New Noise Magazine - Issue #12 by New Noise Magazine

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AINT IT FUN with CHEETAH CHROME Been an interesting summer to say the least… Bush the Dumber and Dick Cheney’s chickens finally came home to roost in the form of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), Israel and the Palestinians are back at it, yet another Malaysian Airlines jet disappeared from the skies, this time with the help of a missile fired by pro-Russia militants in the Ukraine, and the last original Ramone died.

as much as The Ramones. The Ramones, for me and a lot of people, embodied the entire spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. They easily inspired as many people to start bands as The Velvet Underground, and little kids

We noticed that whenever we walked by their dressing room, there was this tapping sound and someone singing very low. At some point after we played, I had to ask them something and knocked on the door, and when they opened it, all four Ramones were there, with their instruments, no amps,

Funny thing is, none of these came as a shock except Tommy Ramone’s passing. The rest is all business as usual for this miserable planet. Humans are warlike. It takes next to nothing to set off conflict in a bar, let alone a tinderbox full of religious zealots like the Middle East. The only thing holding Iraq together was Saddam, asshole that he was. Palestine has two frigging governments and two Constitutions (one driven entirely by hate). How in the hell can they make a decision on anything, let alone sort out a delicate situation like the one with Israel? And Israel? For all of the nobility of their cause, and for all of the support the world has shown them, when it comes down to it, the whole thing with Palestine is about land as much as it is self-defense, plain and simple, one that has killed every peace talk since the formation of the Israeli state. Hospitals and schools are being bombed for chrissakes, and John Kerry is over there hemming and hawing and looking French, and both sides are insulting him and laughing at him, and it will go on forever… …Unlike The Ramones. They are almost all gone. But I digress… Why is it that the bad stuff lasts forever, but a great band that gave the world some great music is gone in less than 40 years? Sure, Marky and CJ and Richie and Elvis are still here, and I am happy that they are: they are great guys and great musicians. And sure, their music will live forever. But that original nucleus – those four parts that made up the original whole – are gone, and for some reason, that freaks me out. The only other band I can think of with allw of the original members dead is the Jimi Hendrix Experience, another groundbreaking band, but for some reason that doesn’t freak me out

The Dead Boys had trouble getting in one hour of a four-hour rehearsal with all five members present… That shows you the dedication those four guys had. I remember all four of the original guys very fondly, as I do all of the later guys as well. All good people. I remember Dee Dee coming up to Stiv at our first CBGB show and tossing Stiv his 007 knife (the same type, I’m told, that Sid Vicious bought in emulation of Dee Dee and, well, you know…) as a token of his appreciation of the band. I remember sitting in Johnny’s apartment with our girlfriends, he and I watching horror flicks, and sharing joints at hottels after our shows. I remember Joey taking us under his wing, lying to Hilly to get us our first gig; sitting up all night listening to records after a night at the Cat Club; getting me to work out an acoustic part for a song (“Come Back Baby”). And I remember Tommy, earnestly convincing us to use Twin Reverbs for the recording of our live album, which he recorded. I have a lot more memories, too many to share here. And so the world will go on its nasty, shitty way, people will hate and kill each other, nations will rise and fall, and the whole damned mess will probably blow up in our faces before too long. But listening to a Ramones record can make the whole shitty mess go away for a little while, which they would have been proud of. So play The Ramones for your children, experience the joy for yourself. Play the Ramones often, for everyone who will listen, and play them for yourselves, just because they were such a great fucking band. Make The Ramones go on forever, just like the bad stuff.

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It might just counteract a lot of it.

Illustration by Chris Shary

RIP Tommy Ramone (1949 - 2014) just loved them. Put on most records and a toddler might look happy, might ask about it, but that’s it. Put on a Ramones song, and that same toddler will immediately be jumping for joy, smiling and laughing, and want to hear it over and over, just feeling the pure love of rock ‘n’ roll. I’ve seen this many times, and it’s a wonderful thing! It’s a well-known fact that kids don’t mince words. If something sucks, they tell you. I was lucky enough to know The Ramones, and to see firsthand the drive and professionalism that got them, well, not as far as it should have. They should have been huge – like Metallica huge – for the amount of work they put into their deceptively “simple” songs. The first gig we played with them was at the New Yorker Theater in Toronto.

Tommy using a little practice kit. They were running through the set, before they went out and played it for the audience. When I asked Johnny later, he told me they ran through it at least twice before every show!

Photography by Dawn Laureen

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........................... I N T E RV I E W W I T H V O C A L I S T A I M E E I N T E R R U P T E R B Y J O H N B . M O O R E bass – is reminiscent of both Rancid and as Armstrong’s work as Tim Timebomb: infectious music coated in two-tone Ska and street punk influences. The project initially started as Aimee’s solo album, but Kevin bringing in his twin brothers morphed it into a full-fledged band. Once Armstrong was invited into the studio, the result was one of punk rock’s best debuts of the summer.

It’s been awhile since Hellcat Records – the Epitaph offshoot co-founded by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong – last put out an album, but the stellar new record from The Interrupters – which is co-produced by Armstrong and features his sometime collaborator Kevin Bivona – was reason enough to get the label up and running again. The debut album – featuring Aimee Interrupter on vocals, Kevin on guitar, and his brothers Jesse and Justin on drums and When I think of German metal bands, I’m reminded of the Teutonic thrash trio of Kreator, Sodom, and Destruction, but Germany also has a rich underground scene that includes metalcore upstarts Any Given Day. Though the band is still young and fresh, they are aiming to make their impact felt in a big way when their debut My Longest Way Home comes out this fall. Germany is rich in heavy metal culture. Who first got you interested in metal? Bands like Metallica, Pantera, KISS, Killswitch Engage, and Machine Head got us interested in metal. These are our roots. How long has Any Given Day been together and how was the band formed? We’ve known each other for almost a decade now. Over the years, some of us played together in different combos. But it was never exactly brilliant. In spring 2012, the time was ripe to start

How did the band first come together? I was writing my solo record with Kevin [Bivona] and he was producing. He brought the twins [Jesse and Justin Bivona] in to work on it, and we all had really good chemistry, so we decided to start a band. Kevin and the twins have been playing together since they were kids and I already had good chemistry with Kevin, so it all came together in a very natural way. Still haven’t finished that solo record! When and how did Tim Armstrong take an interest in you?

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Tim and Kevin have been doing music together for years on various projects [Transplants, Jimmy Cliff]. Tim co-wrote a few songs that were supposed to be for my album. When we made the shift to being a band, he was just as excited as we were, so he jumped onboard right away as co-writer and producer. We were very lucky to have him. He got it right away and helped us develop our sound. He’s kind of like the “fifth Interrupter.” What was he like to work with in the studio? It was amazing. We are all huge fans of his music and the records he has made. Being in the studio with him was so fun and spontaneous. We got so much done in such a short period of time because he made sure we weren’t overthinking it and we were being ourselves. It was very inspiring to make the record with him. How long had you been working on the songs for this record? When we got together as a band, we pretty

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........................... I N T E RV I E W W I T H B A S S I S T M I C H A E L G O L I N S K I B Y B R A N D O N R I N G O something new. Up to now, it has worked out! When did you begin songwriting for My Longest Way Home? My Longest Way Home is the result of a very intensive songwriting process. We started to work on the first songs of the album two years ago. We took the time for every single song; everything was supposed to fit. How did you decide to release My Longest Way Home through Redfield Records? We checked all our options and then we relied on our gut instinct. So far, it has been reliable. The teamwork with Redfield Records works out and we are looking forward to a good cooperation and hopefully a successful time.

Are there particular interests or personal rituals that keep your creative fire going? We always try to take all the time it needs to arrange a song. Time pressure is poison for your creativity. We get our inspiration from everyday madness. Music is the way we vent our anger. You cover Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” which is an unexpected choice. How did that come about? Again, our gut instinct comes into play here. There were a few songs that were shortlisted,

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Popular opinion in the music industry is that good bands aren’t forming as often anymore. But when you stumble across a band like the U.K.’s Empress AD, it’s hard not to take notice. Their unique blend of prog rock and sludge metal makes them a band to keep an eye on in

You guys spent your collective life’s savings on Still Life Moving Fast. Did the high stakes make recording more stressful? We knew the risk we were taking, but we believed in the album so much that it kind of made us forget about the whole money thing. It was a no brainer for us to spend the extra money to get the best sounding album we possibly could. The whole album was about vibe and getting a natural feel, so the minute you start thinking about money and stuff like that when you’re in the creative process, you’re not writing for yourself anymore and the whole process loses its spontaneity. How did the band initially form?

What inspired the song “Easy on You”? Sometimes I can be a little Catholic-guilt ridden. I was trying to cheer myself up one day and the chorus popped into my head. That song is for anyone who is extra hard on themselves for things they can’t control. It made me feel better, so I’m hoping it does that for others. What is it like working as a band compared to going it alone? I’ve been solo for so many years. It feels like a weight off my shoulders that I can share responsibility with the boys. That being said, if I don’t wanna sing something, no one makes me. We all have each other’s backs.

Photo: Mirko Witzki

What sound were you looking to achieve when you began the recording process? There was no concept for the album when we began the songwriting. We allowed free play and My Longest Way Home is the result.

INTERVIEW WITH VOCALIST AND GUITARIST OLLIE LORING BY BRANDON RINGO 2014 and beyond.

much started writing from scratch aside from some ideas we had already been kicking around. We got together with Tim, played him ideas, and we just developed the ones that felt good. We started recording the album, like, the next day, so everything was pretty fresh to us.

We’ve been writing together for about six years now, but we’ve been playing shows as a band for about two and a half. [Bassist] Alex [Loring], [drummer] Edd [Unwin], and I were all in bands before that we weren’t really into musically, so we all felt that we needed a fresh start playing music we actually wanted to play. Did you have a specific sound in mind? Originally, I wanted us to be a thrash band. Everyone wanted to go in a different direction for the first year or so of writing. It was a tough and really directionless time with a lot of doubts. All of a sudden, we just started writing riffs that sounded new and fresh, and it all snowballed from there.

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but in the end, we trusted our inner feeling and decided for “Diamonds.” A good decision, we think! But even if the cover arouses interest, it was our personal matter that our own songs even exceed this. Why did you choose Andrew Schneider to produce the album? When we started to think about recording the album, we knew we wanted a live and natural sound that was still big. Alex showed me Perfect Pitch Black by Cave In and Keelhaul’s Triumphant Return to Obscurity – both produced by Andrew – and we were both fully loving the sound of them. They had the big but natural sound we were after. Another big thing for us was for the album to sound human, like people are actually playing it live, rather than doing a shitty take and just lining everything up on a Pro Tools session. Andrew was all about the vibe and live feel too. It just worked perfectly for us.

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INTERVIEW WITH FRONTMAN MIKE ROGERS BY KEVIN J. WELLS Mike Rogers started the band after having jam sessions with his friend guitarist Brian Warren and members of Warren’s band Weatherbox. However, it was not until Rogers was attending school in London that he started recording music with a friend who was living in Santa Cruz at the time. “I would record guitar and vocals and send it to my friend Ryan Hill, and he would make drums and bass for it,” Rogers explains.

In the past, indie-rock band Future Crooks was known simply as Crooks. Unfortunately for them, there was already a band called The Crooks, so in the last few months, they became Future Crooks. The band’s debut album on Bad Timing Records, Future Crooks in Paradise, is slated for an October 7 release. Rock ‘n’ roll animals Mat Franklin and Lex Vegas of Cadaver Dogs are taking the country by the throat in their children’s transport van, with a custom made drum set and a single guitar.

When Rogers returned home for winter break, he and Hill were asked by guitarist George Pritzker and drummer Mark Deriso from Weatherbox if they wanted to play together as a band. Rogers says, “Ryan and I were totally excited and down, and hadn’t thought about making it a sick rock band.” Warren, who has been playing with Rogers from the start,

rounded out the quintet now based out of San Diego. While home for summer break in 2006, Rogers recorded some of the songs he wrote with Hill for an eponymous Crooks album. They recorded the album in a friend’s barn in Rancho Santa Fe, CA. The lineup consisted of Rogers with Brian and Mark from Weatherbox, and Alex Kent from Say Anything. Crooks later recorded Kids, Cops, and Space TV. In 2012, Crooks went into the studio to record and self-produce a third album, Crooks in Paradise. The drums were recorded at Big Fish Recording Studio, while Tommy Garcia – the guitarist from Mrs. Magician – recorded the rest at Electric Orange Studios. Ben Moore mixed the album.

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They ended up in my hometown of Sacramento, hopping on as the openers for a show that was already six bands deep. Ordering mimosas at the bar and conversing for a solid 10 minutes on the different shades of red lipstick that Covergirl offers, Mat and Lex are not only the type of people who trash whatever stage they grace with sexy rock ‘n’ roll, but are also the type of people who I never want to see go back to Columbus, OH. Recorded for Mind Over Matter Records and digitally released in June, their new album Too Much is upping the ante and conquering the impossible by being more seductive and risqué than their previous release, super loose. You’re out on the road as a two-piece now.

Being taken out on the road with Foxy Shazam was a huge opportunity for the Dogs. How did they discover you? We’ve known those cool cats for years and years. We were originally in a band with Alex [Nauth], their horn slayer. That led to us doing

a couple shows together, which led to Mat doing art/design and road work for them. I’ve done some journalistic work with them, and eventually, we just did the whole country together and went goddamn nuts. No lie.

What should we expect from the new album? How do you keep topping your previous records? The new record is a gargantuan, hormonefilled ragebeast that we’re very happy to feed with the innocence of everyone who comes to our shows every night. It seemed like an impossible task to top our previous album on sheer ferocity and sex appeal, but a night in Hollywood drinking Jägermeister with Lemmy and Justin Timberlake revealed the secret. But you’ll have to come backstage to find out any more.

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INTERVIEW WITH JEN VITO AND ROGER MANGANELLI BY MORGAN Y. EVANS

Nathen Maxwell is pretty busy with his day job, playing bass for one of the most successful Celtic punk rock bands in the world, Flogging Molly. But between endless tours with Flogging Molly, Maxwell still finds time, occasionally, to work on his side project The Bunny Gang. It’s been five years since Maxwell and The Bunny Gang put out their debut White Rabbit, but they are back with a fantastic follow up, Thrive. Your last solo record has a rabbit on the cover and your new band is called The Bunny Gang. What’s the deal with the rabbit theme? The Bunny Gang means peace punks. The rabbit represents new life and abundance. To make a change these days, quite often you must do it from within the belly of the beast. Many have been and will continue to be sacrificed in order for us all to thrive. Also, the punk rock crew I grew up with in the South Bay of L.A. is called the Original Bunny Gang, or OBG PUNX. Is this band the same one that performed on

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Bad Timing Records remastered the album for vinyl. Other than that, the record is essentially the same, but will now be available in more formats with better distribution and packaging. “At least, they better not have fuckin’ changed anything,” Rogers laughs. “Brian and I produced it. Brian was very adamant about trying to keep the songs as close as possible to the old record when they needed to be. His attention to detail really helped.”

INTERVIEW WITH DRUMMER LEX VEGAS BY ERIN JORDAN How has that differed from previous tours with another person in the van? While we definitely miss the camaraderie of our past bandmates, being a duo has definitely made life in general easier and opened up some space for lots of extracurricular activities. For instance, now when we get bottles of booze in our green rooms, we only split them with each other. And we can spread out more in the van, and it probably stinks less of sweaty human. And we’re way louder. I can’t explain that one. Oh man, we have fun.

Gainesville is a big goddamned incestuous city when it comes to bands (see also in this issue: Sunshine State). So when Roger Manganelli, bassist of Less Than Jake, crossed paths with Jen Vito, guitarist and vocalist of NOMORE (who are on drummer of Less Than Jake Vinnie Fiorello’s label, Paper + Plastick) at his Moathouse Studios, yet another great band sprung from the fertile fauna of Gainesville.

Crooks in Paradise was originally released on the band’s Bandcamp page. After being on Bandcamp for only two months, the record caught the ears of Thomas Nassiff and Zack Zarillo of Bad Timing Records out of Philadelphia. Nassif and Zarillo said they wanted to give the Crooks in Paradise record a proper release and pulled it from Bandcamp. The band then changed their name to Future Crooks and the album became Future Crooks in Paradise.

Hello new favorite pop punk band! How did this project come about? The songs sound so bright and uplifting. JV: Heyyy… This project came about while I was recording at Roger’s studio The Moathouse with my band NOMORE. Roger (and Less Than Jake) has been a longtime friend and was producing and engineering our album. He and I got a good taste of what it’s like to collaborate intimately on songs (structure, vocals, guitars) and realized we had some great artistic chemistry. We started trading riffs and song ideas and jamming in the Moathouse basement. I love your voices together. Was it fun writing lyrics and harmonies knowing your strengths? JV: Yeah, it was so much fun! I absolutely loved writing and singing together, and working off of each other’s strengths. I learned a lot, too.

I tend to want to write about political and social issues, and sometimes keep my personal emotions a bit guarded. Rog’s influence was to open up some of those emotions, find the personal in the political, and make the ideas more accessible. And of course, as anyone who has recorded there knows, Roger and The Moathouse Studio make everything sound awesome!

“I Hit the Wall” and “Always Be the Same” are motivating. Early on, did you want to write songs about dealing with depression and life’s bummers? JV: Over the couple of years we worked on this record we talked about a lot of “stuff,” as friends do. By the time we were penning the lyrics, I think we both had a good idea of where each other was coming from regarding feelings and histories. I think some deep stuff sort of came out subconsciously when we were

The Dogs are out on the road this September in celebration of the Too Much album release. From East Coast to Midwest to West Coast, they’re bringing the party to every stop they make. Be sure to mark your calendars for the full moon, because they will be howling. writing, some of which I didn’t fully realize until after I heard the finished product. RM: Part of the theme we had was: to push on, to move forward and get through whatever there is to get through, and to push yourself and strive for something better than what you were handed. Sometimes, being at the very bottom of the barrel, literally hitting the wall can be the motivator to get you moving forward. How did you get involved with Anchorless Records for this EP? What an awesome little label! JV: Yay, Anchorless is sweet! RM: I produced a record for a band called Teen Agers, and Anchorless put that record out. I got to know Neil and he has a great vibe. Another label pulled out of releasing this EP at the last minute, so I approached Neil and he was totally into the songs and the idea. It’s been really perfect. It’s a great time to be in a band with solid mid-level labels out there that maybe aren’t selling a million copies, but put out good music with excellent art and attention to detail.

........................... INTERVIEW WITH FRONTMAN NATHEN MAXWELL BY JOHN B. MOORE White Rabbit? White Rabbit was recorded like more of a solo record. My father Maxwell laid down the drums, then I overdubbed all the other instruments: rhythm guitar, vocals, melodica, and bass. Afterwards the producer Ted Hut laid down lead guitar, space echo, etc. For Thrive, it was recorded as more of a full band experience with Nat Lort-Nelson on lead guitar, Mike Peralta on bass, and Maxwell on drums. It’s been about five years since the last record. When were the songs on Thrive written? Thrive is a collection of both brand new songs and songs that have been stirring around for some time. Why did you decide to record in El Paso?

I discovered Sonic Ranch in El Paso during Flogging Molly’s Speed of Darkness recording. I immediately fell in love with the location, studio, and people. I knew then that that was where I wanted to do my next record.

What is the story behind “Sirens in the City”? Back when I was still living in L.A., I was working with a great musician and friend named Scott Abels. He showed me the riff and I went home to Harbor City and just wrote, mainly about what I heard through my bedroom window: helicopters above and sirens through the city. Has Flogging Molly finished the next record yet?

together to record our new record this year. You guys are hosting the Salty Dog Cruise early next year. How did that come about? Pirates and the sea. It’s just meant to be.

Flogging Molly is currently putting plans

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H B A S S I S T N I C K R O S I C A B Y J O H N G LY N N

Formed six years ago, The Great Explainer delivers their own brand of gritty post hardcore punk. Complimented by divergent vocals and free flowing riffs, their new selftitled album is due for release on October 28. What inspired the title of “Michael Jordan: 666” from your debut EP? Connoisseur may seem like an odd name for a crusty, sludge drenched band budding from Oakland, CA. No refined, delicate posture here. No foie gras or escargot either. This is heavy, blistering music. All gathered under the album name, Stoner Justice. Guitarist and songwriter Daniel Hague has been rolling up songs for his band to spark since January 2011. “I had seen a bunch of great shows that month and was motivated to start something new,” Hague says. “I had a silly idea to combine East Coast breakdown hardcore with West Coast style fast hardcore and power-violence, and roll it all up with goofy lyrics that take a militant stance toward smoking weed. The drummer Lyle and I had grown up in the ‘90s in Rochester, NY, around a lot of militant vegan straightedge hardcore. The music and lyrics are influenced [by] and spoofing that. We both loved West Coast hardcore though. Bands like Noothgrush, Dystopia, Spazz, and What Happens Next are all influences for us as much as Chokehold, Earth Crisis, and Integrity. [Vocalist] Carlos was here for a lot of what Lyle and I are influenced by, so he gets it and fits perfectly. Our sound is pretty intentional

Unfortunately, there is no cool story behind that name. Our previous guitar player’s code to get in to work was 23666, hence us coming up with “Michael Jordan: 666.” All of our songs get these temporary placeholder names that we eventually change to real song names, and they’re usually based off of something stupid like that. For whatever reason, that name stuck as the official name. We have a lot of other stupid placeholder names I could tell you, but I may give away some of our passwords, so I’ll keep those secret.

You almost didn’t make it to your first FEST appearance. What happened? Yeah, our van dying on the road in North Carolina while we were on our way to The Fest in 2010 really sucked. We bought this huge van so we could tour more properly. At some point on I-95 in North Carolina, it started getting

hot and making a weird noise. The awesome dudes in Dead To Me saw us in distress as they were going down the highway and stopped to see if we were okay, which was really cool of them. Anyway, we take the van to a garage and the guy tells us… the van was dead. We ended up selling the van to the guy for scrap and renting a van to continue the rest of the tour.

What can we expect from the new record? This record has a much more solid sound than our previous recordings. Some of our older stuff was a sort of going in a couple different directions musically, and I’d hate to use the term “straightforward,” because it definitely is not that, but this record is really solid as a whole.

You’ve been together for a decent amount of time. How do you think the music scene has changed from when you first started out? It’s certainly a different scene from when we were growing up, but we’re also still relatively young, so it is hard to say. I feel like when I was younger, I had a more idealized view of the scene, and now that we’re more involved, I see that there is a lot of different stuff going on. More drama, egos, etc. However, I think the punk scene has gotten

If you could go for a beer with any musician, who would you choose? Ian MacKaye would be #1 on our list to have a drink with, but I don’t know how into that he’d be (laughs). We’ll drink his beer if necessary.

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and everyone adds their personal touch to the songs. After three and a half years, I can see where we grow and change. I personally try to write new sounding songs, exploring more things, while at the same time embracing older tunes enough to expand on those jokes further. It’s a fine line. Hopefully, we do OK navigating that line.” Oakland is home to some of the ugliest, gnarliest metal and hardcore of the last 30 years. The O also happens to be at the forefront of civilized marijuana systematic implementation. The part of the city dubbed Oaksterdam gained momentum in the mid 2000s. “Oakland cracked down on Oaksterdam, though it’s still alive. The community seems to be down with people getting baked. It’s generally OK to get lit in the smoking sections of some bars and clubs, and lots of people have great weed and hash. I love all of that.” Connoisseur has put out a few EPs, including PSA, which lampoons some hardcore classics.

Stoner Justice continues the blazing music, but Hague admits it was “an odd one for us. Seth and I wrote the music while we were transitioning between vocalists. Seth then had to move to the Netherlands. Thankfully, [it was] enough notice to go into Earhammer Studio for a couple days to track all the songs we wrote. We are all very happy with the recordings. Greg Wilkinson is the wizard behind Earhammer. He gets the joke. He has great ears, and is very, very patient.” Hague keeps the tradition of Oakland (from Neurosis to Too $hort) pulsating with Connoisseur. This is evident from the shows they have booked at “either houses or DIY spaces, though we did do one bar show, and a show in a coffee shop in Kamloops. The turnout and responses were much better than I expected, so that’s got me all buzzed, along with this weed.” Stoner Justice was pressed on cassette through Oakland’s stalwart label Tankcrimes. “I can’t think

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I N TERVI EW W I TH B A SSI ST/ VOCA L IS T S T E V E S M E A L B Y J A ME S A LVA R E Z was still a band,” Steve reveals. “We’re all good friends, so after [drummer] Joey [Edwards] left Ruiner, we wanted to find a way to keep playing music together, or if anything just an excuse to hang out.” With their previous band now in ruins, Steve, Joey and guitarist and vocalist Dustin [Thornton] decided to soldier on, taking the angst their old outfit so gloriously personified into a murky new realm of heaviness.

“Holy Tongues actually started while Ruiner Crimson Shadows create an awesome mix of death, black, and power metal, reminiscent of a fusion of Ensiferum and Dragonforce. Breathtaking solos and harsh vocal elements combine to make something that is both vicious and pleasantly melodic. How did the band get together? Crimson Shadows began eight years ago when two bands that a few of our members belonged to decided to stop playing music together. It was was created by the remaining members of these two bands to create a style of metal that was not very prevalent in Canada at the time. The guys focused on trying to create something original, while minding the styles of bands overseas such as Amon Amarth, Stratovarius, Dragonforce, etc. The new album is called Kings Among Men. Is this a tongue-in-cheek reference to yourselves? We wanted to choose a name for our Napalm Records debut that spoke of grand intentions for the band and related to the content of each song without being overly descriptive. All the songs on the record speak of large scale

If you could be featured on any movie’s soundtrack, which would you pick? The Shining. Kubrick is the shit.

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From the ashes of Baltimore hardcore evangelists Ruiner come Holy Tongues, a trio hell bent on proselytizing us through the stagnant waters of modern life. Remember their name, it will be rolling off the tips of your own tongues when those end of year lists are due come December.

much wider, in that there are more people playing music that is considered “punk” and bringing a lot of other influences into it, which creates a lot of unique sounds.

“I think each Ruiner record was a progressive step from the previous one,” Smeal says. “Holy Tongues is more like four or five steps off.” Just as Obi-Wan shed his physical form after being struck down, the lads in Holy Tongues have transcended the confines of hardcore with their ghostly new project. Their debut album, Weak People, is a swampy cesspool of raw emotion and rockin’ tunes. Droning guitar wails echo throughout, while

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the band’s lockstep rhythm section goes from meandering to pummeling on cue. Sludgy bass lines and shouted group vocals lure you in before the ambush of haunting riffs and ear-cracking snare hits seals the deal. Imagine the somber, emotive drive behind You Fail Me era Converge, mixed with the heavy rock vibe of Quicksand (the band… and the substance). Weak People succeeds in creating the gnarly, doomed out post-hardcore atmosphere we all know and love, with lyrics running the gamut of lamenting crooked teeth and bad tattoos to recoiling from tragedy and yearning for faith, but the album’s secret weapon is the band’s ace songwriting and incessant catchiness. Weak People is stacked with both memorable and powerful songs. Tracks like “92” and album opener/nihilist hymn “Pale Light” pack a wallop most reminiscent of the band’s hardcore past. Lumbering anthems like “Filters” and “Bright Light” offer enough slow-

of anyone I would rather team up with to get our music released, and am honored that [owner Scotty Heath] wants to work with us. I am terrible at hitting up labels, I don’t like the lobbying aspect, I just like writing and playing the songs. The fact that he approached us floors me. I look forward to what we do together.” build crescendos and sing along choruses to entrance a small army. You’ll be shouting “one by one by one” during “Small Fires” in no time. “We’re entering periods of our lives where we went from sitting in a van for six months to working ‘real’ jobs, going to college, getting married, having kids… and it’s weird,” Smeal says. “The whole process of going through transitions in life is what we wrote about on this record. You experience highs and lows, and sometimes you just seem lost. I’ve described it before as jumping off a cliff and just looking for something to grab ahold of to catch your fall.” That’s exactly what Weak People is: it’s a sonic and emotional anchor. The world may keep spinning in strange new (and sometimes terribly familiar) ways, but the tranceinducing grooves and spoken word level rawness of Holy Tongues’ new album offers a brief respite of sanity and compassion in this otherwise topsy-turvy society of ours. That, and it’s just a really solid collection of tunes. Weak People is a start to finish rocker. Heads will bob and refrains will be chanted.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H B A S S I S T M O R G A N R I D E R B Y E R I C M AY accomplishment and overcoming massive feats when the odds are not in your favor. We didn’t intend on the title being a referral to ourselves, but to the content of the songs. The songs deal mainly with heroic and purposeful imagery, such as deciding where your feet fall, resilience in the face of adversity, navigating your own destiny, and others in this vein.

