There are bands out there that stand out above others and one band that truly is unique and captivating is the one and only Spell from Vancouver, Canada. Made up of brothers Cam and Al along with their friends Gabriel and Jeff, Spell are a band of tenacity and calibre. Their music is something truly special that heavily evokes emotions and feelings. Spell took the time to provide us with an intriguing and insightful interview that is really worth a read!

THE NWOTHM: Hey there Spell! Can you start by introducing us to the band, who the members are and where you are from?

C: Hey! Yeah sure. We’re from Vancouver, Canada. On our last album Tragic Magic (2022) Spell was just me (Cam Mesmer, bass/vocals/guitar) and my brother Al Lester (drums/vocals/guitar) but since then we’ve been joined by our dear friends Gabriel (guitar/synth – also of Girlfriends & Boyfriends) and Jeff Blackmore (guitar – also of Gatekeeper). 

THENWOTHM: How did Spell form? Did you cast a spell and appear out of thin air?

C: Basically, SPELL started back in 2007 when me & Al wanted to play heavy metal. Nobody else wanted to do it with us, so we just did it ourselves. We were called STRYKER at the beginning, but it was the same band. At first we just wanted to sound like our idols: Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Accept, etc. Back then, there weren’t many people doing that ‘classic’ sound, so it felt pretty fresh to us. A few bands were in that territory, locally — Antiquus and 3 Inches of Blood, for example, so that was cool. Also Goat Horn and then a year or two later Cauldron and The Devil’s Blood came along and influenced us quite a bit.

Around that time we started getting a bit more diverse and began to develop our own sound. I think everyone pretty much starts out as a copycat band when they’re kids, but then I guess you choose whether you want to cut yourself off from other influences and become closed-minded, or listen to all sorts of music and become a bit more unique, take a risk, possibly become a weirdo. Lots of metalheads think I’m a freak when I tell them that some of my all-time favourites are Diana Ross and Sam Cooke. That’s fine with me. 

THE NWOTHM: Did you turn into werewolves when you were in the midst of ‘The Full Moon Sessions’ back in 2014?

A: Despite all the terrible luck we were experiencing around the recording of that album, we did manage to only work on it during full moons, purely by coincidence. Hence the name. And yes, we did all actually turn into werewolves on that album, but we’re ok now. 

THE NWOTHM: The expanded edition? Just how expanded was it?

C: When The Full Moon Sessions originally came out, it was missing three tracks. The recording sessions we did for that album felt cursed. We didn’t have any money, so we had to book recording sessions at weird hours and save up in between days. They ended up (unintentionally) all being on full moons, hence the name. The guy we were recording with ended up having a mental breakdown and disappearing for more than a year, with our recordings and our money. We couldn’t afford to make new recordings, and he didn’t respond to emails or calls, just disappeared completely. It was horrible and the album should have come out two years earlier than it did.

In the end, I finally managed to get in touch with him and I got 7 out of the intended 10 tracks back. We mixed the album elsewhere and released it as it was, with Hard & Heavy Records (Toronto). The album did OK for a first release and sold out pretty quickly, so four years later, once we were working with Bad Omen Records, we decided to re-press it. I managed to get in contact with the original recording guy once again and got the final 3 tracks from him, so when we re-pressed the record it got a full re-mix by Felix Fung (Little Red Sounds) and came out, at last, with ten tracks as it was always intended to be.

THE NWOTHM: As magical musicians who would you say your biggest influences have been both musically and outside of music?

A: We’ve got so many shared influences, as well as many diverse ones between us. So much different art has fed our creativity the most in the last decade, so it’s hard to list specifics. But I will say that we have a shared love of German Expressionism (both film and painting), the surrealist manifesto of Andre Breton, Dadaism, the Situationists, and related art movements. The incredible, stark visuals in the 2021 Tragedy of Macbeth film by Joel Coen were certainly influential to us while we were working on the Tragic Magic album. Folk Horror like the 1973 The Wickerman has always been very important to me as well, with its combination of pastoral and dreamlike elements with existential terror. I think we try to explore a similar combination of feelings and thoughts with our music in Spell. 

THE NWOTHM: What is your go to instrument for creating music? Do you have any particular favourites? Kazoo? Recorder?

