Starkill's Fiery Blood Talk with Parker Jameson

STARKILL was formed at the tail end of 2008 by Parker Jameson, Spencer Weidner and Charlie Federici. The band makes no qualms about wearing their influences on their sleeves. They combine what they love — melodic death metal, shredding guitars, blasting drum beats and the epic sounds of modern film scores — and make some of the most promising metal music heard this side of the Atlantic in years. The main ringer leader of these guys, Parker Jameson, lead guitarist, vocals, keyboards, orchestral programmer, took some time to talk about the debut as well as other plans these guys have gotten lined-up!

1. Introduce yourself, tell me what you do in Starkill, and how long the band has been together.

Parker: My name is Parker Jameson I am the lead guitar player and singer for Starkill, I write a majority of the songs and I also do a lot of the instrumental keyboarding stuff. Me and the drummer and the other guitar player have been playing music together for 4 and a half years now, while being in other projects as of December 2012 before getting signed onto Century Media Records.

2. How did you guys come up with your band name?

Parker: After going through about 8 million of them having 3 people who don't sync 100% we want something different we didn't want the aspects of a typical black metal or death metal band, we do use a lot of black, death, and power metal aspects, but what we wanted to do was, we wanted to mix it up and settled on something pretty good.

3. You guys are signed with Century Media Records, how did you get signed with them and are you happy with the results?

Parker: We had been touring on our past name having had an EP out, we just had a growing online presents, two music videos, and other interviews, and they had picked up on that and then in late 2011 we received a phone call and emails then put it altogether with them come December 2012. They are one of our dream labels and we're definitely happy with them, some of our biggest influences have been on their label so it's been pretty cool.

4. What bands have influenced your band and its sound?

Parker: For the earlier stages of these songs a lot of them are a couple of years old, the earlier Children of Bodom, Dimmu Borgir, Nightwish, Amon Amarth one of their live DVDs really amazed us so a lot of that stuff really.

5. What lyrical theme do you guys use in your music? What message do you want to send?

Parker: Most of our songs are stories within themselves, it's not a concept album, and I really don't like those self boosting lyrics it's all about battles and killing people, it's like mixing The Lord of the Rings, or epic movies like that to a musical element. When listening to the lyrics we wanted it to be that cinema effect, so the lyrics themselves, there's mythology, satanic, whatever the song calls for really.

6. What inspired the Fires Of Life title?

Parker:  When we entered the studio we had 9 out of the 10 songs written and all of the lyrics were done except for Fires Of Life which didn't have a title of the lyrics for it. So most of the songs has that epic peek of power, courage, perfection, so the title has to have that climax force, we thought that would work. We're not serious about the meanings of the lyrics, we do take some of them seriously but there are means to happen behind the vocals on a record.

7. Who produced Fires Of Life and what was it like working with them?

Parker: I was the main producer and Spencer and Charlie were there on the bulk of it. Not to sound self absorbed but we knew what we wanted on the record, I know a lot of bands say this, but we had these songs for a while and sat back and wanted it to be us, we didn't want the sound to be different, we wanted to do it all ourselves and from what people have said the feedback has been great.

8. Who did the cover art for Fires Of Life and how much input did you have on it?

Parker: Joshua Belanger he's an artist whose' done tees and poster art and checked out his style, he had a comic book flare going on, so we had a few email exchanges, explaining what we wanted, and we wanted a guy with long hair, on top of a mountain with a sword sucking in all of the power of the universe so he got it immediately. Also look at every Amon Amarth album it has some epic graphic on it, so that's what we wanted to do because our styles and lyrics are so similar.

9. What are your expectations for the CD?

Parker: Mainly to propel us as a band, just go out and tour, we don't know what to expect. Our first appearance and since we're a younger band we just wanted to get out there and see what happens, just go out there and tour that's really all we want to do right now.

10. What can the fans expect to see from you in the future?

Parker: Touring, touring, touring, working on our second album, writing new material, release another music video, just wanting to get out on the road and tour, if we could play 365 days in the year we would so do it. So just tour, tour, tour!

11. Anything else you'd like to say to your fans?

Parker: Just catch us on tour, we're pretty chill we like to talk with everyone after the shows and keep frequent updates on the social networks and stuff so come check us out!