What was the writing and recording process like? [Vocalist and guitarist] Greg [Rounding] and [guitarist] Ryan [Hofing] composed the basic structure of the songs and the more basic renditions of the riffs. We did a lot of preproduction starting more or less when we came back from Wacken Open Air and our Canadian tour last summer, and worked our way into the winter. [Drummer] Cory [Hofing] and I took what was completed and arranged our own takes on our parts. The lyrics and the newest element that we added to our music – the orchestral arrangements – were

a communal effort. For the orchestrations on this record, we invited our engineer Jonathan Francois-Leduc (Blackguard, Ex Deo) to perform them! By the time we hit Silver Wings Studios in Montreal, we were ready to go. We had booked only two weeks with them, so we needed to be as prepared as possible.

What are your lyrics about, and where do you draw inspiration? A “motherfucker!” whizzed past my ears at one point… I think the line you heard was in the song “Maiden’s Call.” I’m not sure who wrote that particular line, but it goes, “Kill some motherfuckers, and eat some ham…” which is absolute poetry. We’ve even decided that we’re going to put it on the back of a shirt sometime. We don’t really write lines like that to see how vulgar we can make our lyrics, but because we think it’s funny and it adds a little humor to our music, which is nice. A lot of our lyrics actually stem from Canadian history and tales of national pride in our country. We write our

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lyrics to partake of these inspirations, but we also write them in a way that depicts a light of medieval imagery. Like I said, we are all huge fans medieval fantasy literature, games, movies, etc., so it shows a lot in our art and lyrics.

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INTERVIEW WITH VOCALIST/GUITARIST ZOCK HERZOG BY KEVIN J. WELLS

DC VHS,” Herzog laughs. “That just triggered it. I basically taught myself to play guitar to the AC/DC: Live in Donington VHS. I just watched it once a day, sometimes twice. That’s how I slowly taught myself how to play guitar.”

Not many punk bands come from Austria rather than London or Los Angeles or New York, and yet, Astpai has done just that. The band started in 2001, playing mostly covers until they started writing the majority of their own music in 2002. When asked, Astpai describes themselves as “Strike Anywhere meets AC/DC.” Lead singer and guitarist Zock Herzog taught himself how to play guitar by watching AC/DC. “I got into guitar from watching a Rolling Stones VHS, and then moving on to an AC/ Germany is standing tall on the global stage these days. They’re the top dog of the European Union, stood up to those pesky Americans and their knack for illegal wiretapping and Internet spying (sorry about that, world), and just recently their national team not only swept the World Cup, but utterly devastated the Brazilian home team in the most lopsided, and tweeted about, soccer match in history. Now, the laundry list of German achievements has just gotten bigger, after Munich thrashers Dust Bolt released their new album Awake the Riot on Napalm Records earlier this summer. Awake the Riot marks the Dust Bolt crew’s second full-length recording and it’s a high octane dose of precision thrash metal. If you factor in the relative youth of the band’s lineup – their average age is about 21 years old – Dust Bolt’s new album becomes even more extraordinary. Dust Bolt frontman Lenny B. gives us some insight into the band’s continued rise to underground prominence, and just how the hell they learned to play so well in such short time. “The four of us went to school together,” Lenny explains. “At that point, we all were about 13 years old and were just starting to cover songs from our favorite punk and metal bands. I wouldn’t say we were child prodigies, definitely not, but we just started very, very early and we’ve always been really ambitious.” For a bit Photo: Josh Huskin

Zock got into punk via the popular music of the time, Blink-182 and Green Day. As a teenager, punk rock appealed to him. “You just get to that age where you feel like that’s the most rebellion you’ll ever feel in life. It’s also playable because it’s only a couple of chords. You and your mates can start a band and write shitty songs, especially when you’re trying to write songs in English and your English is fucking terrible at the age of 13, stuck in a small town in Austria.” It was at that special age when one begins to form your own thoughts rather than those that were forced upon you growing up that Zock Herzog found punk music. No longer

did Zock see the world as he may have been told to see it, but as he actually felt he saw it. Punk rock gave him a vehicle for his message. “Being 13 or 14, [punk] just suited an alternative mindset, because you’re starting to get interested in politics and you’re starting to make up your own mind.” As for the band’s name, Astpai, it is not even a real word. “A friend just drew over a sticker. He had an Eastpak sticker on his pencil case. He drew over a couple of the letters and made the word ‘ASTPAI.’ It was cool because we had a local skate shop that gave out free Eastpak stickers. Kids could draw over them and make their own.” Burden Calls is Astpa’s fifth studio record and they tried something they had never done before: a concept record. “There’s basically one story that goes from song one all the way through song 13. I just wanted to try it out,

In September, Astpa will kick off its tour in support of Burden Calls in Europe and, following that tour, they plan to head to the U.S. for a month. The tour is still in the planning stages, but they are planning to start their U.S. tour at FEST in Florida, and then likely tour the East Coast and possibly the Midwest.

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Soon, the band got more serious. They began writing originals and doing regional gigs and local battle of the band type contests whenever possible. “Before we put out our first demo tape, we had a pretty silly German name,” Lenny reveals. “Someone just came up with Dust Bolt, which we really liked, and we chose it because it sounded and looked cool. We’ll figure out its meaning one day,” he laughs. You know what else is cool? Landing support gigs with international metal heavyweights like Sepultura, Napalm Death, and Obituary, and that’s exactly what these then-teenagers managed to accomplish after spending countless hours honing their songwriting and technical chops. “We practiced a lot,” Lenny informs us, “and always continued criticizing and working on ourselves.” In 2011, they won the “German edition of Wacken Metal Battle” and started to record their first full-length album Violent Demolition. The strength of that record landed them their deal with Napalm Records and ushered them into the hearts and minds of metal fiends around the globe. And that, folks,

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is how you go from teenage garage band to rising metal stars before your 21st birthday. So the lads in Dust Bolt are kinda young, but that novelty would have quickly worn off if these dudes didn’t have some serious talent. Case in point: their new album Awake the Riot. It is equal parts pulverizing and infectious. The obvious ‘80s thrash influence – from Bay Area bands to their native Teutonic thrash legends – is there, but this record is also packed to the brim with elements of early death metal, technical shred, and even some punk and hardcore. “We were all listening to different types of music, and all of them had some kind of impact on our own writing,” Lenny says of the band’s varied influences.

This explains why neck-snappers like “Agent Thrash” rest alongside progressive-leaning shredders like “You Lost Sight” and “Drowned in Blind Faith.” If you took the scalpel-like precision of Kreator, added the raucous vibe of Exodus, and some state of the art shredding à la Megadeth, you’d get the gist of what Awake the Riot is all about. “We write what comes to our mind… We don´t sit down and decide which way a song should sound, we just do it,” Lenny says.

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and feel confident about the way that it came out. The studio choice that we got to work with, along with the producer named Cory Brunnemann, who is a local guy. Everything came out way better than we expected, and we can’t wait to get out there and show everyone who Darkness Divided are.

Written in Blood – your debut for Victory Records –was just released. What were you looking to accomplish on your first label outing? This is going to be out first full-length album. We’ve gotten to work on it for a very long time

While the band chose the song “Careers” as the first single off the new record simply because it is the catchiest tune, do not judge the album from that one standalone song. “It doesn’t make sense to shuffle the record,” Zock says. “It only makes sense to listen to it as we put it together. We made an effort to have the music match the mood of the lyrics. Hopefully that comes across.”

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H V O C A L I S T G E R A R D M O R A B Y R O B E R T FAY E T T E

Drawing inspiration from the Christian metalcore artists who came before them, San Antonio-based band Darkness Divided are set to release their Victory Records debut Written in Blood. Vocalist Gerard Mora speaks at length about Written in Blood, his views on his fellow Christian metalcore artists, and what Darkness Divided is all about.

and it felt really refreshing to try and write the whole story around one character, pretty much. We also tried to link certain songs musically. If one song ended with a certain riff, that riff would then come back in the next song.”

Is there a message you want to deliver through Written in Blood? We’re a Christian band, so a lot of what we do is make sure you never have to feel like life is too hard. We have a real positive message in our music and the way we are on stage, which is the most important thing to us. Music-wise, we are really excited about the type of sound that we have developed from being a band for a few years. This is the first time that we really challenged our sound and recorded an album. We have always told ourselves that we want to write the type of music that we would hear on the radio. The song we put out recently called “A Well Run Dry” is the heaviest song on the record, and we were really blown away by the reception that we got from it.

Have other Christian metal bands made it easier for Darkness Divided to get its foot in the door? Well, when we first started playing metal music four years ago, everyone looked up to For Today, The Devil Wears Prada, and As I Lay Dying while they were becoming who they are. That was the type of music that really got us into metal. There were also those crossover bands like Atreyu and Avenged Sevenfold. Eventually, you grow into your musical tastes. Those bands were definitely the huge acts who inspired us, [but] more fans would describe us as more similar to August Burns Red due to a more melodic influence. When we were 17 to 18 years old and our guitar player was 14 years old, they were the ones who we looked up to, which you can tell in our music.

What is your approach to delivering your message versus other bands that use their shows as a sanctuary to deliver theirs? Funny thing is you have some bands with their views that come across as preachy and political to sway a certain way. We really just want to

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Dust Bolt’s new record shows a band hitting its stride on a technical level, but also itching to communicate something to the world at large. Lenny expands on this notion: “We were really hungry to write new songs and bring the band to the next level… We wanted to give people an impulse to awake and maybe to start questioning established systems and concepts again.” In short, Awake the Riot “is about spreading the feeling of a new generation that won’t just accept everything as blind followers, whether it’s politics, economics, or human relations in general. That’s why we came up with the title Awake the Riot. It totally fits.”

meet people and grow in the relationship. Every time we go on stage, we aren’t judging or condemning you, because we don’t believe in the same as you. We just want everyone to know that we are all people who are living together in this world, and if you are going through anything spiritual, for example, we are here to talk to you about it. Once Written in Blood is released, are you hitting the road? Immediately after the record is released, we are planning on doing local shows in Texas – including Austin and Corpus Christi – to really push the record. In September – we haven’t announced any plans yet – but we have confirmed an East Coast tour which we are excited about since have never been there. There are also a few other offers in the air right now that we are confirming depending on the logistics of the tour. From September on, we are planning on being on the road 24/7. We have been a band for four years now, so every tour that we have done, I have booked them all on my own. The fact that someone is willing to book a tour for us is pretty awesome given the amount of time and effort that goes into that.

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Prince is a punk band from Austin, TX, boasting members of Dude Jams, Capitalist Kids, Wild America, among other bands. Their mutant brand of punk is a love letter to late ‘70s power pop that combines the lofi scuzziness of garage punk and the sugary cynicism of classic pop punk. Prince isn’t all dirt and noise; they also write some of the catchiest vocal hooks in underground punk. Their latest self-titled EP is currently only available for streaming, but will be out on vinyl from Dead Broke Rekerds before the band embarks on their winter U.S. tour. How did Prince come together? Prince was already a weird project going on before I was in the band, but it wasn’t called Prince. I can assure you, it wasn’t nearly as great as it is since I’ve joined. Ben Snakepit [J-Church, “Snakepit”] jammed around with ‘em first, and decided he wanted to try out being a super adult and not play in another band at the time. So, as a very noble and kind gesture, he found himself a replacement instead of just ditching them without a bass player. He hit me up and asked me if I wanted to take his place. I said sure, I’d try it once and see what gives. [Guitarist and vocalist] Brad [Bingham] had the bare bones of songs and some complete songs. Brad and I hit it off right away with writing and working out new parts to old songs or whatever. Everything else kind of just fell into place. Thanks, Ben. I hope I get rich and famous from being sued by that other guy who uses our band name. And then

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I’m going to buy a helicopter and fly over your house every day, and throw records at you like ninja stars. Prince is a pretty bold name for a band, considering the competition. How did you choose it and what has been the funniest mix up so far? We really didn’t choose Prince. We – specifically Brad – just couldn’t come up with a name that didn’t sound like we are either robots, or playing songs about whiskey underneath water towers to a bunch of dirty kids flying signs out by the freeway with underfed dogs. And people started asking us to play shows. So, as a joke, at our first show with Wild America and Sex Advice, I told them we were called Prince without running it by anyone else in the band. Then, our friends either thought it was really stupid or found the humor in it, and so now Prince rides on. Nothing too great has come from it. Except for some lady who bought like $100 worth of pre-sale tickets as soon as they went on sale during South By Southwest with us, Off With Their Heads, and The Slow Death. I was also just informed that our show in Chicago for our August tour sold out in record time. See ya later, small-timer. However, ripping people off is never our intention. But if you honestly

believe the other guy who uses our band name is opening up for bands like Sass Dragons, Off With Their heads, Lemuria, and so on, and tickets are only $8 to $10… Come on. That is super beyond unrealistic and takes zero brains to figure out. That other guy only plays for like a million bucks a ticket. Someday… Oh, someday… Your self-titled EP has been streaming for a while, but it’s coming out on vinyl soon, right? Yeah. We decided we’re a new band that no one knows much about, so why not put what we have out on that Jerry Springer marathon known as the Internet? It’s actually worked out great for us as far as helping with booking tours. Once Mike [Bruno] from Dead Broke said he’d be down with putting it out and got some other folks onboard to speed the process up, we were like, “Hey, I think we are like, signed now.” Then, we realized we weren’t. So now we will keep sharing everything we record with the Internet nerds except for our super-secret full-length that really isn’t a secret, because we’ve already told people we’re doing it and I just mentioned it. But we will probably only share a song or two off of that, because we have some super weird ass plans for that one.

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not to exist. We’d like to politely tell people to fuck off.” In other words, Column’s new album is vitriol incarnate, representing its members’ “repressed anger and spite.” Columns has existed in one form or another since 2003. A full decade, a few self-released EPs, and a couple of member swaps later, the band is now finally ready to unleash its first blistering full-length upon us via the fine folks at Relapse Records. Columns have done the impossible. The North Carolina grindcore outfit has not only created a whirlwind of extreme metal chaos with its debut album, but said album’s title, Please Explode, will surely be catapulted into the pop culture lexicon as the next “it” catch phrase. Columns bassist Jake Wade explains the simple, twisted genius behind their new record. “Adam came up with the title,” Jake reveals. Mr. Wade was kind enough to quote Columns vocalist Adam Cody [also of Glass Casket and Wretched acclaim] for us, who says, “Please Explode is the kindest way to ask someone The term Cold Water Army “comes from the Temperance Movement in the 1800s. People joined the Cold Water Army by pledging to stop drinking alcohol, and were advocates for the prohibition movement,” explains guitarist Sean Mott, excluding all potential ambiguity on their stance. Unfiltered and undeterred, straight edge is GHOSTxSHIP’s message. But there needed to be more. “We wanted to use this EP to renew and reinvigorate the core ideas behind the band and its purpose. We wrote these songs to remind ourselves, as well as our friends, why we do this and what it still means to us.” Mott continues, “The Cold Water Army record is a period of growth and transition for GHOSTxSHIP. We hope that people who listen to Cold Water Army will hear it and feel a sense of passion and pride. We hope it evokes those feelings that we felt when we first fell in love with hardcore. Get stoked. Get involved. Get together with your friends and jump off of each other’s heads. We play a super high energy set and really try to pour our hearts into doing what we love. The line between the band on stage and the people in the crowd is blurry. We want it to disappear altogether.” They mean it. GxS often plays on the floor

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“[Michael] joined the band full time and we started writing what became the Please Explode EP, which we initially self-released digitally, with help from Moshpit Tragedy. That got the attention of Relapse, so we then started writing and recording what became tracks one through five on the record last year. Please Explode is essentially a collection of three different sessions from winter 2010, spring 2012, and summer 2013.” Like a modern day Frankenstein’s monster, Columns’ new album was stitched together from the grizzly remains of past musical

corpses, resulting in a towering monster of a record. The barrage of anger on display on Please Explode is breathtaking. Imagine the soundtrack to societal collapse or a decade worth of bad days captured on tape. Despite their tag – Southern fried grindcore – Column’s sound is a veritable smorgasbord of punk and metal debauchery, with elements of noise and spazzy math rock thrown in for kicks. Thrashy, hardcore inspired numbers like “Rattlesnake Steps” collide with groove-laden jams like “Our Creation” and straight up grinders such as “Punching Nancy Grace.” Tempos race by while vocal chords are shredded in impeccable fashion, only to stop on a dime and take the listener on a morose journey through feel bad anthems like “Laid off for X-Mas.” Jake describes the band’s sound and the overall tone of Please Explode as “…a combination of all things heavy – whether that’s death metal, hardcore punk, thrash, noise, whatever – it’s just all things that get your blood pumping. We all love energetic music and have different influences, plenty outside of metal and heavy

What’s next after tour? We are for sure recording a full-length after the December tour. No clue what will come of it, but it will be recorded by our friend Orville Neeley [The OBN IIIs, Bad Sports] who has recorded everything we’ve done so far. Orville is rad ‘cause he will tell us when we sound like shit and he’s into the good kind of lo-fi recording. Orville rules. Recording with him is super fun and he knows what we are going for, and he also tolerates a lot of nonsense from us. By nonsense I mean drinking and taking smoke breaks. Beyond that, we plan to tour again in the spring. Hopefully a super, super long one where we make enough money to buy helicopters and sue the other guy who uses our band name. stuff in general, but when it comes to our sound, you can guarantee it’s going to be dark and heavy.” Go ahead and add gloriously filthy to the list while you’re at it. Recorded entirely by the band at their aptly titled “Rad Pad” studio, Please Explode is a raw and vicious DIY assault on the senses. The album’s guitar sound has a distinct, piercing buzz, the bass tone is thick and sludgy, and Cody’s vocals and blunt force lyrics are belligerent in all the right ways, while Jason Skipper’s frantic drumming somehow keeps the whole affair from just nearly riding off the rails. “We always go balls out,” Jake claims, “that’s kind of a rule of ours [laughs].” As far as epic, face punching cover art goes, I’d say this one ranks up there with Vulgar Display of Power and Fistful of Metal. Understandably so, Mr. Wade is honored to be in such esteemed company. “We’re all Pantera and Anthrax fans, so it’s rad to be compared to them,” he says. “We initially had the idea of someone getting injured or abused in some manner, surrounded by an apathetic crowd. Jason took a picture of himself with his fist slamming his face down. We sent that to Jacob Speis at Relapse, he ran with the idea and turned out something better than we ever imagined.”

........................... I N T E RV I E W W I T H G U I TA R I S T S E A N M O T T B Y H U T C H surrounded by hundreds of kids screaming along. Band and audience interact, on the same level. No stage, no barrier. “The more interactive and participative the audience becomes the more we feed off the energy,” says Mott. “The cycle feeds itself. We try to encourage everyone to move up and be a part of what is going on. The rules are simple. No violence and everyone parties. We want people to not just watch us, but to become part of our set.” Mott grew up stoked on Guns ‘n’ Roses and Foo Fighters- mainstream music that serves as a significant contrast. The stark difference explains how Mott became ensnared in hardcore. “It’s two completely different worlds,” he says. Mott distills that difference down to why many seek out the underground. “There’s no personal connection. I can’t really connect [to it] on a level like [I do with] bands such as Stick to Your Guns or No Bragging Rights. Bands like G‘n’R are rock stars, on a whole different level of living and thinking.” Hardcore grabbed Mott and drove him forward. “I went to my first show when I was 16. I was blown away. The whole concept of DIY was so

interesting to me. I helped out any way I could. I handed out flyers, designed flyers, posted about them on MySpace, until I eventually booked my own shows. By that point, I totally understood the difference.” Their lack of starry-eyed motivation exhibits GHOSTxSHIP’s integrity and purpose. “We want people to come to our shows with a sense of excitement and possibility, and leave in a state of exhausted fulfillment,” Mott says. “Get all the pent up aggressions and negativity out. Dance until you can’t. Scream your throat raw. We want people to feel like they are part of something bigger and that we all have an equal part to play. Everyone is important and everyone belongs. We create single instances of artistic expression that can’t be quantified. It’s the chance to live in the moment and be young, and continue the conversations.” The rest of 2014 will be rigorous for GxS, dripping sweat and screaming loudly. First, they play a show with some legends: “We have our last hometown show of the year on September 18 with Bane. In addition, we’re hitting the Midwest

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and East Coast in November, as well as writing a full-length that we will put out in 2015.” Mott concludes on a positive note, “It’s truly incredible. Not even just straight edge people, but just people in general. That’s what I love most about hardcore. Because of this band, I have friends all over the world from different backgrounds, with different stories. I sit back and think about that all the time, and how truly grateful I am for the friendships and bonds I’ve made over the years.”

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BOMBSHELL ROCKS INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Martin Cedergran WRITTEN BY Jones Vig

hat does it feel like to be back in the studio for your fifth album? It feels great! We’re very excited to finally put these songs on tape. It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while, and we wanted to make sure we had enough good songs for an entire album. We’re kind of picky with our material. We wanted to make the kind of album we grew up listening

to. The kind that keeps you interested through the whole record. What made you decide to record again? Well, I guess it all started in 2012. Millencolin asked us to play their 20- year anniversary show, and this was the first time we played with this lineup in ten years. After that, we did a couple more shows, and we enjoyed it, but I guess we felt we didn’t want to become

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INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist/Guitarist Buddy Darling WRITTEN BY John B. Moore Buddy Darling – frontman and guitarist for The Darlings – always looked up to Strung Out vocalist Jason Cruz, so it was pretty incredible to have him record guest vocals on

their last album. Flash forward a few years and his band is touring with Cruz, releasing their latest album on his label, and Darling is even a member of Cruz’s side project Jason Cruz and

RIOT CLUB INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist/Guitarist Martin D. Caz WRITTEN BY Mike Hex Riot Club is a Toronto-based ska punk band that brings the best elements of those genres together into a highly enjoyable mix. How was the recording process for your new release A Day in the Vice? Who did you go through? Well, I guess you could say that we kind

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of “went through” ourselves recording-wise, as [we’ve] always written, produced, and released stuff on our own. The big difference with Day in the Vice is that we signed to Vacant Lot Entertainment, and as a result, have been able to reach more people. How did you got hooked up with Vacant

one of those bands that people listen to just for nostalgic reasons. We felt it was time to start a new chapter. Both [vocalist and guitarist] Crippe [Määttä] and I had some songs already written, and those songs became the foundation of the new album. What is it like working with longtime friend Mathias Färm from Millencolin in the Soundlab Studio again? What can we expect from the new material? It’s great! Mathias is a great guy. He is very relaxed, and he has a way of working that really makes everybody perform their best in the studio. I think the main reason why we chose to record with Mathias is that we knew what we were getting. A hard working guy who would never let anything leave his studio that doesn’t sound top notch. I think you can expect a Bombshell Rocks album that sounds like Bombshell Rocks 2014. It’s like an updated version of the band, but still very true to its roots. Take us back to 1995! How did the band get together? [Vocalist and guitarist] Richard [Andersson], Mathias, and me had been playing together for a couple of years, and we wanted to [go in] a new direction. We were really into bands Howl. Darling sums up the experience quite succinctly: “I’m a lucky son of a bitch.” Has the band has changed much since The New Escape was released four years ago? Yes, the music has matured from punk into more of a rock ‘n’ roll style, and I think we have started to develop our own sound. However, our hard work and relentless drive have not changed. Our live show has definitely sweetened the pot. We have been on the road touring for the past 10 years and there’s nothing like the glory of a good show. I am also fueled by the fresh blood in the band. Andrew Tyler Murphy on drums is a madman, and Hunter Z goes nuts on stage. Mainly we all like good fucking rock ‘n’ roll and our styles work well together. Me and Chris [Kranes], the bass player, have been together since 2006. How far do you and Jason Cruz go back? Jason and I have been close for about six years, I think. He was one of my idols growing up and a huge influence on my vocal melodies and lyrical content. Now I get to be friends and play music with the dude... It’s a beautiful thing! I’m a lucky son of a bitch. We started a side project – Jason Cruz and Howl – about four years ago, and he’s bent over backwards helping The Darlings wherever he can. Me and him definitely inspire each other. I am excited Lot? We were down in L.A. at the time, promoting our self-released EP, and ended up at a big punk show in Hollywood one night. There was a tented setup right out front of the joint, playing music on loudspeakers for all the people outside waiting to get in. We had some CDs left and with us, so being the shameless promo whores that we are, [we] went over and gave our EP to the girl who was running the booth. That girl tuned out to be Jaycee Lights, an A&R rep for VLE Records, who later made us an offer and we eventually signed with. Being from Canada, are there any misconceptions you run into Stateside? Believe it or not, nothing that crazy, no. I think the punk scene in general – all over the world – is very accepting by nature, and we don’t find it any different in the U.S. We do occasionally get made fun of for the way we talk, eh? What are Riot Club’s future touring plans?

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like Screeching Weasel and Operation Ivy, but also Exploited. We recorded a mini-CD that became kind of a demo. When we recorded the 7” Going Up Going Down and started doing live shows outside our hometown, we gathered interest from a couple of record labels. We decided to sign with Sidekicks, which was a side label of Burning Heart Records. This was very much like a dream come true for us. We already had a bunch of songs that became the Underground Radio EP. After that, things happened really quickly. The first album Street Art Gallery was released, and it was also released by Epitaph in the States. Suddenly, we were on the same label as all our favorite bands. We got a lot of good support slots with bands like Millencolin, Dropkick Murphys, and U.S. Bombs. We will be forever grateful to those bands. Who influenced you in the beginning, and now, almost 20 years down the road? As I mentioned before, Operation Ivy, and Screeching Weasel, The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, Swingin’ Utters, Bad Religion… The list can be made extremely long. We’re still influenced by the same bands, as well as a bunch of new ones.

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to hit the road with both of the bands this summer. First time I will be playing double duty. I’m very excited. What can you tell me about this new album? Raw, truthful, and dark. It is the album I have always wanted to release. On our other two records, you can kind of hear some styles clashing a bit. This is the first time I had complete control to write what I felt. We’re breaking away from the “vanilla punk rock with a mild Americana twist” and venturing into some riskier, darker territory. I think it’s important to take risks. We were lucky enough to work with some amazing musical geniuses on this record. The producer Andy Carpenter, my buddy Jason Freese from Green Day who laid down some keys on a couple songs, and Jason Cruz who recorded and wrote “Evangeline” with me. We also released the album through Jason Cruz’s new indie label Echotone. What was the inspiration behind “There’s a Madman Living in Waco”? Cults... Great writing material, I suppose [laughs]. I think David Koresh actually has an original song called “There’s a Madman Living in Waco.” Kinda funny. It’s got some great slide guitar on the song.

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To get to as many places, and into as many ears, as possible, period. More specifically, we’re stoked to tour Europe. We were shown “quarterly stats” or something along those lines recently, and it turns out we’re getting an amazing amount of love over there. Also, for some reason, Belgium is really stoked on us. That’s cool shit. What’s the Canadian scene like? Actually, it’s sort of the exact same as the punk rock scene in the U.S., save for, of course, some natural deviations. For example, Canada has “pockets” of close-knit punk rock bands and fans just like anywhere else, the difference being that it takes three hours to drive between them up here! Has the move to a label changed any of the day-to-day workings of the band? Not necessarily, unless you count lost sleep, complaining neighbors, and a lot more fast food than any human should eat, ever.

