Metalcore band All That Remains hitting musical stride
Shortly before hitting the studio to record the album “The Fall of Ideals,” the guys in the metalcore band All That Remains got a sign that they might have hit their musical stride.
The year was 2006, and the band was facing a tight deadline to release the new album before joining that summer’s Ozzfest tour. After hammering out rough-sounding demos, All That Remains met up with Adam Dutkiewicz of Killswitch Engage, who was producing the album.
“So when we came in with really low (sound) quality demos of the whole album for Adam, he’s like ‘This just sounds like a great album to me. I don’t think we even do much changing to the songs. Let’s just go in and track it.’ ” guitarist Mike Martin recalled in a mid-March phone interview. “So we knew once we had the demos if we get this in a real studio, this is going to be probably something pretty special. And it was.”
Sixteen years later, All That Remains is celebrating (a year late, thanks to the pandemic) the 15-year anniversary of “The Fall of Ideals.” And the album is still making an impact on the band’s career.
“We’re just so proud of it,”
Martin said. “The fact that people still care about it now, I mean, this is probably going to be the most successful tour that we’ve ever done, and it’s from playing a record that’s 15 years ago.”
The band will showcase songs from the album along with others when they play 7 p.m. May 17 at One Centre Square in Easton.
“The Fall of Ideals” was the third album from All That Remains, and it was a true turning point for the band, which had gone through wholesale personnel changes while releasing the albums “Behind Silence and Solitude” (2002) and “This Darkened Heart” (2004).
Martin joined All That
Remains shortly before work on “This Darkened Heart” began with Dutkiewicz producing.
By the time All That Remains began writing for “The Fall of Ideals” there were tangible signs the group had taken a big step forward musically.
Martin said a major contributing factor was the arrival of drummer Shannon Lucas.
“We were as hungry as could be to write more songs, but we wanted them to be fast and we wanted them to be metal and we wanted to have double bass (drum) all over everything, and our old drummer (Michael
“[Adam Dutkiewicz] kind of gave us a much better idea of how to write a song and put together a song structure and all of that stuff.” — All That Remains guitarist Mike Martin
Bartlett) was great, but he was just a great rock drummer,” Martin said. “So that was the biggest thing.”
It also turned out that the band’s work with Dutkiewicz on “This Darkened Heart” had produced songwriting lessons that paid off on “The Fall of Ideals.”
“He kind of gave us a much better idea of how to write a song and put together a song structure and all of that stuff,” Martin said.
Upon its release, “The Fall of Ideals” gradually made an impact. By June 2007, the album surpassed 100,000 copies sold and the band could feel the momentum.
“We started our first headlining tour,” Martin said, “and every show was sold out. I was like ‘OK, so Ozzfest and the supporting tours actually paid off.’ ”
Another major factor was getting the song “Six” included on the Guitar Hero II video game.
“The Guitar Hero II thing was a massive, massive thing,” Martin said. “People still go crazy for that song (“Six”) now, and that thing came out 16 years ago.”
The career of All That Remains only solidified since then. The next album, “Overcome,” went gold and the five albums that have followed have all produced charting singles.
But the band has had to push through one other major hurdle — the sudden death of original member, lead guitarist and key songwriter Oli Herbert in 2018 shortly after recording the most recent All That Remains album, “Victim of the New Disease.”
The band’s new lead guitarist, Jason Richardson, quickly settled into the lineup, but the mental processing of the loss of Herbert was a whole other matter.
“There’s literally nothing worse that can happen,” Martin said. “The mental adjustment, at first, was brutal. Two thousand nineteen, for me, was just really, really brutal, being on the road. It was our first year without Oli and my mom had passed away. It was just a lot of stuff going on in 2019 and I was like ‘I don’t even know if I can handle this.’ So in a very, very strange way, the pandemic was a good way for me to re-set because I kind of needed a break after 20 years of touring and then having a lot of traumatic stuff happen all in one year.”
The current band members — vocalist and founding member Phil LaBonte, Martin, Richardson, bassist Matt Deis and drummer Jason
Costa — are in a better place now, as “The Fall of Ideals” tour gets underway. And getting to play that album in its entirety — the songs, in a unique twist, are being played in reverse order — has been exciting for the band, Martin said.
“It’s been really fun to play them live,” he said. “Typically to keep everybody (in the audience) happy, you kind of have to play the same stuff over and over again. When you’re doing an anniversary tour, you get to play some songs that you don’t often play. I love it.”