Substream Magazine Issue 49 featuring CHVRCHES

count their blessings

Making metal triumphant again The U.K.’s most exciting new rock band

Baroness

Wolf Alice

Wistful Winter: Your favorite bands share their favorite holiday memories

LA DISPUTE x REFLECTIONS x DRUG CHURCH x THE SADDEST LANDSCAPE

#49 Dec/Jan 2016 US $4.99 CAN $5.99

S UB S T R E AM #4 9 (JAN 1 6 ) C HVRC HE S + BARO N E S S • B R AN D N E W • KURT C O BAI N • DRUG C HURC H • T HE FRO N T B OT TO MS • LA D I SPU T E • MI N U S T H E B EAR • REFLECT I O N S • T HE SA DDE S T LA N DS CA P E • S P OK E N • C HR I S WA L L A • W HI TE R E A P E R • WO L F A L I CE

CHVRCHES

AC RO S S T HE S EA

FEATURES M U S I C

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C U L T U R E

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O B S E S S I O N

O N T H E C O V E R

CHVRCHES CHVRCHES isn’t afraid of writing gloriously catchy pop songs, confronting internet trolls or just being full-on workaholics. Learn more about Scotland’s greatest export and find out where they’re going next.

CHVRCHES COVER & CONTENT PHOTOS: MITCHELL WOJCIK

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28 BARONESS

After surviving a life-threatening bus accident, Baroness could have broken up and no one would have blamed them. Instead, they made the most triumphant album of their career.

32 DRUG CHURCH FRONT 36 THE BOTTOMS

Every sick, sad thought you’ve ever had, Patrick Kindlon has probably already put to song.

Pop-punk’s unlikeliest new heroes are taking their raised profile in stride—and with beer.

40 REFLECTIONS SADDEST 44 THE LANDSCAPE

Jake Wolf has lived harder than you could ever imagine, and his band’s new album proves it.

These traditional screamo lifers tapped into a whole new level of trauma, and they’re inviting you along for the ride.

48 WOLF ALICE

How is the U.K.’s newest rock sensation handling the influx of attention? Just fine, thanks for asking.

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Light Years, the Money Pit, Watermedown, White Reaper

14 FRONT ROW CENTER 16 IDOBI 18 RADIOU 20 DIGITAL TOUR BUS 22 THEN & NOW 24 INSIDE THE ARTIST 26 CHECKING IN 61 REVIEWS 64 PARTING SHOT The Wonder Years & Halsey

Meet Tom Cheney

Spoken

What was your band’s favorite holiday show?

Minus The Bear

Chris Walla

La Dispute

Kurt Cobain, Ghost Town, Handguns and more

Brand New

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PRESIDENT/CEO

SUBSTREAM MAGAZINE

Jason McMahon

PO Box 1059 Delaware, OH 43015

jason@substreammagazine.com

EDITOR IN CHIEF Scott Heisel scott@substreammagazine.com EDITORIAL INTERN Barbara Witherow

ADVERTISING Dawn Burns & Jessie Kelkenberg dawn@hohcg.com // jessie@hohcg.com ADVERTISING INTERN Brianne Angell

LAYOUT & DESIGN Clubhouse Creative laston@clubhousecreative.com

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Dan Bogosian, Geoff Burns, Cameron Carr, Sam Cohen, Landon Defever, Shaye DiPasquale, Tim Dodderidge, Dane Erbach, Maria Gironas, Anthony Glaser, Heather Glock, Robert Ham, Michael Haskoor, Jessica Klinner, Daniella Kohan, Matthew Leimkuehler, Bridjet Mendyuk, Brittany Moseley, Mischa Pearlman, Greg Pratt, Bradley Rouse, Knial Saunders, Jason Schreurs, Karila Shannis, James Shotwell, Christine Shuster, Brian Shultz, Eric Spitz, Nicole Tiernan, Stephanie Vaughan

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Edouard Camus, Heather Glock, Kelly Hamilton, Eddie Jenkins, Anam Merchant, Bradley Rouse, Jim Trocchio, Andrew Wells, Sami Wideberg, Mitchell Wojcik

EDITOR’S LETTER

Greetings, Substreamers!

As 2015 draws to a close, I originally wanted use take this space to look back at the milestones Substream hit this year. But honestly, all of 2015 felt more like preparation for what’s to come in 2016. To whit: Our next issue will be our 50th issue, plus it will kick off our 10th anniversary celebration all year long. We have many big plans in the works for next year, some of which—such as our larger dimensions and new cover logo—you got a sneak preview of in this issue. If you’ve been reading Substream for a while, we are immensely appreciative of your support.

If this issue is your first? Welcome aboard! We promise to keep covering great music from all genres—whether it’s electro-pop (CHVRCHES), metal (Baroness), alt-rock (Wolf Alice), pop-punk (the Front Bottoms) or something else entirely—as long as you promise to keep reading.

Happy holidays, @scottheisel

LIGHT YEARS How to grow up when you’re grown up.

STORY: Bridjet Mendyuk // PHOTO: Andrew Wells “We write a lot of songs about how we’re old pieces of shit,” jokes Light Years vocalist/guitarist Pat Kennedy. If there’s one trait the band has, it’s humility. Joking around about leaking their new record, Kennedy quips, “Tens of people are going to be excited.”

The Cleveland pop-punk group are humble, but their new album I’ll See You When I See You should get everyone excited.

Their debut album in 2013, I Won’t Hold This Against You, seemed like a tough act to follow, but its follow-up LP, I’ll See You When I See You, syncs up perfectly alongside anyone’s favorite pop-punk albums. Yet, if it were to be the band’s send off into adulthood, it would one for the books. Drawing key elements from Blink-182 to New Found Glory and Saves The Day, I’ll See You When I See You rounds out as a modern swan song of youth not far from the aforementioned pop-punk legends.

“We’ve been a band now for so long, [I think] we’ve [finally] figured it out; our sound and what we want to do,” says Kennedy.

“I’m too old to care what the kids want to hear—we just want to make ourselves happy at the end of the day. I think we did that.”

With less songs about heartbreak and more about the reality of growing up, Light Years showcase their talents as individuals with clean guitar breaks, loads of melody and heavy variations of textured tones.

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The record shines with bouncy intros and catchy bridges with the band “all on the same page” and expectations pushed aside. Taking influences from how “being in your mid-20s sucks” and toxic relationships, Kennedy says the title of the record is a way for the band to keep things open-ended.

“We are getting older and real life starts happening,” the frontman begins. “Our guitar player just got married. It’s insane, but it happens when you get older. A lot of that has been coming into reality. I’ve been living in this weird music bubble for the past four or five years. [You wonder], ‘What am I supposed to do without this?’ A lot of the songs deal with that and what could happen after this.”

The reality of disbandment looms its ugly head every now and then, but Kennedy says Light Years will be hitting the road for a while with Neck Deep and State Champs this winter. “I don’t want to get a real job,” he says, neglecting to mention his full-time gig as an assistant manager of a local Subway sandwich shop. If I’ll See You When I See You gains the praise it deserves, hopefully the dudes in Light Years won’t have to.

“I would hope if someone ever said, ‘Have you heard of this band Light Years?’ this record would be the one [they mention],” says Kennedy. “I’m not saying I want this to be our last record, but at the end of the day if this were our last record, I would be very proud. I hope we can continue to be a band, but if it does end, then I think we made a record that is good to go out on.”S

“I’m too old to care what the kids want to hear—we just want to make ourselves happy at the end of the day.”

—PAT KENNEDY

THE MONEY PIT Letting the dream go.

“We wanted a rock record with great pop songs.”

—BOBBY DARLING

STORY: Dan Bogosian // PHOTO: Kelly Mason Bobby Darling and Nic Newsham have always been prolific songwriters, but starting the chapter after Gatsbys American Dream wasn’t always clear.

“[Gatsbys American Dream] never said we broke up, we just kind of stopped doing stuff,” Darling says. “We never really closed the door. The Money Pit record, we toyed with it maybe being a Gatsby record, and then we were like, ‘Nah.’ It didn’t feel right. We may make one someday, but this felt right for the now.”

With the mindset of a new project, they recorded under producer Casey Bates (Pierce The Veil, Portugal. The Man), focusing on getting the deepest hooks they could while still keeping Darling’s slick guitar style. “Casey and I conceptualized the record before we started,” Darling says. “Guitars are like a faux pas now, like, ‘Ew, I don’t want too many guitars in there.’ I think that’s a sign of the times, and any day now a band will come and flip everything on its head.

