Dale from Untombed/Metal Pulse Radio sits down with Boarders to discuss the new album and catch up on the band’s latest happenings.
Can you tell us about Boarders ? When did you guys get started? Who is in the band?
Sure, we started in 1988 (!) in Milan. I’m the only one survived to the original line up, but we’re stable since 2000.
of course everything started to play cover. It was the Thrash era, and the big four were at the max of their creativity..you know, “and justice for all”, “Among the living”, “So far so good…so what”, “The Legacy”…
..as you notice, I have a preference in Testament instead of Slayer: have never like them.
Then we played for Motorcycle fests, around Italy for some time, and then we recorded some demo of Cover songs, plus one entirely dedicated to the Megadeth early years songs.
Actually we toured a lot as a Megadeth cover band in the first half of 00’s. Then something happened on my personal life, I mean exactly what you may guess…and so we did enjoy in putting that experience in music. This gave birth to “The World Hates me”, that was – for us – surprisingly published by a Swiss label and then, in 2009, by the mighty Retoractive Records of Matt Hunt…a great guy and it was a honor being in its roster.
We are:
Egi (me) – Vocals and rhythm guitar
Gigi – lead Guitar
Oscar – Bass
Roby – Drum
How did you come up with the name Boarders? Does it have a special meaning?
We were quite young then, all in our teens, and the guy who formed the band with me was a huge fan of the German band, Running Wild. At that time this band put out a record called “Ready for Boarding”….so, we thought we’d like to be the “boarders”…our poor English didn’t help then!
How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard you guys?
We like to be very groovy, energetic and melodic and some time epic. After all these years many influences mix down in our songs so if I had to describe them with a Tag Cloud I would choose: Ac/dc, Megadeth Annihilator, Eric Adams Type o Negative, Black Label Society.
At least these are the coordinates that we unconsciously have in mind when we play.
Lets talk about the new album “R-Existence”, How long have you guys been working on it? Were there any obstacles in getting this album produced?
The first riffs are from 2007, right after the completion of The World Hates me.
It has been a very slow process, as we’re are in our 30/40 so we don’t have the same time available as when we were younger.
We didn’t have any other obstacle in creating the album, except for each one personal life responsibility with job and families.
I see you are giving the new album “R-Existence” away for free Why is that? I have listen to the album and I think it`s some of your best work to date.
Thanks! yeah, we think this is our best work to date too and this is probably one of the main reasons we’re giving it away for free: we are so happy with the songwriting, lyrics and recording results, that we don’t wanna put any possible barrier to any potential listener. Our main objective is to spread our music as much as possible. On the other hand, we tried to do revolutionary things in this record, for instance we use a Agile Software methodology and tools (redmine and svn) to mix it and master it and we also thought that the music business model need creative minds and new points of view to arise from its serious crisis.
The album cover looks great. Who created it?
Thanks. Roby, the drummer did all the stuff, for each one of our record. Please check out his facebook page at: facebook.com/
What message do you want the listener to pick up from listening to the new album?
Well, there are a lot of message in this album, and the best way to answer to your question would be a tag cloud.
Anyway to me the main message is “Resist to exist”, that’s why the title “R-Existence”.
Where can we download this CD ?
By now the full album can be streamed from www.boarders.it.
At the same page, there’s a download link that redirect to the Internet Archive, where a zip file can be downloads.
One more question…What is the Christian Metal scene like in Italy?
Well, I can tell you that is growing very fast, thanks to very good band. I’ll try to name all of them here:
S91 (Their lead guitarist, Francesco Romeggini appears as a special guest on our song “cause of life)
Seven horizons
Metatrone
Timeswords
Judith
Twinspirits
Doomenicus
Altripercorsi
Inside mankind
just to name few of them..
..as you can see there’s a common ground to easily set up a festival. Maybe one day we could try to organize it, leveraging the legacy of another initiative, started few years ago by Denny and Maureen Hurst. It was called Rock on the rock. I would set it up only for metal genre, and I would call it “Music for the Lion”…it’s a name that goes around in my head since years… maybe that means something.
Thank you very much for your time Egi. Any final words?
Thanks to you Dale. this is the first interview we do after the release of “R-Existence”, and I have to really thank you and Metal Pulse Radio for being so nice in supporting us.
God bless
