By Martin Popoff
Dude, you got a girl singing for you.
"Yes, and I only saw the cons of it, initially," laughs an honest Amott, well aware of that fact. "It was more just a general attitude I had. My brother Christopher came up with the suggestion that we should add her to the list of vocalists we were interested in, because we had seen her on a videotape of a show with her previous band. My first reaction was just negative because, I don't know, I just never thought about it, a girl singing in Arch Enemy. I was kind of being stupid I guess, but I just couldn't see it. I had to get my head around the whole idea first. It just seemed a little bit too different. Maybe some people would think it was some kind of calculated move. I mean, women in metal, that's totally cool and I like some that are doing it. But nowadays, a girl in the band, you think of someone in long skirts and the frozen tears and the lake of..." At this point Michael trails off and spills his blood red wine on his book of cruel orchids. Then he weeps and dismisses the string section with a theatrical, effeminate wave of the hand, and is once again... utterly alone.
"She's back 100%," answers Amott, jarred out of his melancholy by a question about Gossow's recent, and at the time, troubling, voice strain. "She's been fine since last year really. We're in the middle of rehearsal and we are pretty much rehearsing every day. Angela has been doing this since 1991, in underground death bands and stuff in Germany, just going from being a kid screaming in somebody's basement to doing shows and promoting a band. But she's never really known what the hell she's been doing (laughs). She's just kind of done it and it sounded really extreme, really cool and never had any real problems with it, until she joined us and changed her style slightly. We were looking for quite a bit of a wider variety. She was doing mainly low, deep guttural growls before with the odd high scream here and there. We made her work totally hard in the studio and do lots of different kinds of screams. That was an experience for her as well. I think that's where the lack of technique came into it. But I mean, we had this problem with Johan too. His voice got shot a couple times and we had to stop recording. What I'm leading up to is that now, she's totally into voice coaches, learning how to use your muscles in your throat; she's gone really into that big-time. She does stuff every day now, even if we're not rehearsing, keeping her stamina up. I can actually recommend that to every vocalist out there of any style. The coaches she's been going to deal with rock vocalists, not only opera-type singers. I mean, Rod Stewart has a killer voice, but he's got to maintain it somehow. But she just gave him the CD and said 'This is what I do (laughs), and I just want to keep doing it. I don't want to change it, I just want to do it the right way.' She's actually improved now and has more power than she had when she did the album."
ARCH ENEMY - Suture and splice and everything nice... Page 3