C: We pretty much write Spell’s music on guitar. My guitar is alway set up in my living room, so I don’t have to mess around with anything else when I think of an idea. The worst thing is when you have to turn on your computer and fiddle around before you can start documenting your ideas. I have a really simple little looper pedal with 11 channels, so whenever I get an idea I can just save it in the pedal right then and play over top of it if I want. I also have a zillion voice memos on my phone, you’ll probably catch me humming to myself like a maniac out in public. But when you think of something, you have to document it right then or it’ll just disappear. Nicke Andersson taught me that when we were on tour with Lucifer.

THE NWOTHM: When contemplating what the next part of a song should be, what is your go to sandwich?

C: Ok, shout out here to La Grotta Del Formaggio on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. Best sandwiches I ever had. I don’t get there often enough, but I don’t think I usually write good music when I’m overfed and sleepy. Ya gotta stay hungry. 

THE NWOTHM: Are there any current nwothm/heavy metal bands you would tell people to look out for in Canada?

A: Freeways, Gatekeeper, Lockhart, Blood Ceremony, Cauchemar, Smoulder, Kontact, Droid, Iron Kingdom, Manacle, Metallian. I’m sure I’m forgetting some important current ones…Canada has so many great and interesting bands. There isn’t a lot of repetition in the Canadian scene, it’s too small for that. All our great bands in Canada have very unique identities and we don’t seem to end up with too many “clone bands”. There’s no one like Voivod, there’s no one like Triumph, there’s only one Blasphemy, etc. We try to carry on that tradition of making idiosyncratic, earnest, and maybe slightly askew Canadian rock music. It’s just all we know how to do here. 

THE NWOTHM: ‘For None and All’ was recorded on analogue tape! Do you feel like digital is not worthy of your mortal presence?

C: Basically, we did feel that way, haha. We just really wanted to do things the ‘old school’ way. We wanted our recordings to be real people doing the best they could do, flaws and all. A lot of bands will just grid and replace all their drums and tune their vocals until you might as well have a robot playing your songs, and that’s never been cool to me. Most of the bands we loved were from the 70’s and 80’s, so we wanted to do things the same way they had done it. 

My opinion now is a little bit different. I still love hearing real musicians playing their best, with flaws, but I also understand that it’s expensive as hell to record all-analogue that way (we were paying off our recording costs for years after that) and I recognize that the most expensive way isn’t always the best way. I think that the cheapest and easiest way to make music will automatically be the method that all the broke kids are using, and so that’s where all the coolest, freshest music is always going to come from. The cheapest, easiest way used to be pawn shop amps and a 4 track tape recorder, but now it’s a phone or computer with a cheap interface and amp simulators. It’s a very different sound than what I grew up with, and I’ll always appreciate the raw sound of live drums and guitars recorded on cassette with a couple 57’s, but technology always changes and the sound changes with it. There’s some super cool stuff being made now by broke kids with an old iphone and interface they stole from london drugs. No blues lawyer with a $10,000 strat has ever made a cool record, sorry. 

THE NWOTHM: You have written some amazing music after drinking too much coffee. If you were to introduce people to your music which songs would you show them first?

C: I’d say start with our new album and listen to it back to front! I know that not everyone does it this way, but my favourite way to listen to music is on vinyl, start to finish. For that reason, we always try to design our albums this way. They are best experienced as a complete unit, in consecutive order. Beyond that, I’m still quite proud of “Dawn Wanderer” and “The Iron Wind” from our Opulent Decay album, and “Madame Psychosis” and “River of Sleep” from For None and All. Those are just my personal faves. 

THE NWOTHM: What does traditional heavy metal mean to you and which bands do you feel have impacted the scene and the music that we know today?

C: When we started playing back in the early/mid 2000’s, traditional metal was pretty much at its lowest point. Nü metal reigned supreme and most of the metal bands around here were playing goregrind or maybe technical death metal. The term “NWOTHM” didn’t exist yet, but one of the first shows I ever put on was a mini-fest back in 2006 called ‘The NWOBCHM (New Wave of British Columbian Heavy Metal) Festival. I thought it was a great pun but nobody knew what the hell it meant because nobody around here cared about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal back then. 

