During my trip to Korea in October last year, I had the pleasure of catching metalcore band Noeazy live. It didn’t take long before I had developed a girl crush on the bassist and decided I wanted a chance to interview her. Although as all too often I never got around to doing much about it – that is until GMC‘s Kyono in all his awesomeness figured I ought to have a listen to the band’s upcoming album. Thanks to him not just the bassist but other band members too served great answers to numerous questions of mine for an article that will be posted at London Korean Links tomorrow [update: now available here]. Although writing it was more difficult than usual as there was so much I liked in their answers but couldn’t fit in the text. Anyway, as a sort of teaser for tomorrow’s article – and to share a favorite quote that didn’t make the cut – here are four of the questions:
Can you please start by introducing the members of Noeazy?
Vocal : Gursong
Guitar : Hyeongki, Jeongjun
Bass : Hayoung
Drum : Yuna
What changes have Noeazy gone through from the beginning till now?
D : When Noeazy was first formed, we played emo-core-ish music, but changed to metal core after about half a year. Our musical career wasn’t long at all so we got a lot better over time, and with the improvement in our techniques the music itself got more complicated and difficult. We also put in a lot of effort in studying stage actions to make our performances more energetic and dynamic for the audiences.
B : To me, it feels like everything snowballed! When we first got together, we wanted to write and play our own songs, in front of actual audiences (not our friends), and that was about it. I never would have guessed we would release an album and perform in so many shows.
V : I hope that we can continue to do so for a long time.
What would you like to say about Discrepancy? How is it different from The Mirror?
V : In The Mirror, the attempt to put so many elements in just 5 songs led to lack of sense of connection between songs; it was more so since they were written so far apart from eachother (timewise). We were able to pay more attention to the overall construction of the album and experimental attempts could be made at the same time since there are many more songs in Discrepancy. Also, the songs were written in a concentrated period of time except a few.
D : We are still in the process of finding our style so Discrepancy is much closer to the style we pursue than The Mirror in various ways.
Do you have any international ambitions?
V : There is a hope that someday, we will be able to enter the scene in countries with high population like China or India. If 1 person out of 10,000 buys our CD, there are 1.5 billion people in China so that’s a total of 150 thousand CDs! (Haha) But with all kidding aside, people all over the world can listen to our music over the internet so I hope we become known to more people.
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As you may have gathered from the above, Discrepancy is the title of Noeazy’s first full length album. It’ll be released April 15 and Hyang Music has an album sampler track.
As with other kinds of heavier music, metalcore isn’t something I know a lot about even though I enjoy the occasional listen. What makes Noeazy special to me is the mix between different vocal styles: it’s not just the screaming/growling I’m used to from this kind of music but they’ve got a fair bit of regular singing thrown in there as well. While it doesn’t always fall well with me, it does make it interesting and when it works it sounds pretty fantastic.
Actually, on Discrepancy Noeazy have gathered plenty of passages that are nothing but fantastic. On occasion I will listen to a song (usually Last Statement) and find myself wondering what it was that made me click repeat, only to a short while later be stunned by just how great the music that reaches my ears sounds. Considering how much I’ve been listening to Discrepancy over the last month it’s strange to think that I could still be surprised by the progress of any song, but that’s just one other thing I like about this album – there’s so much variety it never gets boring.
I love the way they show off their musicality in intro track A Stardust Tide and I love the way they work their instruments (the drums in particular) in Polymorphism (which’d be my very favorite, I think). All in all Discrepancy is a great listen, if you care for some heavy melodies, and Noeazy is definitely a band to keep an eye on in the future.