Amon Amarth’s ‘Jomsviking’ was almost a film

Posted by on January 3, 2017

The holidays are done, 2017 has kicked off and we have many things to look forward to in the world of metal. Slowly, as the gears of the industry start turning, we are starting to see how this year will play out. One such development (technically coming from 2016) comes from the Amon Amarth camp. In an interview with KAAOS TV, guitar player Olavi Mikkonen talked about how their vocalist Johan Hegg had intended Jomsviking to not be an album at all. Rather, he had written it as a movie script. Given the tempo and feeling from the album this should not come as much of a surprise. Here is a transcription of the interview and Mikkonens comments on the matter:

“I don’t know if the listener is really gonna hear it too much, but we had a different approach on the album. Johan [Hegg], the singer, he wrote a movie script. So we saw the whole thing as a movie. So we basically took the movie script and cut it into ten pieces. And then we [were], like, ‘All right, this is one song. This is one song.’ And then we started to work against that. We had already ideas for, let’s say, five or six songs that we easy to match in where they fit musically. But then we had a lot of gaps where we had a really aggressive lyric but we didn’t have any aggressive [musical] ideas. So we just had to work towards making aggressive ideas. That’s something we’d never done in the past. In the past, we always [used] whatever [musical ideas] we had and then we made lyrics that fit the song. So now we had to fit the lyrics. And that was really cool; I think it was exciting. And I think that’s the album that we’ve been bouncing ideas back and forth the most as a band unit.”

At the time of writing this article there’s no word on if this movie would actually be made (one could only hope!) I would not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see on the silver screen. The only certainty is that it would be full of slaughter and long ships.

 

[via Metal Injection]

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Categorised in: Interviews, News