Groupe:

The Vintage Caravan

Date:

30 Avril 2015

Interviewer:

Orion, Evanessa

Interview Oskar Logi

Hello can you introduce yourself and your band for those who don’t know you yet?

Hi my name is Óskar Logi and I play guitar and I sing in a band called The Vintage Caravan.

We can hear a strong 70's sound through your music, can you tell us what your main influences are?

We listen to a lot of different stuff, everything from jazz to contemporary poppy stuff. But yeah we love the 60’s-70’s rock stuff, King Crimson, Sabbath, Rush, Hendrix, Mountain, etc etc.

How do you explain your passion for old-fashioned artists? One can be surprised by your musical preferences as people your age mostly listen to bands such as Machine Head or Amaranthe…

Amara what? I think that assumption is wrong, but some might be really into those bands, I think most of the people my age are listening to mainstream music, electronic, rap, folky pop stuff.
Ever since I really started listening to music I have been attracted to old school rock and roll. It’s just so powerful and real.

If somebody gave you Marty McFly's DeLorean Time Machine, which event or show from this era would you choose to attend ?

I would attend the second Band Of Gypsys concert at the Filmore East in 1969/1970. Best live album ever, would have loved to see that happen.

Your music has a very vintage sound. What do you use to record it?

We don’t use tape machines, we use pro tools, but we keep the recording process very spontaneous, play live all of us in the same room and try to capture a performance, I use two Marshall plexi heads from 1969, they sound fantastic. We like the warmth of the vintage records (we use tape simulators though) and we like the attack and punch of today's sound, we try to combine that.

Who writes the lyrics and the music? How do you work when you compose music?

I used to do that all by myself. But on "Arrival" Alex and I worked a lot together, we normally write riffs on our own and bring it to practice and work it out together, songs also get written while we jam.

It seems that your first album was well received (for instance on our website it was rated 17/20). Was it the same everywhere? Do these positive or negative reviews matter to you?

Nice! Yeah the album got received really well, much better than we expected. The only kinda bad reviews came from Iceland, haha. But everyone seemed to like it.
The good reviews are definitely nice to come across but it’s important not to let it go to your head and just continue making music, and try to make it better everytime.

Your first album was first released in 2012 by a small record label then it was re-released by Nuclear Blast in 2014. Can you tell us how it happened and how things changed for you when you started working with such a famous record label?

It changed everything, it gave us hope and confidence. Our friend Gunnar Sauermann gave Walter Roadburn from the Roadburn festival in the Netherlands a copy and he got in contact with Nuclear Blast, let Andy Siry from NB hear the album, they all loved it and offered us a contract. We were so surprised... it was a dream come true. They know their shit, their promo work is fantastic. Could not be happier.

Who is "Cocaine Sally" from the first album?

She is an outcast, a girl that chose the wrong path, she is what and who you want her to be.

You are all quite young. Is your time fully devoted to the band or are you still currently studying?

The band is our main job, let’s keep it like that ;). I dropped out of college, fuck that.

Can you play a lot of Metal shows in Iceland? Are there a lot of venues in the country (concert hall, etc...) where you can play to promote your band?

Sure there are places here that you can play live, but there used to be more of them, venues are being torn down to make hotels, which sucks. I would say there are three venues downtown Reykjavík that a new rock band can perform at : Gaukurinn, Bar 11 and Dillon. That’s it. We have played those places probably around 300 times haha.

Did you try to change your sound on this new album? If you compare it to your first album, what is new/different in this one?

We didn’t try, it just happened, a natural process. Our first album that was only released in Iceland, was recorded in 2009. It goes without saying that we have matured a lot since then. The first one was more blues rock and the newest one, "Arrival", goes more into the heavy prog blues rock party gear.

Are you planning a tour?

We are doing a shit load of festivals, Roskilde Festival, Freak Valley, etc etc etc. We are going to do a headline and co headline tour this fall, all to be announced very soon, stay tuned!

Which band would you like to support on tour?

Foo Fighters, Queens Of The Stone Age, Mastodon, Red Fang, please make this happen, thank you. ;)

The last words are yours to conclude this interview.

Thank you for the interview, thank you for the interest. I recommend checking out our new album with headphones, it works really well with headphones! Cheers!