Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )

Los Angeles’ MALICE IN THE DARK is a metal based band with many influences in different styles of the Metal family tree. With Travis Enmon’s departure with Novem, he keeps the flame alive with the passion of music. After Novem, he teamed up with Pradus’s former lead guitarist, Andy Hales and did acoustic covers and made videos on youtube under, the Corner’s Gypsys. And like Gypsys they change along with their style. With the addition of Alex Casanova on bass and Nic Sullivan on guitar as well and whom they beg to play drums with them, Austin O’Rourke , they are formed as Malice in the Dark.

The other day I had a looooong and interesting chat with Travis Enmon, the band’s singer and frontman and a real Metal Gypsy… here’s what we talked about…

Hi Travis, here we are, finally! Welcome to Metal Shock! 🙂 … to start, let’s talk first about you Travis… I guess you’ve been into music since you were born… so tell me how you found out that the Music is and will be your road?

-It was when I was younger. My father really introduced me to a lot of the Rock and Metal bands I still listen to today. Metal just ran in the family. He was a roadie at one point in his life and him along with his two sisters owned their own clubs in different cities in Texas. Houston, Dallas and Beaumont. I was 5 when my aunt Amy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, “A Rockstar so I can take care of Grannie.” Little did I know that I am just following through with what I said many years back now. It is a shock really still to be honest. I discovered this was for real when I first started out and I got little bits of success, positive feed back from Rockstars I admired growing up that I got to meet.

Where your personal influences are coming from, music wise?

– That’s a loaded question. It starts out with though with the core, the Founding Fathers of Metal for me. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, those guys. I also love me some Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine. I grew up listening to those bands along with many others in practically every genre of Metal in the Metal family tree. Sonata Arctica, Powerman 5000, White Zombie/Rob Zombie, Children of Bodom, Agalloch, Amon Amarth, A Perfect Circle, Parkway Drive, As Blood Runs Black, Tool, Kyuss, Fu Manchu, Black Label…It goes on. The entire Scandinavian Metal scene. I also though enjoy listening to hip hop like Immortal Technique. Right now I’m just relaxing before the festivals this so you’ll be hearing a lot of reggae if you enter my home. Music is more than a lifestyle. It is life. Good music that you get into, it can change your entire view and feeling of the world. I take the bits and pieces that I like from the other styles and make it mine. I feel as an artist you should have an open ear. Not closed to one particular genre. I take in the rhyming schemes and study the beats that make you get into the music. Make that brutal and heavy, you got some intense break downs like Parkway Drive, As Blood Runs Black.

What are your first band experiences? and When you jumped into the world of metal?

-First band experiences were really just trying to figure what page everybody else was on in the group. It’s either a struggle or a match made in Heaven when you get on that same wave length, same thought process it is a great feeling. There is peace, you get to cleanse yourself of your demons everyday. When the band is not on the same level, it makes it tough, mentally you question yourself. You wonder if you’re even legit. If you have what it takes. Then when you start thinking like that you just got to pull everything back together and just have a simple perspective. Over complicating things is an experience through out the entire ride of being in a band, being a musician, let alone just being a person.

When I jumped into the World of Metal, it was awesome. I mean, the older I get, the more fun it seems to get. I meet great people, interesting people but the real big changes are the people out there that try and steal your work, the industry that can be dirty and cut throat and treat you like shit. Those that copy pictures of me and put them on their facebook claiming that it’s them and the obsessed ones that stalk my every last move. One won’t even stop texting my sister whom I co-own a production company with, TravLaur. He asks a lot of questions that have been making things a little uneasy lately but this too shall pass. I just love what the World of Metal is. I love the brotherhood of it. I spent 4th of July here in the United States with a Southern Metal band called, Six Past Hell. Owners of the “Outlaw Drinking Club” bars. You have each other’s back. You let one another crash at each other’s place when you’re in their neck of the woods for a gig. I be nothing without my brothers.