We wanted a rock record with great pop songs.”

(Darling wanted every song to have a guitar solo, too, but Bates thought it would turn off listeners.)

The band’s name isn’t a comment on the music industry or past failures, but on the nature of getting older. “It’s about being in your 30s,” Darling says, “and doing what you’re ‘supposed to be doing.’ Working 40 hours a week, doing your taxes, brushing your teeth.

This kind of long, inexorable trip to the middle.

You make money for the purpose of spending it. You spend a massive chunk of your life at work so you can have transportation to work.”

When Darling isn’t playing guitar and writing songs, he and his wife are flight attendants for rival airlines. (He quit an office job after he realized he “was going through the motions in order to have what I thought was a grown-up life.”) Despite the travel, it’s not comparable to touring at all.

“Touring was our least favorite part

about Gatsbys back in the day,” Darling says. “The world is so different now. The internet lets you share stuff without breaking your back touring, and most of our tours were before smartphones, so getting places with printed directions and no access to the outside world just got miserable.”

The time working different places has lead to a new maturity.

“I used to write things so that everyone would like it or think it was clever,” he says. “Sometimes you put so much effort into the little stuff and no one notices, and then the stuff you put so little effort into is what excites everyone. I used to obsess over that, some cohesive music or a literary reference in our lyrics. You get older and let it go.”

With the Money Pit’s self-released self-titled album out, Darling’s already thinking of the future: short tours with old friends like Acceptance in 2016, and another record. “We’re writing a lot more music already. I’ve got about 10 songs in the bag. We want to keep making content, making music. That’s all I want to do.” S

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WAT E R M E D OW N STORY: Landon Defever // PHOTO: Halle Airyn “Did you mean watermelon?”

Believe it or not, you’re not the first person to make that joke. Vocalist/guitarist behind emo-punk project Watermedown, Jonny Mays, is used to hilarious quips like that on a regularly basis. While it hasn’t gotten so bad as a Google autocorrect, it’s still a fact of life that Mays has to be inundated with often.

“When I first came up with the name, I was, like, 17 years old and I really didn’t think that hard about it at all,” Mays says. “Yet everyone’s been in this constant presumption thinking, ‘Wow, this is a really funny and witty comment—holy shit, watermelon!”

As tired as Mays is with the fact, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t embraced the long-running joke.

“The first T-shirts that I ever pressed for this band was just a black T-shirt that says “watermelon” on them,” the singer jokes. “I hope it gets run into the ground very soon, but I don’t think that’ll happen.

Band names are stupid anyway.”

All fruit-based witticisms aside, Mays has had quite a year. In 2015 alone, he signed to Equal Vision Records, toured with the likes of Man Overboard and A Loss For Words, and released Somewhere Sleepless, his critically acclaimed debut EP. However, it didn’t necessarily get that way overnight for Mays, as he first had to lay some groundwork before he could move into the spotlight.

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What’s in a name, anyway?

“I ended up joining up with friends in Head North on a label called Quiet Fire Media that they founded,” the frontman states. “I recorded the EP with them up in Buffalo.”

If it weren’t for the help of Wonder Years vocalist Dan Campbell at a show at the College Of New Jersey back in April, things may have turned out very different for Watermedown.

“I played a show with Aaron West, Dan’s side project, and he really liked the set,” Mays remembers. “He ended up sending the album to a bunch of his higher-up people, who really liked it.”

One of the people Campbell sent it to was Wonder Years manager Craig Monahan, who sent it out to even more people. Monahan told Mays that Equal Vision really liked it and expressed interest in signing the artist. The label ended up releasing Watermedown’s debut EP Somewhere Sleepless—an immensely passionate, fivetrack powerhouse that really packs quite the emotional punch.

To Mays, all of the tracks hold a lot of personal significance, but one in particular that stood out to the artist was opening number “Bragging Rights.”

“It’s one of my favorite songs to play live,” he says.

“Also, Jay Zubricky, who produced the album, really made it sound cool and brought in a lot of great ideas.”

What the future holds for Watermedown in the coming months, Mays isn’t sure. Given the bout of success he’s had in the past few months, however, it seems as if he’s happy to just be along for the ride.

“Everything’s fallen together, and it’s all felt really right.” S

“Everything’s fallen together, and it’s all felt really right.”

—JONNY MAYS

WHITE REAPER They’re so raucous and unpredictable, you might fear the Reaper.

STORY: Cameron Carr // PHOTO: Michael Powel You’re at another show, watching another opening act you’ve never heard of. You’re probably only there to see your friend play.

You live in Boise, Idaho—or someplace like that, it doesn’t matter. There’s hardly anyone there, and you couldn’t be more bored by this band. Then, the singer punts the keyboard.

Welcome to a White Reaper show.

Lots of bands are described as putting on an energetic performance, but this Louisville, Kentucky, quartet tries their best to truly deliver. Since releasing their debut full-length, White Reaper Does It Again, earlier this year the band has seen the crowd begin to recognize and return that energy, but before that the members performed a number of onstage antics—perhaps to amuse the crowd, but often just to entertain themselves.

“There was nobody at this place, and the people that were there just looked so

bored to be seeing us,” vocalist/guitarist Tony Esposito recalls of the first keyboard-kicking incident. “I was like, ‘I gotta start doing some crazy shit,’ so I just punted the hell out of [keyboardist Ryan Hater’s] microKORG.”

Esposito easily rattles off concert antics from jumping into lackluster crowds to bassist Sam Wilkerson climbing on Hater’s back while performing. He explains that the band, rounded out by drummer Nick Wilkerson, is fortunate to spend so much time inactive while driving between shows, allowing for a full release during performances.

The band has certainly seen success with this approach—to the point that they started a side project called the Tommys to allow them to continue playing house parties—but not all crowds have been as receptive. During a U.K. tour with indie-pop band Alvvays earlier this year, Esposito says some audience members began covering their ears during White Reaper’s set. Before beginning the Canadian leg of the tour, Alvvays requested White Reaper drop off the remaining dates.

“The agreed upon term was musical differences, but it wasn’t any beef between the bands, they were really nice the entire tour,” Esposito says. “The reason they told us was that we were too loud.”

Listening to White Reaper Does It Again, it’s not hard to imagine. The LP delivers a relentless barrage of upbeat rock that sounds designed for in-yourface, full-volume performances. Their sound often garners comparisons

“I was like, ‘I gotta start doing some crazy shit,’ so I just punted the hell out of our keyboard.”

—TONY ESPOSITO to punk and garage rock classics such as Ramones and Jay Reatard, but Esposito says that’s never been intentional.

“I think that’s just the kind of music we want to play,” he says. “I think we just kind of write music that we can just hammer out in an up-tempo way because it’s more fun for us.”

Writing music the members would actually sit down and listen to is of the utmost importance for White Reaper. Referencing the group’s upcoming split 7-inch with Daddy Issues, Esposito says the members have been listening to their track constantly. After recording Does It Again, he estimates they listened on repeat for four months.

“It’s kind of split 50/50 down the middle of people that I meet,” Esposito says. “I’m like, ‘Do you listen to your own music?’ and some people say, ‘It’s all I listen to’ and some people say, ‘I never listen to it.’”

White Reaper is definitely a band that listens to their own music. S

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Photo by Anam Merchant facebook.com/anammerchantphoto

THE WONDER YEARS

FRONTROWCENTER

FRONTROWCENTER

HALSEY

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THE SIX DEGREES OF TOM CHENEY STORY: Tori Bilcik // PHOTO: Dan Brink Who would guess that a self-identified introvert would acquire one of the most envied address books in the alternative rock music industry, combine a DIY radio station with rockstar show hosts and reach millions of worldwide listeners a month? Tom Cheney certainly didn’t, but that’s exactly what he’s doing as president and founder of idobi Network. Yet, for him, it’s more about creating genuine friendships than networking.

“You make friends by being genuine and just by being yourself,”

Cheney says. “If you’re trying to be friends with a person, you have to ask yourself why. If you can just hang out and have a drink together, and that’s enough in and of itself, then that’s the type of relationship you should go for.”

That’s much easier said than done. Being an introvert in such

a high-energy music scene, after all, is no easy feat. “I’m not an outgoing person,” Cheney reveals. It’s something you’d know from our conversation; he’s quieter than you’d expect, considering the loud music on idobi’s rotation, but there’s a pragmatic sincerity to his tone and business philosophy. “Everything comes back around at some point.”

