4 minute read
lock up
Grindcore powerhouse
use lockdown to strengthen an already ridiculous lineup
BY KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
With members spread across the south and northeast U.S., England, Sweden, Chile and Spain’s Basque region, it’s only appropriate that the genesis for the latest lineup and album by grind supergroup Lock Up was kickstarted in Berlin, one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan and artist-friendly cities. ¶ “On the Campaign for Musical Destruction Tour in early 2020, Misery Index was touring with Napalm Death, Rotten Sound and Eyehategod,” begins drummer Adam Jarvis (of Baltimore). “At the Berlin show, we were backstage shooting the shit with [bassist] Shane [Embury, of Birmingham] who was telling us that [ex-drummer] Nick [Barker] wasn’t feeling it anymore and was out, and that he didn’t know what they were going to do… unless I wanted to play drums. I was like, ‘It’s that easy, huh?’ Plus, he was talking about getting [co-vocalist] Tomas [Lindberg, of Gothenburg] back in the band. So, in the course of a 15-minute conversation, I was in Lock Up.”
With everyone locked down—or up—as COVID-19 worked its infectious black magic around the globe, the newly-minted lineup got to work on the band’s fifth album, The Dregs of Hades. This work involved guitarist Anton Reisenegger (of both Santiago and San Sebastian) and Embury sending various formations of riffs and songs to Jarvis, who would hash them out at his practice spot, devising rhythm patterns and beats, arranging and rearranging the raw material so it was smoothed out enough for the vocal duo to do their own back and forth about who was going to do what, how and when.
“Once we got the songs, Tompa and I would work out what we wanted to do and what songs we wanted to work on,” explains co-vocalist
Kevin Sharp (of Atlanta). “Tompa and I would track everything. I would send him my tracks and he would track the songs the way I wrote them; then I would take his tracks and do his songs. During the mixing process was when we would take whatever sounded best—call-and-response here, double vocals there, Tompa this, me that—until we had a full record, and the way it turned out had a cool phrasing and contrast dynamic. It was a good idea and it came out better than I thought it would!”
“I gotta say that Anton is a riff-writing machine!” enthuses Jarvis about his new bandmate. “He channeled some [former and late guitarist] Jesse Pintado on this, man. It’s awesome; grind as fuck at times, really punk, and there are even a few hardcore riffs in there. It’s a fun listen! We’ve all been doing this for decades and you can hear it. Everybody had their parts, did what they had to do, let it rip and nailed it.
“I ended up being furloughed from my job at the time,” he continues on a personal note about how working on The Dregs of Hades elevated his COVIDimposed downtime, “so this allowed me to work on the new album as well as the 7-inch we did with the Repulsion cover. It was pretty awesome and gave me something to do during a very dark time. Thinking back on it now, joining the band was a blessing in disguise because it kept me playing drums, allowed me to leave the house, go into the studio and have some fun.”
As for what the future holds for these very busy and very spread-out gentlemen, who knows? Everyone involved approached The Dregs of Hades for the love of the game and as something out of creative necessity they would have embarked upon whether the world was on pause or not.
“Lock Up is a place for old dudes to get together and reminisce about the metal they grew up on and their record collections,” laughs Sharp, “but I recorded five albums during the pandemic; music is just what I—and we— do. It was good to be able to press ‘record’ when everyone was in crisis.”
But now that live music and touring is chipping its way back to some semblance of normalcy, the members are finding that it’s easier to be in Lock Up when you’re at home for two years, as opposed to actively juggling the over 20 bands they are actively involved in.
“I think we’re going to be more of a festival appearance type of band,” reasons Jarvis. “Possibly a tour, but everyone is still playing catch-up with what was supposed to happen last year, and 2022 is still going to have some of that carry-over; like Shane touring the last Napalm Death album will be a priority. Honestly, my first thought was that we weren’t going to be able to play a show for years, but we just signed with a new booking agency in Europe and, sure enough, we’ve already had an offer to play a festival in Belgium that Misery Index and Napalm Death are booked at. It’s like, ‘Well, if you two are already there…’ It’s starting to get a little bit more real, and I encourage it. But this current version of Lock Up still hasn’t all been in the same room together, so the first step will be to get in a room and have a band practice; that would be cool!”
Adam Jarvis
