Back in 2014 melodic UK proggers Panic Room were telling Prog all about their fourth album Incarnate, going independent again, and how they felt about being labelled withthe 'P' word!
The last year has seen the winds of change sweep through the world of Panic Room. The band stand poised to release their fourth album, Incarnate, in March, but they will do so without one founding member and without their record label. Despite the turbulence of 2013, Panic Room face the future knowing they have crafted some of the most sweeping and expansive music of their career. To borrow an old phrase, per ardua ad astra.
The first seismic shift came in March 2013 with the news that lead guitarist Paul Davies would be departing the fold. “It was pretty devastating,” reveals singer and multi‑instrumentalist Anne-Marie Helder. “It was all very amicable but you can’t always have your paths going in the same direction.”
With gigs already booked for that summer, the band called on Pete Harwood, from Morpheus Rising, to handle guitar duties. When Harwood needed to get back to work with his own band, Helder and her cohorts – bassist Yatim Halimi, drummer Gavin John Griffiths and keyboardist Jonathan Edwards – brought Adam O’Sullivan, who they knew from the local South Wales music scene, on board and set to work on their new album. However, at present Adam remains a highly valued hired gun, rather than a fully deputised member of the gang.
“We decided after Paul left that for now, Panic Room would be the four us – myself, Jon, Gavin and Yatim,” says Helder. “Adam played on the album and has done some amazing work and he’ll be doing the tour with us. Really it’s a case of seeing how we all fit. One thing we’ve learned in the last 12 months is to not take anything for granted.”
Six years on from the release of their debut, Visionary Position, Panic Room’s sound continues to evolve. Incarnate builds on the foundations laid on 2012’s SKIN, always keeping the spotlight on the song. The music is highly melodic and instantly accessible, with lush arrangements that leave plenty of room to showcase Helder’s remarkable voice, alongside Panic Room’s pop sensibilities in crafting catchy hooks.
“Having Adam instead of Paul has made a big difference to the sound. He’s a very different player to Paul so that has affected things quite a lot in the way we write and arrange,” says Jonathan Edwards.
One noticeable change is that the melodies on the new album are typically led by the vocals, keys or acoustic guitar, while lead guitar work is employed sparingly for layering or adding textural flourishes.
“I think the first album is entirely different, really, to everything that came after that. It was only on Satellite [released in 2010] that the band really found its sound,” says Edwards about the ongoing development of Panic Room’s music. “When we recorded the first album, it was done over a year and a half. Nobody played in the same room together – it was all assembled in the studio like a jigsaw puzzle. With Satellite it was really the sound of us playing together in a studio and it’s one of those light-bulb moments. When you think about it, music is about people playing together, so why don’t we record ourselves playing together? I think it sounds immensely better that way, and that’s something we’ve continued on this album.
“We’ve got better, hopefully, at writing songs and learning how songs work – what not to put in, what not to repeat and how to make things sound fresh. We try not to repeat ourselves with each album so SKIN didn’t sound like Satellite, this doesn’t sound like SKIN, because it’s boring for us to repeat the same things and I guess that’s probably the same for listeners as well.”
For SKIN, the band signed to Esoteric Antenna, but new album Incarnate will be self-released through Panic Room’s own label Firefly Music. This doesn’t mean that any bridges have been burnt with Esoteric, though.
“We’re still signed to Esoteric Antenna but we decided to release this one independently,” says Helder. “We have a distribution deal with Nova who we’ve already worked with on Luna Rossa [her acoustic duo with Edwards] and we’re happy with that arrangement. We’re still in a very good relationship with Esoteric and they actually agreed with us that it’s probably wise for us to do this one this way. It just depends on how many units you’re selling.”
“In some ways, going with a record label was an experiment for us,” says Edwards. “It was really useful to work with a record company to see how that worked, and doing SKIN with Esoteric was a really good move for us in terms of raising the band’s profile. But in financial terms, it’s really difficult. If you make an album yourself, once you’ve paid the cost, 100 per cent of the album sales are yours. If you’re with a record company then it’s something between 20 and 30 per cent that’s yours. In those terms, it means you’ve actually got to sell between three and four times as many copies of your album to make the same amount of money than if you did it yourself.