These relationships and idobi’s millions of listeners cross national

and global borders. idobi Network now has offices in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, with editorial contributors from all over the world, solidifying the network’s role as a global resource for what’s hot in alternative music. Cheney and his team are also crossing into a wider variety of genres, expanding idobi Network from simply idobi Radio to idobi Anthm for indie music, idobi Howl for heavier music, and soon idobi Electra for electronic music.

“Our stations have everything to do with the music on them,”

Cheney says. “Personal tastes change and preferences change, so idobi couldn’t remain one station forever.”

always been involved with music since high school, and it’s just been something I did on the side,”

he says, nonchalantly recalling his early work as a local photographer and blogger. “When I decided

Cheney wasn’t born a close friend to chart-toppers or his fellow

music industry leaders. Following idobi’s launch in 1999, he established

I didn’t want to be an engineer anymore, I called up some friends who happened to be working in TV

himself as a fortuneteller of bands’ forthcoming success, a legacy that

and they gave me a recommendation.”

paved the way for idobi to eventually be the top alternative rock internet

radio station in the world. “I don’t think I can articulate what the secret

become something bigger than Cheney could have imagined. “idobi was, for me, just a hobby—

is,” Cheney says with a laugh. “I want to say I just got lucky and predicted

something for me to do for fun and to promote music I enjoyed,” Cheney reminisces. He launched

the right things.”

an expanded website for idobi in 2003 to include editorial content and photographs alongside the

radio stream, and left TV in 2005 to manage the station full-time. “They say that making a hit is a

Cheney accurately predicted the mainstream hits of bands like

Within five years of graduating from college, idobi Radio was born, and soon took off to

Good Charlotte, Fall Out Boy and Paramore, and used idobi Radio to bring

lot of work and a lot of luck, and idobi was the same way,” he says.The world sees Cheney’s passion

them into the limelight before they made it big. “I’m sure there were

for innovation through idobi Network’s success and their unique approach to music journalism.

people who tried to do the same things and they were wrong,” he says. “A

The flagship station has always been known for being ahead of its time, in some respect. “We were

lot of this is having an ear for what people will connect with.”

streaming when no one else was streaming,” Cheney boasts. “We didn’t have to adapt so much as

we had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to us.”

The roots of Cheney’s career in the music industry can be traced

back to the friendships he’s built. After transferring to University of

California Berkeley from Georgia Tech and graduating with a chemical

behind him. “We wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for them,” he says. “Like any successful entity in

engineering degree in 1994, Cheney found himself writing for MTV. “I’ve

the world, there’s a team that isn’t always public that makes success. It’s never a one-man show.” S

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Cheney says he owes idobi’s successful expansion largely to the team, and friends, he has

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“I’ve always struggled with hearing my own voice—I’m just not into listening to myself.”

—MATT BAIRD

B R E AT H I N G L E S S O N S WITH

SPOKEN Lots of guys release albums when they’re 19 and are never heard from again. Matt Baird from Spoken is not one of those guys. He has been Spoken’s frontman for more than 18 years, and they’ve just released their eighth album Breathe Again on Artery Recordings. We caught up with Matt to chat about his new record, new label and more.

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This is the second crowd-funded album that Spoken has

to the songs we’ve released over the years, just to see if God

done. What were the best and worst parts of doing that?

might be trying to speak to me through those same words.

MATT BAIRD: The best part about another crowd-funded record

I normally write about life, Jesus, my wife and people that

is that once again our fans didn’t just talk about how much

destroy their lives with terrible decisions. I still experience

they support our band to their friends, they actually proved

each of those things, so I guess all the words can still apply.

it by reaching and exceeding the goal that was set before them. We all love talking about bands we’ve heard before or

Memphis May Fire’s Matty Mullins contributes guest vocals

seen live, but when it comes to actually doing something that

on the title track. How did you get him on the record?

directly affects a band and the record they are recording,

Scoop grew up with Matty, so they already had a relationship.

the supporters actually become a part of the record.

Matty had started listening to Spoken as a teenager, so

I’d say the worst part of the process is having the

he was familiar with our tunes. We had decided to record

thought or fear that you might not reach your goal.

a song with Cameron Mizell, and it worked out to where

It’s hard asking people for money sometimes.

Cameron would be in town working on new MMF stuff and Breathe Again at the same time. The timing was perfect.

One of your Kickstarter rewards was to let someone travel with you for a week. Two people took you

Spoken has been playing music for almost 20 years. In those

up on it. Have they toured with you yet?

years, you’ve experienced some substantial lineup changes.

We’ve actually already taken two guys out with us. One

How does working with new guys effect the latest record?

was from the Kickstarter we did for Illusion, and one

I think that new guys coming into the picture is always a

was from the Kickstarter for Breathe Again. Cody is from

breath of fresh air. I’m not saying I enjoy the process of people

Kansas and Scott is from Texas. Both guys are really cool,

leaving the band, but honestly, I have to make the best out

and helped out a ton. We look forward to doing it again.

of it. I care more about the guys in the band as friends than band members. If someone needs to move on, I’m going to

Despite your initial intentions to release the album

try my best to be supportive of my friend more than bummed

independently, you have now signed with a label. Why

that I’m losing a band member. A new member means new

go with a label instead of staying on your own?

ideas, new writing styles, new influences and sometimes

I can think of at least three different answers to this question.

different goals. Our purpose has always been to share the

The long story short is that Spoken has been a band for almost

hope of Jesus with the world, but sometimes there might be

20 years. That’s a miracle in itself. It’s hard to even exist as

better ideas on how to actually be exposed to the world.

a band let alone thrive as a band. It doesn’t matter if you’re a brand new band, been at it for 10 years, or even 20. The

There aren’t many bands who have had the kind

industry is always changing, people’s taste in music changes,

of staying power that Spoken has. Did you ever

people begin new seasons in life... We agreed it was a better

aspire to a 20-year run with this band? How much

idea to continue to exist by not only having new management,

further do you think it will go from here?

new booking, a new producer and new members but to also

When I was 19, of course I had aspirations to be in a band for

team up with a label that believes in Spoken’s past as well

my whole life. I didn’t know at 19 how hard it would be to be in

as our future. We have the opportunity to be exposed to a

a band, let alone survive on the finances a band provides. God

whole new world of listeners by being on Artery Recordings.

has always made a way, never on my time, but always in his perfect time. There have been many months where God and I

You had lots of offers. What made you choose Artery?

have the same conversation when it come to provision. I know

I think one of the things that drew us to Artery is that [guitarist]

God is going to take care of all my needs, but there are times

Scoop [Roberts] already had a relationship with people at

when logically there’s just no way for it to happen. That’s when

Artery—plus they actually approached us about releasing

he shows up, and yet again I learn another lesson in trust. This

the new record. Everyone seems to be on the right page and

life will never make sense logically, but it makes total sense

has the best intentions for each band. Most people would

when your trust and hope is in something greater than this

never think of Spoken as an Artery band. We might stick

world. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t have to be. I love what I get to

out a bit over there, and that might be a really good thing.

do, I love it that my wife believes in the calling on my life, I love getting to meet people all over the world who have somehow

In previous interviews you have said that you never

been affected or inspired by the music of Spoken. Its an honor

listen to the finished album, why not? Do the other guys

to be in Spoken, and I’ll do it until God tells me otherwise. S

in the band listen to it and tell you what they think?

I’ve always struggled with hearing my own voice—I’m just not into listening to myself. I’ve been challenged recently to listen

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WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE HOLIDAY CONCERT?

By Joshua Weidling

The holiday season is always amazing! You get presents, see lots of family and catch some of the most unique concert lineups you’ll see all year long. Bands love to end the year on a special note and do their darnedest to put together awesome bills filled with their friends and favorite acts! I talked to three bands to see what holiday show holds a special place in their hearts.

REBECCA LOVELL of LARKIN POE Last Christmas, we performed a seasonal “songwriters in the round” set of shows with our good friend Kristian Bush of Sugarland at Eddie’s Attic, one of our favorite venues in Atlanta. We were playing early and late, back-to-back shows for two days straight and we were all fighting off colds. I’m not sure who started the trend, but it became the thing to do to drink hot toddies onstage. I forget how many hot toddies, but if my sauced-up memory serves, I’m pretty sure they were some of the best shows we ever played.