Now we can open the page of Malice In The Dark… who are your band mates, how and when you guys got together?

– Malice in the Dark is composed of Nic Sullivan and Andy Hales at guitar. Alex Casanova on bass and Austin O’Rourke on drums. I met Nic, Alex and Austin when I opened up a skate shop/tattoo parlor in their hometown, Culpeper, Virginia. Nic and Alex’s band at the time, Edge of Insanity played at the Grand Opening of my store and I even got up and we improvised some songs live for the crowd. We only knew each other for 10 minutes top before hand. People thought we practiced an entire month to play those improvised on the spot songs. After that, we realized that we did need to do something together. I also did that with another great friend that night and that’s Hunter O’Rourke, Austin’s older brother. He now joined the military and shipped off. All of us here think about him a lot. I know I do. I met Austin officially though when I came back to Culpeper to be a guest judge for their high school’s Battle of the Bands. The kid killed it on the skins. I just had to have him. He also does a lot of mixing and plays with sounds on the computer that just sound out of this world and mixed with heavy music, it’s a hit.

I met Andy Hales through my cousin here in Port Arthur. We started hanging out on the back of my Uncle’s porch and we started to get to know one another better and started jamming right there at the corner of 39th and Grant, broke like a mother fucker but we didn’t care. We just smoked and drank a lot and provided entertainment for my Uncle Marian, my cousins that would come by, our friends and anyone else. We even jam with my Uncle’s 7 year old son, Carson who has autism. He got a little plastic guitar for Christmas and since then all three of us get together from time to time and get down and heavy at the corner. Andy already has a respectful name in the local Metal Scene here. His claim to fame really came when he put his band at the time, Pratice on the map for a little bit. We all eventually got together just connecting first on facebook and keeping in touch with one another. After that, bonds were formed and it just made things easy.

What about the band’s name? what’s the story behind it?

-It’s simple yet complicated at the same time. Me and my sister had a personal relationship with Layne Staley from Alice in Chains along with the other members of AIC. She knew Layne way better than anyone else ever will aside from his mother. He came into my life at a young age. I of course was a huge fan of his music. When he passed away the world grieved. His music still lives on through the fans and his band mates that are still alive. May you rest in peace Mike Starr. Anyway I get these interesting things that happen to me. I even see him, smell him when he’s around. He leaves a hint of Sage or peppermint. That’s what the song, “Sage” of the “Visions” album is about. He use to be shy at first. I see him at the corner of my eye and when I turned to see who was standing there, he turn and walk away really face. He shows that he’s around. At first I thought I was just nuts and really needed to stop smoking so much but my sister, Lauri would tell me the same thing. He watches over us. I know Jerry Cantrell must have the same happening to him. Now with that, Malice in the Dark actually comes from a muse of mine. A great friend. Her name is Alice Mayfair and she became a subscriber to my youtube page. Her name for her profile is Malice in the Dark. I found that so fitting for us. I asked her if it was ok if I could name the band that. She was flattered and gave me the ok. Malice is hiding in the Dark. I get haunted and creeped out sometimes with how heavy he comes sometimes. Mike Starr came last time. So I know now that he’s truly at rest.

How would you describe your sound and genre?

-We show all of our influences. We take all that we grew up listening to and what moves us and inspires us and we lay it down with a heavy, brutal, distortion and loud noise. We even named our style “Dank Metal” Dank is a term used a lot in California for the quality of grass you get. If it’s dank, it’s the real sticky icky, and the best stuff. It came more into the urban dictionary as a way to compliment things. Like, “This sandwich taste so good! It’s dank! This sandwich is dank!” Or “Coca-Cola is the danks.” So why not call our genre that??! It is a good time. Got to enjoy everyday. That’s all we’re doing. Enjoying it even with our struggles and our own personal demons.

Your road hasn’t been a “bed of roses”, but you’ve never given up… from where you find your energy and strength of will?