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INCITE

together and began figuring out the direction and the vibe we wanted. We definitely wanted to go heavier with shorter songs than All Out War, so [guitarist Kevin] Dis and I talked about the direction of what the songs were about, so he could start banging out the riffs. It all came together very smoothly, we all had the same vibe, and I think the album captures a definitive sound for the band. We were all definitely fired up, focused, and hungry. I think having the new bass player [Christopher “EL”] and drummer [Lennon Lopez] really fueled our excitement again. Also, to have Dis back was very cool for us.

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Richie Cavalera WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

hen you’re a musician with a famous last name, how much weight does that name really hold? For Richie Cavalera – vocalist of Incite and son of the legendary Max Cavalera (Sepultura, Soulfly, Killer Be Killed) – it really is just a name. Over the last five years, Cavalera has worked relentlessly

to pave his own road with hard work and perseverance. The band has just released their stunningly heavy third album Up in Hell, and show no signs of slowing down. When did the writing process for Up in Hell start? At the end of last year, we all got

SET IT OFF Photography by Mimi Hong

slowly winds to a close, Set It Off is back with a new sound, a new tour, and their sophomore album, Duality. Vocalist Cody Carson assures that their hardest work went into creating the

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist/Bassist Will Peplinski WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

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Unfortunately, their dreams were temporarily halted when producer John Feldmann was forced to back out at last minute. “We were dying to work with John Feldmann,” assures Carson. “We had just finished the We are the In Crowd tour and drove all the way to L.A. from New York when I got an email from John and found out that we weren’t able to work with him anymore.” Luckily, Carson was able to get in contact with three of Feldman’s past associates: Brandon Paddock, a friend from Carson’s couch surfing days; Matt Appleton from Reel Big Fish; and Tommy English. “These three people came ian psychology. “The shadow” is the unconscious self, the negative parts of yourself that you don’t like and repress from your self-identity. The idea is to face and conquer “the shadow” in order to incorporate your entire self into the conscious realm, thus fining the deeper meaning in life, happiness, or whatever you may be looking for. So transcending “the shadow,” essentially. We chose “Parables” because it kind of gives it the feeling of a collection of stories, like the EP.

SWINE OVERLORD

hough Swine Overlord has been kicking around in the death metal underground for the last few years, 2014 marks the beginning of the band’s rise. Their unrelenting progressive, slamming death metal is impossibly brutal, and has earned them a cult following that will grow massively after the release of their Gore House Productions debut

Do you feel pressure as a member upcoming record. “With every album we’ve gone into, I obviously just want to be the best possible,” he says. “Going into it, I knew that volume equaled a greater chance of success.” Carson reveals that the writing process for Duality produced about 40 demos, though only a small percentage made the cut.

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Cody Carlson WRITTEN BY Natasha Van Duser

wo years ago, pop rockers Set It Off began to shake the music radar with their debut full-length, Cinematics, which earned them critical acclaim and their first headlining tour. Now, as 2014

What inspired these songs? I had a friend pass away while we were recording and that brought out a lot of emotions. Things like dealing with the loss of life and how fragile we all are. It’s crazy. It made me really think about what is important to me. Also, about three ounces of weed always helps the creative juices flow.

Parables of Umbral Transcendence this fall. What does the title Parables of Umbral Transcendence mean? The album title was chosen for multiple reasons. One was, I will admit, just that it sounded cool. But also it had some depth to it. It came from my interest in “the shadow,” as described in Jung-

What inspired the lyrics for Parables of Umbral Transcendence? We tried to go for what our first EP Anthology of Abominations was, essentially a collection of stories. So most of the songs are just messed up, scary stories. “Celestial Purge” is about an alien invasion and genocide of the human race, while “Transformation and Rebirth” is about a man realizing he is somewhere between man and God, believing that he is above other men because he acts upon his primal instincts. There are some slightly more typical death metal songs on here like “Chunks” and “Post-Burial Defloration,” but there’s usually a twist or an underlying element

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of the Cavalera family to rise to the high expectations of fans and media? Not at all. I never really let that get to me. I just write what I feel, and focus on what we want to achieve, not what people expect. There’s always pressure to not suck, of course, but we don’t let it bother us. We just have fun and write music. We enjoy playing for people. Hopefully, through our hard work and records, people will let us just be a band and not “the band featuring [Max’s son] Richie.” What are your thoughts on your journey so far? Where would you like to see Incite go from here? It’s been a hard ride, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s been so killer getting to know all the fans and friends we’ve met along the way. I feel like it’s only the beginning, and this is the next chapter in the story. I hope we can play forever and enjoy doing it. Hopefully, we can be a force to reckon with in the metal world. Thanks so much for the support.

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out of nowhere and just completely saved us.” Carson was able to make all of this happen within a matter of hours, while backstage at an All Time Low show. “It just seemed like such a moment of destiny, and from that moment on, things really came together.” Paddock became one of the key influences on Duality. Set It Off both wrote and recorded with him, while helping him finish building a studio of his own. Paddock even contributed to the album’s first single, “Why Worry.” Carson lists the disparate musical inspirations that helped form Set It Off ’s sound, “When we were writing with [guitarist] Dan [Clermont] and Brandon, we referenced Beyoncé, Celine Dion, Jon Bon Jovi, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson, *NSYNC, kind of all over the board. We had a jazz influence as well, trying to create sort of a big band feel. There’s jazz, there’s rock, there’s pop, there’s soul.”

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to keep things interesting. “Post-Burial,” for example, at its core, is really a love song. The love of the protagonist just happens to be deceased. The song “Bleeding the Sinful” was the only song with a lot of outside influence. It was inspired by the game “Silent Hill: Homecoming”’s character Dr. Fitch, who had to sacrifice his daughter, and spent the rest of his life living in anguish and regret. What is the difference between slamming death metal and regular death metal? Does Swine Overlord lean towards the slam side of the genre? I joke that there’s a specific slam-to-riff ratio that must be met before you are a slam band, and vice versa. We kind of stay conscious of it in the sense that we don’t want to do too many slams, because it will sound boring. We don’t really care what people label us. Slams are, of course, a staple of our sound and always will be, but between those two, we are trying to lean more to the death metal side, especially as we continue to grow and refine our sound. But with an even stronger progressive edge.

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brightly in the hearts of these bands? I’m sure they would all have their individual answers, but the bottom line I’m sure is that they all believe in their music and want to express themselves and their views with honesty and integrity. How many crowds get freaked out by the power of Uzuhi if they haven’t seen them live before? How fun are they? This will be their first time on Upstart, [though] we have done

numerous shows in the past with them. I always love to see newcomers get swept away in their energy, especially the tough guys who can’t help but smile through the whole set. Thanks, man!!! No, Morgan, thank you. And Lisa, and everyone over at New Noise, for fighting the good fight against mediocrity and helping to spread the word of real music to the masses. Keep it up. We need you!

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INTERVIEW WITH Travis Meyers WRITTEN BY Morgan Y. Evans

ith nine venues, will there be punk Deadheads who tailgate at every stop? Last year, we had two girls who made it to six out of nine shows, plus a few faces who we saw at least three times, so yeah, it happens. I’d say it’s definitely worth it just to see the bands who only do a couple of dates. What were some highlights for you as organizer this year? Highlights? Well it’s pretty hectic dealing with all the different bands and venues, but I am very happy to be having Svetlanas coming over again from Mother Russia, as well as Left Alone who I am personally a fan of, but have never seen live. And… The Sharp Lads are fuckin’ genius. Upstart always has fresh merch designs. Who does your printing?

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Beth from Flyer Squad in Albany, NY, does all our design work, and Eric from E-Bomb Printing in Orange, CT, prints all our stuff. Both are great at what they do and totally get us as well, which is always a big plus. Do the bands get competitive or is there plenty of team spirit? Glad you asked that. The absolute best thing about doing this Upstart thing over the last four years is that, to date, we have had zero drama with any of the bands. It’s been a total team spirit, “all for one, one for all” type thing. Everyone getting along, sharing gear, and helping one another out, the way it should be. We know most of the bands – which is a plus of course – but overall, everyone is really positive and happy to be involved. What keeps the punk spirit burning so

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SUNSHINE STATE

TO THE WIND

INTERVIEW WITH Bassist Troy Perlman WRITTEN BY Janelle Jones

first heard Sunshine State on a split with Dead Bars on No Idea Records and knew I needed to learn (and hear) more about these alums of Whiskey & Co., J. Page, Against Me!, and The Scaries. Their debut LP, Pour – out in September, also on No Idea – truly showcases these guys’ penchant for creating a unique, multi-faceted brand of punk. Before the release, I speak with frontman Troy Perlman… Can you get into how this all started? We kinda formed by accident through Warren [Oakes], the drummer. He owns a restaurant called Boca Fiesta, and they had this thing called Band Roulette. Basically, you put your name into a hat and tell them what instrument you want to play. Warren, [guitarist] Kyle [Fick], myself, and a girl named Jessica all ended up in a band together, and we just kinda clicked. I had a couple songs written and we decided we wanted to keep playing. Jessica had a lot of other stuff going on, so she just slowly took herself out of the picture. I used to be in a band with [guitarist] Mike [Magarelli] seven or eight years ago, and we had a couple conversations, mostly those kind that you have at the bar with your buddies that never come true. We asked Mike to come out to practice with us to learn some of the songs we already had, and he helped write more. Here we are a year later and we have one record. Did you do most of the writing? “Peace and Rain,” “Concrete World,” “Long in the Tooth” – some of those heavier, riffier-type songs – Kyle had written musically and brought to the table. It becomes obvious once you see us live who wrote what. The poppier, more straightforward punk rock songs I wrote on acoustic guitar and taught everyone, and they made them sound a lot less simple and more interesting. It’s collaborative, as far as arrangements go. Lyrically, it’s mostly me. “Long in the Tooth” and “Concrete World” are heavier… Well, the way I write, they seem very heavy to me. I know they’re still kind of standard. But on the flipside, Kyle also wrote the music for “Friends of the Deceased,” which is probably our poppiest song. Oh yeah. It’s almost new wave-ish… We all are influenced definitely by The Cure, accidentally by the Psychedelic Furs. I honestly wasn’t familiar with [them] until people started hearing that song and comparing us a lot. And I listened to it and I’m like, “Oh yeah, totally. I guess I’ve been accidentally ripping this guy off!” For the most part, we all come from the same general punk rock background, but from different angles. I guess that would explain the lack of consistency from song to song.But I like

Photography by Jaime Schultz

that… It seems like there’s so much good music out there, to just focus on being a punk band seems kinda silly to me. And honestly, I listen to punk rock, but if you get into my truck, you might find that I’ve been listening to The Grateful Dead for a month. How do you feel about the press’ focus on “Warren from Against Me!”? We always knew that was gonna be a thing, because that was a really popular band and Warren was just a very recognizable face. I always knew, “That’s Warren who’s in Against Me!” But one of the things that really interested me was how energetic Warren’s drumming was and how it seemed to come from a different place than a lot of punk rock drumming at the time. You could feel that kind of anarchist sense about it where he wasn’t really playing by the rules. He hit the drums so hard and it was all pretty simple, but the tones of the snare… It was just interesting. I was always a fan of his style, and I really felt the band wasn’t the same after he left. But people are gonna talk about it. Hopefully, as we get out there and play more shows and record more stuff and develop our own identity, eventually it’ll be one of those things where no one says that anymore. Why did you choose No Idea to release your record? We talked a lot about labels and possibilities when we started realizing that we were gonna try to be a real band to some extent, and for me, it was always hopefully gonna be No Idea. Var [Thelin] from No Idea is the first and only person who we actually approached when we were recording and playing shows. We had no idea how he was gonna react. We all had previous friendships with Var and professional relationships; Warren had put out records on No Idea, and they’re a label here in Gainesville. Is “Long In The Tooth” just about getting old? It definitely is about the fact that we’ve been in this town for a while, seeing all the changes as well as things that don’t ever change. And I guess it’s about getting older, maturing, trying desperately not to lose touch with the things you value. […] There’s something to be said for being older and really being part of the same crowd, not letting your age get in the way because everyone’s gonna get older. I go to shows now and I see some of the same people I saw 10 years ago when I moved here. They’re relentless. They do it because they love it, not because it was cool when they were in their 20s. There are some kids here I’ll probably see at a house show when they’re in their 50s, and that’s the beauty of living in a town like Gainesville.

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WRITTEN BY Brendan McBrayer

ou guys are from the Pacific Northwest. How has it been operating out of Bigfoot country? It definitely is a little tough being from Seattle and touring as much as we do. We’re always driving hours and hours to either start or end a tour. Nowadays a lot of tours don’t even come up [here] because it’s so out of the way. Which is a shame, because there’s such a strong music scene here. I always see you guys “Listen if you liked” with The Ghost Inside, but I’ve always heard more of a Comeback Kid or Stick to Your Guns influence. Who do you actually get your inspiration from? Is everyone missing the mark? We’ve heard that we “sound like The Ghost Inside” for a few years now. We personally don’t see that, but understand that it’s easy to link us into the same general genre. Our bands may have similar influences as well. If we had to choose out of the three that were mentioned, we would say it’s more Comeback Kid, since we have listened to them for almost 10 years now. Our influences are all over the place, but overall (at least the majority of us) are fonder of an older influenced style of melodic hardcore and metal. And yes, I think A LOT of the time people miss the mark, but there are times where I have agreed. You guys are on strongest independent label in existence right now: Pure Noise Records. Who are some of your favorite labelmates? Pure Noise has always been such a supportive and friendly label to work with. All the bands on the roster kill, straight up. We listen to a lot of Pure Noise bands on the road and individually, so we definitely don’t have a favorite, but we can say the Matthew Vincent/ Alex Corriea split has been in heavy rotation: sonically and lyrically perfect. The Sights and Sounds record Silver Door rules super hard, so so catchy. The last song on that record “Good Morning” we literally listened to three times in a row. That new Heart to Heart Dulce is awesome. The first listen to that record and we feel like we are already singing along. VOID from Vanna is heavy, pissed, currently in the CD player. Rotting Out’s The Wrong Way rerelease we have been listening to for a while now. Don’t see that changing either. All of Pure Noise is great, to be honest. How long did it take to collect the solid songs on Block Out the Sun & Sleep, and which are your favorites? Honestly, we were told we were going to record two months before we hit the

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studio. We had a couple riffs and ideas here and there. But as soon as we got home from tour, we got straight to work. [Guitarist] Ryan [Murphy] and [drummer] Cory [Lamb] really grinded to get the drums down solid in about a month. I think the reason why we were able to get 11 songs solid and ready to record is because we were mentally ready to make this record. With Empty Eyes, we knew we wanted a melodic, heavy sound, but not really set in stone how we wanted to sound. After touring heavily for two years, we really understood how we wanted Block Out the Sun & Sleep to sound and which direction we wanted to go. It’s almost like Empty Eyes made us realize what we could have and should have done on the record, and it just prepped us to do what we wanted on BOTS&S. Every song on our new record is exactly what we wanted and we love them all. Every single second of this record is thought out and we didn’t let anything slide. Since we can’t decide our favorite, I guess y’all will have to for us! BOTS&S was recorded with Kyle Black (Comeback Kid, Set Your Goals, Forever Came Calling) and your first record Empty Eyes was recorded with Sam Pura (The Story So Far, Heavy Heavy Low Low, State Champs). What was the difference between these two producers? Sam Pura is awesome and we definitely love the dude. He makes brilliant records. Sam is hilarious and has so much energy and love for the art of recording music, it’s inspiring! He made Empty Eyes sound great. He was very strict on making sure that our performance tracking was A+ at all times. Made us better musicians. He made us feel welcome, and we are glad we did that record with him. Kyle Black was laid back, very good at listening, and awesome at making sure every song was to its full potential. He has literally a million ideas and he never stops working. Kyle really enjoyed preproduction with every instrument. So we got to push ourselves and our ideas to make each instrument and vocal line what we wanted. You guys are currently on the Vans Warped Tour. How’s punk rock summer camp treating you? Making any friends? Warped Tour is exactly what everyone prepped us for. So rad meeting all the people who are either new or old fans of To the Wind. Plus, we get to watch a lot of our favorite bands every day and that rules. We’ve been walking the line with CDs and our set times just trying to meet new people. We love it so far.

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t’s common to see a band no one has heard of blow up and reach pinnacle status among their peers, but it’s often debated whether or not they deserve the spot. In the case of Black Crown Initiate, no one is debating anything. Lyrically, they range from insightful to nihilistic, and they are on the brink of releasing what may be the best metal release of the year, The Wreckage of Stars. You guys are blowing up right now. How has this whole experience affected you? Well, our lives are now much more music-centered. We have been touring so much that our personal and “professional” lives have changed a great deal. We all aspire to be completely professional musicians, but at the beginning stages, it is hard to come home from a tour with any money at all, and it is also difficult to hold down regular jobs when you leave every few weeks for tour. That being said, this is the best thing that has ever happened to any of us. It is surreal and wonderful. We cherish the ability to focus with this level of intensity on our music. What were some of the lyrical inspirations for The Wreckage of Stars? The lyrical inspiration, directly, is my personal life and the painful beauty of being a human in the “modern” world. On our EP, we had much more of a concept, one that I have explained in other places on the Internet, but with this album, I really wanted to focus on what it means to me to be alive. That is not necessarily a pleasant topic to explore, as I find a great deal of evidence that suggests that our “reality” isn’t

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BLACK CROWN INITIATE

very real at all. This is not to say that our reality does not completely FEEL real. Our relationships and interactions shape us and our perspectives, and my lyrics also reflect that. What is the story behind “Withering Waves”? “Withering Waves” is based loosely on a recurring dream that I have where I am standing on a shore and the tide is way out. It sounds sort of boring, but it is a very eerie scene. The middle section of the song was written, musically, in a dream. I woke up and knew how to play the guitar part. It has only happened to me once, but it made sense to base the lyrics off of the dream world as well. What message are you sending through the album title? Our world is a pile of wreckage; generations and generations of it. We are most certainly more than blobs of organs but, at this point, we are so far from any type of “truth” that hope is lost. What bands did you guys play in prior to Black Crown Initiate? All five of us played in a band called Nightfire at different points. They were more of a technical death metal band, and I honestly found very little emotionality in the music. As a result, I found it very difficult to deliver the music with any type of conviction. I can only speak for myself, but I learned what I did and didn’t want in my music. What are some other bands who personally inspire you?

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist/Vocalist Andy Thomas WRITTEN BY Ridge Briel Rivers of Nihil, Fallujah, The Faceless, Devin Townsend, Meshuggah, Gojira, Opeth, Mastodon, Decapitated, and Behemoth are all heavy bands that inspire me. The list of other types of inspiring musicians and bands is endless.

give would be to never settle for anything musically that isn’t exactly what you want, and to make a professional sounding recording and distribute it wherever possible for as little money as possible.

After your current touring cycle that ends in October, what’s next? We will continue to tour and hopefully make new fans. We will release our album on September 30, and we hope that it is well received. We are hungry and will work as hard as we need to in order to make lives of this.

Last words for the fans? Thanks for the support! It means the world to us, and we will continue to do what we do. We are beside ourselves that our music means so much to people, but we can assure that it means the world to us.

Any advice for beginning bands who aspire to be respected? The two biggest pieces of advice I could

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SAD AND FRENCH

Photography by Emmanuel V. Cruz II

How did the band come together? I started making acoustic songs after a bad break up five or six years ago. It was easy to write about it because it was so true. But also [it] was nice to get back into music after so many years. I started by playing open mics in Miami by my own name, and when I got my first solo show, I decided to give my “act” a name. I remember this conversation I had with a good friend of mine, at a bar one drunken night, about how – in her mind – I always looked sad, and also I reminded her of this French singer Herman Dune. So I decided to call my “act” Sad and French. I started playing guitar when I was 14 years old and started my first punk band when I was 16. We were called The Go Go Punkers. I know, I’m really good at band names [laughs]. That was back in Venezuela, where I’m from. In 2002, The Go Go Punkers moved to Florida to try to “make it.” After one year of trying, the rest of the band went back home and I decided to stay. I went to art school at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. That’s where I met Edwin, my best friend and bass player for Sad and French. We met over some NOFX conversation and became best friends. After graduation, Edwin moved to Rochester. I ended up moving to N.Y. because of this new job I got. We played some shows here and there in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but we didn’t really get serious until three years ago when I was like, “Fuck this advertising job life.” I quit my job, and we went on a three week tour. The year after we did another tour, a month and a half long. About a year ago, we started playing with Greg Taylor – our current drummer and best fucking bud – and Sad and French changed for good! We all went from playing acoustic to full on electric. Everything got louder and faster! Greg is from Florida too, and played in awesome bands like The Holy Mountain and From First to Last. He is basically the best drummer I’ve ever played with. Basically, I play in a band with my best friends and I fucking love it. What was recording like? It was AWESOME and super sad… Literally. We went to this amazing studio called Waterfront Studios. The studio was inside of an old church and [they] let us sleep in there and fed us. Plus the owner/ engineer was this guy Henry

Hirsch who recorded Lenny Kravitz and Madonna – I really don’t care about Kravitz at all… I do like Madonna, though – but the main reason for us was the old church structure and the reverb you get from it. It was fucking amazing! Edwin and I were supposed to be there for six days. By the third day, my best friend Edwin got the most terrible news of his life. His Dad was dying of this weird cancer and he only had days to live. So he had to leave the studio and fly all the way to Colombia to be with his dad in his last days. We couldn’t finish the record at that studio because of it. So a whole year went by. We asked our good friend Ratt [Brett Romnes] – I Am the Avalanche’s drummer – to help us finish this record. We went to his studio in Jersey and finally finished our first and only fulllength record. The Ratt had a friend over at Sterling Sound who mastered the record for super cheap, and [that’s] why the record sounds like it sounds now. Are there advantages to being based in N.Y.? Living in N.Y. and having a band, it’s hit or miss. I do love N.Y. with [all] my heart. But it’s hard to get people to come to shows because there’s always something happening. It’s not because you are playing a random Wednesday night. It’s because that random Wednesday night Hot Water Music and The Descendents are playing a secret show at Saint Vitus. I love N.Y. and wouldn’t change it for a thing. But I don’t think there’s a lot of “advantages” of being in a band here. How did you connect with Black Numbers? I met Dave [Frenso] who runs Black Numbers over at one of my favorite venues ever, Asbury Lanes. His Band, Banquets, was opening for I Am the Avalanche. We talked and exchanged numbers because I really liked his band and t-shirt designs; I am a designer, so t-shirt designs mean a lot to me. Banquets and Sad and French ended up playing a bunch of shows together. When our record was finally ready, I talked to Dave about it and he really liked the record, so he ended up signing us to his label. What’s next for the band? We are in the process of writing new songs as a full band. We were thinking of recording a live record of our selftitled with the full band. Maybe that will happen soon, and then we will record a whole new full-length. I don’t know… We are still talking about it. I do know that we are playing FEST and PRE FEST this year for the first time ever, and we are super-duper stoked! Our main goal is to have a new full-length by the end of the year.

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PEARS

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Zach Quinn WRITTEN BY Johnny Wilson

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist/Vocalist Jose Prieto WRITTEN BY John B. Moore

ad and French started out as a solo, acoustic project for frontman Jose Prieto while living in Miami. Incrementally, he moved to New York, and added bassist Edwin Santacruz and drummer Greg Taylor. Newly signed to Black Numbers, the band is out with their self-titled debut. Prieto speaks about founding the band, making an album out of a broken heart, and the downside to rockin’ in N.Y.

Photography by Dawn Wilson - For The Love of Punk

EARS’ aggressive and technical nature combines with an irresistible pop sensibility, and sets this New Orleans band apart. They are both talented and humble. I once posted one of their videos and guitarist Brian Pretus replied within 20 minutes, excited someone cared enough to spread the news. Their first full-length Go to Prison was released with help from Off With Their Heads’ singer and guitarist Ryan Young’s Anxious and Angry: originally a podcast to help Ryan heal his own anxieties and depression, now a forum for helping others as well. State your name and occupation… Zach Quinn, Alientologist, Dept. of Archives at the Federal Bureau of Petty Bullshit. Are you FEARful of getting sued by FEAR for aping their logo? There is nothing to fear but FEAR itself, so yes. Except NO, I’m not scared. I don’t even exist. I have no social security number. I ate that band already. Are there any other dream bands you’d like to get sued by? I would love to be sued by Greg Ginn. PEARS Black Flag t-shirt? Anyone? I would love to be sued by Nick Jr., and wash over their headquarters with a violent tidal wave of thousands of pennies – the bits of copper I have bled for – edging us into the apocalypse that is commonly signified by the return of Steve Burns to Blues Clues for a 27th and final season. I heard you guys recorded this album in a hotel… Who engineered it? Always operating with haste, and never afforded the luxury of stillness, we are forever on the run and in the trenches of a war that has not yet made itself visible to the naked eye. Sometimes, our eyes betray us, and sometimes the mind cannot digest what the eyes retrieve for dinner. But as we move, we stop once every 963 lunar phases to document our progress. James Whitten provides us with the tools required. He is an amazing and selfless man, and what he has at stake shall ne’er be forgot. Being from New Orleans, do you ever have turf wars with zydeco and Dixieland bands? Ahhh, The Great Voodoo Juju War of 2031… The war we were sent here to prevent. It will be a bloody war: hand grenades will be hurled, the roads lined with land mines and tourist traps. What will begin as exchanges of ugly looks and sneers will escalate to weaponized accordions and our neighborhoods littered and terrorized by crawfish drones. Zydeco was created in 1928, and in 2018, Zydeco becomes selfaware.

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When naming the band, were any other fruits considered? Have you not been listening?! Among all of the archetypal characters, themes, motifs, PEARS are the most significant to our mission. Alas, they are what will force the hands of our pepaw clock to its and humankind’s final hour! We must reconnect; our isolation has become too great. The old adage rings true: united we stand, divided we fall. I am but a partridge. Aren’t you? The first song on the album is “You’re boring.” What is NOT boring? The winding and endless tunnels of the mind. Inside of these, you are a god, forlorn and free. Anything can be as true or false as you’d like. But bits of bread scattered behind you will never be enough to return you from whence you came… If you venture deep enough. Once you have seen spacetime six, will you ever see space-time four again? Have you ever been asked to lead a jazz funeral? Jazz has not yet died, but when it does, we will lead the march of mourning, carrying a banner that reads, “Too dumb to get it, too smart to pretend to.” What influences PEARS? A full and responsible knowledge of the table of elements is absolutely pertinent to our cause. I also love Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Jan Svankmajer, Burning Witch, and Hayao Miyazaki. How did Hurricane Katrina affect the band? Too soon? It’s never too soon. We’ve actually only been a band for 6 months, so this predates us, but it was a devastating tragedy that was prepared for and handled feebly. For years after, I watched the proverbial middle fingers in the form of the barrage of public transit buses with watermarks carry people to their jobs and back again. Just a singular example of the squandered resources and piss-poor fundamental planning and protection by the very people who claim to serve us. Things should have been different. I got lucky. Nine feet of water in the neighborhood where we lived, but everything I owned was on the second story of my grandparents’ home, at a comfortable 10 feet above ground. We rehearse and operate mail order from that house now. Is it safe to eat the shrimp yet? I eat it all the time, and I’m fine. What’s next for PEARS? Well, it is still a time of relative peace – you’re welcome – but we are in a perpetual state of motion, a hurdling asteroid of ambivalence going all AND nothing. We’re gonna be touring a lot.

