FROM THE ARCHIVES: ALL THAT REMAINS

With a new album completed and a freakishly stable (for them) lineup firing on all cylinders, the Massachusetts metalcore crew are ready to, as frontman Phil Labonte puts it, “get paid.”

By Richard Bienstock
Photo by Sarah Sturges

“It’s too early in the morning. I don’t like getting up early.”

All That Remains guitarist Oli Herbert is sitting in the front lounge of his band’s tour bus, strands of long brown hair sticking to the sides of his face, his clothes soaked with sweat. He’s in Englishtown, New Jersey, in a parking lot full of buses, next to a parking lot filled with stages. The weather outside is bright, sunny, and very, very hot. It’s only a little past noon, and All That Remains are already done playing for the day. Welcome to the Warped Tour, boys.

“We hit the stage at 11:30,” says equally damp co-guitarist Mike Martin, seated beside Herbert in the lounge. “And I think they start letting people in at, like, 11:29. So it wasn’t exactly ideal. But the set times rotate every day. I never know when we’re up until someone knocks on my bunk in the morning and says, ‘You’re on in a hour—get out of bed!’”

Fans of the band will hopefully have arranged for similar wake-up calls, as Warped ’08 represents the first chance they’ll get to hear All That Remains perform tracks from their upcoming fourth full-length, Overcome (Prosthetic/Razor & Tie). Due in September, the hotly anticipated disc is the follow-up to 2006’s The Fall of Ideals, which peaked at number 75 on the Billboard album chart and has sold more than 175,000 copies to date in the U.S. It seems that after years of weathering continual lineup changes (roughly seven members have left in the band’s decade of existence) and living in the, um, shadow of fellow Massachusetts metallers like Shadows Fall (for whom ATR frontman Phil Labonte used to sing) and Killswitch Engage, All That Remains have firmly established themselves as one of heavy music’s premier heavies.

Not that they’re content to rest on their laurels. Quite the contrary, they’ve been going at it hard—so hard, in fact, that Labonte, after four consecutive days of screaming his head off for the throngs of Warped Tour goers, has blown out his voice. “It’s right at the beginning of a tour cycle,” says Martin, “and there’s 12 shows in a row to start. So Phil’s a little raspy right now.”

As if on cue, Labonte, shirtless and heavily tattooed, enters the bus and nods a silent “hello” in the direction of his bandmates. He heats up a sandwich on the lounge’s communal George Forman grill (“That looks and smells delicious,” says Martin, to no one in particular), grabs his laptop, and plops down at a table. After taking a few big bites, he clicks on an early cut of the video for “Two Weeks,” the first single from Overcome. The music that blares out of his computer’s speakers will be the only sound emanating from Labonte’s general direction for the remainder of the afternoon. Otherwise, the singer, screamer, and, ordinarily, band mouthpiece will communicate by tapping out messages on his iPhone, then holding up the device to the face of the person being addressed.

“It sucks,” says Labonte of losing his voice, when Revolver catches up with him by phone a week later. He’s on the mend, and about to take the stage at a Warped stop in Milwaukee. “There are songs like ‘Not Alone’ [from The Fall of Ideals] that we’ve been doing live for a long time now, and that I love to play. But they’re right at the top of my range, and that’s the first part of my voice that went out. It makes me feel like I’m not putting on the best show possible. And that’s really painful.” He pauses, and then clarifies. “Not painful on my throat, but painful on my ego.”

Fortunately, Labonte is not a slave to vanity. He does, however, have mountains of pride and a shitload of tenacity. All of which have come in handy on Warped, where All That Remains—which also includes bassist Jeanne Sagan and new drummer Jason Costa—are surrounded by dozens of emo, screamo, and pop-punk bands…and also the “I Kissed a Girl” chick. “It’s a hard tour to do,” says Labonte, “I mean, if people come here to see Angels & Airwaves…well, we’re a bit different. But we get up there and embrace it. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you. There are seven other stages you can go over to if you don’t wanna deal with me.’”

This “love it or leave it” credo also characterizes Labonte’s attitude toward the band’s internal workings. It’s what’s kept All That Remains (in which he and Herbert are the only original members) going all these years through an almost insurmountable number of roster shakeups. And what’s kept them on the road practically non-stop for much of their career (“The next year and a half,” says Martin, “is pretty much ‘turn your life-switch off’ time again”). It’s also what contributed to Overcome being a huge step forward from The Fall of Ideals. “That record is old news,” says Labonte of his band’s breakthrough disc. “I don’t even think about it. I think about this record.”

