Mike Valente – An Xperience Interview

Mike Valente – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

Mike Valente and the band Brick by Brick are pillars of the Capital Region music scene. Their fierce riffs and aggressive vocals have influenced local bands too many to count, and have successfully brought them around the world. A new release is causing excitement, and guitarist Mike Valente joins us for a few words.

RRX: You have a new release coming out, called “Collapse.” It’s coming out April 26, and the release party is at Empire Live. Tell me a little bit about the album?

MV: We definitely did a different approach with this album in writing, recording, production, everything. We just kinda went back to the grassroots as far as writing goes. Jeff and I wrote most of the foundations, and then Andy comes in, and then things change, and then we get, like, a good skeleton together. Once the good skeleton was together, we brought it to the producer, Joey Z from Life of Agony. Once he got a hold of it, he put his input in there, and things changed again. There really wasn’t too much rehearsal on these songs. We pretty much left a lot of it for the studio. But the foundations were built really solid. And then once all that happened, Ray started writing the lyrics. Ray really wasn’t part of the building process, and I think that was good because the lyrics were much more aggressive and angrier. I don’t know how Ray can be more angry, but he was on this. So that was pretty much the process with the writing, and Joey Z, as a producer, did such a phenomenal job reeling us in and basically pushing us to make sure that we did a solid piece of work.

RRX: Nice, nice. That’s cool. That kind of dovetails into another question I had. Sometimes, an album has a vision, like the whole album starts out with this big vision, and sometimes it just comes down to the individual songs. Was there an overall vision for this album starting out, and if not, how about the vision for just one song that you liked?

MV: On the past records, I have, like, an overall vision on everything. A theme, I guess you could say. With this one, we just had fun with the songs and wrote what we were feeling, not necessarily focused on an end goal. So the songs came more naturally. We weren’t forced to write an angry song. And a couple of these songs drastically changed from the first draft up until the final product. So, for an overall theme, I would say no. But the title, “Collapse,” is how we wanted to revamp how we look at everything. All of our titles for our songs have something to do with what’s going on in the world. And we keep that as true as possible, so “Collapse” is just kind of what’s going on in the world, right? Everything seems a little f***ing nutty, with the COVID, the politics, all this – everything – it’s just too much to really fathom. So yeah, the songs don’t necessarily reflect on a direct approach to the collapse, but they’re all angry, they’re pissed off, and it’s day-to-day life. It’s how you envision it. You can either make these songs positive in your head or negative. And with the artwork, we went a different direction. A lot of the past stuff has been more animated, more illustrated. For this one, I wanted more of a bleak outlook. And I think Maxime Taccardi did a great job in capturing the word “collapse” on that.

RRX: Empire Live is two venues, as you well know. The smaller one, Empire Underground, and then the larger Empire Live. On social media, you mentioned that the release would be moving up to the big room, and it was a big step. What kind of a step is that, do you think?

MV: We do very well in Empire Underground, and the last couple of shows that we played down there were sold out. I was looking for a bigger band to play with us, and I started reaching out to bands in like October, November. And a lot of bands were committed to spots already. Shadows Fall was supposed to do it with us, and then they got picked up on that Kill Switch Engage tour, and they couldn’t do it. And I was like, “Oh man.” That was gonna be such a great package. And I was talking to their management, and they’re like, “What do you need another band for? Just headline your own CD release party.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I wanted a wow factor,” and then I’m like, “You know what, you know, just f*** it, we’ll just do it,” and now it’s turned into excitement. But I’m nervous because it’s kind of a big responsibility. We got a big room to fill now, but everybody else around us seems to be confident that everything’s gonna be fine, and the lineup that we got is 90% local. We wanted to put our friends on there, and we wanted to get a diverse lineup. All within a metal genre. So you have the Lycan, who’s more of a tribal, newer band. This is their debut show. You got Oakheart, who’s from Glens Falls area. I could go through each band, and they’re all from a different area, so there’s really not much fan crossover. From local sales alone, there’s gonna be over 300 people, and then with our online marketing and our ticket sales, I don’t see why there’s not gonna be 5-600 people there. It’s a big responsibility, a lot of overhead, a lot of bills to pay on this one.

RRX: You’re offering this album in vinyl, which is an increasingly popular choice for bands, but it is more expensive to produce, more of an in-depth process. What’s it like working with vinyl on the production end, and are you responding to a demand from the fans, or are you trying to create that demand?

MV: In partnership with the label, we usually print CDs on every run. This one we’re not, our streaming platforms suck. We really don’t have a lot of people that go online and listen to us, so what we’re basically doing is giving away our music online, and you’ll be able to listen to it on Spotify, Apple, all the major streaming services. But the vinyl demand is more of a collector’s aspect, and we sell a s**t ton of vinyl when we’re on tour, and the label does very well with it. So it’s a no-brainer for us. The first time we did vinyl (for the second record) was an afterthought, and we did it just as an “Oh, yeah, let’s see what’s up,” and the demand was so high, I was like, “Oh, all right. So people are definitely spiking.” The popularity of vinyl is coming back, and now I could justify all the old records that I have and put mine in there with it.

RRX: Is there anything else people should know about?

MV: We’re doing a VIP package for the show, and the link for the VIP package is BXB.soundrink.com. It’s $75. And it includes a bottle of Smooth Truth. It includes your ticket. It includes the laminate, and they got all sorts of other stuff. And we’re gonna meet an hour before doors and take the people that do the VIP. We’re gonna take them through a tasting, you know, and do like an official whiskey tasting with them.

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