– You only live once, so why think twice? I chase dreams like an addict chases the dragon. Even if you never catch it, you will never look back and have a single regret because you did give it your all. What keeps me going really are the fans. It’s still kinda crazy saying that we have fans. It’s still a tough pill to swallow but like I said, the fans keep me going and I do this for my selfish reason of liberating myself from those daily struggles. Sharing a 2 bedroom apartment with 17 other musicians in Santa Ana, California is rough. It’s not the hand you dealt, it’s how you play your cards. My energy to go on is fueled by my love ones, they support me so much, I give it back to them everyday and my strength is from those that dog my music, those that say I would never make it. I don’t like to use that though as my only fuel for strength. I just keep going cause that’s all I know what to do. You will always make it out on the other side of problems. Whatever is thrown at you. You got to roll with the punches, brush the dirt off and just let things roll off your shoulders.

Talking about the songwriting, how you create your new song?

-I get together with a few of the band mates or all of them or sometimes just by myself. I enhance a single emotion. I give it life and meaning. The sounds, I treat every last one of them like a life lived. Giving its birth, enjoying its moment alive and at its climax. I enjoy the memory of it after it is gone. I hold on to the notes like they are all living and breathing just like me. It is life. I just let whatever comes out at that moment do so, let it freely flow out of me. If I trip up too much on how I want to lay it down or how it sounds, then I look at it as most likely that if it’s that complicated, the listeners are not going to grasp it hard and get into it heavy. I think about what moves me, what fuels me and gets me going. What are the correct formulas to bring you to your feet and make you just want to jump around. Also I want to enhance the listener as well as myself. So for myself, I become selfish and not focus just on what a listener may enjoy. I get lost and just let it come out. It’s freedom of expression. There are no rules. I hate rules. Trust me, ask North Carolina about my speeding ticket I am doing community service for. I realized that if you focus too much on pleasing others, your music suffers. It shows really. I can sense it in other bands as well. I improvise on the spot for the most part unless we want to really put energy into something we feel is good and just need those little adjustments and changes of speed, tone, delivery. “Black Waters” was improvised in that 2 bedroom apartment at 3am. I was so broke then. I had a few spoon full bites of peanut butter just before my friend hit record on his laptop. We did one take, he did a 2nd one just to put down his guitar solo and that was it. It became one of my hits that got me some credit where I was living at the time.

Malice In The Dark released the first EP album at the end of last november, tell me about it, about the songs and topics and title…

– “Visions” is what I was actually working on with a few other musicians that I use to play with back in Santa Ana. We all had different visions of music, what was our favorite style. Thing about brining in a bunch of different styles and branching out to make your own is that you’re going to have conflicting views. It eventually lead to the disbandment of the group. The album is started out with an intro which we named, “Ere the Sun Rises” Ere means, “before” So it means, “Before the sun rises” It was really about the music scene there in Southern California. The Sunset strip is dead. People from the 80’s staying around. Making the venues, music scene old. Old trashy groupies that slept with Whitesnake, worn out, now fat and balding musicians taking all the head liner spots and best times to play. Not having to do the pay to play like most Los Angeles bands have to do now. Venue owners pocketing money, causing the venues to suffer and a few well respected ones to close down. I think the Musician’s Institute is a joke. They know nothing about raw Metal. Raw emotion. They get to play everyday, have equipment to do so as well, a nice apartment, getting to learn more about their craft everyday and too busy really putting up the image, the “outfit” of a rockstar. They play the roll and dumb people fall for it. We have the last laugh though because they just end up being our drum tech or whatever for when we’re on the road. “Ere the Sun Rises” Is about the process of eliminating these problems in our music scene. In our Metal culture. The world will end when everything is perfect. Right now we are far from it. This generation is about building and coming back from the ruins of our fathers. We are the the building block to something new. We just got to let it happen and embrace our creativity. We had our throw backs with the 70’s, 80’s and now the 90’s both musically and fashion wise even. Now though it is time for our generation to really take charge in leading this world to something better. Something more than focusing on your facebook and having the latest smart phone.