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NO BRAGGING RIGHTS

Photography by Vincent Van Hoorick

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Mike Perez WRITTEN BY Nicholas Senior

ardcore bands never seem to capitalize on forward momentum: countless bands have released phenomenal albums, only to drop the ball in dramatic fashion on the followup. California’s No Bragging Rights are bucking the trend, in more ways than one. The band’s latest, The Concrete Flower, comes hot on the heels of the excellent Cycles. The new record ups the ante in every way imaginable: it’s heavier and filled to the brim with melody. Yet, it’s the earnest lyrics that are likely to resonate most with casual listeners. What is behind the title of the new album? Something beautiful rising up from harsh and impossible conditions. When I think about people who are able to come out of their rough circumstances

October File.K. post-punk social activists Interview with Lerwell The guitarist October Matt File have done by Morgan itY. Evans again with their most realized album, an art as life U.K. post-punk activists The The commentary onsocial our world called October File have done it again with Application of Loneliness, Ignorance, their mostLove, realized album, an art –as life Misery, and Despair An Introspective on of the Condition, commentary our Human world called The being released throughIgnorance, Candlelight Application of Loneliness, Records.Love, and Despair – An Misery, Introspective of the Human Condition, How do you make art that interacts with being released through Candlelight real world events? Records. We feel there’s not really another way to do it.do I see point nothing. How youno make art in thatsaying interacts with Music is aevents? great platform to get your real world point of view across and vent your We feel there’s not really another frustrations. way to do it. I see no point in saying nothing. Music is a great platform to “Heroes are Welcome” has a great postget your pointattack. of view across vent punk guitar Why do and we elevate your frustrations. only certain types of heroes?

I think everybody who fights for a “Heroes Welcome” haspraise, a great postriotous are cause deserves and I punk guitar attack. Why dowould we elevate believe most of society agree. only certainwhat typeswe of heroes? However, all believe in and Iwho think who fights for always a weeverybody wish to praise are not riotous cause deserves and I the the ones who end praise, up getting press media coverage due toagree. an over believe most of society would PC modern who have However, whatBritain we all believe in andbeen convinced that speaking mind is who we wish to praise are their not always wrong orwho offensive. the ones end up getting the press media coverage due to an over What do weBritain gain from learning PC modern who have beento be alone with ourselves? convinced that speaking their mind is If I wereornot happy in my own company, wrong offensive. I would worry that other people were also not happy in my company. So, I What do we gain from learning to be guess, learn to love yourself and others alone with ourselves? will love you.

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on top, it’s inspiring. I hope that this album expresses that. Faith – both internal and external – is clearly a theme on the album. Why is The Concrete Flower focused on issues of the mind? Issues of the mind for sure: mental illness and depression, violence, suicide, hate and resentment, marriage equality, and searching for peace. My faith is a big part of my everyday life, so it definitely comes out in my lyrics. For example, I’m a Christian and grew up with the idea “You can’t go to heaven if you kill yourself.” “Downhearted” is a conversation I’m sure many people – not just Christians – have had with God or a higher power. Kind of like, “Of all people, you should understand why I want to do this… So why should I be denied heaven?” Also, knowing what people will say about you when you’re

gone: “It was a moment of weakness.” Was it? I don’t want to glorify suicide in any way, it’s just something I’ve thought about and know I can’t be the only one who has. I have a lot of faith and belief in keeping a positive outlook, even when it’s the furthest thing from how you really feel. The title track “The Concrete Flower” touches on that. What inspired the song “Attention”? It’s an immensely powerful track about a fairly unknown issue… When we started becoming more vocal about suicide awareness, our friends who are or were in the service would tell me about their personal battles with depression and suicide. They would tell me about suicides that would happen on base, and how most of them were swept under the rug. I started doing my own research on military related suicides and it blew my mind. Not the numbers themselves, but how it’s not talked about or even mentioned in any of our media. Two of your previous albums discussed martyrdom. Now “Damager/Recover” has the lyric “I am not a martyr. I am my own champion.” Is this a paradigm shift? No real shift, just different context, I guess. When I mention it in previous albums, it’s more of a willingness to take initiative in a movement or sacrificing yourself for a greater cause. For “Damage/Recover,” when I say “I am not a martyr, I am my own Champion,” it’s on a more inward and personal level, almost selfish. The song is about

How has the band changed since Our Souls To You? This has been the biggest change between records. We have been through a lot since then: two of the members are now fathers, and we are all with

Did you aim for a heavier sound on the new record? Do you have a favorite track? We found our sound with Cycles, so we kind of used that as a reference point. From there, we just pushed and experimented without getting too far from our own sound. Musically, my favorite would probably be “Bottoms Up.” It’s fun and catchy. That will probably change as we start playing these songs live. What would you be doing if you weren’t in the band? Did you want to pursue a different career path growing up? This answer has changed within the last year. Now, I want to go back to school and get a degree in Psychology. I think it would be cool to be a counselor at a high school. Before that, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. That dream died when I picked up a guitar and realized I couldn’t hit breaking pitches. Is there anything else you’d like to share? I like sushi, coffee, and the [Los Angeles] Angels. I hope [you] give our new album a listen. I honestly feel like it’s our best work; I am super proud of it. Oh, and we’re pretty easy to find at shows, so come say what’s up.

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OCTOBER FILE

Is technology still a means for growth? “Reinvention” speaks to the need to rediscover our souls as a species. …I would say some of the social media technology is responsible for a lot of vanity; there are a lot of self-serving narcissists out there blowing their own trumpets and throwing their toys out of the cot when people do not agree with them. Perhaps when everyone has logged out of their vanity pages, they can help put technology back on course and “Reinvent” it as a tool for solving puzzles and obtaining information of use, instead of entertaining the narrow minded keyboard warriors. How do you know what to leave on the cutting room floor? It’s quite instinctive really. We wrote about 25 songs for the album, and we knew what was going on and what wouldn’t make it. It was made a little more difficult this time due to the fact that we knew we wanted a different sound, so I guess we stayed away from the typical. We are quite strict on filler, and in agreement about what’s “October File” and what’s not. It’s difficult to explain, but I’d say if someone says, “Oh, that sounds like so and so,” I immediately start to move away from it or make it less so.

not relying on someone else to bring you peace. Sacrificing your ego and accepting help is great, but sometimes you have to step up and be there for yourself.

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist Matt Lerwell WRITTEN BY Morgan Y. Evans significant others and firmly grounded as people. Not that we ever dipped our toe in the water when it comes to opinion or expression, but now we do it with complete confidence. After 10 years of playing together, we know each other’s playing inside out, and I think you can hear that confidence and comfort on the album. What has been the most eye opening part of being in this band? For me, it’s been getting the live part down. Touring with the likes of Killing Joke and Prong really influenced us to get the show down, and engage with the audience as much as possible. It’s hard to keep a few blokes on a stage

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interesting. Also [surprised by] the utter contempt towards bands by venue staff, sound men, light men, and a self-important bunch of key holders. I always thought bands were respected by these sorts of people. However, we seem to have moved into a time where we are cliché and to be sniggered at. Don’t get me wrong, we know a lot of great crew, but the hipsters need to realize that we are all in it together, and it’s all of our jobs to make sure the crowd enjoy our show.

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OPETH

NACHTMYSTIUM

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist/Vocalist Mikael Akerfeldt WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

here is not a single band in the pantheon of extreme metal that strives for innovation, creativity, and progression more than Opeth. Since exploding out of Stockholm, Sweden, over two decades ago with an incredibly unique and melodic mixture of black and death metal, they have become the gold standard for bands that refuse to abide the limits of what is considered heavy. When examining their discography, their constant genre-defining evolution and unwillingness to live up to anyone’s expectations but their own is apparent. Any time you put on a new Opeth record, one thing is for certain: it’s going to be full of surprises. That’s how it has been from the beginning with their legendary albums like Orchid and Blackwater Park. It continues with their new release Pale Communion, a record full of gorgeous vocal melodies and organ-driven prog rock. It is also a bit more upbeat than 2011’s Heritage, an album that stunned fans and critics due to its lack of the death metal for which they had become known. Naturally, when a band changes their sound as drastically as Opeth have in recent years, fans begin to question their intent. For Opeth, their intentions were simple. “This record and the last one… Every record we’ve done, we’ve written the way we do because we like it,” assures vocalist and guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt. “That’s how we wrote the Blackwater Park record, that’s how we wrote whatever popular records we have that our fan base kinda agree ‘This is a great record.’ You know, those records are done in the same way that we did the new one. Obviously there’s a change in sound, but… I don’t really believe in being a musician because of the fact that it generates money. It’s a career.” For many fans, one of the biggest points of contention has been the lack of Åkerfeldt’s signature brutal growls on the past two records, growls which have been traded in for sticky sweet vocal melodies that stay stuck in your head for days. Though the change in vocal approach was a drastic one, it was one made completely in the name of progress. “To me, I felt like – with the screaming vocals – I couldn’t take it further, so to speak,” explains Åkerfeldt. “You know, I tried to scream as deep as I could, I tried to scream as highpitched as I could, [I tried to scream] somewhere in the middle, or to make it sound more emotional. I’ve tried everything, I felt like, over the years. So at that time [when recording Heritage], I was a bit more interested in trying to develop my normal vocals so to speak, because I’m still learning things about that. While the death metal vocals, for me, have kind of gradually become less

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist/Guitarist Blake Judd WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

interesting, because I’m not developing. I still like it, but I don’t feel I have a need to write music that calls for that type of vocals right now.” The struggle an artist faces between writing what they want to write versus writing what fans want to hear is one that’s as old as time. For Opeth, however, this decision is not difficult at all. “It’s not like we’re not thankful for the fact that we have fans, and we want to please them, but not at the price of our own integrity. It’s something that’s more important to us,” Åkerfeldt asserts. “It would be easy for us, I guess, to try and make a career where we just did whatever the fans wanted us to do, that would be fine. But I don’t think that has anything to do with being a musician for real. A musician, I think, should broaden their horizons as much as they can. They should experiment and they should learn more about music as opposed to just, kind of, cashing in.” Though the band’s uncompromising artistic approach is one that is completely admirable, the task of dealing with fans after such a change is unenviable. “I mean, I want everybody to like what we do, but the reality is that that’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter: you can’t calculate the business and make everybody like your stuff,” assures Åkerfeldt. “I’m sure that some of those bands that stay the same and pretty much put out the same record over and over again, they probably have fans in their fan base who want them to change, maybe to try something new, and we have always been the opposite. We have fans who ask us or want us to do a repeat performance of something we did 10 years ago, but that stuff ’s just not interesting for me. It’s not gonna happen. If we do something like that, it’s because we want to do it. It’s not because we want to maintain a career; it’s just not interesting.” It’s refreshing to see one of the most respected bands in extreme metal stepping out on a limb creatively and avoiding a robotic, corporate approach to their art. “You know how McDonald’s has the Big Mac, because they know everybody wants it all the time? Some bands almost work in the same way,” jokes Åkerfeldt. “They just put out the stuff that they know the fans are gonna like, you know? But I think there’s something sad about that, really; something not artistic about that. It’s something that doesn’t have anything to do with being a musician, if you do it that way. We’re one of those bands who consist of musicians who don’t like to be pigeonholed, and we’re just too restless to stick to a sound. I think being a musician, you have to be open for change. I think it’s important for us at least.”

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ver the last decade or so, Nachtmystium has evolved into one of the most celebrated and progressive bands in the U.S. black metal scene. Their back catalog runs the gamut from raw and hateful old school black metal to a newer style that’s impossibly catchy and leans a bit towards goth and industrial at times. With the release of their newest masterpiece The World We Left Behind, they have taken their sound to an even greater level. Despite all of the band’s success, the road to this point for vocalist and guitarist Blake Judd has been one paved with more than its fair share of obstacles. Both personally and musically speaking, The World We Left Behind is easily the most important album Blake Judd has ever written. “My life has changed dramatically in the year since this album was recorded and continues to every day,” states Judd. “I’ve finally gotten my drug problem under control and am putting back the pieces of my shattered life after an immense four year battle with severe heroin addiction. This record is kind of the end cap on that hellish part of my life, and the lyrics tell that story pretty clearly, I think.” One of the first steps for Judd in the process of creating the record was undergoing a drastic lineup overhaul. On their past three albums, Nachtmystium featured a who’s who of Chicago-area musicians from bands like Indian and Lord Mantis. The band has since been pared down to just a trio consisting of Judd, bassist John Porada, and drummer Sam Shroyer. “Nachtmystium has always been an ever-changing ‘beast’ and I find that working with new musicians when I’m making directional shifts always helps in my ever-expanding mission to try new things and take my sound into new territories,” Judd explains. One of the major positives of this lineup change for Judd was the ability to take full control of the songwriting process and silence his critics once and for all. “Nothing frustrates me more than to see the recurring comments here and there online from people making these claims that ‘Blake Judd doesn’t write his own records.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Judd assures. “Sure, I’ve had people involved who helped and contributed in the past, absolutely. But I have always been responsible for the majority of the music. I was determined to make sure that this fact was absolutely unquestionable on The World We Left Behind. I wrote this record front to back. Porada and Shroyer absolutely helped with the arrangements and structuring of the

NEW NOISE MAGAZINE

songs, so in no way am I saying that I’m fully responsible for the music and arrangements on this record, but I will say I’m responsible for the majority of it musically and all of it lyrically.” Judd made an even bigger personal and professional move by choosing not to record the album in his hometown of Chicago with longtime producer and bandmate Sanford Parker. Blake instead elected to record in Racine, Wisconsin, at Belle City Sound with his friend Chris Wisco. “It was an awesome decision to get out of the city and away from home for the entire session,” explains Judd. “It allowed me to completely focus on the record, plain and simple. There were no distractions. By being up in Racine – about 80 miles north of Chicago – and literally living at the house in front of the studio, we would work all day and when we were done for the day – aside from the occasional trip to the bar across the street every couple of days – my head was completely immersed in the album.” Despite all of these changes, it was still clear that even bigger changes might be necessary. Initially, it was announced that this album would be the final Nachtmystium record, but according to Judd, “I’ve since decided that I am NOT hanging up the name, BUT, this album is very much the final piece in a chapter of the band’s history. What I do with Nachtmystium from here will be very different. This was our last record for our current deal with Century Media, so we’ll see if we’ll be resigning with them for more records or taking the band elsewhere.” Regardless of what the future holds for Nachtmystium musically, there will be no more touring or live shows, with Judd instead focusing on maintaining a more structured schedule in order to continue his recovery. Though both Judd and Nachtmystium have endured – and will continue to endure – a number of major changes, he remains hopeful for the future. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in the future of the band right now, and that is actually really good,” he enthuses. “In the past few years, I’ve known what putting a record out means: tons of press work and tons of road work. Getting to know that I don’t have to go tour rigorously, and also that I’m not going to be under pressure to do another record within the next year or two, is a really cool thing. I’m going to focus on my private life a bit, and when I feel the time is right to get back to work on music sometime down the line, I will get back to it.”

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INTERVIEW WITH Interview with Vocalist Cristian Machado WRITTEN BY Ridge Briel

il Death, La Familia seems to be a more personal and aggressive record than your previous albums. What led to that transformation? It is a very personal album for everyone in the band. It is an aggressive album, but I feel within the aggression resides a lot of heartfelt topics and life changing passion not previously captured on our past albums. We didn’t intend for it to be this way. Truthfully, we had a very strict deadline and there was not much double thinking. That might have allowed for unfiltered inspiration to come forward. I really give credit to all the guys in the band for putting together such great music under such strict deadlines. Personally, it was truly a pleasure to focus solely on vocal patterns, melodies, and lyrics. I didn’t force any ideas onto the album, and most of the ideas that made it to the record were simply complementing the awesome instrumental tracks [guitarist] Ahrue [Luster], [bassist] Laz [Pina], and [drummer] Dave [Chavarri] threw my way. Being able to become a fan of the music and write the vocals as a fan was a huge shift from our previous three recordings, and I genuinely thank the guys in the band, and also our producer Eddie Wohl, for allowing me to do my thing. I was sincerely blown away and extremely surprised

hree years ago with the release and acclaimed success of their self-titled sophomore album it seemed as if soulful melodic rock band Emarosa had the music world in the palm of their hand, and then suddenly it all fell apart as scandal and controversy took over the life of their former front-man Jonny Craig. As the years followed there was silence from Emarosa, leaving most of their fans in the dark of their potential future. But now Emarosa is finally back, and not just with a new album, but with a new vocalist, new sound and upcoming tour as well. Emarosa’s third album, Versus easily faced more internet speculation than any of the band’s previous albums. But with its release, vocalist Bradley Walden can finally safely squash all false rumors and stand by the album to let everyone know that Emarosa is back and better than ever. “I think for us going in, we wanted to make the best record we could,” says Walden of the writing process going into Versus. “We were just so excited to make music in general, to get back in to show the progression the band has made over the past three years.” And so far, this new Emarosa has hit their stride off running. Walden, formerly of the band Squid the Whale, took matters into his own hands when he found out that Emarosa was still without a singer over a year ago. After originally declining the offer to be the next vocalist of the band, Walden eventually reconsidered the offer from

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at the modern approach being molded into our style. I’m really looking forward to future albums following in the footsteps of this new approach. How has moving to Victory Records affected your development? Victory Records has been nothing short of amazing to Ill Niño. They truly allow us to do our thing, and even though this time around a very unrealistic deadline was placed upon us, we did all we could to turn over one of our most creative albums yet. I wouldn’t call the new album a change in style; perhaps a change in approach would be a better word. I also wouldn’t attribute the change in musical and lyrical approach to shifts in record labels. It’s simply a part of being a musician while believing in the never-ending search for original stylistic musical creativity. We’ve never been the kind of band to release the same album twice, and after almost two decades in the industry, it is challenging. Still, our main goal is to always offer refreshing music to our fans. Your grandmother brought you to New Jersey when you were 12. Tell us a bit about her and where she came from before she fled Poland. My grandmother, Alexandra Gubik, rest her soul, was the most kindhearted person I’ve ever met in

INTERVIEW WITH Interview with Vocalist Bradley Walden WRITTEN BY Natasha Van Duser a fan’s perspective. “I loved Emarosa and I was tired of waiting for them to have a singer and to make music again,” explains Walden. “So what better way to get them back on the road than to just join myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and not worry about the repercussions that would have happened.” As with any replacement vocalist, the position can be very daunting, as fans tend to be temperamental when it comes to change. But this time, Walden and the rest of the band chose to really redefine themselves to show their musical progression and the benefits of their time off. “One of the most important things about being in a band is to have that bond,” notes Walden, “to have that trust in the other people’s musicianship and to have that trust from them as a person. It took over a year after I joined officially for us to really find our stride and really start writing music that we enjoyed. I think in that year a lot of the time was just getting to know one another and becoming good friends.” By creating this organic progression with the band, the group has been able to release several new singles, which, surprising to many old school Emarosa fans, have been positively received. “I think we picked ‘Mad’ [as our first single] just because it was different,” explains Walden. “As

my life. She was a dedicated family woman who prayed every day in search of a happy and prosperous future for all people around her. She was born in Poland and found her way to Uruguay after fleeing the country as a World War II escapee. Her sister had fallen in love with a Jewish man and did not want to forfeit her heart to the Nazi regime. She told my grandmother about her and her lover’s planned escape from Poland. She asked my grandmother to go with her. I believe they escaped by train. My grandmother’s sister sought refuge in Italy, then eventually continued on to Israel. My grandmother wanted to travel and was given an opportunity to embark a ship leaving Italy for Uruguay. That is where she met my grandfather, an Italian man en route to a Uruguayan vacation. They fell in love and had a baby in Uruguay, which was my mother. My mother’s side of the family is very much European, my father’s side is strictly Brazilian/ Portuguese. I was born in South America and everything good that has happened in my life I attribute to my grandmother’s search for love and freedom. She passed away in my hands last year after a long battle with age. She was 91, and I will never forget holding her until her last breath. The song “Blood is Thicker Than Water” certainly touches on some feelings I carry from that experience.

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soon as it came together in the studio we just felt like this was the first song that was representing the band well.” Soon followed by the single “American Deja Vu” Walden assures fans that this release was to affirm that Emarosa has not lost their old sound, just evolved with it. “There are songs that come out of left field and people are not going to have expected this band to have made this kind of music,” notes Walden citing artists such as Michael Jackson and Patti Labelle as inspirations for one of his favorite tracks on the album, “Say Hello to the Bad Guy.” “I was raised on a lot of R&B and pop female artists, so I feel that was a huge influence for me,” continues Walden. Following multiple rumors of possible guest vocalists, it was talk that Jason Butler of Letlive. may have a spot on this record that seemingly intrigued fans the most, though in the end, the collaboration was not meant to be due to time restrictions. “Ultimately,” says Walden, “we also decided that we felt it was better to not have any guest vocals just so that people didn’t think that we were relying on any big names to try to sell to record. We wanted it to stand alone and not lean on anyone popular to try to push the record.”

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1349: the year the Black Death came to Norway. 2014: the year the Bubonic Plague reappeared in China and resulted in a nine-day quarantine of an entire city. It seems fitting that a band synonymous with the plague would have a killer new album out at the same time the infamous disease rears its ugly head once again. Massive Cauldron of Chaos is 1349’s sixth full-length album and its vicious musical content lives up to the title’s namesake. After 17 years in the grim and frostbitten black metal game, the band is now poised to release their most eclectic and perhaps definitive album to date. A warning: like the plague itself, this record is highly contagious. The band’s new album accomplishes two things and does them both rather remarkably. Well, three things if you count being a slamming extreme metal record. Massive Cauldron of Chaos succeeds at harkening back to the band’s raw and aggressive black metal roots, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of experimentation and chaos they explored on their last two full-lengths. “This album is, by far, the essence of what makes up 1349 [in] 2014,” Archaon explains. “We perfected what we feel we do best and stretched boundaries at all ends, still making what we feel is an album of the highest possible quality that our abilities allow us to.” 1349 began their career as a lean and destructive black metal powerhouse. Their first three albums consisted of razor sharp blitzkrieg riffs and blazingly fast and intricate drum work, all wrapped in ghastly, soul-wrenching screams. The soundtrack to the apocalypse if you would, or a torturous demonic possession at the least. By

INTERVIEW WITH Interview with Guitarist Archaon WRITTEN BY James Alvarez their fourth album however – 2009’s Revelations of the Black Flame – the band entered a period of avant-garde experimentation. Both Black Flame and its 2010 follow up Demonoir were rife with doom-laden interludes and some genuinely creepy atmospherics. Despite the broadening of their sound, anyone who has seen 1349 live over the past five years can attest to their continued ferocity. They never took off the corpsepaint or dulled their spiked armbands for a moment during this period, the band just wanted to peek beyond the confines of their überrestrictive genre for a bit. “I believe this album shows the very fundamental side of the band’s development over the years,” Archaon says of 1349’s new melting pot of a record, “from the extreme black metal style presented on our first albums, [to] finding ourselves and perfecting our art through experimenting with both epic and technical approaches.” Massive Cauldron of Chaos finds the 1349 hellions back in fighting form, churning out the venomous metal jams of their Hellfire days, but with an expanded palette and confidence from their recent era of experimentation. “We do not define ourselves by the latest effort,” Archaon declares. “That would be limiting our energies, which

to a great extent have to be free-floating when undertaking a task of such caliber as making a new record.” With cleansed minds and some newly acquired skills, the 1349ers naturally hashed out this wildly addictive hodgepodge of extreme metal that is their new album. Lightning paced songs like “Slaves” and “Exorcism” bring the “blast first, ask questions later” approach the corpsepainted faithful love so much. Tracks like “Golem” and album closer “Godslayer” showcase the band’s newfound versatility, featuring haunting melodies, some genuine hooks, and seriously ripping guitar solos. “We’ve used thrash inspired bits and pieces on all of our albums,” Archaon says, “but I guess to a bigger extent this time around… Now even with hints of tributes to what we see as masters of [heavy metal], such as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple amongst others… This overall perspective gave more room for guitar-orientated work, [and] for all instruments, actually. I mean, there was just more to build on when writing these songs than ever before, so to let each instrument play its own significant role felt right.” 1349’s new album also enjoys a killer

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production sound. It evokes the raw energy of their earlier catalog, but doesn’t suffer from the thin, monotone styling of the old school necro sound. Instead, Massive Cauldron of Chaos sounds full and very much alive. The new record, like all their albums released over the past decade, was recorded at Studio Studio in Norway, but this time around, “we did something we haven’t done before,” Archaon says, “bringing in Jarrett Prichard, our front of house engineer from the U.S. to produce the album. He knows 1349 from a technical point of view as he has tweaked our live sound there since 2008, so he has his own ‘perfect touch’ when it comes to our optimal sound. That, combined with the fact that we’re highly comfortable as well as familiar with the studio and its facilities from previous recording sessions, really worked wonders for us this time around.” For all the subtle changes and artistic growth the band has wrestled with in recent years, to the glorious new slab of rollicking black metal the band is set to release on Season of Mist records, one thing has remained 100% clear throughout the band’s long career: plague or no plague, 1349 shall always be entwined with the bleak, shadowy aspects of the human experience. It’s called black metal for a reason, folks. “It’s dark arts we are performing,” Archaon says, “…so it is only natural in that manner to dig into subjects such as our band name itself is associated with. The human mind has proven itself to be not only at the top of the food chain or level of intelligence, but also of unimaginable gruesomeness and barbaric actions. To convert the deranged into art is what we do…”

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he Haunted have existed in a state of flux for much of the past decade. Lineup, musical, and artistic changes have concurrently broadened and alienated the band’s fan base. There’s probably an entire generation of young metal heads only exposed to the band’s recent, experimental work who aren’t familiar with The Haunted’s origins as a fully certified thrash inspired battering ram. Those kids are in for a rude – and rocking – awakening when the band’s new album Exit Wounds drops this September. The record not only marks The Haunted’s triumphant return to their frenzied aggro roots, but demonstrates the severity of the group’s resolve, emerging through the biggest lineup shift in their history all the stronger for it. Every person in a band brings something different to the table. If a single member swap can mean serious changes, imagine what changing 3/5 of your lineup might do? That’s exactly what happened to The Haunted just a few short years ago. “We wanted a title and artwork that would reflect that the band was wounded by the leaving members, but also that it has healed and came back stronger and harder,” drummer Adrian Erlandsson reveals. In 2012, the band’s eight year strong lineup fell to pieces when vocalist Peter Dolving, drummer Per Möller Jensen, and guitarist Anders Björler all jumped ship. This left founding guitarist Patrik Jensen and longtime bassist Jonas Björler with a bit of a dilemma. How do you move forward from such a massive loss? It seems for The Haunted, moving forward meant calling up some allies from their past. Enter Erlandsson and vocalist Marco Aro. It’s fitting that Erlandsson is bashing skins in The Haunted once again. He helped form the band alongside Jensen back in 1996 after the demise of his old group, some Swedish metal band called At the Gates. You might have heard of them: they kind of spawned a worldwide underground phenomenon in the mid ‘90s. The Haunted seemed to exist as the antithesis to his previous band’s melodic tendencies. Erlandsson and Jensen’s project took its cue from the glory days of ‘80s thrash metal – employing a raw sound devoid of pomp or theatricality – and existed in a seemingly perpetual state of operation: kill. They recruited the Björler twins from Erlandsson’s old Gothenburg band and launched The Haunted into the heavy metal lexicon. Exit Wounds is easily The Haunted’s most extreme record since 2004’s One Kill Wonder. It’s no coincidence that both albums feature the same vocalist: the returning screamer and prodigal son, Mr. Marco Aro. Dolving may be The Haunted’s original and longest serving singer, but the two albums recorded with Aro during Dolving’s first absence from the group are hands down the most punishing and extreme of their

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career. It’s safe to say that Aro and Erlandsson’s return to the band are what brought the heavy back to The Haunted. “When the new ‘old’ members were recruited, it was obvious that the course was going to change,” Erlandsson says. “Both of us have a style of our own that it is very different from the leaving members’. Marco’s voice is more ferocious and in your face, and my drumming has more of a caveman approach. We decided that we wanted to return to our thrasher roots at the same time as we completed the new lineup. Once we started writing, it was very clear that we were on the right course to a heavy thrash sound.” The Ghost of Christmas Past may have brought these former members back to the fold, but The Haunted still had an open guitarist spot to fill. That’s when they doubled down and began an exhaustive search for The Haunted’s next axeman… on YouTube. “Jensen was looking around on YouTube for guitar nerd things one day and kept coming across this guy Ola. He wrote him on Facebook to chat about various guitar things, they struck a friendship up, and then the idea sparked that perhaps he could be the guy for The Haunted. Jonas and Jensen discussed it and then all was agreed. The rest is history,” Erlandsson explains. And that is how guitarist Ola Englund not only joined The Haunted, but also officially won the Internet. “He immediately wrote a few songs for the band that had the right feel straight away,” Erlandsson gushes. “Ola brings a lot to the table with his technical expertise, incredible playing, and recording knowledge.” The Haunted made good use of Ola’s technical expertise on their new record. The same for Erlandsson’s caveman drumming and Marco’s ferocious vocals. Songs like “Cutting Teeth” and “Psychonaut” are some of the most pummeling tunes the band has ever written. Aro’s bark may not be the most diverse tool in their sonic arsenal, but like Erlandsson said, it’s just so in your face you can’t help but love it. “Trend Killer” has an addictive bass groove and infectious guitar leads, while “My Enemy” is probably the closest anyone has come to vintage Slayer intensity in decades. The album is full of genuine skull-crushing riffs, and even the slower mid-paced numbers like “Eye of the Storm” or “Temptation” are sure to leave heads banging and mouths foaming. Keep an eye out for Exit Wounds when it hits shelves across North America this September via Century Media Records. With their newly invigorated lineup and this slamming new album in tow, The Haunted are still an exciting new band to watch 18 years into their career. “No matter the turnout for the album,” Erlandsson says, “it is a great success for us as a band. To have been reborn and reinvented.”