The first bands I ever heard of that might be called “NWOTHM” were Goat Horn, 3 Inches of Blood, and Antiquus. A bit later, before Skull Fist existed those same guys were doing a cool band called 30 Years Too Late which also had that sound, and then there was Cauldron, In Solitude, and The Devil’s Blood. Me & Al took a few years to get a lineup together because we couldn’t find anyone else who thought traditional heavy metal was cool. Nobody at my high school was into heavy metal, it was all pop punk and emo and gangster rap and maybe some nü metal. At that time, it felt super fresh and even kinda dangerous to be into our kind of music. I remember buying pants from the girls’ section because I wanted to look like Skid Row and you couldn’t get skinny jeans for guys back then. I wore them to school and got called a bunch of homophobic slurs, just because of my pants! It’s kind of funny because tight pants were cool for a while after that, but now I’m getting made fun of for my tight pants again. Fuck off, I’ll die in tight jeans.  

I’ll always love traditional heavy metal, but I do feel like geist of the movement has come and gone. There are a lot of bands recently playing traditional heavy metal now in a narrower and narrower sense. People think it’s gotta have falsetto vocals, you’ve gotta play a Charvel guitar, you have to wear spandex, you have to sing about swords & fantasy… I like all that stuff just fine, but when a scene starts being about being the same rather than about being different, it gets cut off from fresh creativity and dies a slow, painful death. When we started, it was about being different and there were very few rules.  Even for a genre like NWOTHM, which is inherently traditionalist in nature, there has to be room for innovation and new perspectives. I think Unto Others and Sonja are great examples of this. 

THE NWOTHM: I saw you were ‘Trapped Under Ice?’ That must of been pretty cold? How did you get involved with that chilly compilation of some of the best acts around?

A: Our good friend and longtime co-conspirator Annick Giroux (Temple of Mystery Records) contacted us to be a part of that compilation, and we were very glad to be part of it, because it is an absolute ice-pick of the best and MOST Canadian heavy metal out there. We wanted to do something a bit different and special, so I wrote “SIlent Towers”, and that was the first Spell song I sang lead vocals on. 

C: That LP sold out immediately and It’s getting harder and harder to find copies of it! If you can find one, grab it!

THE NWOTHM: Do you think metal musicians spend too long on their hair in the mornings? What are your go to hair hair products?

A: I’d say it usually looks like metalheads have never spent a moment on their hair. Heavy Metal Haircare seems to have been left in the 80s, which is unfortunate cause they really knew how to make their hair do incredible things back then. I can’t have mine dangling around at work, so I wake up and tie it to my head and off I fuck to my job. 

C: When we were on tour in Europe, a fan once asked us – quite concerned – if we were going to perform “with our hairs tied together.” The answer is no, we absolutely never will. If I could make my hair look like NITRO, I would.

THE NWOTHM: Who is the main lyricist in the band and where do you draw inspiration from for your lyrics?

C: Generally me & Al each write lyrics for the songs that we sing. I’ve done most of the singing so far, so I’ve written most of the lyrics. I’ve written about different things for each of our albums, but on Tragic Magic it was all about real stuff I’d been dealing with in my life. We’ve lost a few family members to Alzheimer’s disease and there’s a decent chance I’ll get it someday, so I wrote a song grappling with that. We also recently lost our last grandparent, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the generational knowledge that disappeared along with her. Until recently, I could just give her a call and ask ‘what was it actually like during World War II’ or the Great Depression, or whatever. Now, I can never again access that knowledge in the first person, and it’s up to anybody’s interpretation. So there’s a song about that.

Also, I’m not getting any younger and over the last few years I’ve witnessed a lot of my friends and peers achieving their life milestones – starting families, getting good careers, etc. I’ve poured all of my energy and resources for my entire life into playing heavy metal with this kind of mindless optimism, and now that I’m well into my 30’s I’m sort of looking back and realising that there might be a few things that I missed along the way, and it might be too late for them. The album deals with stuff like this – the things that keep me up at night. There’s some catharsis in writing it down, I guess, and in other people recognising their own anxieties in it as well.

THE NWOTHM: Opulent Decay feels somewhat of beautiful, hazy journey? Can you tell us about that writing period and your favourite moment of jumping out of bed in the middle of night and shouting ‘by jove I’ve got it!’

