We recently covered The Room Colored Charlatan’s excellent new album Primitives (check out our review here). We caught up with guitarist and producer Justin to find out a little more.
Firstly can you introduce yourself and tell me a bit about the band?
Sure, I am Justin Seymour – guitarist and producer of The Room Colored Charlatan. I founded the band along with current vocalist Jared Bush back in 2009. We have since been developing our sound in a direction which we have really come into with our newest release Primitives. The band is Justin, Jared, Robert Allen (guitar) Michael Miller (Bass) and Cameron Witt (drums).
You recently released your new album Primitives – can you tell me about the writing and recording process?
The entire album was actually written in the studio, we self-produced, mixed and mastered the record. I, Justin, run Skyline Studios Indy in central Indiana and felt I could give the album the best product for the vision I had at the time. The writing process was essentially creating and idea for a song then recording parts until they were exactly how we wanted them.
Were there any tracks that were more of a struggle to complete than others?
Surprisingly no, this record came together seamlessly in terms of writing. Everything just fit and flowed the into a direction that was even better than I had imagined it. With this method of writing you never know what a song is going to become until its completed and in that sense its more like a musical discovery than a creation.
Which track are you most proud of?
The Atlas Artifact is my favourite track. I was focused on writing a truly epic ending piece to the record and I feel we were able to accomplish that.
One of my favourites is the title track Primitives, can you tell me a little more about that one?
When we came up with the opening riff to that song we knew it was going to be the title track, there was just a power to it that fit and we knew it should be the title track of the record. The song covers the general theme of the record lyrically, which is of course that man is not as advanced as we like to think we are. You can see this is the lyric “our technology has outpaced out social advancement creating the illusion of a modern species”.
Which track is the most fun to play live?
So far Questions of Origin has been the most fun to play, the chorus in the song is powerful!
Moving onto live shows, what would you say the best show you’ve played has been?
So far we have not been able to play out with this newest material, but some of our favourite shows have been with bands like Tesseract and The Contortionist as they have come into the Indianapolis area, because their live performances are so inspiring and that is part of what inspired the feeling in the record primitives.
And perhaps the strangest or weirdest?
When we first started playing, we played a small house show and one of the people in the crowd, her dad died (not in attendance) so literally no one was listening to us…but at least we can joke that someone died during one of our shows.
If you could play a show anywhere, with any band, what would you choose?
Anywhere with Deftones would be perfect.
And lastly if The Room Colored Charlatan could put their name to a product, what would it be?
I assume this is in the context of endorsement? This is difficult because we all have different preferences as a band, but for me personally I have been very dedicated to Schecter guitars for the last several years. In our early years it probably would have been duct tape as it held all of our equipment together!
The Room Colored Charlatan: Facebook
