I find that one of the greatest things about being a music blogger is that it sort of pushes me into being more open minded and observant when it comes to discovering new bands. It has also given me the opportunity to exchange a few words with musicians in bands that I admire.
A reader sent in music suggestions to me at one point, and on his list were Painted in Exile, which were described as being kind of like Between the Buried and Me with more jazz influence. I knew I had to hit that up. Since then, I featured PIE in my first Sumeriancore Sunday post for The Number of the Blog. This captured the attention of their vocalist Robert Richards, with whom I exchanged a few emails.
Painted In Exile – Revitalized
First off, introduce yourself!
My name is Robert Richards. I’m 23 Years old, I’m from Seaford, NY and I’m the vocalist of Painted In Exile.
Painted In Exile’s first EP showed signs of progressive metal, but on Revitalized you guys really went all out, incorporating more clean singing, extended jazz sections, and songs that come close to hitting ten minutes in length. Was this a conscious thing with the band to want to be more progressive or did it just sort of work out in a happy accident?
Well Jimmy, When we got together we were looking to add more clean sections onto ideas that we already had. We had a fairly new member line up so we had a lot of new ideas that we wanted to get out. Everyone wanted to put their two cents in, so it was a semi-conscious effort to make the songs more clean sounding, and at the same time kinda letting the pieces fall where they may.
I understand there’s a full length album in the works?! How’s that coming along? Any cool details you can divulge at this point?
Yes, we are working on a full length as we speak! I’m very excited to be honest with you. Every Sunday we practice and every week James [Murphy--guitar], Eddie [Decesare--drums] & Mr. Lambert [Marc--guitar] show me stuff they have been collaborating on and they keep blowing my fucking mind, pardon the French.
I also saw that you guys filmed your first music video, and in the process you managed to get the police called on you?! Care to spin us a manly yarn about what happened at the beach that day, and how that situation played out?
HA! Yes, we did film our first music video with Andrew Pulaski with Abstrakt Pictures. The day we went to the beach, we thought that we could drive on the sand, cause there were tire tracks all over the sand and no signs saying “no off-roading,” so we drove on the sand and unloaded the equipment and started filming. Then some fucking JERK-OFF, instead of coming to talk to us and say, you know, “What’s going on here?” so we could have explained that we were filming a music video, calls the cops and told them to tell us to leave. So they came down, told us to get the car off the sand, handed out summonses, then tried saying we had to leave. Eddie asked if it was illegal to film there, and they said it wasn’t, so we finished up and left… To be honest, the guy who called the cops is smart, cause if he tried coming over to us like he owned the beach and told us to leave, I probably would have put him in his place.