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LES BUTCHERETTES freaking out and kept it to myself.”

Meanwhile, school was rough. Suárez details her high school years: “At Guadalajara, I was new bait… New meat to be made fun of. ‘You’re not really Mexican.’ ‘Your skin is too pale.’ ‘Your accent is too Spanish.’ And then, in Guadalajara, you can get kidnapped or meet your best friend. You learn which cabs will rob you or charge you too much, and that the green cabs are safe. You don’t go down this street after 6 p.m. It’s a very bipolar city.” Her mother kept a tight watch on Suárez to make sure that she didn’t fall prey to the dangers of the city. “She’s very neurotic, like me,” Suárez laughs. “I can understand that women are sometimes more open to being victims. I’d go out with all the punks and she would freak out. If I was home five or 10 minutes late, I kid you not, she’d call the police. If I went out with a guy friend, she’d call all our friends and spread false information. ‘Tell Teri to stay away from this guy, because he did this and that,’ which was a lie.”

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But this difficult and bloody transition to womanhood would go on to create the entity and stage persona “Teri Gender Bender.” Suárez usually goes by her birth name these days, as opposed to her punk alter ego, but she points out that, at all times, she is “Teri,” “Teresa,” and “Teri Gender Bender.”

INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist/Guitarist Teresa Suárez WRITTEN BY John Gentile

hen Teresa Suárez turned 13, she had her first period and her father dropped dead. Before his untimely passing, Roberto Suárez was a prison guard in the kitchen of a Denver prison: a large, powerful man of Spanish descent. The convicts respected the firm, but understanding guard who would check them every day for knives, forks, and spoons before they left the cafeteria. “I remember we once stopped at a convenience store and ran into an exprisoner,” Suárez says. “He said, ‘Roberto! It is great seeing you! Your positivity helped get me out of there.’ I thought, ‘Wow! People adore him in there. They might not be good people by society’s standards, but they admired him!’” However, just as Suárez – who had always been daddy’s little girl – was becoming a woman, Roberto suffered a sudden, unexpected heart attack and, like that, he was gone. Suárez says, “My mother had to

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play the part of mother and father. I had to grow up and help my mother with my brothers, because I was the oldest.” With the man of the house gone, Suárez, her brothers, and mother, moved back to her mother’s home, Guadalajara, Mexico. The transition was difficult for Suárez. The littlest things, like the weather, were bothersome. “I was very used to the cold,” she says. “Mexico is the opposite. Amazing weather, and people just come up to you and hug you. There is no wave from afar. You go up to everyone, hug them, and kiss them on the cheek.” The big things – like the fact that Suárez really didn’t have anyone to talk to about her new womanhood – were brutal. “I had all sorts of hormones coming in and out of me,” she says. “I don’t blame my mother, but she wasn’t really there for me in that respect, because she had just lost her husband. She was there for me in other senses, but not the bleeding stage. I didn’t know how to ask my mom. I was

“I don’t know if it sounds sad,” she says, “but I would write down stuff in my notebooks and read it to myself, and try to edit it as much as possible.” Eventually, she graduated and became a “mall punk” where she and likeminded friends would sit in the middle of the mall and sing Bikini Kill lyrics at passersby. That led to the creation of Suárez’s band Les Butcherettes. In the band’s early days, she would perform covered in blood, draped in meat, or with a pig’s head hoisted on the front of the stage. Thus, “Teri Gender Bender” was born: the frontwoman for a berserk, feminist punk group that was equally confident ripping through two minute barnstormers as it was exploring gothic, Alice Cooper-like horror epics. “The meat and blood represented not just the gore part, but the personal part. That’s how I felt,” Suárez says. “I felt like a big piece of material that was once alive, that was now just to be poked or eaten or stepped on. I can see why people thought it was gross or gory. But, at the time, it worked as therapy. I think art can be used to heal, even if other people don’t understand it.” Surprisingly, despite Suárez’s mother being full-blooded Mexican and from

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a community usually closely associated with the Church, the matriarch “got it” right away. A former actress herself, who toured Mexcico and the U.S., she understood the concept of art as a living, breathing thing, even if it was draped in carcasses. “I think my mom was just happy that I wasn’t doing drugs or drinking,” Suárez says. “She knew my frustrations of getting picked on. She said, ‘Let’s go get your meat.’ We’d go together to the butcher shop and ask if they had any old meat, and they’d give us what they were going to throw away.” But, now, on Les Butcherette’s second album, Cry is for the Flies, Suárez has put the meat aside in favor of focusing on what was going on underneath her ski, instead of underneath the skin of an unfortunate cow. She says, “I feel like there are many other ways to express yourself. What else can I use to explore my ‘inner’?” The new album is dark, ornate, and raw. On “My Child,” Suárez directly addresses the 13 year-old little girl who just lost her daddy. “I was daddy’s little girl, and when he passed away, part of me passed away,” Suárez explains. “My inner child died away. I had to let go of me as a kid to help my family.” Continuing the album’s theme of innerconversation, punk icon Henry Rollins makes an appearance, playing the part of Suárez ‘s conscious via spoken word performance, reprimanding her for leaving her family and friends behind when she moved back to the U.S. “Henry Rollins was always capable of being varied as a person,” Suárez explains. “He sang in Black Flag and then did spoken word, going to two extremes. Yet, despite his talent and what he represents, he’s a very down to earth person. I just want to work with people who are humble. There’s no point working with someone – even if he or she is going to help your career – if they’re a bad person.” Between the commentary on selftransformation and Rollins’ stint as the ghost of guilt on Cry is for the Flies, you’d expect the LP to convey self-loathing. But to the contrary – between the album’s abrasive, sometimes hardcore, sometimes psychedelic dark tones – the whole thing is more rejuvenating than ruinous. Suárez explains, “I’m just happy that I am the daughter of my mother. I love that I am a product of what made me. In “The Plague” by Albert Camus, the people can’t believe that they’ve lost their freedom. But, they gain a new sense of freedom and live for the moment. I certainly have lost people and things, so I, too, just live for the moment.”

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WOVENWAR Photography by Ty Watkins

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist Phil Sgrosso WRITTEN BY Morgan Y. Evans

erhaps no hard rock or metal record of 2014 has been more anticipated than Wovenwar’s long-awaited debut. How would the former members of As I Lay Dying start again after the Tim Lambesis controversy? Would Oh, Sleeper vocalist Shane Blay be a good fit? The answer is yes. “Death to Rights” opens the record with such explosive energy. When kids hear that intro, they will go off! The whole Wovenwar debut is an incredibly moving testament to a band’s will to weather the storm and be good to their fans. I speak with guitarist Phil Sgrosso over the phone on an early date of their tour with Black Label Society to get the scoop… Hey Phil, where are you? We’re in Asheville, NC, today. There’s an awesome scene there. Seems like it. We played here a couple times with As I Lay Dying. How does it feel to know you have so much support from those not swayed by TMZ-type reporting? Those are the diehards willing to follow you wherever you go. We’re so grateful they put their faith in us. You can’t ask for anything better than that. Shane is awesome on “All Rise.” His melodic vocals still command attention over some of the heaviest parts… Our other guitar player played in a band called Evelyn from Dallas after high school with Shane. Dillinger, chaotic stuff. Over the years, we kept in touch with Shane. He played guitar for a while in Between the Buried and Me before Oh, Sleeper. We always thought Shane was awesome and loved to hang out with the Oh, Sleeper dudes. We’ve all been friends for a long time and always stayed in touch. When the idea came

to find a vocalist who could actually sing, [guitarist] Nick [Hipa] thought of Shane. Obviously, we had to figure out what Oh, Sleeper was doing, but Shane told us they were going to actually be not very active. So Shane was on board, and it was perfect. We’re all in this and this is our livelihood, wholeheartedly. You’ve written so much intricate material. The record is overflowing with ideas… Yeah, we are used to doing headlining shows that are over an hour. If we wanna get out and do headliners more than a half hour, we have to do a lot of songs. So I think the album comes in at 54 minutes. We have the option of doing the whole album live sometime, and I think it would make a good headlining set.

gives a big hug and is like, “What’s up, brother?” For a guitar legend like Zakk to want to take us out on the first Wovenwar tour ever, you don’t say no. It’s really sweet of him to be helping us out and we’re stoked to be a part of it. Black Label fans are a little crazy and want to see a lot of flash from guitar players, so it’s a lot of stress on us. We have three guitar players. Shane plays guitar as well. So hopefully they are getting enough that they are not bored with Wovenwar. We’re compensating for a lack of 10 minute guitar solos [laughs].

fluid than you could have done in As I Lay Dying… We didn’t want to feel restricted. There’s only so much you could do if the drums have to be a certain way or it always has to be screaming. It was getting pretty stale. So, with this album, we went for these things we’ve always wanted to do that wouldn’t have worked before. When Shane wanted to play guitar live as well, Nick and I could both do solo stuff and textures. If we all played the same thing, it would sound muddy. Three guitars? I was really stoked on having a lot of guitar stuff on the album.

You both have melodic elements. It’s interesting when these genres meet on a package tour… Yeah. Like, Judas Priest is a band influenced me, even with As I Lay Dying. We even covered “Electric Eye.” I’m not saying Wovenwar has vocals as operatic as Rob Halford, but it is melodic.

What inspired the intensity of “Matter of Time”? That song was written years ago for As I Lay Dying, but some of the guys – including the vocalist – couldn’t get behind it. [Bassist] Josh [Gilbert] and I wanted to do some songs on the side, and Josh came back and knocked it out of the park. Over the years, it has morphed and gotten new parts here and there, but the song needed to see the light of day. Tim, I think, he never wanted to go to far outside of his range with things. He just couldn’t see how his style would work over it to where he could enjoy the song. That’s fine. This song was meant to be sung over. It is a standout track of the Wovenwar record. It bridges the gap for the old fans. Josh kills it on vocals and it was a no brainer.

How has your label supported Wovenwar through this difficult time? Brian Slagel lent support immediately. Everyone at Metal Blade has been like a family to us. It’s insane. Our lawyer… Everyone was on board and stuck with us through all the mess and bullshit. They trust us and we’re not gonna let them down. If everyone had cut ties, I don’t know how we would have pieced it back together again. This shows we’re working with great people.

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Some of this release is a little more

That’d be a good DVD… Exactly. There’re a lot of songs, but if we took out any, it would feel weird. They serve a purpose for each part of the album. We didn’t want to cut it any shorter. I mean, we were just really driven to do something that exceeded our own expectations. We were able to concentrate on this fully because our livelihood depends on it. Whatever drama was going on with As I Lay Dying… Before we had a band name for Wovenwar, we knew we were going to make a kickass record. I think it was better for us to be working so we weren’t focusing on how crappy a situation we were in, not just overthinking the negative going on. How does it feel to be touring with Black Label Society? Had you toured together before? We toured with Black Label in 2005 with As I Lay Dying. We didn’t share a stage. We were side-stage. Zakk has always been such a cool dude. You see him coming your way and he always

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INTERVIEW WITH Interview with Guitarist Jus Osborn WRITTEN BY Morgan Y. Evans

ime to Die – Electric Wizard’s first new album from the mysterious U.K. doom legends since 2010 and eighth overall – could serve as a capstone to their career. The band have boldly tread where few mortals dare, burning incense for the damned lit with the torch of rebellion. Though they came close to disbanding, the group is alive and well. Black Masses was awesome, but kind of a wandering trip… Black Masses was an experiment in writing stuff. The new material was really focused. We were in a bad way with the band. There was a lot of bullshit going on. There was less emphasis on songwriting and more on getting in there and figuring it out, you know? Sometimes you can forget about an argument and get in there and do it. “Funeral of the Mind” struck me. Trance music doesn’t so much alter perception as bring it back to the root. Yeah. That’s the basis of the original music. The heartbeat. The essential jam. You go back to the thing. It’s something you have as a group of musicians that you return to. I think we should let it evolve, you know? […] Studying music was an occult art in the Middle Ages. It was like the study of time and the manipulation of time. “Saturn Dethroned” is the closing track. Saturn can represent things we need to face, but hide away from. We all have to face death someday. Time to Die is a celebration of life in some ways, but it’s also a middle finger That’s what you do to forget about how pissed off you are sometimes. Black Masses is about how we can be enjoying ourselves, but we got a reality slap. All of us. We’ve got to face the reality of death, even the death of the band. Saturn is referred to as “The Wizard’s Planet.” Protector of black magic. In the end, it’s the possibility of being rebuilt and starting over. Even though we’ve died and given up. Hopefully, with Electric Wizard, we can take [it] to the next level. We converted the garage over the summer to a rehearsal studio. We could go in with each song as a skeleton and jam around with the same riffs and ideas. It was a few takes of each one. Basic recording was probably four days, and then [we] added some leads, melotron, and vocals. Melotron is always fun. I paid 50 bucks for it. “I’ve gotta have this fucker!” Are you looking forward to people hearing this? Are you concerned? I shouldn’t be. I dunno. I can say it’s beyond criticism and be a cunt. [Laughs] I hope people are destroyed by it, on one level, at least. I want it to be a new level in some sort of brutality and heaviness. […] It’s gonna stand on its own forever, I think. A long-lived fuck

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off to the world. It was heavy duty work, doing the album. I felt cursed. We lost the master tapes at one point. Held for ransom. We had to do fucked up shit. It was all shit. […] People were trying to stop this record! Hate and negativity. How do you prefer to write and record? It’s good to try different approaches to making music. Trying different styles and instrumentation. The core of our sound stays intact. Influences and surroundings, people change. When we were teenagers, it was easy to say, “Fuck everything,” but as you get older, life stuff starts coming in and fucking with everything, you know? People have kids and all sorts. Could this be the last record, or will you rise above the turbulence? This Electric Wizard sound is hard to escape from. I like when [guitarist] Liz [Buckingham] and I collaborate on arrangements. Pretty good teamwork. There is a sense of movement in this record… We listened to a lot of classic records this time around. Classic albums. Good shit. Alice Cooper. Listened to what makes those albums great. Sabbath’s Sabotage is not just one heavy riff after another. We just wanted to make fuckin’ Wizard music and have it be that. The battle for heaviness has become technological, and that’s not the real way to get there. I’ve lost interest in who can rectal prolapse people the most. [Laughs] Do you feel you’re doing something bigger than just music? We embark on that journey and take it a bit further. Electric Wizard has a far more serious attitude than a lot of people realize. It’s not just the band that watches horror movies and smokes weed. People need to look up at the diseased world they are living in. We haven’t reached any conclusions other than that maybe death is fuckin’ glorious. I’d like to get through to someone at some point. Make it more than a band and music. There’s got to be more to life, right? […] All the coolest shit I grew up with was made by musicians who wanted to make something cool because reality was so fuckin’ lousy. I was excited at a young age. Like, the early black metal ‘90s wanted to recreate the excitement they heard when inspired by ‘80s stuff done by Hellhammer. Are you inspired by H.P. Lovecraft? Yeah. You look at Lovecraft, and he inspired a generation. He had true dedication. He made his art. Scratched his fucking mark on the side of the Earth. It’s like leaving your name on the side of a tree. Once, we built the pyramids. Maybe the pyramids were big middle fingers to the world.

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after we moved, and after I toured the East Coast with Austin Lucas. I had a lot of ideas floating around, that I’d been thinking about finishing for the past year and half. I just buckled down and finished them.

What inspired your move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to write this EP? I didn’t move to write the EP, I moved because I was looking for a better quality of life. I was tired of coming home from tour to NYC during the worst months of the year, to a tiny apartment that I could barely afford. So I moved to L.A., where I can live in a house and have some room to breathe. I wrote the EP

Who do you bounce songs off of when they’re nearing completion? Do you need outside feedback to decide a song is finished? Not really. Unless I’m specifically writing a song with a friend, I tend to keep my songs pretty private. For this EP, I did bounce some ideas off my producer Joanna Katcher. Since she was going to have a hand in how they turned out in the end, I’d play her the song and ask for arrangement suggestions. You know, like, “Do you think there should be a double chorus here?” or “Is this chord progression cool?” There’s actually one song called “The Fall” that had completely different lyrics in the chorus. I wasn’t sold on them, and Joanna agreed. She was like, “Honestly, they’re not your best...” and I knew she was right, so I rewrote

llison Weiss is one of those rare artists with the ability to maintain a presence in both the basement indie world and the more visible and commercial Warped Tour scene. Garnering respect from both ends of the spectrum, Weiss released Remember When, a sunny follow-up EP to her flawless No Sleep full-length Say What You Mean. After her recent cross-country move, Weiss is happy to embrace the change and spend as much time on the road as possible. Can’t catch her on the road? Then Weiss invites you to join her on her back porch.

them and they’re so much better. The record is largely about expectations vs. reality. Can you expand on this concept? I think it’s something everyone deals with, and definitely something I think about a lot. I overthink everything, I always try and plan ahead, even with things I have no control over. Especially with relationships, people always have an idea of what they should be like. Movies and TV try to tell us how love feels, when in reality it’s different for everyone. I touch on that subject a little on Remember When, but I›m definitely not done talking about it yet. Say What You Mean grabbed a lot of attention, then you toured with some huge names. Do you feel pressure to maintain this momentum? Not at all. I feel energized. I feel completely ready to get on the road and stay there. I’m already starting to write for the next full-length, and I can’t wait to get started. What is it about Warped Tour that

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keeps you coming back? The folks at Warped hooked me up with a bus spot this year and it’s hard to turn down that kind of offer. Warped is so hot and intense and a ton of work, but in other ways, it’s easy. If you’re doing it totally solo like I am, you just get on the bus and follow directions. You get to visit cities you might not normally hit when you’re driving yourself. After the summer run, where will we be able to find you? I’ll be back out in the fall and winter, and I’ll always be all over the Internet! I’ve been doing shows from my deck in L.A. and broadcasting them online. Come hang out with me at allisonw. com/live. It’s pretty fun. Anything you’d like to add? Preorder Remember When from No Sleep Records/ on my website! I designed the packaging, which features some pretty sick looking vinyl with a screen-printed b-side. I’m proud of it!

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NEIGHBORHOOD BRATS

INTERVIEW

WITH

VOCALIST

oming off their latest European jaunt, Neighborhood Brats frontwoman Jenny Angelillo speaks about her ferocious four-piece punk band and their latest stunning album, Recovery. When you went to Europe, you had some pressings of the record? Yeah, it’s coming out in North America in August on Deranged [Records], and the European release is on Taken By Surprise. We had 100 test pressings in Europe and blew through them in three days. People were bummed. We got them in Cologne and, three days later, we played a huge festival in Copenhagen called K-Town Hardcore Fest and ran out that night. People were physically upset. I’ve never seen that before – people wanting the record so bad – so I hope it’s a good sign. How has your sound progressed? I definitely think there’s a progression. [Guitarist] George [Rager] and I started this band five years ago in San Francisco, but we both came from the Midwest and we grew up on American punk rock and hardcore. George always leaned towards more the L.A. bands, and I grew up more listening to the East Coast bands. We always just wanted to have a fun, punk rock party band. All of our songs were about San Francisco. I think definitely our earlier recordings and the first formation of the band was more a punk/hardcore-sounding band, but I think as we’ve progressed – especially with this new album, Recovery – we’re exploring other styles of music. George is an amazing guitar player and a really good surf guitar player, so I hear the new album – songs like “Painted and Gutted” and “One Wasted Year” – and there’s definitely some surfy elements. When we finished listening to this record, we were like, “It’s still a punk-rock record, but… it’s like a bad day at the beach. It’s really beachy and summery, but it’s also kinda dark.” I don’t think we’re gonna alienate anybody who likes Neighborhood Brats. I don’t feel like anybody’s gonna listen to this record and be like, “Oh, fuck that. They’re not our punk-rock hardcore band anymore.” We’ve always recorded at the same place here in Oakland, so we haven’t changed. Greg Wilkinson’s been our recording engineer since Day 1. He helped develop our sound, and I really like the way Recovery sounds. Not to say that I wouldn’t listen to the other records, but Recovery is an album I’d actually buy and enjoy listening to. “Painted and Gutted,” is definitely a little bit different. More melodic… Yeah, I think when we wrote that song,

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George was like, “That’s a surf song I wrote.” George and I wrote this entire record in my living room. We didn’t write it in the studio; we didn’t write it at band practice. It was just me and him sitting across from each other on the carpet in my living room writing songs. He would just play things, and I would literally lay there on the floor with a cup of coffee and a notebook. George can just play and play and play… So I’d have to be like, “Oh, I like that. I like that,” and I would just pick through his brain. Then, sometimes, we would look up X or something, and be like, “Fuck, we’re kinda going this way.” We would write, and then pull out our encyclopedias for reference. Writing this album was like writing a research paper in more ways than one. “Year of the Brat” is such a perfect opener… We really liked that name as a title for the album, but it became evident we wanted to use Recovery instead. “Year of the Brat”- that’s just an opening. It’s saying things are gonna be different. People are like, “The album’s called Recovery; why is it called Recovery?” Just read the lyrics. It’s about shutting the door on the past and moving into the future, and not being resentful or regretful about things you’ve done in the past or mistakes you’ve made, because they’ve all gotten you to where you are now. It’s declaring, “Yeah, it’s our year and our record.” Everything that’s happened in our lives personally and band-wise has put us in a really good place. People are like, “Fuck, I hit a wall.” Things are fucked, but you should always look at life like… maybe you’re running into a wall that’s got a door in it. Have you ever done a totally instrumental track like “Escape the City” before? No. But I felt like it was a nice break. Again, George is a great surf guitar player. He’ll probably deny it, but he’s awesome, and it felt like a fun thing to put on the record. I just picture it in a skate video, or surf video or something like that. And also, it showcases that we are musicians. The boys in my band can actually play their instruments. I know it’s not very “punk rock,” but… They’re actually great musicians. It makes the record more of a story instead of, “Here’s a bunch of songs we threw together.”

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JONES

Now we both live in Long Beach. Is “Suburbia” about the city? “Suburbia” was inspired by the movie. We made a fun little video you can see on our Facebook. Like a tribute? You basically don’t have to watch the movie ever because we just did the best hits of the movie. Did you have a little kid on a Big Wheel? Yeah. You should watch it. George was in the living room one day – he and I are roommates – and I’m like, “What the fuck are you doing?” He’s like, “Just wait. It’s gonna be great.” Finally he’s like, “You can watch it,” and I’m like, “This is genius!” [The song] “How We Lost Control” is definitely about San Francisco, how it’s changed so much from when we lived there to now. So different, just because of all the new money in the city, the dot-com industry and the fact that people in the city are really wealthy at a really young age.

meth lab… So this is “Stevie Nicks and the RV”?! There literally was an RV parked outside, and a woman we called Stevie Nicks because she looked like her. There was a fistfight on the front lawn one night. We were hanging out in the house and heard this yelling, and they were beating the living crap out of each other. There were always people working at all hours of the night on cars with blowtorches, sort of “Breaking Bad”meets-“Mad Max” next door. So the main dude who lived there – his name was Scotty B. – apparently had a band, and told my ex that they were writing a hit song called “The Pharmacy is Closer Than the Liquor Store.” And I said, “That’s genius, I’m totally gonna use that.”

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That last song, “The Pharmacy is Closer Than the Liquor Store”… Isn’t that hilarious?! What do you say in between the lyrics, “It’s fucked!”? Basically, I encountered these people who actually live next door to my ex-boyfriend – the guy who “One Wasted Year” talks about – and it was a crazy house, just these people coming and going, we’re pretty sure it was a

When did you guys move to L.A.? I think George moved in 2011, so there was a year that we weren’t in the same city. George and I were both living in Hollywood, and then George moved to Torrance and I moved to Long Beach.

