Platypus: Frigid But Not Rigid Page 2
by Martin Popoff

And how would you characterize the music? "Well, why don't we try to come up with a term that combines progressive, fusion, metal, semi-instrumental but mostly vocal, I don't know. There's got to be a funny term for it (laughs). You know, it's hard to remember what might have been influencing us at the time. All I know is that when some of these ideas were coming out, it was like, 'hey, this is hitting me like that Soundgarden record, Superunknown, and even a kind of Alice In Chains vibe.' I think there is less Deep Purple on here, because we were hearing a lot of those comparisons with the first one. But you know what? I think when you have a distorted Hammond, there's always going to be that thing in there. And Derek loves playing Hammond, and he does it so well. So as soon as you start playing it, people are going to go, 'oh oh, '70s prog!' (laughs)."

But unlike '70s prog, there was a lot of cut-and-dried disciplines to the Ice Cycles sessions. We were pretty regular," notes Rod. "because I live in a neighborhood. So we would try to be done by say 11 or midnight. And then some of the guys would maybe go out once in awhile. We tried to start by a reasonable hour, like 10 in the morning because you're fighting the clock. You only have seven to ten days to rehearse, and then another seven to ten days to get most everything done. There's really not that much time."

This album sounds to me a lot like the new King's X album. Would Rod tend to agree? "Ty has a strong influence on the band, no question. He's writing the vocals and the lyrics and melodies that go along with it, so it is clearly going to have that King's X vibe to it, especially since there are more vocal tunes on this one than the last. I can't comment as far as the lyrics go, because I'm not a lyricist. I've never really quite understood that whole end of songwriting. In fact I think I've always been a little bit unfair in my treatment of lyrics. You know, when I would hear people say, 'well, a song is 50% lyrics and 50% music', as a musician, I would be, 'what are you crazy!? Nobody listens to the words!' Then I went through this dramatic transformation with my years playing in Winger. Because I came to find, that indeed, most people do listen to the lyrics. And of lot of people get really deeply into the lyrics. And clearly, Ty was going through some heavy stuff. But I tend to think that when people have heavy things going on in their life, that's sometimes when they do their best work, you know what I mean? Happy songs don't always tend to make it."

Platypus: Frigid But Not Rigid Page 3