C: Yeah. To oversimplify, I’d say that the music on Opulent Decay was inspired by dreams and contemplation, whereas the music on Tragic Magic was inspired by adrenaline and action. During the writing of Opulent Decay, I’d always be thinking through and going over different song ideas in my head as I fell asleep. Sometimes, these would morph and change and then next thing I knew I’d be dreaming with some cool musical bit running through my head. If I was lucky, I’d be lucid enough to recognise this and I’d force myself out of my beautiful dream and run out to the living room, grab my guitar and record some voice memos on my phone, trying to make sense of my dream melodies. Sometimes they made no sense the next day, but sometimes they did! The main hook of Psychic Death came about that way, and many other parts on that album. 

THE NWOTHM: What was it exploring the ‘New World’ with Wytch Hazel? Top blokes from England!

A: I’ve been a huge fan of Strawbs for many years, and always thought that the song ‘New World’ would make a great cover done in a slightly heavier style. It has a somber, melancholic, desperate feeling that hits me the same way my favourite doom metal does, and we tried to do justice to that. It also addresses the futility of war and the cowardly nature of warmongers, which we feel strongly about. 

We’ve always wanted to do a split with Wytch Hazel since we discovered them in 2011 when their ‘Surrender’ demo came out. Now, 12 years later we are label mates on Bad Omen Records and even though our approaches may be quite different, I think our bands fit together really nicely like two sides of a shiny gold dubloon. 

THENWOTHM: I don’t think the bloke needs chains on his grave? I don’t think he’s going anywhere he’s pretty dead?

A: He actually does need them, as he may well be going somewhere, despite his rescinded status among the living. We all know that ghosts and spirits always wear lots of chains – that’s how they’re shackled to the burdens and misdeeds of their lives. More graves should wear chains I think, it’s very becoming on them. 

THENWOTHM: If you were lost in an RPG what would your magical weapon of choice be?

C: I don’t really go for weapons. Give me the magical lute anyday, to charm and bewilder my friends and foes! 

A: Foldable guillotine that can fit in your pocket. 

THENWOTHM: Do they spend a lot of time around the cauldron making potions to keep your moustache(s) in tip top shape?

C: We’re pretty lucky I guess that our moustaches more or less take care of themselves, so we can focus our magick on other things. Most of the time my cauldron holds a nice minestrone soup, a pot of chili, or maybe a broccoli cheddar stew.

THE NWOTHM: Are you guys nerds? Do you have a super geeky fact about yourselves that no one knows?

A: Neither of us plays any video games unfortunately, if that’s what you’re asking. But we do sometimes wear glasses. We don’t know anything about superheroes or tabletop games or typical nerd stuff though. But I think nerds are cool, I’m just too boring to be a nerd I guess. 

C: I don’t like star wars or whatever, but I can tell you exactly what Adrian Smith was wearing on each Iron Maiden tour and we also have thousands of records kept in plastic sleeves… so you tell me.

THE NWOTHM: ‘Tragic Magic’ was your most recent release last year? How did that record come about and how many dragons did you have to slay to save the woman on the album cover?

A: We recorded the album from late 2021-early 2022, at Little Red Sounds. The only dragon we managed to splay was my spine, which basically was already fucked and then got fully slain during the recording of drums and guitars for the album. Then I had to have surgery, and then we finished recording it soon after. It was sort of like when Frodo woke up in Rivendell after getting stabbed by that Nazgul and then had to form the fellowship to finish his quest.

THE NWOTHM: Your artworks are pretty awesome and the art for ‘Tragic Magic’ makes you wonder? Out of the band members who would be the woman and who would be the horse?

C: Weird question. I guess I’ll be the woman, she looks like she’s having a better time. My girlfriend always calls me a horse though… because I love to run. 

A: I think the band is the horse, doing all the legwork and looking crazed, barely maintaining its composure.  And the music is the woman riding it – briefly ecstatic and enthralled but could easily fall off and be trampled by an out of key note or off time drum fill at any moment. Gotta be careful up there! 

 THE NWOTHM: Who are the brilliant artists behind all of your artworks?

C: Our first album The Full Moon Sessions was a photo arranged by us and shot by a photographer named Ryan Rose. It came out pretty cool, though we ended up accidentally catching some stuff on fire with the candles and filling the whole tunnel with disgusting black smoke. Some nice young couple was going for a hike through the tunnel just as we did that and they waited for a long time before entering and looked VERY perturbed as they went by us.