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Photography by Rebecca Reed

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ost bands don’t get a second chance, let alone have the mojo to propel them to a second career peak. On the brink of releasing their third record since their hiatus, it’s as if Yellowcard never left us. The band braved the heat this summer slaying Warped Tour crowds, providing guest vocals with Linkin Park, and honing what would become Lift a Sail, a record that is sure to delight fans who grew up with the act. Calling it “mature” would be undermining its brilliance, and “progressive” would imply their previous releases were somehow inferior, so we’ll leave the adjectives up to you, dear listener. In a scene where resting on your laurels can garner you a handful of years of fame, few bands are able to break the decade mark and push themselves to new heights. Reminiscent of early Foo Fighters, Sail feels like the launching pad for the next 20 years of the band. Vocalist Ryan Key and company have been through every peak and valley imaginable – both personally and professionally – so it’s no wonder that Sail breaks new ground in every aspect possible. Key phones us from the backseat of his parents’ car as he makes his way home after a grueling, but fulfilling summer on the Vans Warped Tour. Would it be fair to say you guys felt pigeonholed in pop punk? I think you have to tread lightly on that stuff. We’ve been through it and back again, as far as letting it get to you or not get to you. People are going to put a name on something, so there is nothing you can do about it. That being said, being a part of said scene, whatever it is, got us where we are today. No matter what it is we have been a part of, we’re grateful for it. We’re not trying to be one thing or another, we’re not trying to be pop punk or not be a pop punk band. We’re just trying to write songs that we feel inspired to write at the time. I think we’ve always done that and stayed true to that. This record took us in a very different direction, but it was from the heart. So it wasn’t a conscious decision to go heavier? We made some choices to tune the guitars a little lower than normal. I’ve been trying to describe the evolution of the band in this way: there are two batches of bands that

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really heavily, in their own right, influenced us as individuals and us collectively. We were all getting our first guitars and learning to play music in the explosion of rock music in the early ‘90s, whether it was grunge rock or whatever label was on that music. Those bands – Nirvana, Filter, Smashing Pumpkins, the first Foo Fighters’ record, Weezer, early Green Day, etc – they were all writing and playing rock music, but it was so mainstream and so accessible. I personally didn’t have any access to cool underground music at the time. I don’t even know what it would have been in the early ‘90s. I guess it would have been the older NOFX and Bad Religion records, but we all share that. The early ‘90s were a very formative time for us as far as wanting to learn how to play music. We were all starting to get into the Warped Tour, so bands we listened to were No Use for a Name, NOFX, Lagwagon, Strung Out, the list could go on forever. Pretty much, if Epitaph or Fat Wreck Chords put out an album, then we bought it. That was the time we began to be very influenced in the matter of forming a band, what kind of band we wanted to be, and what kind of career we wanted to have. I think what’s happened with Lift a Sail, the first batch has really pushed their heads through. They’re the root of why we all started playing music, the rock music that formed us and got us to become guitar players and become songwriters. They really made themselves evident influence-wise on these songs. That was more of a conscious choice when we started writing. All those old songs we love and those old bands that we’ve loved for 20 plus years continued to come up, so we just ran with it. I think that’s where a lot of the shift came from. Where it may sound new and different, it comes from a very real place; it’s just a place we haven’t visited in quite a while. You mentioned the backlash from Lights and Sounds and being a band for 15 plus years. Is confidence driving you to do whatever you want now? Of course, I think it’s confidence, not arrogance. It’s our desire to challenge ourselves and push ourselves further. I think there’s always been a desire deep within to be a rock band, and not just have one label from one genre put on what we do. Whether we pull that off or not, I don’t really care, I don’t care what people say or think. We’re really happy with the record

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we made, and we’ve been happy with every record we’ve ever made. I think this record is really special. [Guitarist] Ryan Mendez kept reminding everyone through the process that we each individually and collectively needed to outdo ourselves. We needed to push ourselves harder and farther sonically and musically. We kept that in mind the whole way through. We wrote a record that has so many layers and so much depth sonically, emotionally, lyrically, etc. I just think it’s the greatest thing we’ve ever done, and I’m really proud of it. What are some of the biggest missteps or mistakes of your career? I’ve been a pretty open book in interviews about my personal one. Let me just go on a tangent and say: I hate complaining about anything at all because of what my wife is going through right now. Whatever I’m bitching about pales in comparison to what she’s fighting to get through, so it’s really hard to answer these questions. When I was 24 years old, the band was exploding and I was feeling a lot of insecurity. I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be. I was the frontman of this big band now, and I didn’t really have a lot of confidence in my singing voice. Instead of owning that and working on it, I kind of went into a corner and played in my own little world. I gave off an air of ego or arrogance when it was really more fear than anything else. I learned you have to take care of your singing voice, get better at it, and be more confident in yourself. Don’t worry about what people think, it doesn’t matter. If you love what you’re doing, that’s all that matters. It’s taken me the whole journey to learn and I’m still learning now. I think that was my biggest mistake. I think that’s why Lights and Sounds was one of my favorite records, because that whole record comes from that. Lyrically, where I was at then, I think you can hear a darkness or a searching throughout that record. I think that’s why it didn’t sound as sunny and shiny as Ocean Avenue did. I’ve learned a lot of that over the years, and I really try now to get out every day and remember that I love to do it. I can’t speak for everyone. I think as a band we’ve learned so much: how to run our business better, how to put on a better show, how to write better songs. We’re always just learning.

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THE OFFSPRING

INTERVIEW WITH Dexter Holland WRITTEN BY Brandon Evans “Ahhh, it’s time to relax…” The first few seconds of that legendary intro track are all you need to remember exactly where you were when you first heard The Offspring’s massively successful album Smash. The album came out in April 1994, a year when alternative and grunge music dominated the rock airwaves, and another California punk band – as well as many other artists – experienced massive breaks in their careers. The difference between those bands and The Offspring is the sheer enormity of the latter’s success with Smash. We speak with frontman Dexter Holland about the album, its remastered rerelease, and the upcoming Smash 20th anniversary tour on which the band will play the record in its entirety. You felt a lot of pressure and worked on a very tight budget leading up to the original release of this album. After remastering it, is there anything you would have done differently 20 years ago? I actually think it all turned out pretty good. I think our budget was $20,000, which is nothing in terms of making a record. We ended up recording the whole thing in three weeks. We weren’t going to be able to finish it because we were about to go on tour with Pennywise to open up for them, and I called Epitaph and said that this [record] is going to have to wait until we get back. They were like, “It can’t wait, it can’t wait. We’ve already booked ads and billed the stuff, so you’re just going to have to finish it before you leave.” So, it was really a scramble for us. I had like four lyrics left to write. I hadn’t written the lyrics at all and I still needed to sing them, so I did like two a night, because I had to go to work and stuff. So I showed up at the studio at 6 p.m., would write for a few hours, sing for a couple hours, write another one, sing a different one, and so on. The last night I got done at like five in the morning and it was pretty crazy. When you listen to it now, I really like the way that it sounds… I think it sounds really good! Mastering mostly now just makes things sound louder and a little more present than it may have sounded originally. You can tweak the queues and things to make it sound brighter, but we didn’t want to do much of that. We just wanted to make it sound really nice, full and present. So, nothing major was improved upon or changed? Everyone tends to be his or her harshest critic… Oh, for sure. I read a great thing by J.D.

Salinger – he’s the guy that wrote The Catcher in the Rye – and he said that he’d go back and read The Catcher in the Rye like 10 years later and he’d be like, “Oh gosh, I wish I wouldn’t have written that.” Or he’d say, “I wish I could change that and go back.” Then he realized that no matter if it’s flawed or whatever, the flaws are a part of what makes it what it is. He said that there is an appeal to it just the way it is, even though it’s not perfect. I guess in our case, it’s kinda like that too. We could have probably spent more money and we probably could have made it sound “better” – whatever that means – maybe technically better, but there is character to it. Will you discuss “Nitro” and “Smash”? Everyone knows the Smash’s singles, but these songs are so underrated. I liked “Nitro” being the first song on the record because it starts off with that snare roll and stuff. “Time to Relax” was kind of a strange thing to put on a punk record, so I wanted to go right into something that was super punk right afterwards, and “Nitro” was just the perfect song (musically) for that. It was very melodic and very simple, and “Live like there’s no tomorrow” represented the kind of vibe that was happening with bands like Pennywise and even some of the clothing companies in Southern California. It was very much a Southern California surf and punk thing that was happening. I thought that was better than something that was dark and doomsday, or whatever. So I thought that it was a cool way to start off the album. “Smash” is the last song on the album and uh… Well, “Smash…” That might be one line I would change. [Laughs] It sounds kind of silly when you say it out of context right? The idea was that you have to think for yourself and when people say, “Are you a punk band or a rock band?” I would have to say that we’re a punk band, and I think that there’s a spirit that comes along with being a punk band and that it’s different for everybody. For a band like the Sex Pistols, it was very nihilistic, and for a band like the Dead Kennedys, it was very political. For us, the idea was anti-authority. We felt that you should think for yourself, don’t listen to what other people tell you, and don’t make decisions based on what other people think you should do. You need to decide what’s right for you and be your own person, and that song wraps up that idea pretty well. It can be invaluable to younger kids to hear that message from someone other than a parent or teacher…

Photography by Rebecca Reed I guess so. I mean, high school is a tough time for kids. There is a lot of pressure to be trendy and all of that stuff. I think that it’s something important for people to hear! Let’s say you could pick any band to cover these songs… Who would you choose? Oh my gosh! I would love to hear The Police cover “Self Esteem.” [Laughs] I think that would sound pretty good right?! I love The Police. Sting can sing really high and he sounds great. Dude, I don’t know, you can ask me again 10 minutes from now, and I would have a totally different answer for you. I’m going off of the top of my head. I’m winging it here! How much time was dedicated to relearning these songs for your upcoming tour? We did have to go back in and do a little band practice and stuff. We have played a lot of them before, and we still play a few of them a lot. We never had the feeling like, “Oh man, we have to go back and relearn this entire album.” But there were some songs that we hardly ever played, and there was one song called “Not the One;” we actually never played that song live. It was different, and the first couple of shows were a little shaky, but it’s all come together. We did this for about a month and a half in Europe, so it feels really solid and natural now. We have a lot of fun doing

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it, and I like it because it’s different from the set that we have done in the recent past. I wasn’t sure how the audience was going to react because there are some deep cuts on that album that some people aren’t going to be familiar with. It’s been going over really great, and people are getting behind the idea that it’s the whole album and realizing that it’s just a kind of a different experience, I guess. It’s turned into something where people can say, “I went and saw them play that whole album!” How are you executing the dialogue into track live? [Laughs] Well, we did a couple of different things. We did that opening off of Smash, but we had it redone. We’ve fixed it up and I’m going to see where we’re going to go with that, but to answer your question, we’ve got a new and improved version that we’re using. Is this reissue the first time Smash has been pressed in vinyl? Well, it came out on all three versions originally: we had it on cassette, vinyl, and CD. We released it in a remastered version a few years ago on CD, but this will be the first time that the vinyl is available remastered. We are sort of doing a collector’s set, so even though it’s a remaster, you can buy the full-on box-set with old photos, backstage passes, and all kinds of crazy stuff that’s in there as well as the remastered LP and CD.

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hat do you get when you combine Darkest Hour’s Victory/E1 era rhythm section with Tony Foresta of Municipal Waste on vocals and Phil “Land Phil” Hall of Municipal Waste and Cannabis Corpse on guitar? The answer is a razor sharp, boot-to-the-gut of old school crossover thrash straight out of 1986 known as Iron Reagan. With an impressive pedigree of members, an unyielding old school approach, and a jaw-dropping new record coming out on Relapse Records, 2014 is destined to be the year they force extreme metal to tear down its walls. Though the band was initially formed in 2012, it was a project that was already many years in the making. “Iron Reagan was a band name Tony had floating around for a while,” states drummer Ryan Parrish. “We had always wanted to do a band together for years, so when I was no longer in Darkest Hour, I called Tony who told me that Phil had been busy writing riffs that were sick as shit. A month later, and the addition of bassist and long time pal Paul Burnette

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he said he couldn’t do it because he saw the momentum, where the band was going, and the interest in it, and he didn’t want to hold us back, you know? He wanted to help us out. It was a friendly decision, it’s what he wanted to do, but it kind of surprised us.”

[also ex-Darkest Hour] aka ‘Dr. Guitar,’ Iron Reagan had 20 songs.” Midway through 2013, the band dropped their debut full-length, Worse Than Dead, and it took off like a rocket immediately upon release. Shortly after the rave reviews came rolling in, the band started receiving numerous tour offers. Unfortunately, the necessity of touring created a conundrum. “Paul… couldn’t tour, so Iron Reagan wasn’t really going to be a touring band,” states Foresta. Due to an impending tour that would include dates with bands like Drop Dead, Whiplash, GWAR, and Hatebreed, the band recruited guitarist Mark Bronzino (Mammoth Grinder, ANS) to be their touring bassist. “Tony hit me up a few weeks before it was supposed to go down and I was on board immediately,” confirms Bronzino. Once the band returned home after a successful first tour, they weren’t able to settle for long. As their status began to grow, more and more tour offers began to roll in, which led to some unfortunate news. “Shortly after that tour we did, Paul quit,” states Foresta. “Just flat out,

Despite the loss of Burnette, the band had to continue on, and did so by hiring new bassist and fellow Richmond native Rob Skotis. “I joined the band right after their first tour with Mark on bass. Apparently Phil had me in mind because of some recording he did in the past for my other project Hellbear. Ryan was one of my favorite drummers growing up, [so having] the chance to play thrash with him and the dudes in the Waste, it was pretty much a no brainer,” enthuses Skotis. The band decided to keep Bronzino by moving him to second guitar. “Going on that first tour was so much fun; I wanted to continue hanging out with these dudes because they rule, so I joined full the band full time. Also the style of music is so much fun to play: riffs and dive-bombs and all of it,” Bronzino explains. The band started off 2014 with a bang by

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releasing a split with Exhumed through Tankcrimes and signing a deal with the legendary Relapse Records. From there, they continued working on material for their upcoming Relapse debut Tyranny of Will, and released the 13 song Spoils of Identity EP through A389 Recordings and Decibel Magazine’s Flexi series. Many bands might be nervous to write their debut for a big label like Relapse, but according to Parrish, Iron Reagan’s approach was a very simple one, “Our mindset was to write some sinister jams. We knew this record was going to be fast and heavy, so when we met up to write songs with one another, our different influences took over. It’s a really maniacal ride.” Though this recording session was the band’s first with Mark and Rob, things still went very smoothly. “They were both very excited about working with us, and we were all very excited, too,” explains Foresta. “It was kind of like we’re still testing out what works with different people and what we can do, and the addition of the second guitar player really opened a lot of doors for us, musically.” The inclusion and contribution of Bronzino is something original guitarist Hall couldn’t be happier about. “Having the addition of Mark on second guitar really opens up this band to a whole new world of possibilities live. It’s just crushing to have two guitarists playing

With bands like GWAR, Lamb of God, Municipal Waste, and Iron Reagan calling it home, Richmond, VA’s affluent metal scene has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in recent years. Its wide variety of bands has gone on to accomplish great things. Though Iron Reagan might be considered its resident supergroup, here are some other bands from the area that are worth your attention:

Inter Arma

these riffs and I really enjoy it,” exclaims Hall. Bronzino also concedes, “I’m personally more involved in writing material, riffs, and lyrics now than when I first joined. The guys gave me some room and I feel like I gave them some of my best riffs. They sit really well on the record with Phil’s songs and the ideas of the other band members.” No one can be certain what the future holds for Iron Reagan, but one thing that is certain: despite their other commitments, the band’s initial goals of having fun and playing as fast as possible will never change. “We are all dynamic and creative individuals, and that’s why and how we came together,” states Bronzino. “All of our other projects serve as aspects of our personalities and come from a raw desire to create. I personally see all of my projects as fluid, different faces of a larger picture, a full personal body of work. That being said, we have been touring our asses off and writing and recording at a rapid rate with Iron Reagan, and we ain’t gonna stop.”

For Hall and Foresta specifically, splitting time between Iron Reagan and the rigorous demands of Municipal Waste takes a bit of juggling. “We didn’t really come into this with expectations, you know? We just like playing music. We like playing shows and travelling, and it’s a lot of fun. We’re thankful for all the success that we’ve had, and it just feels good to be out here hanging out with my friends and playing shows. It’s a part of my life and has been for the last 10 years,” admits Hall. Foresta concludes, “The reaction people gave Worse Than Dead when it came out kind of shocked me. I mean we weren’t really looking for that at the time. It was crazy. We just had some spare time and had some pals we wanted to jam with. The whole thing is pretty exciting and I’m honored, but it doesn’t really change things. I still want to keep working with my friends’ labels, and playing whatever shows we can, big or small, just like we’ve been doing. That stuff ’s never gonna change. If it blows up, that’s great. If not, we don’t really give a shit. We’re gonna keep doing it, because it’s fun as shit.”

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It takes a whole lot of guts to write one 45- minute song. It takes even more guts to do so on the heels of a groundbreaking debut album released one year prior, and to refer to it as an EP, but that’s exactly what Inter Arma has done. This genre-defining powerhouse is one of the Richmond scene’s greatest jewels, and with the release of their 45 minute EP The Cavern this fall, they continue to expand upon a sound that is certainly too unique and heavy for any fancy adjectives.

Bastard Sapling

This is how American black metal is supposed to sound! Their Gilead Media debut Instinct is Forever is raw, hateful, and full of tons of flesh-ripping riffs that are memorable and catchy as hell. In the fashion of most Richmond bands, their no-bullshit style of black metal is incredibly refreshing. Vocalist Mike Paparo is the vocalist of Inter Arma as well!

Like labelmates Windhand, Cough plays an old school style of doom. At times, their pace is so slow that it borders on funeral doom, with thick-as-molasses riffs taking their sweet time to sink in. One of the elements setting them apart from their doom contemporaries is their vocals, which come in three styles: painful wails, tortured screams, and sticky sweet clean singing.

Occultist

Supremely brutal, raw old school thrash, with a little bit of hardcore and black metal thrown in for good measure. Face-melting thrash with incredible female vocals. Though they haven’t signed to a bigger label yet, the future is bright and they will be making bigger waves very soon.

Bowl Ethereal

In addition to having the most fun name to say out loud, Bowl Ethereal makes incredibly awesome instrumental tech-death. While instrumental death metal can be boring, Bowl Ethereal solves this dilemma by ensuring all of the songs on their debut EP come in at one minute and one second, forcing you to listen to it over and over.

Windhand

With the release of their monumental 2013 album Soma, Windhand made their presence felt in the doom community in a big way. Their style of doom is an old soul, relying heavily on a warm, huge tone and heartfelt, cleanish singing to get its message across.

Cough

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ENTOMBED A.D.

INTERVIEW WITH Guitarist Nico Elgstrand WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

n the world of extreme metal, it is essentially impossible to deny the impact of Swedish death metal icons Entombed. When they released their debut album Left Hand Path in 1990, they changed the face of the genre of extreme metal with a completely new and fresh sound. Over the years, the band gradually turned towards a style they coined called “death ‘n’ roll,” but they were still one of the most important bands in the genre. Until 2013. Shortly after announcing that they would be releasing new album Back to the Front, the project was shelved due to a dispute with the founding members over ownership of the Entombed name. In 2014, the band announced that they would be releasing the album and touring under the name Entombed A.D. Guitarist Nico Elgstrand discusses the new record and sets the record straight regarding the band’s name and their future. When did you begin writing and recording Back to the Front? If memory serves me, we started writing it somewhere at the end of 2012 and recorded it in May/June 2013. Did you already have the deal with Century Media? We had the deal in the making with them when we started recording, and sealed the deal at the end of recording. Why has “A.D.” appeared at the end of your name? We added it when we realized that the alternative was to wait on the release

and go through a bunch of legal crap with our adversary on the matter. Shit, that would probably have gone on forever. This was not an option for us. Will there be two versions of Entombed? This is the one and only version. Back to the Front’s title conjures images of warfare. Is this a theme on the album? It just turned out that way. I guess that our, shall we call it, internal dispute pissed us off a little extra at the time, hence the war theme. Do you still identify as death metal? Entombed has undergone changes in the sound from the start, more or less. From death metal to what has been called death ‘n’ roll. Personally, I think it’s still under those categories, if I have to. I’ve never been big on categorizing music, especially one’s own. That’s for other people to do, meaning the listeners, if any. [Laughs] Call it bossa nova metal for all I care. As long as you dig it, I’m happy. Was there any difference in the band’s approach to writing Back to the Front? Yeah, everything was done as a team. No solo egos letting the others know how it’s gonna be. We just argued about everything until we came up with something that worked for everybody involved. A very fruitful way of doing it, I might add. I highly recommend it! Cooperation is very underrated, especially in this business.

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a lot of material, and I think we’ve always tried to do our best and come up with some great material. We’re getting better as we go.”

INTERVIEW WITH Drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz WRITTEN BY Brandon Ringo

n the history of extreme metal, few bands have been as reviled and criticized for the brutal, gory imagery in their titles and album covers as Cannibal Corpse. Typically, when public figures damn the glorification of violence in music, Cannibal Corpse is one of a few bands that have fingers pointed at them. However, due to their steadfast refusal to change their method of operation over the last 26 years, they are also looked at as an institution of American death metal by fans and media alike. With the release of A Skeletal Domain – their 13th studio album – the band has proven that they are not only at the top of their game, they also won’t budge any time soon. Since the release of 2006’s Kill, Cannibal Corpse has been on an impressive three record winning streak. One of the keys to this success has been producer Erik Rutan (Hate Eternal, ex-Morbid Angel). For the production of A Skeletal Domain, however, the band decided to make a change. They chose producer Mark Lewis, the man known for his work with bands like Six Feet Under, Black Dahlia Murder, Deicide, and Arsis. “Mark is a great producer. We knew a lot of his work up to this point: he’s done some great work and I just think we felt it was time for a change,” states drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz. “It was nothing against Erik and his productions at all, it was just [the fact that] we’ve used him for three records and, you know, it’s time for a change on our end, I guess. And we just decided to give Mark a try, because we knew what he’s been doing in recent years and we wanted to give him a shot. We figured he’d be able to do a good job tackling one of our records, and I believe he did.” One of the impressive things about A Skeletal Domain is the way the band maintained their signature heaviness while featuring a ton of groove and catchier riffs to keep things interesting. Though some of the credit for this could go to Mark Lewis’s production, according to Mazurkiewicz, it’s not something they set out to do specifically. In fact, they try to keep their songwriting process as simple as possible. “I mean, you know, the way

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I look at it, it’s always a continuation kind of a thing,” he explains. “We’re always trying to write a better song and be better at what we’re doing. We seem to really be firing on all cylinders and we just concentrate and do our thing. It’s just the next chapter in the Cannibal Corpse story, basically.” For Cannibal Corpse, part of the simplicity of their songwriting process is their ability to focus and their workmanlike attitude. “We started writing in September [2013] and we recorded in February [2014]. We practiced every day, working on these songs. So it’s a lot of work from September to February, that’s for sure. We work our ass off. But, there you go. The album was created, and that’s it,” shrugs Mazurkiewicz. “Sure, those months are a little difficult and time-consuming and nerveracking, but it’s fun. We’re creating, and things are just flowing. So we worked hard, but relatively sp e a k ing , it seems like i t ’s

When your band boasts such glorious song titles as “Orgasm Through Torture,” “I Cum Blood,” and “Blunt Force Castration,” naturally people will focus on your lyrical content straightforward than you might think. “It’s pretty much just within, kinda like how we write,” Mazurkiewicz says. “We’ve been doing this for 26 years. I’ve written a lot of lyrics for the band, a lot of songs, and I just like to kinda delve into my

own imagination. Whatever the song is gonna be about. Sure, there’s always gonna be some influence, but it’s usually […] absorbed over the years. I don’t watch as many horror movies as I used to, and I don’t even watch a lot of TV or whatever. So, it’s almost like, these days, I pull it out from within when I have to, and just delve into my own imagination and just write some songs, ya know?”

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pretty easy. We’re not having to sit here and have years to take time to craft and write songs or whatever.”

Naturally, the band’s process hasn’t always been as simple as it is today. “It was developed,” admits Mazurkiewicz. “I mean, we always wrote as a band in the early days, and now it’s more of an individual way of doing things. But we’ve been around like 26 years, we’ve done 13 albums now, and we’ve written a lot of songs. We just do it when we need to do it; that’s the way we work, that’s the way it is. We’ve come up with

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Photography by Nathan Katsiaficas

FOUR YEAR STRONG INTERVIEW WITH Vocalists and Guitarists Dan O’Connor and Alan Day WRITTEN BY Brendan McBrayer

’ve always had a sour taste in my mouth revolving around the reception surrounding Four Year Strong’s last LP, In Some Way Shape or Form. I thought the album had some of the band’s biggest songs of their career on it, but some chastised the band for “slowing things down.” There are those of us who saw growth and respected the band for trying something new, but as always the squeaky wheel gets the grease. After learning what I did about the album itself and the creation that went into it, I hope at least one of those detractors will change his or her mind.

First, the band signed a very exciting deal with Universal Motown records, where a good friend had recently taken up residence and made it his first mission to get FYS out to the masses. The label folded halfway through recording, and the LP wound up in the hands of Universal Republic through a merger inheritance. FYS was dropped after the riff heavy pop punk band could not match the initial numbers of Taylor Swift or Lil Wayne. Dan and Alan wanted this new LP to not only feel and sound different, but to be created differently as well. The last thing they wanted was to write another Rise or Die Trying. It would have been forced, and trying to recreate songs they had written six years prior wouldn’t have worked. Four Year Strong are incredibly thankful for their fans, but they won’t pander to a certain vocal part of their audience. Dan explains, “we are not creating art for the sake of making money. That’s when this all falls apart: when you lose the passion for what you are doing and make an album specifically to make some quick cash. I’ve seen it before and it’s how bands lose everything in the end. FYS want to write songs to make the fans happy, but we have to make sure it’s sincere. If we write insincere pop punk songs with breakdowns, people will catch on and the show will be over.” Alan explains that many thought that they changed their sound to

get on the radio, build a bigger audience, and appease the masses. He admits that you always want more people to hear what you are doing, but it’s not at all what they were doing. Says Alan, “Sure, that’s every band’s desire deep down inside. Sure, you always want more people to hear what you are doing in at least a tiny way.” But he has a big problem with those who would say the album was trying to be radio rock. Dan adds, “Over the ten year existence of the band, we had never really written any midtempo songs, a decade is a long time to do the same thing every day. So we set out, for the first time in the band’s history, to write some honest midtempo songs, to write some darker songs, to play around with guitar FX, and to write some songs where lyrics and melodies came first, a thing we as a band had never attempted before.” The shift in the lyrical composition of the album came naturally when the two vocalists tried to write narratives that would further connect with the fans, rather than spout the typical “my friends are awesome” diatribe that litters the current pop punk lyrical landscape. Dan says, “To be an older band in this scene that isn’t as big as say, A Day To Remember or Pierce The Veil, if you aren’t making that kind of income where it’s easy to just show up every day, then your hearts need to be in this and you need to believe in what you are doing.” (Dan clarified that he was not saying that ADTR and PTV don’t pour themselves into their records, but it’s important that when the money isn’t there, at least your heart is.) They had to evolve as people, and as songwriters.

Dan says the songs are “five fast paced, technical songs, and fans who are calling out a return to form are getting what they want out of them, but these songs wouldn’t sound the same had they not gone through the growth and evolution coming from the In Some Way Shape Or Form sessions.” They incorporated what they learned about songwriting with the energy they had when writing Rise or Die Trying and Enemy of the World. Alan wants people to know that In Some Way Shape or Form was the band honing their craft, learning how to write actual songs that would have longevity, and giving each song the attention that it deserved. He says all their old songs were trying to be fun live songs. Dan adds, “The first two albums were written so kids could learn the songs

Four Year Strong has a new five song EP called Go Down in History, recently released on Pure Noise Records.

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and come to shows and have fun. In Some Way Shape Or Form on the other hands was written as a good solid listening record that you could put on at home and thoroughly enjoy.” What’s important for those crying out for Rise or Die Trying Part II to know is this: the band is actively incorporating both of these aspects into their new music. The evolved songwriting and confident lyrical voices will stay, but they will recapture that “fun” energy. Four Year Strong are doing everything they do for the fans. They are truly a class act. They are trying to make people happy, while staying true to who they are as people. You could not ask for a better bunch of levelheaded dudes to be one of your favorite touring bands.

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Photography by Joe Calixto

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his lungs out. As things turned out, he was a bit shy, so Addi took over the screaming. We all met during grammar school and lived in the same neighborhood. Skateboarding and playing music was a fine way to pass the time.