“We’ve spoken to Esoteric and we explained to them what our reasons were for doing this independently and they were quite supportive. It may be that we’ll do the next album with Esoteric – it depends how this one goes. Because we’d done the first two albums ourselves, we’ve built up a lot of contacts in terms of promotion and getting the album heard, so it’s something we’re already fairly good at. We think it’s probably the best move for us at this point in our career, really.”
Panic Room have won no shortage of critical acclaim over the years – Helder won Best Female Vocalist from this very magazine for two years running – but they still have to toil away to try to reach new listeners with each album and tour. “It’s a constant project,” says Helder. “Even if I wasn’t writing songs and recording, I could probably spend 100 per cent of my time just promoting the band. We have to juggle so many jobs within the band and sometimes I’ll spend most of my week purely promoting online. Facebook and Twitter are essential. Some people don’t like them but you have to embrace that.
“We’ve got a really good relationship with our fans and I think that means they’re always happy to bring new people in, both online and to gigs.
“Every time we go to a new city to play, we’re approaching the papers and local radio and making sure we try to get radio play to have new people hear us that way. We find that we have a lot of new faces at each show we play, more so than we did three years ago. Things are definitely growing. There is no magic trick to moving up levels in the industry – it’s just hard work really, and sometimes being in the right place at the right time.”
Panic Room’s first big gig of 2014 will be at the HRH: Prog Festival, where they should receive a warm reception from the prog faithful.
“Most of the fans will say, ‘Unless you’ve seen them live, you haven’t really heard the band,’” says Helder. “We tend to be more powerful live than on recordings so that will be great to reach those people. But the audiences increasingly cross over between progressive and more mainstream rock and pop fans.”
The band have undoubtedly been embraced by prog fans, but on their social media pages they identify themselves as alternative rock, noticeably eschewing the progressive pigeonhole.
“Originally we were labelled as prog because the band that we were in before, Karnataka, was more clearly a prog band,” says Edwards. “I don’t particularly think of Panic Room’s music as being progressive. It’s got elements of progressive music in some of the songs but there are elements of a lot of other types of music – jazz or folk, pop or whatever. A lot of people come to our concerts and they’ve got Magenta or The Reasoning T-shirts, or Pink Floyd or Genesis. I really don’t care what people label us as long as they come and enjoy the music.”
“The problem with describing yourself as a prog rock band is sometimes we’ve had people come to shows when it’s been listed as a prog rock event who were like, ‘Well, you’re not as prog as I thought you would be,’” says Helder. “If you have big keyboards and some longer songs, people associate that with progressive, but we’d rather be thought of as alternative.
“It’s difficult to find the right tag for yourself as any band. We tend to say it’s alternative rock with a sultry edge, and some people have described us as being cinematic rock because some of the songs have a very big movie-style sound to them. We tend to write very emotive music – you could say emotive rock – but maybe the right category doesn’t exist for us.
“We’re well aware of and we embrace the fact that we have some progressive sounds in there, but we also have some songs which are more funk and some that are more jazzy and bluesy, so it never seems completely appropriate to say this is a prog band because we don’t aim to be that.”
All that said, the band clearly have strong roots in the prog community, albeit on the more melodic, song-friendly end of the spectrum, away from the turbulent waters of the chop-busting community. When not fronting Panic Room, Helder has worked with the likes of Wetton/Downes, Parade and, along with drummer Griffiths, Mostly Autumn, which must help to introduce her to new listeners. But as enjoyable as those experiences are, she always returns to Panic Room.
“Working with Mostly Autumn and other bands, that’s very different for me because I’m there as a session player,” she says. “I enjoy it in a different way. I’m on the side – watching the band almost, because I’m playing keys and flute, so I’m watching other people lead the band. In a way it takes the pressure off and I can just play the gigs and not have the responsibility of fronting everything. In every band it’s all about teamwork at the end of the day. The bands that work the best and do the best shows, it’s all about the chemistry you have together.
“I suppose with every band I’ve worked with, I’ve learned something slightly different, but when I go back to Panic Room, the thing I enjoy the most is always the camaraderie we have together. Even in rehearsal, everything that we start playing always feels great and sounds great because the guys are such good musicians. It’s easy, even with a jam, to make it sound tight and to enjoy it.
“We laugh a lot in rehearsals. We take the music seriously but not ourselves. It just feels like coming home with Panic Room because they’re some of my oldest friends and it’s a family more than just a band.”