“I am I” is off of a book we read called “The Anthem” by Ayn Rand. It was actually a song that was going in a completely different direction at the time we first started making it. Members in the group at the time really stressed over it and over complicated things. Like I was saying earlier. When that happens, you’re in a world of hurt. I sat down with the lead guitarist at the time, Richard Mendoza and we wrote the lyrics together. If you haven’t read “The Anthem” I suggest it to anyone out there that loves to read. In a nutshell, the book is about a member of society as it is in the future discovering the beauty of himself as one. Not just what he was with and amongst his members of society. “I” and “Me” are not words in their vocabulary due to the direction the world went to and came to be. We took the story of this book and found similarities with the struggle of just discovering yourself and who you are now a days just amongst your friends and what the world wants you to be. “I am I” is kinda the anthem for us in letting ourselves be ourselves and just to not care what anyone thinks or says.

“Black Waters” is about my struggling addiction with drugs and my selfishness when I’ve been on them and the selfishness of just doing them and who I hurt when I do it. The EP is closed out with “Sage” and that’s just the revealing of Malice in the Dark. What is going on, where this band is going and what is happening. It really is a war waging everyday in our head. We decide if we let it destroy us though.

How do you support the album? gigs?

-We do gigs yes but we don’t do them all the time. Playing over and over in the same area every weekend doesn’t really do much for you. I knew great bands that had a huge following but they played in LA every weekend, the same songs, the fans that they had would not show up in huge numbers. Why? Cause they would just see them some other time. In a city that has 20 plus music acts in one night in different areas. Not a great way to support yourself. 90’s grunge taught us that if you play once a month, you will draw in a bigger crowd cause they’re not going to see much of you so when you play, it’s for real, you’re there in it and so too the fans will be. I support the album by just having a little account on reverbnation. Got it on itunes, my friends play it loud too on a nice day or whenever they are around others and it’s for sure a game of word of mouth. Not adding tons and tons of people on myspace. It’s not off of just youtube views and hits on your reverbnation page. I also own a production company. So legit I have a tax id for it. It is fun. I love my “job” I also design and sell skateboards, skate shoes and I have endorsements I have to take care of for the cycling team I am on, Team Traveller. I endorse Kinetic Koffee, the Racing Post and Just the Right Gear. I also do some p.r. stuff where I go on radio shows from time to time and get out of hermit, nocturnal mode.

Where we can find your music? Gimme the links, thankssss…

-We’re at www.reverbnation.com/maliceinthedark, we’re a quick find on facebook as well and on youtube, www.myspace.com/maliceinthedark and our link to buy our music on itunes is http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/malice-in-the-dark/id409516620

Tell me about your local underground metal scenes… is it difficult to get in?

– I’m kinda the Metal Gypsy. There are a few Metal scenes I sink my teeth into and stay at. The scene here where I am now in Port Arthur, Texas is easy to get into mostly because we are the scene along with a few other Metal bands we are friends with. It’s a struggling act here. The man really tries to bring you down. Texas is a police state. It is filled with bible beating, high strung tight asses. There are actually few that rock long hair and visible tattoos and piercings. So we have to be a success. Not going to get a real job with knuckle tattoos and questionable gang related tattoos in people’s eyes. We go to Houston, San Antonio and Austin and the scenes there are so much bigger but yet it is a closely knit family. The Metal Scene in the Twin Cities area is legit. Tons of great acts go there and there is the respect of up and coming bands there that just need a little luck and leverage in their corner. The most stunning and exciting is Virginia’s right now. With Lamb of God being from Richmond, it is a real hot spot for Metal. If you’re good, it’s not hard to get in. Thankfully we are pleasure to people’s ears and even get air time on the most brutal underground metal radio station ever http://www.eyessewnshutradio.com and just great people behind the scenes making it happen at NoEX Productions. They put on events, shows, concerts, they reach out to the bands, not act like they’re the shit and everyone should come crawling to them on their hands and knees like the Los Angeles Metal Scene. Santa Ana though is heavy. A whole bunch of long haired latinos throwing it down wearing all black, going heavy in people’s backyards on a friday night and getting trashed. Straight up practicing in storage units with beer cans all over the place smelling like dirty rockers. Last but not least, I got to give love to the 505, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Metal Scene. I think that it actually helped put my career on track to where it is today. Great radio station there, introducing young minds to new music, great music, new bands and bands not that well known. That is key. Also not overplaying Avenge Sevenfold’s “Nightmare” My god that use to be a good song. But local radio DJ’s here at big dogg 106.1 plays it so much I hate it now. Albuquerque is a hidden jewel. Great culture and you can play your music as loud as you want out in the middle of nowhere in a desert. But the crowds come and that’s what matters.