ólstafir already broke new ground with Svartir Sandar in 2011, and 2014 sees them further breaking the ice with Ótta. Much different than its predecessor, Ótta offers up an array of icy emotions along with some tinges of classic rock. Drummer Gummi speaks about how the band began, the album’s connection to an old Icelandic method of keeping time, and the band’s musical evolution, which keeps veering further past the realms of black metal. How did Sólstafir begin, and what made you decide to play music? The band was formed in January 1995 by [guitarist and vocalist] Aðalbjörn [“Addi” Tryggvason], me, and [former bassist] Halldór [Einarsson] who was supposed to play bass and scream

What was the environment during the writing and recording of Ótta? We wrote the album in a similar fashion to the way that we wrote Svartir Sandar, by locking ourselves in the rehearsal room every day for three months or so. The album was recorded in Studio Sundlaugin, which is an old indoor swimming pool that is located just 15 minutes outside of Reykjavík. The atmosphere there is amazing, with a stream literally running through the studio building, and a small pond outside. It’s really relaxing and a good working environment. The recordings took about a month and a half and went remarkably well. What does Ótta mean, and what are the lyrics about? All of the song titles are based on an old Icelandic way to tell the time of day. Before people generally had clocks,

INTERVIEW WITH Drummer “Gummi” Óli Pálmason WRITTEN BY Eric May Photography by Alyssa Lorenzon

they’d estimate the time of day by the sun. In Iceland, we’d divide the day into eight parts, so each spanning roughly three modern hours. The album starts at “Lágnætti (Low Night)” and continues through the night. “Ótta” is the time between three and six in the morning. Then it was time to rise with the sun at “Rismál,” though at “Dagmál” the day is fully begun. “Miðdegi” is midday and “Nón” is noon, although in this system, noon is not at 12:00 sharp, but rather the time between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. After that comes “Miðaftan,” or midafternoon, and finally “Náttmál,” or nighttime. The lyrics are based on our personal experiences, some related to the different feelings of the different times of day. But the times of day are also different depending on the seasons. Some have a more wintery feeling, while others are more associated with summer. We also took inspiration from Icelandic literature. For the lyrics I wrote – I wrote four and Addi wrote four – I was inspired by Halldór Laxness (especially Sjálfstætt Fólk) and the memorial poems by Jóhannes úr Kötlum. I know Addi was reading a lot of Hallgrímur Pétursson and I think he took some influences from there. What are the best five records of all time? What record could you not live without? That’s a hard one, because if you were to ask me again in a year, I’ll tell you at least three different albums. But I’d have to start with Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. I just never get tired of it, no matter how much I listen to it. Fields of the Nephilim’s The Nephilim was a huge influence on us, and is still among my all time favorite albums. As well as Love of Life by Swans. Although The Great Annihilator and Soundtrack for the Blind might be even better albums, Love of Life always has a special place in my heart. The album Angeli Daemoniaque Omnigena Imbecilli Sunt by Icelandic electro weirdos Inferno 5 has been my favorite reading/chill out music for almost two decades. I’ll also mention Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada by Godspeed You! Black Emperor was a game changer when it came out, and has remained one of my favorite albums ever since. Several other bands – such as Alcest, or Wolves in the Throne Room – have also recently moved from black metal to post rock. Are you guys just getting tired of black metal? I can’t answer for other bands, but we’ve never been a straightforward black metal band. Even our debut album Í Blóði og Anda – which we wrote between 1997 and 1999 – is far from being normal black metal, and I’d say we already had developed this style of ours by 2005’s Masterpiece of Bitterness, although it might have been a bit rougher round the edges. What is something about you that no one would ever believe? We haven’t played live drunk since 2001, despite some reviewers claiming otherwise [laughs].

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HEMINGWAY INTERVIEW WITH Singer/Guitarist Benjamin Ward WRITTEN BY John B. Moore

t’s a ballsy move to name your band after one of the greatest writers this country has ever produced. Thankfully, the guys in Hemingway have turned in a hell of a debut with Pretend to Care: ten emo songs that wouldn’t sound out of place if they came out alongside Sunny Day Real Estate in the ‘90s. Singer and guitarist Benjamin Ward speaks about how the band came together, working with producer Jack Shirley, and learning to embrace the emo tag. How did the band first get together? Yeah. The band got started as just a

fun project in my friend’s basement playing Jawbreaker covers with Ryan [Harper] on bass and myself on guitar. Ryan and I have been in quite a few bands in the past, mostly all hardcore. He has always been on guitar and I’ve always played bass, so it was just a fun switch up on instruments from what we were used to and playing different kinds of songs. I eventually started writing my own songs, and as we got more serious, we got Jared [Ridabock] on drums and moved Ryan over to lead guitar. I asked Justin [Mozer] – who was my co-worker at the time – to play bass. And here we are.

Do you guys share similar musical influences? Any that would surprise people? Ryan and I definitely always seem to be on the same page when it comes to bands that have influenced us, but with the other two, it’s usually a bit more difficult to find common ground. We usually tend to agree on music in groups of threes, with one person feeling indifferent. I honestly think that the only artist we can agree on collectively as a band is Drake. How long have you been working on the songs on Pretend to Care? It varies, but a majority of them are almost a year old. Ryan and I had been working on at least six of them for quite some time, before we even knew whom we were going to record with. But I always knew I wanted to have ten songs that would make the final cut, so after we set a recording date, we kind of just jammed out a few more to make it ten. Are you OK with the “emo” tag? Totally. We have nothing against it. We knew going into this the sound we were going for, and describing it as emo always seemed like the best way to convey that sound. Was producer Jack Shirley your first choice? He most certainly was. How well did you work with him in the studio? In the past, we recorded a few songs here in Portland at various places and I was never really satisfied with

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the end result. I had known about Jack from the countless bands he has recorded, and had heard only good things about him and their experience with him from friends in Joyce Manor and Souvenirs. I somehow convinced the rest of the guys to make the trip to the Bay – which is an eleven- hour drive – so I could finally get the sound I wanted. Jack was extremely nice to us and had a good understanding of what we were going for. We all seemed to work really well together, maybe a little less so with me since I would get a little picky at times. But all in all, I would say it was a very successful experience. How did you guys connect with 6131 Records? Sean [Reid] from 6131 hit me up after hearing about us from a tour we did on the West Coast. I think he saw our name on a flyer or saw us on Cavistapes and luckily gave us a listen. I’ve always been very familiar with 6131 and the bands they have worked with, so I was pretty stoked to say the least. What’s next for the band? Tour. Just hoping to play to new people in new places, promoting the album and having a whole lot of fun. I’m definitely already thinking about new songs for down the road, and I look forward to working on them and releasing them with 6131.

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EMPIRE! EMPIRE! ( I

W A S

L O N E L Y

E S T A T E )

happened. I was in a band in college and we were headed out to a practice area. …We got into a pretty severe car accident, and fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. For some strange reason, I was at the point in my life where I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt as often as I should have been. But I remember driving out there, and 10 or so minutes before, realizing that my seatbelt wasn’t on and that I should buckle it. I think that seatbelt saved my life. How does making art with your spouse impact your marriage? She’s my best friend. I taught her how to play guitar in the early 2000s. We just have a connection. I love writing with her. She brings her own flair to everything. I feel very fortunate that we can share that together, and the unspoken bond that musicians have is definitely heightened because we are in love and are married.

INTERVIEW WITH Keith Latinen WRITTEN BY Tim Anderl

uring Gaelic and Medieval times, patrons, monarchs, and members of high society employed professional poets and musicians to tell stories of their activities and commemorate the patron’s ancestors. The tradition was meant not only to entertain, but also to immortalize their influence and traditions. The new record from Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) – the project of Michigan-based husband wife duo Keith and Cathy Latinen – is, perhaps accidentally, a natural extension of this tradition. You Will Eventually Be Forgotten is a collection of carefully crafted, meticulous, and moody songs that spotlight a band who have honed their storytelling. Every moment of intimate and vivid prose puts the patron listener in the middle of a scene from their lives: a living, breathing movie script that is sometimes harrowing and other times calming, but always unforgettable. How do you feel about your band being cited in a lot of the “emo revival” media buzz? I guess something that irks me is that people will say, “Emo never died, it was always there.” Try telling that to my band in 2006. We would play shows almost exclusively on bills where we didn’t fit. So when we started dealing with other bands that were doing similar things to what we were doing… it became a family. It snowballed from

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there. I never expected the mainstream media to be covering the stuff that my friends and I were doing. It’s great. We all work really hard and to get any level of success or recognition is awesome. And to reach more people. That’s the goal right? To have more people listen to your music. I love that. As far as the term, it doesn’t bother me. When I was younger the bands that I was into were Mineral, Jimmy Eat World, The Promise Ring, and [emo] was the label. I can understand being pigeonholed, and that has happened to us, but it’s OK. That word has a different meaning to me. I’m curious to see how our new album will be received. When did you begin writing the new record? It was early last year, I guess. Then we took a break, not for any particular reason; we either went on tour or got busy with the label. Then we picked it up again seriously sometime last summer. We listened to the older songs we’d written and kept a couple of those. Empire! is just my wife and I. She plays guitar, I play guitar, but I also play drums and bass and whatever other miscellaneous instruments. So it’s a different writing process than I would imagine most bands have. So we sit down together and write the songs on guitar, and then work backwards to incorporate bass and drums after that. The album release is a partnership

between Topshelf and your label Count Your Lucky Stars? Yes. When I talked to Topshelf about doing this record, it was years and years ago. It took much longer than I thought it would. They are very good friends of ours and we thought it would be a fun thing to do. If you drew a Venn diagram of our audience, I think the larger slice would be Topshelf fans. They have fans who they reach that we don’t and vice versa. So it was a way to do something with our friends, trying to reach as many people as possible. Empire! has a more linear, narrative approach to songwriting… I write my songs like a short story more than anything else. In a typical song, you’d repeat the lyrics of the chorus, but if you’re telling a story that would be detrimental to the story. So I feel like I can tell a more complete tale just by virtue of this songwriting method. On “I Was Somewhere Cold…” you tell of a near death experience. Did that happen to you? Everything that happened on the album is factual, as much as was possible for me to recall. The way I approached every song was to write out the lyrics and then call the people who were involved. Working together, we could correct details that may have been a little wrong or misremembered. I wanted this to be as literal and factual as possible. As far as that song goes, it actually

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What have been your proudest moments and accomplishments during Empire!’s tenure? We are going to play with Mineral. And we got Chris Simpson and Bob Nanna from Braid to guest vocal on our new album, which is surreal to me. Those are bands that I idolized and looked up to growing up. We’ve also put out a Zookeeper release – which is Chris’ solo project – and we put out a record by Certain People I Know, which is one of Bob’s other bands. To actually be friends with and to be working with these musical giants… We’ve also gotten to travel. We’ve been to Japan, Europe… And the amount of friends we’ve made. I’ve made so many friends and memories this way. How did you become interested in contributing to the Blink-182 tribute album? When I was younger, they were one of the first bands that I got into on my own, without my brother introducing me to them. He’d introduced me to stuff like Hootie and The Blowfish and The Goo Goo Dolls, and stuff like that. When I started doing some discovering on my own, I found Blink-182’s Dude Ranch. I actually remember that my wife Kathy, who was not yet my girlfriend, had a bedroom wall that she allowed people to draw on. I remember drawing both the Blink-182 logo and Jimmy Eat World on her wall. I’ve been a fan of those guys for a really long time. How aggressive of a tour cycle are you planning for this album? In September, we’ll be going out for an eight-week tour and we’ll be bringing out some of our friends’ bands. It will be really laborious, but it has been a while since we’ve been able to tour extensively and had something substantial to promote. So we’re going to do it as big as we can. It starts with a date with Mineral and ends with The Fest in October.

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outhern Lord has scoured the depths for their impressive roster, but with the signing of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Baptists they reached far north for the best punishing hardcore Canada has to offer. Not just your normal metallic hardcore, there’s elements of discordant rock like Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi thrown into the mix. Bloodmines – their second LP– displays their controlled chaos in perfect fashion. Your debut was well received and had legit cover art. What did you set out to accomplish with the follow up? It’s actually very much in the same vein, especially as far as the album art goes. It’s a running theme that fits us. We didn’t go out of our way musically to sound drastically different than we did on Bushcraft or anything. We sound like we sound! I do think, though, that things moved forward: the fast songs feel more out of control, and the slower ones feel like they have a bit more substance. I’m biased, though. [Laughs] How did it feel to have Dave Grohl say your drummer Nick Yacyshyn is his favorite new drummer? Pretty fucking rad. Obviously Nirvana is a band that we all love and continue to be hugely influenced by, and a couple of us are really into the drumming on [Queens of the Stone Age]’s Songs for the Deaf, among other projects of

his. Grohl seems like a dude who just wants to be a part of whatever musical projects he thinks would be fun. Just a guy who really likes playing music who just happened to play in some of the biggest bands ever. I don’t know him, but from the outside looking in, that’s how it seems. So yeah, it was a pretty huge thumbs-up for Nick and for all of us. Any pop star you think is actually getting it right? Out of all the ones getting things wrong? [Laughs] Nope. None of them are getting it right. Well, no, I change my answer: the ones – if there are any – who write their own songs are getting it right. It might not be my thing, but if they’re writing music they’re psyched on, that’s cool. I’m 100 fucking percent positive that Baptists ain’t everybody’s shit, but it’s right to us. Same thing. Baptists always sound so well rehearsed on recording. But it sounds like enthusiasm rather than anal retentiveness. Accurate? I’m glad that’s how we sound to you. I would say that’s correct. We don’t rehearse a crazy amount. We were a decently consistent jam-once-aweek band for a while, but now we don’t all live in the same city. We do communicate well with each other when we jam, though. That’s the main thing. We’re all really happy to be in this

band and are stoked to be able to play these songs together, so it’s nice to hear that the enthusiasm comes across… To your ears, anyway! How is your home of Vancouver, BC, better or worse than elsewhere in the world? Scenery wise, it’s unreal. Pretty unbeatable. Huge mountains, lush forests, the ocean, etc. Then there are serious drug, mental health, and homelessness / low-income housing issues in the city’s core, which is a huge juxtaposition. Each problem kind of seems to fuel the next. Vancouver’s downtown Eastside has always kind of been a weird sanctuary for people with some of these issues, but like most cities, it’s growing and new condos and developments are pushing those people out. It’s tough, though. You can’t just stop people from moving to a city or stop it from growing. You’re either going to displace people’s homes and build new bigger, taller buildings, or you’re going to expand out and cut down X amount of forest every year to make room for houses. It’s fucked either way. They build a lot of new skateboard parks, though… That’s cool. [Laughs] What has been the band’s favorite tour so far? The Power of the Riff Fest in L.A. a few years ago. That was a fun trip. So many rad bands played that fest: Black Breath, All Pigs Must Die, fucking Trap Them,

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Pentagram, Eyehategod! It was a blast. We got to play these rad festival shows in L.A., S.F., and Seattle with these bands that we really had no business playing with. We also unexpectedly played at a record store with Trap Them and APMD, which was pretty rad to us. Not a ton of chances to play with – or even see – some of those bands in Canada. The title track has a different feel for you guys. I don’t even know what to call it… [Laughs] I don’t know! During the writing of this album, I was listening to a lot of Hot Snakes, Queens of the Stone Age, Fugazi… That kind of stuff. Maybe that had something to do with it. That first riff had been floating around since before we recorded Bushcraft. It would come up and, I don’t know, maybe it felt like it was going to take too much thinking and work to make into a real song. Not sure how much the dudes really dug it at first. Sometimes, the more dynamics you envision in a song, the harder it is to get the feel across, or for everyone to feel them in the same places. It’s one of my favorites on the album, for sure. Everyone’s parts just came together really well. Usually, if a song takes too long to arrange and such, we’ll just scrap it. I like that song because we had to put more of an effort into it.

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rey Gordon is a busy guy. Since he started making demos in 2011, he has recorded and released his free debut EP Outgrowing Hope, followed by more free demos and a 2012 EP called Sleepless. Fittingly, it was Sleepless that caught the attention of No Sleep Records. No Sleep is finally set to release Gordon’s latest, Forget I Brought it Up, this fall. And Gordon has managed to do all of this when not performing with the five or so bands with which he currently puts in time. Is there a general theme to the songs on Forget I Brought it Up? Yes and no. As the title denotes, thematically, I think the album mostly deals with the idea of words falling on deaf ears. While the songs aren’t all about one singular event or set of events, they’re all more or less rather heavy statements addressed to a person or persons. It’s that feeling you get in your gut after you’ve just dumped so much time and energy into explaining yourself to someone, only to see a look of complete indifference on their face. Then again, I think that theme arose in a totally organic fashion. I didn’t go into it with that end goal in sight. Also, fun fact, I actually took the album title from a Dinosaur Jr. lyric. You spent a lot of time putting out demos and EPs on your own. Did you eventually intend to sign to a label?

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Well, the project arose as a total accident. I demoed some songs acoustically, basically because I couldn’t find anyone else to play the music that I wanted to at that time. The whole thing snowballed, and eventually, it became clear that I could make something of this if I really set my mind to it. It didn’t start that way, but there was a definite turning point where I decided to pursue the next logical step and approach labels with the material. I sent my EP Sleepless to No Sleep in 2012, and corresponded briefly with [founder] Chris [Hansen]. A little over a year later, I was on the label. What made you choose the two covers that cap off the record? Those covers won’t actually appear on the record, unless we do a sick ‘90s style bonus track deal for the CD release. The Dag Nasty cover will be on A Comp for Mom, and the J Church cover has yet to find a home. I just wanted to pay homage to bands that were important to me, but that fall outside the genre I’m playing. I take every opportunity I can to broaden listeners’ horizons. Covering two songs that were sort of left of center seemed a totally appropriate way to do that, and they’re both classic cuts. You seem prolific. Are you constantly recording?

I definitely try to stay busy. I’m pretty much always writing and demoing. I was working on new songs during the process of recording Forget I Brought it Up, and I’m already thinking about the next thing I can do. I just don’t know how to sit still. Too much downtime provides me far too much time for reflection, and thus opens the door for stagnation, anxiety, depression, and my various other emotional deficiencies. I’ve corresponded with Henry Rollins a little bit, and one thing he told me is that it’s very easy to get comfortable, and that it’s the absolute worst thing you could do as an artist. I live by that advice. I never want to lose my edge, and for me, constant creation is the key to that. I’d always rather do too much than not enough. This is probably the reason I’m currently playing in, like, five bands. Your brother is a musician too, isn’t he? Yeah, he fronts a really amazing band called The Wickerwolves, which I also play guitar in. I’m allowed to say they’re amazing, because I don’t write any music for them. Those dudes are crafting such awesome songs, and they actually serve as my live band and played on the record. He also has recorded tons of solo stuff that is absolutely mind blowing, but he’s

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scared to release it. Trying to talk him out of that. He’s one of the most naturally talented musicians I’ve ever met. I’m constantly jealous of the ease with which he writes such phenomenal songs. Is it tough to be a vegan on tour? Eh. Yes and no. I consider it a very minor inconvenience. I might not always be able to eat like a king on the road, but I get by just fine. DIY spots are usually down to cook a vegan meal, or at least direct me to a good local spot. In Europe, all the clubs cooked amazing vegan meals every single night. It was amazing. It’s not the same in the States, but I’m always met with hospitality. Plus, I’m usually careful to make sure to pack plenty of protein-filled snacks before I hit the road. What’s next for you? Who knows, man? Hopefully, all good things. I’m ready to take this to the next level. At present, I’m trying to singlehandedly spur on the college rock revival, so wish me luck with that. I just want to put out a staggering amount of material over the next year, honestly. I’m feeling more energized and ready to go than ever, and I’ve got so many ideas swirling around in my head. I think now it’s just a process of taking all the necessary steps to actualize those ideas. I couldn’t be more stoked for the future and all that it holds.

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cording. I think the vast majority of arrangement and production decisions actually come from us. I’ve always thought that glockenspiel communicated so much timelessness and wistfulness. I began to feel its absence in punk, and thought that the glock/ piano/ organ/ lead guitar team could bring a certain majesty to this record, and to the genre. As for Will’s role, I think Will was more of a master of capturing performance. That’s his genius. He understood the art of elevating the individual performances and bringing out that electricity that’s often elusive in the digital age. He was a master at coaching great takes out of us, and specifically, out of me. We developed a great chemistry: we just worked really well together. And when you have that kind of productive relationship with someone, you develop a confidence that permeates every part of a record.

Photography by Elena DeSoto

HOSTAGE CALM INTERVIEW WITH Singer/Guitarist Chris Martin WRITTEN BY John B. Moore

t takes a lot to change up your sound with each record. Especially when the records are unanimously well-received by both critics and fans. But those who follow Hostage Calm shouldn’t be too surprised that their latest, Die on Stage, is yet another evolution of the band’s already impressive mix of indie and punk rock. Produced by Will Yip outside of Philadelphia, Die on Stage finds the band reaching for a slew of new sounds, using more piano and organ, and even busting out the glockenspiel. The result is just as impressive as 2012’s fantastic Please Remain Calm without resorting to revisiting the same blueprints. Its predecessor was a breakup record, but according to frontman Chris Martin, Die on Stage tackles what comes next. Please Remain Calm was very well received. Did you feel any pressure working on the follow-up record? I would be lying if I said I felt no pressure, but the majority of that pressure is completely self-induced. We’ve just always wanted to be a legendary band. Each time this band is making an album, we’re assuming the responsibility of contributing something defining to the great body of art that has come before us. We’re committing ourselves to not partaking in the death of rock ‘n’ roll. We’re pushing @ NEWNOISEMAGS

ourselves to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to leave a lasting imprint on the music that saved us, the chance at making something worth remembering after we’re gone. To me, that’s pressure. What is the significance of the album’s title: Die on Stage? It’s a mantra. I used to say it sometimes before we would play so that we would get all hopped up and burn the place down. When you look at us on stage, you will see five people who have given everything they have to their art. Each of us, “the man in the arena,” if you will. And that’s the nature of songwriting and performance: to lay one’s travails out to bare; to give oneself in the name of a larger creative achievement. With that in mind, this album title conjures up a sense of finality, of sacrifice, of drama, of grandeur. Die on Stage is just a huge title for a huge record. Is there a general theme to these songs? The album celebrates the fatalism of youth in America. It’s an album of extremes, really. Extreme highs and extreme lows. And I think the album celebrates the extremes for the extremism alone. Our prior album, Please Remain Calm, portrayed me on the verge of my personal and interpersonal collapse: the album was fueled by a pervasive sense of imminent aban-

donment. Every note was screaming, “Don’t leave me. Not now. I can’t do this alone.” That record was fighting for its life and for the love that has sustained it. If Please Remain Calm was the breakup record, then Die on Stage confronts life after love. For the first time in my adult life, I’m confronting some of the unforeseen dark interpersonal offerings of singlehood: random, meaningless sex; emotional detachment; and loss of identity. There are times on this record where I celebrate this, and times where I am scared to death. And I think that blurry and irreconcilable confluence of feelings makes this record a fight worth watching. You guys sound different from album to album. Is that a conscious decision? We’ve given ourselves so fully to each record, and feel so complete in our expression on each record, that it seems silly to me for us to ape any of our prior work. I look at Lens, or [our self-titled] and feel so content in what we created that I feel no need to recreate it. In my view, each album should be a specific musical achievement, and the only way I can see us creating singular, iconic records is through constantly pushing ourselves further and further away from what’s come before. You added different sounds on this one, like the glockenspiel. Was that Will Yip’s idea? No, but he is definitely a legend and contributed a ton to this re-

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What was the recording process in Pennsylvania like? This was the first time that we’ve had an adequate amount of time to take on a record with the sort of grandeur and scope that we’ve wanted. Thanks to Run for Cover [Records], we moved to Philadelphia, lived in a house, and had the sole responsibility of bringing this album to life. On prior records, we’ve had all types of erratic recording schedules due to our tour schedule, personal lives, school, work, and the like. Don’t get me wrong, Die on Stage was still a seven-days-a-week, round-the-clock marathon, but we had the time and resources to really do things right. How does new drummer Keith Sidorowicz’s playing and personality change the band’s dynamic? Keith drives this band. His demeanor and presence have been a breath of fresh air – emphasis on “fresh” – for Hostage Calm ever since he came into the picture. He’s a monster of a player, a model human, and he gets the big picture. He’s Hostage Calm as fuck. The band has been very loud proponents for LGBT[QIA] rights. Are you surprised federal judges are knocking down gay marriage bans after last year’s Supreme Court decision? No, I’ve always thought that the denial of equal rights to the LGBTQ community so blatantly violated the Constitution that the U.S. Courts would eventually side with justice. I think that our generation even more so understands the merits of individuality, self-expression, and the right to love. I have only optimism for the future. What’s next for the band? A lot of smashed guitars. See you at the gigs.

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PUNCH INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Meghan O’Neil Pennie WRITTEN BY Hutch “The last few years, San Francisco has changed a lot, with many musicians and artists pushed out. I think it is extra important now to keep music and rebellion a part of the Bay,” says Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil Pennie. Soldiering on as residents and musicians in a city purging its soul for high rents, Punch will release their third full-length, They Don’t Need to Believe. Despite tearing out throats with each of their many releases, this album raises the bar, for themselves and for hardcore.

subjects such as “street harassment, helping others with addiction, and keeping commitments. There’s a song about how people’s ability to be taken seriously is unfairly undermined when they show emotion. I also wrote a song for our friend, the late Sarah Kirsch.” O’Neil Pennie continues, “I do try to personally promote veganism and women’s issues. There are so many terrible conflicts happening around the world right now, I think it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless to change things.”

But accomplishing this task wasn’t simple or easy. “Songwriting has been a bit of a challenge the last few years, as we have all been so busy,” O’Neil Pennie explains. “If we aren’t on tour with Punch, we are on tour with other projects or traveling personally or working.” Recording three full-lengths and six EPs in eight years – all while touring continually – is an admirable achievement. “I don’t think we ever foresaw touring as much as we have. We have just taken opportunities as they have come to us.”

In the world’s current oppressive climate, where does O’Neil Pennie find the balance for this latest LP? “I was really inspired when I watched ‘The Punk Singer.’ Kathleen Hanna sums up, what is for me, the message of the movie. She doesn’t expect everyone to understand feminism or her personal battle with illness, but they should have to stay out of her way.” This ethos spawned the album’s title: They Don’t Have to Believe.

That constant touring, though, has culminated in a taut energy that manifests viciously on this full-length. This provides the perfect platform for Punch’s seemingly rage-fueled message. “I wouldn’t describe my lyrics as ‘rage fueled,’” O’Neil Pennie clarifies. “I would like to think my lyrics can be hopeful and positive. Writing is a way for me to deal with the more complex things around me. I have a lot to be happy about, but it’s the upsetting things that need a little more effort to work out. I think hardcore gives us a way to deal and process what is going on around us, personally and on a bigger scale.” Just because something is delivered angrily, does not mean that the content is angry. Punch boasts savage riffs and short, grinding songs to hone in on

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Touring remains DIY, as Punch plans for a mini-tour in September annihilating East Coast venues. “We did book this tour ourselves,” O’Neil Pennie confirms. “We have a lot of wonderful friends all over who help us. I know we are all looking forward to staying with my aunt outside of D.C. who always cooks up quite a vegan feast for us, no matter hovvvw late we arrive! Our first overseas tour was to Japan, through [guitarist] Dan’s friend Uchuu at Cosmic Note Records. We met our friend, Tara, from Australia on the East Coast. They offered to book us a tour, through their label One Brick Today. The first time we went to Europe, our friends Comadre invited us on their tour. We became friends with Marc from the bands Trainwreck and Glasses; he helped us with future tours there.”

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INTERVIEW WITH BASSIST AND VOCALIST CHRIS #2 BY JOHN B. MOORE

hen Pittsburgh political punks Anti-Flag first got together, a Democrat was in the White House, but Conservatives still did their best to keep the country from progressing even incrementally, and the country was still cleaning up from a war in Iraq. Flash forward two decades, and Conservatives are still doing their best to drag us back to the 1950s and Iraq is starting to look like Vietnam, a nearly inescapable quagmire. So there are still plenty of songs left for the guys in Anti-Flag to write. Having just released A Document of Dissent 1993 – 2013, a compilation of the group’s releases, bassist and vocalist Chris #2 is kind enough to answer some questions about the lessons learned along the way. How did you decide what to include on A Document of Dissent? It was a pretty heavy collaborative effort between us, Fat Mike, and our friends and families who have been with us from the beginning. We wanted to demonstrate what made us start this band and how it has progressed.

Did you rediscover any older songs you had forgotten about? Actually, the 20 year anniversary did that. We did some shows only playing songs off of the first four records. That reconnected us with some of the statements and idea that were there at the inception of Anti-Flag. Mike was at the San Francisco shows. Somewhere between there and a flight we had together in Europe, we came up with the idea for the retrospective. Did you have any idea the band would still be going for this long? Never had a single idea. Our goals were always things we could accomplish. Play a show in Pittsburgh. Play a show in NYC. Make it to L.A., Europe… We just kept challenging ourselves each time we marked one of those off. To what do you attribute your longevity? That we love these songs. People seem to connect with our passion for what we do. That has been the biggest lesson we have learned over the years as a band. The things that the four of us truly believe in resonate much louder than the things we get talked into doing. For some reason, Anti-Flag

grows every time we bet on ourselves and not what people expect from us. What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned as a band? Believe in what you’re doing and the statements you make. There are a tremendously large amount of political happenings that we could comment on or write songs about. But any time we do that and we are not fully educated or passionate about said issue, it backfires. The things we strive to eradicate are the same. A place of solace: no sexism, no racism, no homophobia, [and] no nationalism. That’s what we want the community surrounding us and our songs to be. Anything you guys would do differently? Not really. Maybe trim some fat on The Bright Lights of America, but I love that record. Maybe realize earlier that we can say no, and not play every show in the world and sacrifice so much of our personal lives, but that’s made us appreciate the things we have so much more. There are positives that come out of all the lumps you take. We like to focus on those.