BEN ROTH of COME WIND In December 2014, our friends the Orphan, The Poet invited us to play their annual Christmas show. We hadn’t performed in a little while and we were somewhat hesitant to accept. However, we eventually said yes and the show went great. We performed at Double Happiness in Columbus, Ohio, and were received nicely. Columbus has always been good to us. The stage was cramped, but the crowd was responsive. For one part of the set, our guitarist/ vocalist Jon Robinson played a drum kit we set up on the floor. We even covered a Christmas song! That has never happened before. The whole experience was a blast. We’ll always look back on that show fondly.

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MIKE DUCE of LOWER THAN ATLANTIS My favorite festive show has to be the Christmas show we played at Koko in London in December 2014. The show sold out and Christmas songs were played over the PA between bands. Everyone was singing along! We have a Christmas song called “Merry Christmas (Wherever You Are)” which we obviously played. It was a nice way to see out the year, which all our friends and family over a few Christmas beers!

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MINUS THE BEAR

&

THEN N 2001

By Cory Murchy

ORIGINAL LINEUP

Jake Snider (vocals/guitar) Dave Knudson (guitar) Matt Bayles (synth) Cory Murchy (bass) Erin Tate (drums)

WHY WE STARTED We all grew up listening to and playing in bands associated with the hardcore scene but we wanted to branch out a little more than those confines allowed. We had no desire to adhere to a specific genre so we just set out to play music that felt good and that could draw from all sorts of elements. Whether it was dance/electronica, hip-hop, metal, reggae or prog rock, it was all on the table and we were not shy about embracing it.

OUR FIRST PRACTICE SPACE Our first practice space was in south Seattle and we shared it with Pretty Girls Make Graves. It was a tiny, windowless shithole, but we made it work.

THE FIRST SONG WE WROTE “Lemurs, Man, Lemurs” was the first bit of music Dave brought to the practice space. He was coming up with a lot of finger-tapping guitar lines, and it really set the tone to what would become MTB’s signature sound. The first time he played it, I remember being pretty floored because I’d never really heard anything like it before. Fast-forward 14 years and he’s still bringing guitar parts that blow me away.

OUR FIRST TOUR VAN In the beginning, we borrowed Botch’s old tour van for shows. It was a heavily traveled white Ford Econoline named Blanche. Like her Golden Girls namesake, she’d covered a lot of miles and had seen it all.

OUR FIRST BIG SHOW Our first show was with Pretty Girls Make Graves, Benton Falls and Box The Compass on September 14, 2001. It was an especially weird and uncertain time that week in light of the events of 9/11. We weren’t sure if the show was going to happen, or even if it should happen. The show did go on, and in hindsight it was pretty cathartic to end such a heavy week with some positivity.

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NOW

RYAN RUSSELL

2015

CURRENT LINEUP Jake Snider (vocals/guitar) Dave Knudson (guitar) Alex Rose (synth) Cory Murchy (bass) Kiefer Matthias (drums)

WHY WE CONTINUE

CAROLINE BOWMAN

We still enjoy what we do and we love making and performing music together. There are so many more songs to write and shows left to play, we just want to keep on keeping on.

I firmly believe that our best days are ahead of us.

OUR CURRENT PRACTICE SPACE We don’t share a practice space with anyone anymore and we have moved to downtown Seattle, but it’s still basically a windowless shithole.

OUR CURRENT TOUR VAN Nowadays we rent our ride and hire a driver. Our current driver Jordan brings along his dog, Sweet Dee, and it’s awesome to have a four-legged companion on tour. Totally positive vibes, which are essential on the road.

THE NEWEST SONG WE’VE WRITTEN We’ve been busy writing a bunch of new songs, and we couldn’t be more excited. Everything is falling into place and I feel like everyone is really gelling in a way that’s shining through in the music. We can’t wait to play some of the new ones on the road.

THE BIGGEST CHANGE BETWEEN THEN AND NOW You see and experience a lot of change over the course of 15 years. The most important thing for us is the fact that at the very core of it, we want this band to go as far as we can take it. I’m not so sure that there is any one definitive change between then and now, but what is important is that we’ve been able to roll with the punches and adapt to all the changes thrown our way. Life goes on, man, and you just have to keep going. S

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I N S I D ETH E A RTI ST

C H R I S WA L L A INTERVIEW: Michael Haskoor PHOTO: Dianna Walla

“I spent 17 years—literally my entire adult life—in a rock ’n’ roll band with three other guys who are like my brothers and then all of a sudden I’m not in that band anymore. It’s a little weird.”

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What’s it like to try and rebrand yourself after being in a band like Death Cab For Cutie for 17 years?

I wouldn’t say I’ve done much rebranding, and if I have done any rebranding, I think I’ve done a pretty poor job. [Laughs.] It’s not so much a matter of rebranding as it is a matter of personal identity and a shift in how I think about myself. I mean, I spent 17 years—literally my entire adult life—in a rock ’n’ roll band with three other guys who are like my brothers and then all of a sudden I’m not in that band anymore. It’s a little weird. We’re basically on good terms but I don’t talk to them, really. It’s weird, it’s challenging, it’s quite a mindfuck.

You say you’re “basically” on good terms with the other members of Death Cab For Cutie, so does that mean that there was a falling-out?

I wouldn’t say that there was a falling-out but I would say that despite everyone’s best intentions, when something falls apart, whether it’s a relationship, a business venture, a band or whatever it is, it’s never perfect.

It’s never the way that you want it to go in your dreams. There’s just pieces of it that are challenging and sloppy and difficult. You know, that’s the stuff that time takes care of. It’s fine, time is going to make it better.

W

ith one platinum record (2005’s Plans) and two gold records (2003’s Transatlanticism and 2008’s Narrow Stairs) to their name, Death Cab For Cutie is widely regarded as one of the biggest bands in indie rock (even though they’re on a major label).

It’s tough to walk away from a critically acclaimed, commercially successful band, but that’s just what guitarist/producer Chris Walla did, leaving the group in 2014 after playing on their latest album, Kintsugi. Now, Walla has returned with Tape Loops, a solo album that is completely instrumental and heavily influenced by ambient electronic music. Although Walla doesn’t sing on Tape Loops, his creations speak volumes on his behalf.

Why did you choose not to sing on your new solo album Tape Loops?

Well, the record was never intended to be a record of songs. It was just something that I started working on right at the moment that I decided that I was not going to produce the Death Cab For Cutie record after a few weeks, before we hired Rich Costey. We got up at three weeks into it and it just felt like it wasn’t working. I felt like we needed to make a change and I felt like we should hire a producer and it would be better for the record and everything, really. Everybody was a little shell-shocked but ultimately agreed with me and we started the search. This was well before I had decided to leave the band. The immediate fallout of that, when I told the band that I wasn’t going to produce the record and everyone packed up and went home, we still had the studio time booked. It was like, “Shit. Well, now what? What do I do? What would make me really happy?” This record is the answer to that question. This is a record whose stories are not literal, it’s wordless. It’s not a record about singing or songs, it’s a record about being where you are and being who you are.

What the heck happened to your moniker Martin Youth Auxiliary and why not release the new record under that name?

When Death Cab For Cutie got together in the late ’90s in Bellingham [Washington], you just didn’t record music under your own name. That was just something that wasn’t accepted. I think the thing that was accepted were these ridiculously cumbersome names, like Death Cab For Cutie, the Somewhat Legend, Magnetic Bicycle Craft and the Martin Youth Auxiliary.

There were a bunch of these bands who had these sort-of Guided By Voices non-sequitur names, so Martin Youth Auxiliary was just one of those.

Aside from it being instrumental, how is your new album different from your 2008 solo debut, Field Manual?

Well, it’s completely unrelated. It’s literally a record of tape loops. It’s 39 minutes of tape bits, occasionally strapped together with a few musical notes. It’s very minimal, and the whole idea was that I pretended like it was 1977 and there’s definitely no computers, it’s all tape. It’s very much inspired by the work of the forefathers of that genre. It’s got a lot more to do with [German ambient group] Cluster than it does with Death Cab, at least that’s my hope. I tend to like machines much more than I like computers.

I’m much more of a tactful person, I like to move around and be invested in it and involved in it. I mean, the computer does a job and that’s fine, I’m not mad at the computer, but that’s just not what this one was about.

What’s next for Chris Walla?

I have a handful of records that I’m producing that are in my future.

