Caligula’s Horse

ALMOST A DECADE IN THE MAKING, RISE RADIANT IS MUCH MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER KALEIDOSCOPIC ONSLAUGHT OF CONCEPTUAL MAYHEM FROM THE BRISBANE BELTERS IN CALIGULA’S HORSE. LEAD GUITARIST SAM VALLEN RIFFS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE BEHIND THIS MONOLITHIC LISTEN.

Much like the fabled Roman emperor referenced in their name, Caligula’s Horse are titans of a gloriously stately force. Since their earnest origins in Brisbane’s underground club scene circa 2011, the prog-metallers have carved out an impressively zealous niche for themselves – they’re the go-to crew for grandiose, sprawling narrative epics that grab the listener by their ears and yeets them at a thousand kilometres a second into the eye of a kaleidoscope belonging to God himself.

Rise Radiant is the fifth album to bear the Caligula’s Horse stamp of approval – yet, in many ways, it’s the album they began working on all the way back when shredder Sam Vallen first envisioned the project. It’s not a reboot for the band, however, but something of an awakening; they made four albums in an effort to build a set of tools they could use to chisel out a true, career-defining masterpiece, and now that they’re adroit with those tools, the five of them were able to start grinding away. And what wound up with? Rise motherf***ing Radiant.

Spanning eight of their tightest and most tenacious cuts of steel-shattering metal to date, Rise

Radiant is to Caligula’s Horse what Caligula’s horse was to Caligula – their most prized possession, and something that will come to define them long after their reign’s end. At times introspective and others intense, though always bold and bright and slicked at every sharply produced turn with polychromatic poignancy, it’s clear to see why the record means so much to the band. And according to Vallen, it’s the kind of record they could only have created now, almost a decade into their legacy.

In announcing this record, you declared that “Rise Radiant is the album we’ve been working towards for almost a decade.” How did that journey finally lead you to this record?

In one sense, it’s the culmination of a lot of practise – a lot of records where we’d increasingly worked on different characteristics that we loved and wanted to lean further into as we got better and better at executing them. But in another sense, it’s an album that has this thematic thrust behind it – this idea of getting back up again when you’re knocked down. It’s about accepting when something is difficult, resisting the urge to fight and overcoming the struggle.

And because we’ve had things like lineup changes recently, we had this moment where we really had to think, “Is this band something we’re going to push into fully, or is it something we’re going just keep doing the same thing we’ve always done for?” Rise Radiant would be the opportunity for us to explore what the absolute limits of our band can be. How hard can we push it technically? How intricately could we weave lots of different ideas into songs?

What guitars were you drooling over in the booth this time around?

This is the first record that I recorded with my seven-string JP15, which is a guitar that I got only recently before we went in to record, and which my wife has banned me from taking on tour because, y’know, it’s a very expensive and very beautiful looking instrument. I had a Telecaster that I did a lot of the cleans, too. Unfortunately,

I’d bought a Music Man Cutlass a little too late in the game, and it came about a week after mixing finished, so that didn’t quite make it onto the album. So I would say 80 percent of the guitars on the album were done with that seven-string JP15 – it’s just a monster.

What is it about it that you just can’t get enough of?

I’ve been playing Music Man guitars for quite a while now, and when I first made the jump to seven-strings, I was playing an Ibanez Universe. I love that guitar and I’m still a huge fan of it – it still appears on records and stuff every now and again – but the difference with the JP15 is that the JP is just this classy and understated looking, non-metal guitar – it could just be any classic instrument, and it just happens to have that beautifully thin neck profile and all of that accessibility in terms of things like upper fret access. It doesn’t scream ‘shred’ or ‘metal’ or any of those characteristics that might seem a little bit garish sometimes. It ticks all the boxes for me.

I’ve taken a JP7 on the road for pretty much every tour we’ve ever done. It’s been on all these long-haul flights, it’s been on tour busses, it’s been dropped and thrown and it’s had everything bad that you can imagine done to it, and I’ve never had to replace a part – it still works as new, y’know? It’s just a beautiful make of guitar.

I think it goes without saying that as batshit mental as your studio material is, the live show is really where Caligula’s Horse shines the brightest. Did you have the stage in mind when you were writing this record?

Jim [Grey, vocals] and I muse on this a lot when it comes to conceptualising a record – we always have a big discussion about what it is that we want to do and what kind of energy we want to capture. We just had this experience of coming off our first European headline tour and some pretty big tours in Australia and elsewhere, and we realised that we needed material that would universally feel good to play live.

In Contact was an album that I adored, but it was an album that demanded a lot from the audience – y’know, it had a lot of prolonged, more thoughtful and quiet sections – so what we wanted to do this time is create a much more immediate kind of sound. We wanted something that hits you and allows you to understand it instantaneously. Whether we actually captured that or not, I’m not sure, but that was our goal.

I’m hesitant to use the word ‘accessible’, but you could almost throw that in there as well – it’s the idea that it should grab you immediately. And of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s all heavy – if you’ve heard the record, you’ll know it certainly isn’t – but the heavy stuff is heavier and the lighter stuff is lighter, and those things tend to translate really nicely live, I think.