versatility and we can do a lot more stuff and you add that together with the songs and the melodies for me it is a no brainer, it is the best Eden’s Curse album that is out there. For more details please visit:-https://tbadaily.com/ https://www.kulfiy.com/ https://pressmagazines.com/