I’m scoring a film right now called North, I think it’s going to be really good. I also just moved to Norway. I got a lot going on. S

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C H E C K I N G I N

Watching La Dispute’s new documentary Tiny Dots will truly open your eyes to the authenticity this band brings to the table. Each member gives their input on each other as well as their latest album, Rooms Of The House, where there is a developed sense of wholeness. In essence, each member is a room that makes up this symbolism of a house, where each fan is harbored and welcomed by artistry and solidarity. Substream sat down with bassist Adam Vass (who also served as a cameraman and graphic designer for the documentary), who enlightened us on the intimate behind-the-scenes look Tiny Dots provides.

WITH

LA DISPUTE

“There is no obvious next step for the band. We don’t know if this is the end of the novel.”

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INTERVIEW: Heather Glock PHOTO: Joanna Bongard

What can you tell me about the creation of this documentary?

Was there a goal in mind?

ADAM VASS: At first it was going to be a performance piece and of course, plans change over time. I think we ended up with something cool anyway that opens up that window to fans of our band to see a different side that they haven’t seen before. I wasn’t seeking to accomplish anything, except for capturing what it was we were doing every day. We had a couple of GoPros and handheld cameras; that kind of won itself to the aesthetic of giving that behind-the-scenes visual. It was pre-planned that way, but because the cameras were so small, people would forget that they were even there, so we ended up with a very real result.

I noticed fans interviewed for the documentary continuously repeating that La Dispute’s music is “real.” What was it like to see this mesh together in the band’s personal moments on film?

It is gratifying, and you definitely feel rewarded like your mission is accomplished. That is what we have always sought out to do, and it is weird to say that, because to be deliberate about being real is almost a paradox in itself. Bands are really transparent between Twitter [and other social media]...

We are very out in the open to retain who we are and not how we want people to perceive who we are. I think we do a pretty good job of that, and I am glad that we were able to see our fans acknowledge that in the film.

Vocalist Jordan Dreyer mentions in the film that he feels guilty by performing “Andria” live, as he does not suffer under the weight of those emotions anymore. Looking back on the older songs, would you agree?

I think so… I would say that time era of the band or maybe even before that, it all seems dated to us. We play those songs when we tour, but it is more out of obligation than a proper emotional response. I think when you write something at 18 years old and you go out onstage at 28 years old, you are a different person. No one feels the same way 10 years later about anything; you grow up and your perception of the world changes. I don’t know if I would consider them disingenuous at all, but I think the rest of the guys would agree on a detachment from some of those experiences that led to those songs.

The title Tiny Dots is a reference to the song “Woman (In Mirror).” Dots are seen as symbols of the sun and moon which make up the infinite lifeline of the world. Was this intentional to say that this documentary is but a glance at memories that make up La Dispute’s infinite timeline?

I would say that latter more than the dots symbolism, although that is very interesting to hear. It was more directly a reference to that song and the ideas present in that song. There are shared events across multiple lifelines; one example would be the tornado in “Hudsonville, MI 1956” where people’s lives intersect, because they all share this moment. All these moments in our band’s history brought not only the four of us together, but all the people who have worked with us or listened to us, anything pertaining to sharing these shared experiences that could potentially shape the way we perceive the world around us. I think some of the fans who speak during the course of the film can attest to that we are all are changed by this whole experience.

This film almost came off as a farewell or a tribute. Was this documentary a closing on the chapter that is Rooms Of The House, or the novel that is La Dispute?

I think that ending was left intentionally ambiguous, because we ourselves aren’t sure of that future and no one else knows. I think it was meant to be the enclosure of Rooms Of The House, or the way that we can kind of document the whole experience. It was a cathartic happening, as no one was sure that we were going to do it, or even us. We did record the album, the film is a celebration of that, but at the same time there is no obvious next step for the band. We don’t know if this is the end of the novel, but we figure then that this documentary is a fitting way to close it. S

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A NEW HOPE BARONESS redefines what is possible with heavy music on their landmark new album. Purple deals with some heavy issues, but instead of misery, the sounds are pure victory.

INTERVIEW: Greg Pratt // PHOTOS: Jimmy Hubbard

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S

avannah, Georgia’s Baroness has survived a horrific bus crash and a rhythm section revamp since their last album; they’ve emerged with a victorious and game-changing disc, Purple. The record makes good on what their last, 2012’s Yellow & Green, hinted at: songs that are soaring, exploring and moving in ways that heavy albums usually aren’t. It’s the unlikely feel-good album of the year, which actually makes a lot of sense, considering the difficulties it was born from and strives to overcome. Substream caught up with frontman John Baizley to talk about Purple and the circumstances surrounding it.

The album is really moving. I’m a life-long metal fan; it’s not too often in the realm of heavier music I’m emotionally moved, but this album just takes me away.

JOHN BAIZLEY: Thank you. You are very simply summing up what I was trying to accomplish with the record. Admittedly, as you and I both know, it’s a very difficult and very ambitious task, but why wouldn’t I try something difficult and ambitious? I’ve been putting out records for a while. The point is to do something that elicits reactions from people. That said, when we mostly had the record written and demoed and I was speaking to our producer or whomever, and they would ask what the record is like, I would have to describe it, and the descriptions which I kept saying, which were genuine, were “sonically heavy, musically dense, creative, artistic, emotional, melodic, earnest rock album that has moments of metal and a variety of other genres.” That sounds terrible. Not only pretentious, but it sounds like I’m describing anything that would fit the modern day active-rock formula. So it was a tricky thing to set out to do. I’m very happy to hear you’ve responded the way that I’ve responded.

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I think the album clicks with me so much because it actually feels like guys playing music that has some meaning behind it.

It’s funny that it’s so hard to sound like guys playing music with meaning behind it. I agree with you. Fads come and go, and I like at least half of them, but honesty is a different thing. We made a decision that when I would write lyrics in this band, and this is an old MO for me, I won’t write lyrics about things that I can handle and deal with in my everyday life. I don’t get as much out of the music ultimately as I want to that way. With this record I chose, once again, to focus on the parts of my life that are difficult, the concepts that are tough to wrangle with and to ask questions that I know I really can’t answer. Hopefully through that questioning maybe I can come a little closer to dealing with whatever it is that each song is about. And with the events of August 15, 2012, obviously there’s no lack of stuff to ponder. It left me and all of us with a lot of questions, and I don’t think any of those questions are necessarily going to get answered, but we certainly aren’t going to do ourselves any service by ignoring them.

I was almost loathe to bring that up because every journalist is going to ask you about the accident and how it influenced the album. But it’s so apparent that I have to ask: How much of an influence was that 2012 bus accident on these songs?

It’s a foundation stone. But it’s not the only thing we’re willing to talk about. The fact is we were forced to contend with a brand new rhythm section, and while that could have been a real difficulty for us, it allowed [guitarist] Pete [Adams] and I to work with two musicians who brought no baggage with them regarding that crash towards the writing process, and, on a very simple level, we just didn’t have to talk about it. I mean, of course they knew what’s going on, it’s obvious that we went through that, and in some ways it’s obvious we don’t want to talk about it all the time, but we can’t ignore it.

There are some very real and immediate effects from that crash, physical and mental. So if half of us don’t have that, and the other half do, and we play in a band that prides itself on working collectively then we simply cannot force two people to deal with a situation they had no real experience with, and we don’t want them to have a real experience with it. We needed to prove it wasn’t the sort of event that was going to stop the band. We can write a record that has elements of hope and pain and deals with the anxiety but not by creating more, by relieving some through the best medium that we know.

There is a lot of hope on the album. I was wondering if it would be miserable, but to me it’s a very uplifting and hopeful album.

Yeah, it’s coincidental in a way and maybe not so much in other ways. I thought we could very easily write something that was somber and reflective but nobody else really wanted to do that. In retrospect… thank you. [Laughs.] I think in order to achieve the subtle things we want to achieve and some of the broader things that were important to us, the idea of writing something really bleak, which I certainly had the impetus to do, would have ultimately been a mistake, and a misrepresentation of who we are. Very quickly we realized that we had an opportunity with this record to say something simple and profound, which is that you don’t have to get stuck at the way station just because life is difficult. That’s one of the things that attracts me to music: It’s an outlet for people who have to contend with the darker side of life. But we never even really talked about the crash, other than things like, “Someone help me pick up this amp, my arm is screwed up.” But we weren’t dwelling on it, which is what I did when I was alone. When we got together, we celebrate. That’s what music’s about. That’s what this record’s about.