What are your future plans, personal ones and with Malice In The Dark?

– It’s one day at a time. You always seem to think you know where you want to go in life but the attitude changes. I just embrace it. I have things I need to do to keep my head above water and make some money. Wealth is something I don’t strive for but you now a days you seem to have to have a lot of money just to be free to not give a fuck. When I was homeless for a few years out in California I learned that life was so much more than that. So much more than goals, making money and having a status in your community. Just got to be yourself, do what makes you happy and if people can’t let you enjoy your happiness then those are people that you just don’t need in your life. I have a few plans though. Personally for me it’s to find that place somewhere in this world to call home and to go back to from all my daily adventures. I am on the road a lot and since I was 17, where ever I was, that was my home. That’s like one of the few things left in my life that I am really focused on but not pushing hard. A place to eventually call home. I am still young so it’s not too much of a bother. I am just a wild Metal gypsy born a flower child. I just got to remain heavy though in a brutal world. It’s not the 60’s anymore. I plan on launching my own brand of Whiskey. I plan to place well and hopefully even win a few bike races this year. Give the middle finger to those that thought I’d never race again cause I was so far gone on drugs. I use to be on the US Team. I just want to remind people why I was selected to be so at one point. Malice in the Dark will stay around as long as all of us in the band plan to have it around. It also is up to the fans. Without their support, we are nothing and we know this.

…and would you like to reveal us some your dreams, music-wise?

– I’d like to keep opening up for great bands that I grew up listening to and or still listen to. It be awesome to open for a band like Parkway Drive or Amon Amarth. I also have a friend that is a rapper named, Karif “Reef” Knox and we been wanting to do a hip hop/Metal album for some time now. When things are not so crazy, I want to make that happen. I love hip hop almost as much as I love Metal and to bring my take on it with my background, my roots would be a fun adventure and an interesting one. My next album will actually be recorded in Reef’s studio back in Las Vegas. So that’s another dream music wise. To keep making music. Making it out on the corner with Andy and Carson. Writing lyrics in my notebook and journal, even sticky notes of some things I want to say and think is a good delivery of lyrics. I love being in the studio and being up real late working on it.

And now, the word is yours… what would you say to our readers?

– You guys are the most brutal mother fuckers I know! Stay heavy and thank you all for keeping Metal so alive and so well all over the world. It is nothing with out you the fans. Rockstars are nothing more than fans of Metal as well. They just keep delivering the great music. So anyone out there that’s a fan and loves to play, keep playing. Keep playing for you and remain true to yourself. The wealth, the fame, the fans and huge concerts, that all follows and falls into place by doing just that. That is to stay heavy, be your brutal self and true to you and others. I am blessed for you all and wish every Metal Head out there the best in whatever they choose to pursue in life. Just keep the music loud \m/

Thanks Travis for sharing … we managed to cover quite many arguments, and next time we’ll go on… Stay… Metal Gypsy \m/

Thank you for your time and listening to me hahaha. I really appreciate this opprutunity and I just really appreciate your friendship as well Tarja 🙂 Hope you’re having a great day back in Italy \m/

Interview by Tarja Virmakari