The album in question, Overcome, is the first disc that the group cut outside of their home state of Massachusetts. It was also recorded without the services of Killswitch Engage guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz, who served as producer on both The Fall of Ideals and its predecessor, 2004’s This Darkened Heart. This was not the original plan—in fact, when Revolver spoke with Labonte in late 2007 to get a preview of the new record, he stated that Dutkiewicz had assured him of doing only two things in 2008: “eating chicken and producing your album.” Though the jury’s still out on how many breasts and thighs Dutkiewicz has thus far consumed, he certainly didn’t work on Overcome.

“We just couldn’t make it happen,” says Labonte. “When you’re dealing with a guy who’s as busy as Adam, and there’s deadlines to be met, and label people are screaming about this and that, it’s like, ‘We gotta get it done, we’ll have to go somewhere else.’” The upside of this scheduling conflict was that the band was able to land Jason Suecof, known for his work with Trivium, God Forbid, and Chimaira, among others, to produce the album at his Audio Hammer Studios in Sanford, Florida. “He was the only other guy we felt comfortable talking to,” says Labonte. “I’ve known him for years, and he understands where we’re coming from and what we want to accomplish.”

Another important factor was that Suecof, like Dutkiewicz, is a guitar player in his own right, which proved to be valuable when working with All That Remains’ Martin and, in particular, Herbert. “Oli’s a bit of a weird dude,” says Labonte with a laugh. “He’s the kind of guy who needs you to be able to speak his language, and know what he’s talking about musically. Jason’s a great guitar player, and he also understands theory. So they were able to talk to one another on that level.”

A clear line of communication between Herbert and Suecof was also essential due to the fact that, as was the case on The Fall of Ideals, the guitarist wrote the majority of the material on Overcome. It’s his textured, twisting riffs that power straight-ahead thrashers like “Two Weeks” and “Chiron,” as well as more mid-tempo, melodic cuts like “Forever In Your Hands” and “A Song For the Hopeless.” “I’m the generator, I guess,” says Herbert. “I tend to write on my own, record all the guitar and bass parts on my computer, and bring them to practice. And then things get changed, modified, added to, removed, whatever. Because in the end, to make it onto an All That Remains record, a song has to be All That Remains-worthy. And that means it has to be approved by everyone.”

“He really took the lead,” says Labonte of Herbert. “But when we got into the rehearsal space and the studio we worked on everything as a band. Jason [Costa] stepped up, too. He took a big role in the arranging process, making sure the drums fit with the guitars and things like that, whereas [previous drummer] Shannon [Lucas] just showed up and bitched.

“It’s funny though,” he continues. “If we ever really got into it with each other, it was usually only because Oli and Jason are such intricate players and tended to want to do so much, whereas Mike and I were always the ones saying, ’Make it stupid. Dumb it down.’ So I’d mess with Jason and say things like, ‘Dude, there’s only four drumbeats in existence. Pick one and go with it!’ But overall I really trust all these guys, and that made it possible for me to lay off a little bit, and not lord over the whole process.”

But if Labonte felt confident in stepping back from micro-managing the musical side of the band, his involvement in the business end of All That Remains has only increased as they’ve become more successful. “You have to pay attention to that stuff,” he says. “I watch other bands. I watch them go up and down. I watch the mistakes they make, and I do my best not to let us make those same mistakes.” And while he’s aware that his band sold a substantial amount of records with The Fall of Ideals, Labonte knows that one of those errors would be to get caught up in trying to replicate that success with Overcome.

“The business of this band is not the business of selling records,” he says. “Our business is touring. The label, their business is selling records. And they want us on the road, because that helps them do that. So we have similar agendas that complement each other. And that’s my only concern—that we’re being taken care of the way we should. Prosthetic and Razor & Tie understand what we’re trying to do. But at the end of the day, they’re record labels, and I hold no allegiance to any label. Only to the band and the fans.”

And so for the next year-and-a-half at least, the members of All That Remains will, as Martin says, turn off the “life-switch” and live on the road. After Warped wraps up, they’ll embark on a headlining tour in support of Overcome, followed by another tour, and then, well, another one. Says Labonte, “We’ll definitely be playing in a city near you—a lot.”

Not that it’s as thrilling as it may sound. “This whole lifestyle is very different from how it looks from the outside,” says Labonte. “People think being in a band is really glamorous, and it’s all a big party. But that’s not the way it is. Anybody who tells you different is a liar.”

The reality, judging by the visual evidence on hand at Warped, is something akin to showing up, playing the show, stewing in your own sweat on the bus for a while, and then heading on to the next town.

“The way I’d put it is, we’re really just one step away from, like, the carnies that put together rides at the local street fair in 15 minutes,” says Labonte. “And I’m not even saying a step up—just a step away. It’s the same kind of existence.” He pauses. “But there’s two ways of looking at it. I love playing shows, and I love being on the road. And then I always remember something my dad, who was a contractor, used to say to me: ‘If you’re not out there working, you ain’t getting paid.’”