Chamber Singer on Baptism of Fire That Led to Fronting Incendiary Hardcore Act

PT KONTAK PERKASA - What do you do when your frontman quits in the middle of a tour? That was the question Nashville hardcore quintet Chamber stared down last year. The band was in the midst of their first tour when some lingering tension came to a head with original vocalist Sam Fleming, leaving them with a lot of unanswered dates and nobody to scream. Luckily, they had a friend hitching a ride in the van who was more than capable. Jacob Lilly was playing bass with tourmates Orthodox, and overnight, he was initiated into one of the most exciting new heavy acts on the planet.

PT KONTAK PERKASA - And so, partway through the tour, at a moment when Chamber's hype was hitting a fever pitch, Lilly found himself listening to the band's inaugural EP, Hatred Softly Spoken, over and over again, doing his best to memorize the lyrics and feel of its five brutal tracks, in order to make a truly auspicious live debut. It didn't work. The 22-year-old musician freely admits that he had no idea what he was doing onstage during the first few sets. It wasn't until his fourth show, back in his hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, that he finally felt his mojo surging — this, despite pulling double-duty singing with Chamber and playing bass in Orthodox for the duration of the tour.

PT KONTAK PERKASA - By the time Chamber eventually made it to Nashville for a homecoming gig during a later trek, the show was filled with friends who were mildly perturbed that Lilly had supplanted a local. But all doubts were quickly put to bed. "There wasn't drama, but people were bummed like, 'What happened?' But then we played, it was sick, and I was like, 'All right, they don't care that much,'" he remembers.

Filling in on vocal duties is never easy, but filling in on vocal duties for Chamber? One of the most technically pugnacious hardcore bands around? That requires an otherworldly dexterity. Their music is a blunderbuss: death-metal crunch, whiz-bang Dillinger Escape Plan logarithms, grindcore that sounds like a kicked beehive, and even some of the serrated, minor-key guitar whines you could find in the '98 nu-metal catalog. (Lilly doesn't run from that influence either. He cites Converge and Slipknot in equal measure.)

Source : revolvermag.com