“With the events of August 15, 2012, obviously there’s no lack of stuff to ponder. It left me and all of us with a lot of questions, and I don’t think any of those questions are necessarily going to get answered, but

we certainly aren’t going to do ourselves any service by ignoring them.”

—JOHN BAIZLEY

And I hear that. My favorite song on here is “Shock Me,” although immediately I was like, “Goddamn it, you named your song the same as a KISS song.” How distracting is that?

Oh, whatever. We’re riding on the backs of our forefathers. Our record is Purple; Prince had his purple thing. We did Blue [Record, 2009], so did Weezer; we did Red [Album, 2007], so did Weezer and Taylor Swift. We’re just begging, borrowing and stealing from one another. If someone takes something that was said before... at least it wasn’t “Lick It Up,” you know what I mean? There’s not going to be post-apocalyptic naked women eating turkey legs in our videos.

You sound like you were traumatized more by the Lick It Up era of KISS than anything else that’s happened to you.

That video is terrifying to me. [Laughs.]

But your “Shock Me,” as well as other songs on the album, are full of hope. They really lift me up when I hear them.

Yeah, I like that fact. I think that shows where we were when we were in a rehearsal studio in my basement. I have a tendency to go toward darker music, but that’s not representative of the rest of the band. So when they take what I have and put it through their filters, it ends up being very triumphant. S

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “Maybe I can answer this in a roundabout way,” says Baroness vocalist/ guitarist John Baizley. “It’s the one time of year where my family gets together, and in the past couple years, my family, we’ve all gone through a couple of extremely difficult things, and to have a couple days a year where you can get together with people you love and not focus on those negative things and not concern yourself with all the terrible things that can happen in a lifetime, it really is a beautiful thing. While I don’t subscribe to the religious side of Christmas, I’m a father, I have a father, I have a family, we want to get together and be innocent and relive every Christmas every year. It really is a nice time of year; I like the holiday.

And being a father, you can really enjoy the things that prior to that were sort of no-gos for the serious adult; you become kids again. I like that, because I do have a tendency to get a little too serious about things.”

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TRASH-FLAVORED TRASH DRUG CHURCH channels the trashiness of upstate New York through the filter of ’90s grunge and a singer who sounds like the Unabomber.

STORY: Jason Schreurs // PHOTO: Jake Lewis

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LOST IN WONDERLAND WOLF ALICE is the newest rock sensation from across the pond. How are they handling the influx of attention? Just fine, thanks for asking.

INTERVIEW: Mischa Pearlman // PHOTO: Jenn Five

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T

he first thing you’ll notice about “Banco Popular,” the churning opening song to Drug Church’s new album Hit Your Head, is that singer Patrick Kindlon still has a voice that only his mother could love.

The upstate New York five-piece poached the frontman of Self Defense Family to be their singer but, according to Kindlon himself, it might have been a career-damaging move, or at least a reason for the group’s stunted progression.

“The way that bands progress is to either make a shitty metal record or to get a little bit more commercial, then deny it. I’m going to say that we went the more commercial route on this one. I wanted to do a shitty metal record, but the band wasn’t having it,” says Kindlon wryly.

“They wrote stuff that I think if a guy with a good voice was on it, the band could experience some success. But because my voice is continuously terrible, I’ve robbed them of that.”

Definitely brandishing a love-it-or-hate-it vocal style, Kindlon says he wasn’t about to mask his imperfections in the studio. Instead, the band let their vocalist just do his thing: a shouted, raspy, man-on-the-bus-yelling-in-your-face style that is an interesting juxtaposition with a band that has written some of its most intricate yet simplistic rock to date.

“If we had taken two weeks making my voice sound great, we would have a product that more people would like, but then we couldn’t perform it live. So this is a what-you-hear-is-

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what-you-get thing,” says Kindlon. “If you come to shows there’s a good chance I will sound very much like I do on the record.”

Kindlon says the band also kept things simple in the studio. Recorded by Jay Maas (formerly of Defeater), Hit Your Head sounds heavy but not overly produced, something the band was aiming for going into the studio.

“More and more, there are bands playing what I call ‘small-room music’ that are going for a nice production that tricks you,” he says. “I’m not naming names, but a friend’s band had 160 tracks on each song, and there’s legitimately no way to recreate that.”

Kindlon points out that a glossier approach is fine for some bands, but it wasn’t right for Drug Church’s latest album.

“It’s a knowingly intentional commercial failure [of a] commercial record. I thought the chances of people liking it were slim, but it’s actually pretty approachable songs done in a very unapproachable way,” he says. “We halfintentionally chose to give you what we sound like when we play live. It’s a honest record in that regard. We were given enough money to do tricks if we wanted to, but it didn’t seem like a tasteful direction to make me sound like an angel on the record and then have me sound like a fart in person. That was foolishness to me.”

Lyrically, the 11-song album has what appears to be a narrative about a bunch of skid rockers living in the suburbs, hanging out in 7-Eleven parking lots, smoking lots of pot

and partying. Which begs the question: Is this narrative or reality? It’s something that Kindlon isn’t really able to give a complete answer for.

“It’s interesting that this music does this to me, but when I hear Drug Church music, I think about trashy things,” he explains. “The music isn’t like listening to Kid Rock. It’s not, like, pure trash music, but something about it makes me think about parties from high school, and it gives me these strong impressions about the trashier side of growing up, and that’s what comes out, and I honestly don’t know where it comes from.”

A veteran of emotional and politically charged bands, Kindlon was happy to channel some different elements into these songs, including a firm understanding of the area the band comes from.

“It’s got a very upstate New York feel. I think I’ve done a decent job of singing upstate New York,” he says. “But it’s interesting because people will write me from Michigan or Idaho and say it reminded them so much of their high school, or what they did last week, so it’s interesting to me that I think I’m singing about upstate New York, but I’m really singing what must be the universal American trash story.”

Despite the trashy nature of the lyrics, it befits Kindlon to have something more going on beneath the surface. Sure, the band is kicking ass and the frontman is raving on about petty vandalism and getting way too drunk, but a message is hidden deep within just waiting to be discovered, we know it.

“When I hear Drug Church music, I think about trashy things. The music isn’t like listening to Kid Rock. It’s not, like, pure trash music, but something about it makes me think about parties from high school, and it gives me these strong impressions about the trashier side of growing up, and that’s what comes out.” —PATRICK KINDLON

“Drug Church is a band where I hear the songs in the studio, I write the lyrics there and I sing whatever comes into my head. Often it’s not until I’ve finished recording until I know at all what the purpose of the song is,” he says. “Almost always, there is one, but I put no checks on what I’m writing and then I listen to it and say, ‘Damn, I’m deeper than I thought.’ So, in a manner of speaking, it’s free association, but then at the end it goes from that to, ‘Oh, isn’t that peculiar. I told a story. Isn’t that weird?’”

Speaking of weird, there’s that band name.

Drug Church seems like a peculiar choice, but it ends up being a good fit for a band that sounds like they could be reeking of pot smoke and covered in denim and flannel. How the band got their name isn’t a great story, says Kindlon, just a small anecdote.

“For fun, Self Defense Family started making a list in the van on tour of the most localsounding band names. We’d go to a town and play a bar and we’d see that the next day Scum Hornet was playing,” he says, laughing. “So, on long drives, we’d make lists of the most local-sounding band names. When the guys in Drug Church asked me what they hell we wanted to call this thing, I gave them a list of five or 10 things that were all pulled from the shittiest band name list and they loved Drug Church. They said it was perfect, so Drug Church it was!”

Despite the questionable name and Kindlon’s apprehension with an approachable singing voice, Drug Church is a band that easily

could overtake the popularity of his other bands, if not for the sole reason of being open to different possibilities.

“Drug Church is not afraid to be liked. Self Defense Family, in particular, we don’t go out of our way to be hated, but there is not a person in that band who has any interest in being liked.

That band says no to opportunities and tours that would get us more fans, simply because it’s not something we give a shit about,” explains Kindlon.

“But Drug Church is different. In Self Defense, I say no to everything. In Drug Church, I say yes to everything. And that is the fundamental difference. If the dudes in Drug Church said they had a tour offer from Skrillex and... I don’t even know, someone else who sucks really bad, I’d say, ‘Sure!’ Meanwhile Self Defense is turning down tours. I told the guys in Drug Church to just assume that I am a yes for everything.”

The only potential problem might be if the rest of the band asks Kindlon to learn how to sing properly.

“You know what? It’s funny. In my head, while I am singing, I sound so good,” he says.

