Rockezine.com interview with Feast For The Crows on Feb 11, 2007

with Max Hufnagel on Feb 11, 2007


		Please introduce yourself, the band and the members. Hi my name is Max Hufnagel and I`m the lead guitarist of Feast For The Crows (FFTC). The other band members are Sebastian Kollat/ rhythm guitar, Moritz Jung/ drums, Simon Kollat/ vocals and Stefan Kraft/ bass. The band was founded in mid 2006 when Sebastian`s and my old band Tear of Phoenix split up. We wanted to keep our music alive and so we quickly hired new members and started FFTC. The album When All Seems To Be Burned was recorded in July and now here we are :) . FFTC`s hometown is Marburg which is located right in the middle of Germany .
		What kind of music do you play? I`d describe our music as modern melodic death metal. Many people call us a metalcore band but we do not really see ourselves as such. Maybe the first impression the people get when they see us is like "oh hardcore guys" but we always had the intention to make good old Swedish death metal bands like In Flames, At the Gates, Gates of Ishtar, In Thy Dreams or The Crown did. What is important for us is the dark, evil and blazing atmosphere our music suggests. When we start to write a song we don`t really think about how the people will call it at the end. The quality of our music is absolute priority number one and if someone calls it metalcore but likes it in the end we don`t really care about the genre.
		Last month Bastardized Recordings released your album. Are you satisfied the way the record turned out? Yes, indeed. The label gave 100% promotion power. They made a really great advertisement and I think the record is running very well on Amazon and the labelshop.
		How are the reactions in the press? Awesome. We reached position four and five in the two German top metal print zines MetalHammer and RockHard. Plus we got a complete site in RockHard zine with a report. The reactions of the online magazines are also stunning. The majority of you guys gave us above 80% which we had never expected. Honestly, we were a little bit afraid that everybody would call us cliché-German metalcore but fortunately most of the reviewers discovered that there is more behind the songs. Of course there are some people who gave us bad grades but that`s life :).
		How is the relationship with the label? The relationship is very personal. It started when we met up so sign and discuss the contract in a pub and drank some beer. The atmosphere was very smooth and friendly from the beginning. And it`s still like that. When we have a problem we just call or meet with them because they don`t live far away from Marburg.
		What are the plans for 2007? We want to play as many shows as possible to spread our music all over Europe . There`s a UK tour planned for July 07 and we`ll play lots of single shows in Germany and Europe for example in Antwerp Belgium on March 24th or at Treasurefest in Sweden on May 12th. Furthermore we are working on new material for a new album but we didn`t come very far yet. I suggest it will take ten to twelve months before we can enter the studio again.
		Which countries do you get the most reactions from in general? Most of the reactions come from Germany, Austria and the Benelux states because these regions are the label`s focus. But that doesn`t mean that we didn`t get any reaction from other parts of the world. I did several interviews with Italian zines. On myspace many people from the UK and USA tell us that they love our music. Plus we had proportionally many orders from Australia.
		Could you give some insight in the writing process? It`s Sebastian and me who do all the song writing. Usually it works like this: we write some riffs separately at home and put them together when we do a so called "song writing session" :) . We program some drums and try to put things together or create some new riffs together. It`s always a double quality check and a big exchange so that the result is often something completely new. This is how the best songs came to be. Sure, sometimes we write something spontaneously during the rehearsal but not very often.
		What is the weirdest thing that has happened to the band on the road? We get lost every single fucking time when we drive to a location we don`t know. It`s always an odyssey until we reach the club because everyone is too lazy to print a route map from the internet and trusts on his male sense of orientation :) .
		Did you ever visit www.rockezine.com? What’s the best and what’s the worst part about this site. I never visited it before. You have a nice graphical design but I don`t like your navigation. I`m more a fan of the conventional navigation structures but that’s only my humble opinion.
		Do you have some famous last words for me? Horns up!
		(Jeroen Habets)