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What does your label AF look for when signing a band? Someone who feels similar to us. It’s not about who is gonna blow up, or tour 300 days a year. We just want people who love their songs and convey that love for them when they play. Also, racist, sexist, homophobe assholes need not apply. What’s next for you guys? Writing a new record. It’s taking a long time and will take a long time. At this point, we can live comfortably touring the world playing songs from Terror State, For Blood and Empire, Die for the Government. So in order for us to release a new record, it needs to be particularly important. Socio-politically and musically. We want to continue to challenge ourselves. To have a goal of making a record encompassing 20 years of being a band is a daunting task. We are about 15 songs in, writing-wise. If you ask me, we are on the right and righteous path. Don’t fight it. Feel it.

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Photography by Dan Rawe

RUDE AWAKENING INTERVIEW WITH Vocalist Josh Hynes WRITTEN BY Hutch “This record is our defining sound, hands down. We nailed it,” says Josh Hynes, vocalist of Massachusetts hardcore aficionados Rude Awakening. “Collateral Damage speaks to who we are as a band.” What sets is apart from previous releases? “We spent time writing songs,” Hynes explains. “The difference was Bridge Nine pushing us to demo songs and spend time with them. Dean Baltulonis produced it and really helped with this record. I wanted it to be a real in your face record, [with] thick bass tones. Dean produced a lot of records I liked, albums that were influences to us growing up.” Baltulonis certainly put his stamp on Collateral Damage, as he has with Sheer Terror, Madball, Out to Win, and Righteous Jams in the past. But the accolades still belong to the band. Rude Awakening is still a young band, having formed in 2011. Hynes had played in some killer Massachusetts bands before – DRUGXTEST, Hammer Bros. – but they never accomplished what he thought they could. Now, he keeps the vision focused for Rude Awakening. “We started in a serious manner. In the first few months, we were playing Philly and N.Y. [Our] first year, we played This Is Hardcore, and we played [it again] last week. The focus has paid off. Two years ago, people didn’t know us. This time, everyone knew us. It was a madhouse. The difference was that we focused on touring with a lot of friends’ bands and new bands. Generally speaking, we tour with comparable bands that we enjoy listening to. Sometimes, we go out of the box, with more metal bands. We like different crowds and are not opposed to playing with other genres. It’s a cool experience.” This month alone, Rude Awakening is scheduled for New York and New England gigs, but it doesn’t happen too often. “We try to play things strategically,” Hynes elaborates. “I have seen great

bands burn themselves out [locally]. People pull a few hundred kids. Then, they pull 50 kids. We find a happy medium. We don’t play too little, so kids don’t forget about us. Bigger bands rest and expect the support. That can backfire.” Rude Awakening will be playing frequently as the year moves toward fall. “We are throwing strong for the next few months,” Hynes says. “We tour in October with Expire. This weekend is the Holyoke show [with Municipal Waste, Ramming Speed, and Madball]. We have a few shows with Madball in Canada. We hit Buxport, Maine, then Long Island for the last Mongoloids show [with Wrong Side, and Death Threat]. We play Back to School Jam with 16 bands at the Jersey Shore. Oh, and the day after, we play [Richmond, VA] with Criminal Instinct, [and] Foundation. Then we have a fest in upstate New York with Sheer Terror.” If you have seen Rude Awakening, you know their delivery is vicious. That acrimonious live display will only strengthen with the material from Collateral Damage. This is one angry record. Rude Awakening ardently emulates the ‘90s hardcore that Hynes remembers well. “This whole record is not PC. It was not written to please anyone. Collateral Damage is the brutal, honest truth. We are cutting ties, and doing so with violence and anger.” Hynes continues with dismissive frustration. “People listen to Cro-Mags all day, “Street Justice.” But if there is a fight, they get up in arms. There are issues I am vocal about. I can’t bite my tongue. I see bands that won’t speak up. People are afraid of repercussions.” Perhaps it’s the influence of social media and its immediacy, that people are

worried that some video clip will alienate them from certain fans? Josh agrees, “100%. With the faceless, nameless rat pack running rampant, people are too afraid of social repercussions from saying what they feel because people will point the finger on the Internet.” If you listen to the lyrics on Collateral Damage, they are not stuffed with meaningless violence. Most of the lyrics are sparks for others to go fight for their values, and for themselves. “We are

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not looking for violence, but we won’t back down,” confirms Hynes. That view seems to get buried in the PC forums of hardcore. “Today, you are scrutinized for sticking up for yourself, which, in my opinion, is wrong. Violence is not a good thing, but stand up. Vocalize yourself. When you find your confidence, run with it. Hardcore showed me that.”

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Photography by Michelle Dosson

in a rural area. Actually out here in Manor, where I live, it’s only six miles from Austin. There are woods around us, and you have to drive through the long fields to get here and stuff. But the deal was just so good. Austin is just so incredibly, insanely expensive at this point. So far we’ve been here a month, and it’s great! Student loans have that tendency to really fuck peoples’ future… Yeah, pretty much. I dropped out of school, I never even finished. I just made a payment on my loan yesterday. It said the final payment date is going to be in 2038. That’s when I’ll finally have it all paid off.

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

BEN SNAKEPIT W R I T T E N B Y B R YA N S P E A R R Y

What inspired you to start “Snakepit”? There was a comic that ran in the Onion in the ‘90s called “Jim’s Journal.” It was written by Scott Dikkers. It was four panels where the guy would just say, “Today I went to work and came home to play with my cat,” and that was it. I was in the mall, killing time in Waldenbooks one day, and I saw this “Jim’s Journal.” It blew my mind; it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. This was the ‘90s, and I didn’t have Internet. It was kind of a big deal if you got time to really Google. I looked it up and found out it was fictional and that Jim wasn’t a real person. It was a bummer to find that out, but a light bulb went off over my head and I thought, “I should do this shit for real, like do

What are some of your favorite memories as a member of J-Church with the late Lance Hahn? Lance was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. I got to go all over the world and do all kinds of cool stuff because of J-Church. Lance barely drank at all. There was one night in France when we ended up with a bottle of peach schnapps. Weirdly enough, Lance got shithammer wasted. I’d never seen him do that before. It was funny; he said some hilarious out-of-character things for him that he would probably not want me to repeat. But even to me, being in the band with

him, he had this iconic status. He was this other type of person who was above a lot of stuff, and it was kind of cool to see him drunk and talking shit. Like see he’s fallible just like everyone else. What’s your most embarrassing tattoo? I was going through a breakup with a girl. Not very happy, drunk, and depressed. So I gave myself a tattoo of the title of the Dwarves song “I Wanna Kill Your Boyfriend.” I’m actually looking at the tattoo right now. Thankfully, it’s high enough on my leg that it’s usually covered up, but if I’m wearing swim trunks… I’ve thought about getting it covered up. It’s embarrassing, but it’s funny. Are you still playing in bands? I’m only playing in Ghost Knife right now, which is a side project with [vocalist] Mike [Wiebe] from Riverboat Gamblers and [drummer] Chris [Pfeffer] who was in J-Church with me. We’re strictly a side project. I think we played two times this year. We’ve actually got a 7” coming out. Mark Twistworthy is putting that out on [Twistworthy Records]. I think that’ll be out next month. We’re going to do a release party at that trailer space. That’s probably all the shows we’ll play all year. I

the exact same thing, but actually make it about my life.” And that’s how I started [“Snakepit”]. Your life’s changed quite a bit recently. Did you ever envision living the suburban life? I don’t know, it just kinda happened. So, I got married, and we decided we were going to buy a house. And I’ve always wanted to own a house, my whole life, but it just always seemed like such an unattainable goal for me. You know, I went many years without a car, didn’t have a bank account, totally lived off the grid for a long time, and fucked up my credit real bad by screwing myself with student loans. We found this government program, where the USDA gave us a loan to buy a house, but one of the stipulations was you had to buy it

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love playing music and it’s fun, but it’s definitely not my main thing anymore, it’s not my main jam. Just being in a side project where the other guys have real band that they’re focused on is kind of perfect for me. Especially now where there’s a thirty-minute drive to band practice every time I want to go.

eventually someone’s gonna like it. That’s a fact, no matter how bad it is. You recently collaborated with Mitch Clem. What else is on the horizon? No real big plans for anything. The last book I did, “Snakepit Gets Old,” is already out of print. My friend JT at Birdcage Bottom Books in New York, he published that, but he kinda under-printed. He didn’t have the money or the interest really to reprint it. He wanted to focus on other comics. I talked to Joe at Microcosm and he’s going to rerelease it for me. And that will come out next year. Other than that, the next three-year book will be [out] in 2016.

What advice would you give someone interested in starting his or her own comic? Uh, just do it? People ask me that question all the time, and there’s nothing to say, really. Just, y’know, draw it. Go and make copies and staple it together and give it out to your friends. I went to Detroit a few months ago and spoke at the Museum of Contemporary Art about my comics. A piece of advice I gave to everyone there was that if you do something, even if you suck at it – because I suck at drawing, you’ve seen my comics, I don’t know how to draw – it doesn’t matter,

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If you could give young-you one piece of advice, what would it be? Don’t. Go. To. College.

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was a good parallel to draw.

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Photography by Joe Steinhardt

Marissa Paternoster

WRITTEN BY DUSTIN VERBURG

arissa Paternoster is an artist and musician from New Brunswick, NJ. She’s best known as the guitarist and vocalist for the punk band Screaming Females. Her innovative guitar work earned her a much-deserved spot as Spin’s 77th best guitarist of all time. Marissa’s artwork has graced all of her band’s album covers, and she also produces comics, lithographs, drawings, murals, and other assorted artwork. Last year, she released her first book, “My Body is a Prison/My Mind is a Disease,” which is available through Don Giovanni Records.

not really something that I thought I could or wanted to be a part of. When I found out about punk, I wanted to be a part of it. Bands like The Ramones or Superchunk make you feel like you can do it. Fine art is more like Rush or Led Zeppelin- you don’t immediately think “I can do this.” You could definitely draw that parallel. When I first started listening to music, I listened to stuff like Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden. Relatively complex music. When I was 13 and first starting to play my instrument, I

learned a lot because that music was challenging. I got to the point where I thought, “Okay, now I’m good enough to be in a band,” and then I thought, “I’m never going to be able to do this. I’m never going to be able to play like that or meet other people who can play like that. How does it happen?” Then I learned about punk. I was listening to Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, and it was just as powerful and engaging. I was like, “I can do this, these people are like me. I can find people and we can make music together that will be powerful and resonate with people my age.” That

You released a book of your work late last year, right? I finally just got rid of all of them a week ago. They’re all gone. Joe [Steinhardt], who runs Don Giovanni Records, wanted to see if we could put out a book of artwork, kind of referencing Pettibon’s SST [Records] releases. I kind of just threw it together. It was just stuff I’d done over the years, and then we had it printed up on nice card stock. And we made a few copies. We were just like, “We’ll see if anyone’s interested in this.” And it did remarkably well, which was really exciting, because I didn’t think there would be that many people who were interested in buying something like that. It did really well and I’m almost done with my second one. It should come out later this year. Don Giovanni also just put out Lauren Denitzio’s (from Worriers) book called “How Do You Like What You Have” and it’s awesome. I think you can still get copies of it. Do you have anything else coming up? I’ll be doing another book, and I also have my first nice lithograph for sale, an edition of 100. It’s gigantic. That’s up for sale too. I’m super stoked on it. I also just finished a mural in New Brunswick, which Joe helped me with. He dealt with the city for four or five years trying to find the space for it. It finally came through. It’s in downtown New Brunswick. So that’s another awesome thing I got to do this year. It took about three weekends to do. It’s probably 25 feet high and 75 long, I’d guess. It’s just black and white; there are pictures of it on my blog and the Don Giovanni blog. It’s really exciting. I was happy to contribute to the New Brunswick landscape.

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How did you get started making art? I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. My mother was an art teacher and she probably turned me on to drawing. My dad also works in the school system. I’ve just been doing it ever since I can remember and I’ve never stopped. Where does is intersection of DIY punk and outsider for you? I always really loved art. Both of my parents showed me the fine art world, which I definitely value, but it’s kind of inaccessible for the average Joe. Actually being a part of the fine art community is kind of difficult. I found out about punk and then learned about how relatively easy it is to become a part of DIY punk. And it sort of combined two things I loved. I could be a part of it. I could make drawings for bands and do what I love, which is draw, and not have to navigate through the fine art world. Which is also a world that’s kind of not relatable. The older I got and the more I learned about fine art movements, I learned to appreciate it because it’s totally interesting, but it’s

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COMEDY SPOTLIGHT

J.T. h ab ers aat

different currents of energy. I don’t want to go down some name-drop spiral, but I will say that some of my favorite bands are also some of my favorite people: Riverboat Gamblers, Ryan [Young] and Off With Their Heads, Tim Barry, Chuck Ragan, Lower Class Brats, Krum Bums, MOD… These are people I identify with, and they seem to identify with me. The crossing of audience has never been a stretch in my mind.

Stand-up and music are blending more and more. How did your time in the music world influence your comedy? My time in the music world has been a big influence on my comedy career, mainly in terms of… The two scenes that matter are not that far apart. I still

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keep in touch with the same publicists and label folks I did back when I was running the magazine, and they even sometimes rep comics I know. Also, I’m friends with a lot of known band peeps by now, so I when I do shows with them, it makes perfect sense. We are coming from the same places, just using

You talk about being an angry 30something. Is it difficult to keep your ear to the ground for new trends and bands? [Laughs] It can be tough, because most trends I now discover on Facebook or Twitter, and 99% I despise. I do run Altercation Records still with my NY business partner Travis Myers, so in some regards, I am still current on what is “in” due to the demos we receive. But to answer your question, I don’t really go looking for current trends to annoy me… They find me [laughs]. Some stuff I used to rail about – like shitty screamo bands or whatever – I don’t even know if that’s a thing now. It doesn’t really play into my day to day. I don’t need to know about it, so I choose not to. I just watched that “Blurred Lines” video like two weeks ago and mentioned it online, and no one believed me! But it’s true. I kind of self-isolate from shit culture. Plus, when you reach a certain age, it just becomes “old man doesn’t get it” rant, and I don’t want to be that. So much of my current ranting is more tied to humanity and its arrogance in general, rather than, say, Cute Is What We Aim For. What can fans expect from the Altercation Comedy Tour? The Altercation Comedy Tour is

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probably my biggest accomplishment. I’m pretty proud of the reputation we have carved out. We are headed out on a mammoth national tour starting in early October, and running more or less straight until December. We are doing Fun Fun Fun Fest in Texas with John Waters and Jello Biafra, and also heading back to New Orleans for Hell Yes! Fest in November. Doug Stanhope’s Celebrity Death Pool website is officially presenting all our dates, which is so rad to me. Doug is like my comedy Yoda, and Jobi who runs the Death Pool is like family. Just great, creative, no-bullshit people. Which is what the Altercation Tour strives for as well. Come see us… I promise we will not waste your time. Fans can expect a serious show for a cheap ticket, with no ego horseshit before or after the gig from any of the comics. I am very proud of the upcoming lineup, which includes Joe Staats, Junior Stopka, Jay Whitecotton, Kristen Becker, Nick Lavallee, and many more. Excellent comics and excellent people. The live show is the main thing these days when it comes to comedy and music. The live show is where the magic happens, and it’s tough to get people to get their asses off the couch and put the bong/ Xbox/ iPhone down, which is sad to me. You cannot recreate the live experience in any medium. I love Murder City Devils’ records, but there is nothing like seeing them live. Check out all of our dates at JTComedy.com, and grab the album Hostile Corporate Takeover on Stand Up! Records so we have gas money for tour. Thanks and hope to see you on the road.

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LABEL SPOTLIGHT:

attack. In the early days, it was just: the record’s recorded, we put it out. I feel like now there’s a much longer waiting period. More work goes into it.

How do you know a band is right for the label? SPR: For me, the key has always been if it’s good music. I can’t think of an example where we signed somebody from a demo. …Where we’re at with the label now, Joey and I have very broad music tastes and we want the label to more accurately represent those tastes. If you’re creating something interesting, people will care about it. JC: One of our first records was a band from Massachusetts called Defiant Hearts. They sent me their demo, and we put out their CD. It happens less now than before, but like Sean said, if a band sends a demo and it’s mindblowing, we’re not gonna ignore it. SPR: There’ve been a couple situations recently where it hasn’t explicitly been an unsolicited email, but it’s been closer to that than us seeing them at a show. There’ve been some bands recently that we’ve started working with that we just knew already. […] It’s interesting because, in the Internet age, you can hear a lot of music without having inperson contact.

INTERVIEW WITH Owner Joey Cahill & Manager Sean Patrick Rhorer WRITTEN BY Janelle Jones

hough they live on opposite coasts – label owner Joey Cahill lives in L.A. while label manager Sean Patrick Rhorer calls Richmond, VA, home – the two music lovers have managed to create and maintain a thriving record label. 6131 has released material from such bands as Strife, Bane, and Touché Amoré, and has quite a few more releases coming out this fall, including new records from Dads and Choir Vandals. When and how did you start this label? JC: It started in 2006. I lived in a house in Huntington Beach with a bunch of guys, and bands would always stay

at our house. A hardcore band called Sinking Ships from Seattle were staying once. Their CD was out of print and they pretty much said, “You guys should start a label and put out our CD.” So we did. The address of the house was 6131.

Have things changed since 2006? JC: It was only eight years ago, but in music that’s an eternity. With the age of digital downloads things are different, but I think we approach everything differently now. Before I’d be like, “I like your band, let’s do a record.” We always had distribution set up, but there was never a release schedule and a plan of

What formats do you release? SPR: There were a lot more CDs before I was around. JC: There were quite a few releases from the early days that were only released on CD and digital, whereas now… it would be vinyl and digital. I think [we’re] being a little more thoughtful in our approach and trying to make sure we do the best we can do as a label for the band so everybody benefits from it as much as possible.

Some bands are putting cassettes again… SPR: We’ve done a few cassettes as well. It’s crazy. I don’t even have a way to actually listen to cassettes. The thing is, we’re both in our 30s, we’ve been around music long enough to see all the trends. We recognize they all come in cycles. The first punk records I had were on cassette. Cassettes are back. Punks tend to buy the physical product. Are sales of vinyl up? SPR: There’s a lot of people – and I would assume it’s a lot of younger people – consuming music this way, because they still have that nostalgic attachment to the physical product. I want to have an LP in my hand as well as a lyric sheet. [Younger fans] learned and grew up with music from the Internet. …The primary way they consume music is through Spotify, and that’s

How did you know you wanted to keep going? JC: It started off where we just did records for friends. It was that kind of house where we always had bands stay over from all over the country. …We all worked at Revelation as well. With this, we could do a little more on our own, as opposed to with Rev and not having as much control. So you two had prior label experience… SPR: Yeah, I started working for the label about two and a half years ago at this point. Actually, the first LP the label put out was for a band from Virginia called Permanent, and I was on tour with them. I wasn’t in the band, but I was along for the ride, and that’s where I met Joey and just kept in touch over the years. Joey worked at a label called Abacus, and I worked at a bunch of different labels and did publicity. It got to a point where it made sense for him to have somebody else helping him, so I got involved.

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hugely helpful in letting people hear the music, but it makes us have to be a little more aware of when we do a vinyl release to make it interesting, make it cool, make it worth buying. It can’t just be the cheapest, most bare-bones thing, because you wanna give them a reason to have it beyond just the songs. I think a lot of kids who are buying vinyl these days are doing it more as a collectible than a way to listen to it, which is great. It allows them to have the attachment to the physical thing without necessarily needing to consume it that way. That idea of a record as a whole package can get lost with digital stuff. JC: I think the demand now with digital being more prevalent is you need to have better looking merch. When a kid gets the music on Bandcamp and comes to the show, he or she is not gonna buy a record necessarily, but they may buy a shirt. Let’s talk new releases… SPR: The newer stuff ’s really great. We’re working with Dads, sort of the flagship band for the label right now. They have a new full-length coming out in October that we’re really excited about. I think it shows them taking some chances and writing some songs that are different. Then we have a crop of younger bands. We’re working with Choir Vandals from Missouri- sort of moody, indie-rock stuff. Also from Missouri: Wish. Kind of heavy alt-rock, they do it really well. We’re working with a band from the Bay Area called Culture Abuse; I’ve know the singer for quite a few years and was a big fan of his old band, and the new band is

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incredible. Joey saw them live and said they were one of the best bands he’s seen in a while. JC: It was pretty amazing. SPR: We have Teen Death from Richmond. Really cool, kind of if Weezer and Nirvana had a baby, the perfect blend of the grunge-y thing, but catchy and poppy. Hemingway have a record coming out in September; they’re from Portland, OR, emo ‘90s, really good. Seizures from California, kind of a metallic-hardcore thing – technical, kinda mathy – are rereleasing their current record through Melotov Records. We’re announcing tomorrow that they’ve signed with us. If you look at the roster, now… it represents our taste, the gamut of what we listen to. JC: Even though the label started with its roots in hardcore… I think of us as an indie label, not a hardcore label. I describe it as we put out music we like. SPR: We look up to labels like, for me it’s Sub Pop and Epitaph… You can’t ever predict where they’re gonna go. Those are the labels that have lasted 25, 30 years. We’re eight years in, and hopefully we get to that point where 25 years down the line, people are saying, “Wow, this is a label that’s been all over the place, and it’s always been really quality stuff.

people can hear them. If the quality of music is there, [it’s] ready to put out, and we can do it in a smart way, then we’ll definitely do that. Are there records that you’re the proudest to have put out? JC: I started the label just for fun, and then three or four years later, we put out a Bane 7”. I never thought [that] would’ve happened. We put out the first Touché Amoré record, and they’ve become this incredibly successful band.

It feels really cool to have them as part of the family and see what they’ve been able to accomplish. SPR: I have to shout out the Permanent LP [Sink | Swim], because if it weren’t for that band working with 6131, I may not be a part of it now. JC: And that record is criminally underrated. SPR: Everyone should hear it.

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How many releases do you try to get out per year? SPR: I think, when all is said and done this year, we’ll end up with either 12 or 14 releases, which is a lot by our standards. It just happened that this year we have quite a few young bands that are eager to get music [out] so

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Hello, again! This is For The Record #3 in which we discuss some absolutely awesome rekkids and some super limited ass shit that you probably can’t get anymore.

BEACH SLANG - S/T

ead Broke Rekerds really got their hands on something special, and made damn sure it came as limited as possible. First pressing info has this thing at only 651 copies: 420 Black, 114 Mint Light Green, 107 Opaque Purple, and 10 Grey. The Black vinyl comes with a regular-ass printed sleeve, but I ended up getting the Opaque Pur-

NEW

T 78

ple – the pictures don’t do it justice – and the colored editions come with a special two-color screened, two and a half page jacket. It’s simply beautiful. The half-page fold-over has what look like song lyrics, but since there’s an insert for that, they are something special: a message to the listener inspiring society’s “persona non grata” to remember that they’re “never not going to be okay.”

LOWS

his record is just fucking cool looking. Deathwish Inc. has a reputation for going the extra mile with their packaging and

- ABHORRENT

artwork, and New Lows’ Abhorrent Endings is just one of their many beautiful pieces. The cover illustration is an obvious Jake Bannon – of Converge fame – piece

ENDINGS

done in black and white. Pressing info is as follows: 547 Clear with White Smoke, 550 Clear with Black Smoke (pictured above), and 983 White. This 12” EP fea-

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tures a B-side spray-painted with the New Lows logo. Call me crazy, but knowing that – somewhere between the pressing plant and my doorstep – some person’s hands touched this record to make it even more unique is very erotic to me. A+ Deathwish. You win again.

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AMERICAN FOOTBALL - S/T DELUXE

REISSUE

process, candid

such a short time, the influence this

and posed shots,

band has had on modern emo is un-

explanations

each song, and – here you go, guitar nerds – the tunings for the

recorded

versions,

(hint:

none

them

are standard. Damn). Having been on Earth for

oly shit. Where to be-

landscape photography, and a 12-page

gin? This is one of the

booklet bursting with fascinating in-

believable, and this deluxe pressing

most well thought-out

formation. The second LP is chock

is a fitting tribute. It’s still available

and executed pieces

full of demos, live tracks, and every-

on the Polyvinyl Records website for

I’ve ever seen: American Football’s

thing else they could think to throw

somewhere around $22, and you’d be

S/T album reissued from Polyvinyl

at us. The booklet is littered with

fucking stupid not to grab a copy.

Records. Double 180 gram Red LPs,

Chris Strong’s photography, which

two record sleeves with beautiful

reveals the secrets of the recording

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Until next time, nerds...

.....

s we descend deeper and deeper into the sweaty months of midsummer, ice cold beer, BBQs, and pool parties become ever more necessary in relieving the oppressive heat and swampy humidity. Thankfully, The Awesome Party Squad – aka Cross Examination – have rallied to the goodtime cause with the announcement of their follow-up EP to 2008’s Menace II Sobriety LP. The appropriately titled Dawn of the Dude sounds as partytastic as ever, and in a world where beer-chugging crossover isn’t quite the brewmaster’s choice it once was, the St. Louis thrashers party on with a refined passion and genuine love for the inebriated arts. There’s a timely nod to current affairs, too, with the intro track

“Wake Up Call” rallying the changing tides of pot legislation, (also note the rerecording of “The Bluntocalypse” from the 2007 Super Party Brothers split EP with Spring Break!) In related crossover/thrashcore news, Relapse Record’s recent signees Iron Reagan premiered their latest and goriest lyric video “Eyeball Gore,” taken from the upcoming The Tyranny of Will full-length. A compilation of cinematic eyeball mutilation – naturally including the infamous scene from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou – it does what is says on the tin with stomach churning accuracy. Relapse has also announced a reissue of Num Skull’s 1988 seminal release Ritually Abused dropping September 16. Long lost in the vaults of thrash history, this Midwestern classic of thrash-meetsproto-death is set to enjoy a deluxe repressing with re-mastering and bonus

tracks for the enjoyment of old-timers and young-bloods alike. True thrash never dies. By that same token – if the grapevine is to be considered a reliable news source – U.K. thrash/ crust/ metalpunk legends Sacrilege have apparently decided to return from the shadows and reenter the realms of madness. Little more is to be said on the matter. But if, like yours truly, you hold Sacrilege’s first two LPs in the highest esteem, this is a rumor worthy of restless excitement. Meanwhile, in the world of

100% confirmed news, modern-thrash stalwarts Battlecross are poised to shred with the big boys of mainstream metal with the announcement of a U.S. tour with Machine Head and Children of Bodom this fall, also featuring dates in Mexico City. Pair this with the Slayer/ Exodus/ Suicidal Tendencies package, the return of King Diamond AND the Samhain/ Goatwhore/ Midnight traveling trio, this fall is gonna be somewhat busy on the arena circuit.

But, of course, all that commercial remortgage-your-home-for-tickets profiteering is easily cured by some culter-than-thou blackened thrash. Enter Martelo Negro and Force of Darkness, this month’s saint-slaying dose of Latinate Luciferianism. The former – translating from Portuguese as “Black Hammer” – offer a thrashriddled plague of old school black metal with their latest Equinócio Espectral full-length released via HellProd on June 30. “UGH!!!” says it all. Chilean blackthrashers Force of Darkness are no doubt in ritualistic preparation for the Hell’s Headbanger CD release of Absolute Verb of Chaos and Darkness, originally released earlier this year on vinyl by Iron Pegasus. Expect nothing more than Pleasure to Kill-era Kreator and Sarcofago’s Rotting in a satanic slurry of, well, chaos and darkness. Thrash on.

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