Deveria – An Interview with Liam Sweeny

Deveria interview.

We lean over the opened hoods of muscle cars, tossing numbers in the air like 426 and 3.0 liter, and we marvel at how that combination of numbers and constants and forces can combine and take a quarter mile in fourteen seconds. Heavy metal is no different, except the numbers are 4/4 and 134 beats per minutes, and the result takes you into a mosh pit in as little as three seconds.

Deveria is well versed in the numbers of music, and what they do to one’s willingness to get in and let it all go. This upstate power/thrash band is on a long road.

I sit with John Suski,  Deveria and we talk pit stops.

RRX: In 2010, you took an eight year hiatus as a band, and came back in 2010 with substantial lineup changes. This sounds like you’re describing just starting a new band. Are some or all of the same songs in play? Is there a thread that runs through the old stuff and the new stuff where I would listen and go ‘yup, that’s Deveria?’

JS: A lot of the original songs are still played as they are on our first album, along with some new material from when the band formed in it’s current and best lineup to date.  Listening to that album now, for me, it’s easy to pick out which songs are the newer ones.  They have a sharper edge to their sound and tend to be more dynamic and grow as the song progresses.  We have definitely grown into this style more as we go.  But we are not adverse to a straight up, in your face monster, that is fast and heavy throughout.   Overall, between the guitars and vocals.  that “sound” carries over all our songs, no matter the style.  But as far as trying to pinpoint any particular theme?  That is almost impossible for us.

RRX: You guys are influenced by a lot of the same bands that I was influenced by, not in music, but in life: Queensryche, Metallica, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, to name a few. When you’re heavily influenced by more than one major band, does one of those bands tend to lead you, or do they collectively create a sound greater than themselves?

JS:  I like to think of all our influences as different paints on a pallet.  We all can try and paint a specific landscape scene, but everyone’s will have subtle differences, depending on how much of each paint you use.  As a band we all seem to enjoy a lot of the same “core” metal bands, (Iron Maiden, Metallica, Exodus, Fates Warning, etc).  But I think it is more the bands that we don’t share together, (some of which would shock most people),that we bring to the table, is what really makes us different from other bands.

RRX: One of the bitches of getting older is that you can lose touch with a scene if it caters to the young; or rather, those with young backs. The local metal scene was everything when I was growing up – Saratoga Winners was still around. Now it’s a new scene, and we got Empire Live and Empire Underground… is this driving a new metal scene?

JS:  Absolutely!  And I would like to point out, that it is not just the venues, but there are some awesome people, (Mike Valente for one), personally responsible for keeping this going.  I missed out on a lot of it back in the day.  I joined the Navy right out of high school, and was pretty much absent from the scene up here for about 20 years.  I hear stories all the time about the way it was, some good, some horrible.  And from what I can gather, it seems that it is a much tighter community now.

RRX: Deveria is an American melodic power/thrash band. And power in a band comes from the emerging of flesh and steel, will and wire. Equipment and gear makes a big contribution to any band’s sound, but in a power/thrash band, the right equipment can take the place of an army. Can you tell us something interesting about your gear?

JS:  I play the drums, and I have gone through many styles of how I set them up over the years. from tiny little 4 piece kits, to massive 12 piece prog beasts.  As I have gotten older, I tend to stick with a 7 piece, that more than gets the job done, but isn’t too crazy.  I absolutely have to have two separate kick drums.  I own a double pedal, but I don’t like the way it feels compared to two individual pedals.  Lots of younger bands nowadays use smaller kits, which is cool, it works for them, but it is not for me.  The big kit just screams metal when looking at it from the crowd.  But as far as sound, I always stick with Evans G2 heads, which make my Pearl kit punchy, and for cymbals, I recently switched over to Meinl Custom Darks (I love these, they cut through the mix without overtaking the guitars), along with some personal custom made cymbals from Soultone.

RRX: Deveria was nominated for a 2022 Listen Up award, which is the first award show of its kind, from Radioradiox. It was homegrown strictly, meaning the station didn’t have anything to do with who was nominated or voted on. Do you have anything you can say to the people who nominated you? Care to nominate a band for next time?

JS:  I was super honored to even be thought of.  It was a shock for sure.  Typically, when you see these type of local voting polls, metal bands are not even a thought.  They are not mainstream enough to get the crowds like the other styles you will typically see at all the outdoor stages in the warmer months.  So it was surprising to see Deveria, along with some other local metal bands be nominated.  That being said.  I would love to see the poll maybe split off into separate genres.  Let’s be honest, I have no delusions on how awesome we are (I’m kidding of course), but no original metal band is ever gonna beat out a pop cover band when it comes to popularity contests. But the metal fans are die-hard for sure, and it would be interesting to see.

RRX: About ongoings and what-not. You guys are busy, and I can’t imagine some digital multitrack recorder isn’t flashing a red circle once in a while. What are you working on right now? Do you have anything coming out that you can spill a little about? What about shows, anything happening next month when the paper comes out?

JS:  We are constantly writing and polishing songs up.  We learned a lot in the studio the last time with the way things work, and what we could improve on preparedness wise.  We are taking our time with this new album, and the songs definitely show the time and effort.  I (a drummer!), even have contributed many ideas for them, which obviously makes me very proud.  This next album is gonna be harder, faster, and more technical than anything we have ever done.  Yet I believe it still holds true to the more “old school” style that people expect from us old farts.