“But, upon playback, I learn the awful truth that perception is not reality.” S

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “When I was living in a scum apartment with seven other people, the holidays were the only time I had any privacy,” explains Drug Church vocalist Patrick Kindlon. “The roommates would all go home to visit their folks. My dog and I would eat Tofurky and watch Martin Lawrence movies. It was heaven.”

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I guess this is growing up THE FRONT BOTTOMS are just like you— when they’re not trying to sneak across borders, drink a million beers a night or sell out venues nationwide, that is.

STORY: Brittany Moseley // PHOTOS: Andrew Wells

B

rian Sella is not an easy man to nail down. When Substream catches up with the Front Bottoms frontman, Sella and his bandmates (drummer Mat Uychich, bassist Tom Warren and keyboardist/guitarist/trumpet player Ciaran O’Donnell) are two weeks into a headlining North American tour that’s already taken them through New York, Connecticut, Vermont and Canada. And while the entire band no doubt already has plenty of touring tales, Warren might have the best story to tell thus far.

“We had to leave our bass player at the border,” Sella says during a phone call before the band’s Richmond, Virginia, show. “He got in trouble four years ago. We’ve been to Canada a bunch of times since then, but this time going in it was just the wrong [border guard] that we got. He was like, ‘You can’t come into Canada.’

It was pretty intense. [Warren] was like, ‘Let me go get my backpack,’ and the guy was like, ‘No, no, no. Your backpack is in Canada, and you’re not allowed into Canada.’ We had to walk to the bus and get his backpack for him.

We gave him $200 and were like, ‘All right, man, we’ll see you in Rochester.’ So he had a three-day adventure. It was pretty wild.”

This past year has been a pretty wild one for the Front Bottoms. After releasing two wellreceived albums on indie label Bar/None, the New Jersey band made the jump to Fueled

By Ramen for their newest record, Back On Top. Although the album title is a bit tongue in cheek, the band’s rise has been anything but a joke. Since forming in 2007 they’ve gone from playing basement shows to selling out

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2,000-capacity venues. Their devoted fanbase, now known as the Motorcycle Club, continues to grow thanks to their communal live shows which are full of raucous sing-alongs and easygoing banter between Sella and the audience.

The main draw of the Front Bottoms is of course the music, which has always walked the line between funny and serious. While Back On Top follows this formula, it also veers from the path at times. Sella’s lyrics are still as sharp and relatable as ever, but he’s wading through different waters than he was when he and Uychich started the band. Sure, there are still songs about getting high (“Historic Cemetery”) and all-night parties (“Laugh Till I Cry”), but there are also songs about dealing with their growing success and the demands and personal tolls that come with it. After eight years of steadily growing popularity, the Front Bottoms are learning what it means not just to be a band but to be a popular band. Sella still remembers when that reality hit him.

“We had been on tour for probably five years straight, and we had just gotten home.

I was sort of making the decision of, ‘This is gonna be my life. I’m gonna write another album right now, and then we’re gonna go back on tour for probably another fucking two to three years,’” he recalls. “I never really thought that this could be anything more than me and Mat playing in basements and people being excited.

It was dealing with the decision that this is going to be my life and how do I feel about that.

“Of course the biggest thing is the relationships that I have and trying to balance this one life of me being on the road and being

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away and partying every night and then this other life—which really does feel like a completely different life—of being home and hanging out with the people I love and being able to relax and not drink a million beers every single night.

It’s a little scary to think, ‘This is gonna be my life.’ That is the most insane goddamn thing ever,” he says with a laugh. “It’s so awesome, but it’s just a trip. It’s sort of unbelievable.”

If Back On Top is any indication, then the Front Bottoms are handling this unbelievable trip quite well. Fans who were worried the band’s sound would change as a result of jumping to bigger waters no doubt breathed a sigh of relief as soon as they heard the album’s opener, “Motorcycle.” Back On Top is very much a Front Bottoms album. Nostalgic numbers about former lovers and easier days (“Cough It Up,” this album’s version of “Twin Size Mattress”)?

Check. Lyrics about being out of your element, paired with bouncy choruses just aching to be sung by a crowd of sweaty concertgoers (“HELP”)? Check. Like its predecessors, Back On Top is the perfect merger of opposing forces: humor and somberness; criticism (outward) and criticism (inward), slow and heavy and fast and light. It’s an album that makes you want to dance, but it also makes you want to stop middance and say, “Wait a minute. These songs are kind of sad.” Sella laughs at the description.

“That is my style!” he says. “When we play live, I’ve noticed going into the chorus, people start to get hyped on that and push each other around and yell that part. And then the chorus comes, and everything sort of drops out and it goes back to being a slow song again. So it’s kind of a cool, tricky thing, like a balance of the audience. Everybody’s gotta be on the same page. As it goes, it sort of becomes what it is.”

The most noticeable change on Back On Top is the production. It’s a much more polished affair this time around. Some songs even seem to bleed into each other. That could be seen as a negative on other albums, but in this case, it makes for a much more cohesive end product.

All of this is in large part due to the album’s producer, Joe Chiccarelli (the White Stripes, the Killers). The band spent a month in LA recording with Chiccarelli. The benefits of this working relationship extend far beyond the album, though.

“I basically learned how to make an album like a professional musician on a major label,” Sella admits. “In the past, I play the guitar part, I look at Mat and Ciaran and Tom and they’re like, ‘That was great!’ Then we moved on. That’s always how it’s been, whether it was sloppy or not. So now to have an older person—a lot of times I felt like my dad was in the room with us—say, ‘No, you could do that again.’ I realized very quickly this is part of the experience; this is part of the process. He wants the best performance. It was good because it pushed me.

He started off as a stranger, and by the end of it he became a friend and somebody I look up to.”

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“The biggest thing is trying to balance this one life of me being on the road and being away and partying every night and then this other life—which really does feel like a completely different life—of being home and hanging out with the people I love and being able to relax and not drink a million beers every single night.

It’s a little scary to think, ‘This is gonna be my life.’”

—BRIAN SELLA

The band wrote the entire album before recording began, but one song did go through a substantial change in the studio. Front Bottoms fans first heard the name GDP when the New Jersey rapper released a split for this year’s Record Store Day with the band. While in the studio, someone suggested asking GDP to contribute vocals to “Historic Cemetery.”

The result is a low, throaty poem-like ending to a song that was already really good but has been elevated to something else.

“When we play ‘Historic Cemetery,’ he’ll come out, and he’ll do his last verse. Sometimes I look out into the audience and people have these blank stares on their faces, and sometimes people are super into it,” Sella says. “And it also gives me a chance to finish a beer.”

The Front Bottoms do indeed love their beer, as illustrated in their video tour diaries... and live shows… and Instagram posts.

“Oh god, it’s so embarrassing. I always forget my mom will show my grandma this,” Sella says of the videos documenting the band’s ongoing headlining tour. “Maybe one day I’ll grow up.” S

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “Probably just being in my cousin’s basement and all of us just beating the hell out of each other,” remembers Front Bottoms frontman Brian Sella. “It’s something I learned to look forward to, but I usually ended up in tears, and everybody was cursing at each other. But that was our thing; it was our holiday tradition. I had two older cousins, Tom and Chris. They would just naturally be on a team, and it would be everybody else against them.

So it would be me and my cousin Ian who’s the same age as me, and then my little brother, [Ian’s] little brother, sometimes a little sister would get involved and anyone else who was in the house and wanted to go down and wrestle. A half an hour in, somebody would go upstairs crying or screaming.”

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ith bands that w d re e tt li is lcore Modern meta of shit. But ll fu , e s ra h p of a better are, for a lack ow story, you’ll kn ’s lf o W e k a J once you know ose bands. th f o e n o t o n IONS is that REFLECT ew OS: Tyler Andr Burns // PHOT STORY: Geoff

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f there was ever a time when Jake Wolf felt a sense of accomplishment throughout his life, the time is right now.

“It was always my greatest fear/Everyone I love would disappear/Just like the color clear...”

After Wolf penned the above lyric during the writing of his metalcore band Reflections’ third album The Color Clear, something made him realize he could make a statement.

“It’s like the feeling you know you’re there,” begins the frontman regarding the album’s title. “You know you’re a part of everything and know you’re around other people. You know that you, as a person, are alive but you’re not actually there. All of the things around you that you take for granted. It’s just letting yourself kind of go away. It means so many different things it’s just something that’s there that people don’t see, something that gets overlooked.