Our second album For None and All features an amazing painting by Adam Burke. He’s a modern classic and has done covers for so many amazing bands since then. Our third album Opulent Decay has a painting by the German surrealist Max Ernst called L’oeil du silence (The Eye of Silence). It is from 1943/44 and we were lucky to be able to license it from his estate. Our latest album, Tragic Magic, features a 1893 piece called Frenzy of Exultations by the Polish symbolist Wladyslaw Podkowiński. The story behind this piece is quite dramatic – it was the artist’s masterpiece, but it was brutally rejected by critics. In his despair, Podkowiński slashed the painting (it was later repaired) and took his own life shortly after. If that’s not tragic magic, I don’t know what is. 

THE NWOTHM: What are your fondest memories from being on the road? Any bands you particularly enjoyed playing with?

C: Oh yeah, we’ve had great times on all of our tours! We love being on the road. I remember playing in LA with Voltax quite fondly, which also reminds me of another quite memorable LA show with Grave Danger. Touring Europe with Svartanatt was amazing, as were our USA tours with Lucifer, Order of the Solar Temple, and Witchstone. Our first tour was a fairly insane run across Canada and back with Funeral Circle, which featured a few really swell 30 hour drives nonstop between gigs, because I didn’t know how to plan a tour at all yet! 

We also just got home from Texas, where we played Hell’s Heroes festival alongside some stunning bands like Sonja, Tower, Gatekeeper, Unto Others, Christian Mistress, and many others! We all had a fantastic time. 

THE NWOTHM: What are your live plans for 2023? Will you be conjuring up any performances?

C: You bet. We recently performed our first shows since 2019 on March 18th in Vancouver and the week following at the Hell’s Heroes festival in Texas! Over the next few months, we’ll be doing some shows in Europe, including the Muskelrock Festival in Sweden, and then we’ll be playing the Frozen in Time festival in Fresno, California! Probably some other stuff, too, before the year is out. Our band sounds better than ever and we’re super excited to show off our live set.

THE NWOTHM: Is your quill latched to your hand? Is the ink flowing continuously? Are you writing more music this year?

C: Of course. The only time I’m not writing new music is when we’re recording the music we’ve already written. I work on writing music almost every day. However, that doesn’t mean we’re going to start blasting out 3 new albums each year – we like to take our time and make sure the stuff we release is only the very best stuff we can possibly come up with! All killer, no filler. Also, I’m proud to say that we’ve gotten better with each album we’ve released, as we become better players and writers. There’s so much inspiration out there, so our sound will always be a little bit different, too. We’ll have another new album before too long, and it’ll be our best one yet. 

THE NWOTHM: Where can fans purchase your music and merchandise? Do you have any new items on the way?

C: Sure! The best place is on our bandcamp: https://spellofficial.bandcamp.com/merch

We’ve always got a bunch of stuff up on there, and we’ll put new stuff up from time to time.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spellspell

Instagram: http://instagram.com/spellofficial

Metalblade: https://www.metalblade.com/spell/

#spellcanada #spellheavymetal #spellmetalblade

THE NWOTHM: Finally Is there anything else you would like to mention?

C: Yeah – if you love music then go start a band! You don’t have to be good – everyone sucks at first – but I believe it’s our responsibility to try. You can’t just consume art and really love it without making your own effort. You owe it to the bands and artists that inspire you to try to carry on their legacy. 

Each generation has the responsibility of taking the most beautiful and significant messages from the art that they enjoyed, and translating them into a format that will continue to be relevant to the generation that comes after them. Shakespeare might have been great, but you don’t see too many 15 year olds picking up Hamlet for fun. That’s because the language and format he used is no longer culturally relevant to young people of our generation. The stories are still beautiful, but it requires work to understand and interpret. Some of the subtlety is lost. However – Shakespeare’s stories have lived on because others took inspiration from his works and built this into their own creative efforts, and this continued each generation so that some of the great power of Shakespeare is now built into our cultural landscape. 

The same is true in music. The great blues players of the 50’s and 60’s might not be what most teenagers are talking about these days, but Tony Iommi captured some of the magic that he found in them when he formed Black Sabbath. Though it may be difficult to imagine, the time will come when even Black Sabbath is no longer culturally relevant – and so it’s our job to take what we love about them, or any other band that inspires us, and try to translate that into our own work. If we can continue to do this, then great art will never be lost – it will only grow. If even a few people hear the message that we’re translating from the art we love into the art we make, then we’ve done our job. So start a band, or write, or draw, or film – whatever it is, just make something! It’s your responsibility. We have to do it.