It’s about being hollow and about being empty and is about losing everything.”

Through the many hardships Wolf has went through in his life, he certainly has ghosts from his past that make it clear he really did lose everything. The difficult years leading to the release of The Color Clear begins during the time of Reflections’ second album Exi(s) t while touring. About a week before leaving for tour, the house Wolf was living in caught fire. His best friend couldn’t make it out of the house in time, and died as a result.

“Seeing someone that you are so used to seeing everyday just laying on the ground in front of you is really surreal,” he says. “We stayed in a hotel for a week, just sitting in our hotel room waiting for tour to leave. [Then we went on] tour and it was really rough for me.”

Around the same time as the house fire, Wolf had already been going through issues with his bandmates, guitarist Charles Caswell and drummer Cam Murray. He says there was always tension between himself and the two other musicians. Murray decided

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to leave the band during the tour, which the singer said made Caswell upset. When Wolf made a remark that was not intentionally directed at Caswell during a show later in the tour, the issue became worse.

“We were playing a show and I commented between one of our songs, ‘I realized something today, that you have to be careful who you consider a real friend,’ and he took that personally without me directing that toward him,” says Wolf. “After that show, I left the venue right away. I was so overwhelmed with what was going on after the fire.”

He ended up at an old train bridge where he sat for an hour-and-a-half by himself. After finally making it back to the venue, he saw Caswell was extremely upset; for the rest of the tour, Wolf was forced to ride with a separate band to each show. After the tour and finally making it back home, guitarist Patrick Somoulay and Wolf unloaded their gear while Caswell drove off. That was the last time Wolf ever saw him.

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But even before Exi(s)t was released, Wolf had personal struggles he was dealing with as well. Growing up, he went through an abusive childhood, became a drug addict and went through an abusive relationship. He was homeless for close to a year until he finally got a job working in demolition and was able to afford to live in a house in Golden Valley, Minnesota. But it was in that house where he had to be hospitalized after the person he was dating at the time severely severed an artery in his arm after throwing a broken cymbal at him.

(It was a 16-inch China cymbal, details Wolf will never forget.) Before he went to the hospital, he bled for three straight days, and still allowed his girlfriend to stay with him in the house.

“I was sleeping with her in my arm that wasn’t cut and the next morning we were in a puddle of my own blood and I was like, ‘You have to go. I can’t do this,’” he recalls.

After Wolf returned from the hospital, where his heart briefly stopped beating from so much loss of blood, he allowed the same woman to continue abusing him for the next three years.

“I thought it was okay because that’s what my dad used to do,” the vocalist says.

“I just wanted to fix everything. She made it seem like she could fix everything for me and I gave it a shot and it was worse than ever.

That’s when more lyrics came out, and it was just a very trying time because the older you get and the more you try to get something through to someone and it just doesn’t happen, you feel defeated and just want to go home.”

He started doing LSD, more so as a therapeutic treatment than for recreational use, and material started to come out. Reflections had a few songs written with Caswell before he left the band, but Wolf decided to trash the material and start completely over.

Wolf says the entire process of creating Exi(s)t was rushed, which contributed to his lack of faith in the album. Now, with a a new drummer, Nick Lona, and Caswell and Murray out of the band, The Color Clear has brought to life a side of Reflections no one has seen before.

While the band is still pursuing their initial metalcore vibe, Wolf’s vocals switch from clean

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to screaming throughout the record. Reflections has progressed monumentally with The Color Clear, which is exactly what Wolf wanted.

“This record was our chance to start over,” he explains. “This is our chance to restart and try to come off as a different band with a different message and have some meaning to people. We wanted so badly to be looked at in a different way. We wanted to be a band that could help people. For me music helps me not hurt myself. That’s what we have to do.

We have to help people not feel like this.”

Aside from everything Wolf has had to deal with throughout his life, The Color Clear is finally something toward the light. Reflections is finally at a stage in their career where each person is comfortable being in the band.

“The things that I express with this album are things I struggle with everyday,” Wolf admits.

“You’ll always have time throughout the day where you’re distracting yourself. That’s when things are tough. I understand people have that feeling too. Those feelings don’t ever go away, and all you can do is find new things and doing new things in the hope that one of those things may fix the problem and will give you that sense of belonging and that sense of purpose. The person I used to be was the really messed up drug addict that took out all of my childhood aggressions on other people and on myself because I didn’t understand why I had to go through those things and watch other people not go through them. I see that person every time I see myself. I have to try to know the person I am on the outside doesn’t really have anything to do with who I can be.” S

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “In 2002, my mom and I found a kitten out in front of my house in a pile of snow,” Reflection frontman Jake Wolf recalls. “It was this little black kitten. We thought it was my neighbor’s because she had a black kitten and we brought it to her and we were like, ‘Hey, we have your kitten,’ and she was like, “No, you don’t.’ We saved a kitten that day. His name is Roger and he lives in Texas with my mom now.”

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SAY GOODBYE GOOD

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In recent years, THE SADDEST LANDSCAPE has escaped death—though some of their closest friends and musical influences did not. Now, it’s time to put those ghosts to rest.

INTERVIEW: Brian Shultz // PHOTOS: Andrew Wells

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he Saddest Landscape formed at the turn of the century when basement screamo was still en vogue, surviving beyond its mall-ified permutations to develop a cult following of international fans who devoured their multiple vinyl releases and the deeply personal, raw songs etched into them. After a brief hiatus of sorts in the late 2000s, countless member changes, the loss of a close friend and one near-death experience themselves, they settled on a solid lineup and stepped outside their comfort zone with a new producer and more songs for Darkness Forgives, their most varied, compelling and arguably best album yet. Vocalist/ guitarist Andy Maddox sat down with Substream at a bakery near his home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to discuss the record’s genesis and themes, and how he managed to address tragedy and happiness in equal measures.

“There’s a lot of learning how to accept that it’s okay to be happy, not always having to feel like I have to struggle with everything.

There’s a lot of adversity and terrible things that happen all around, but it is okay to just sometimes be happy and be able to just feel good. Historically, that hasn’t been easy for me.”

—ANDY MADDOX

The band was involved in a serious van accident at the beginning of a tour in December 2013. You all escaped without serious injuries though, right?

ANDY MADDOX: Emotionally, I think we were a little shaken up. We had a tire fall off on the highway, the axle cracked in Pennsylvania. The last stop we went to [was record store] Double Decker in Allentown, shopped for some records, and then...I remember we were listening to Cave In, and the next thing I know I [had] nodded off or something, and I remember just waking up outside of the van. I didn’t realize it at the time but I had a minor concussion. I called home and was like, “Hey, I was in an accident.” [The response was,] “Oh, I know, you called five minutes ago. Do you not remember this?” And I had no recollection of it. I remember at some

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point the police were there and I was talking to them and just rubbing my head and had blood coming out of my fingers, and I was just like, “Oh, this is a thing now...” But as far as seriously injured, no. Everything turned out fine, but there’s just that unknown. In hindsight, the van was probably more packed than it should have been, which is a thing a lot of bands do, but I’m sure all that weight in there wasn’t ideal.

Do you think the accident influenced writing this album lyrically? Did you pull anything from it?

Directly, where I can pinpoint the song is about that? No. But it definitely has an effect on your outlook on life—you just don’t know what’s going to happen. I hate saying things like, “We came really close to death,” but you don’t know—it just puts it in perspective. What if the van was

going just a little faster, or if [bassist] Andy Farrell [who was driving at the time] didn’t pay attention...? It definitely made you nervous to drive. We still had a tour that was underway, but no one wanted to get back on it. No one wanted to drive. That definitely shaped this a little.

I thought it was interesting that “’Til Our Ears Bleed” kind of circles back to “In Love With The Sound” in a way—it’s a different topic, but you’re referencing predecessors and peers, respectively. “’Til Our Ears Bleed” is directly for Jason [Rosenthal from On The Might Of Princes, who passed away in August 2013]. I almost called it “For Jason” but I wanted the song, for people who didn’t know Jason or On The Might Of Princes, to be able to stand on its

own. He was in the Saddest Landscape briefly, and we had done a couple recordings with him, post-[2010’s] You Will Not Survive, pre-[2012’s] After The Lights. In a way, it’s a love letter to the music scene, but it was more for him, or how his passing affected me and the band, whereas “In Love With The Sound” is more just commentary on the scene in general at that point. When I was first writing “In Love With The Sound,” it finally felt like music was exciting again for bands like us.

Our peers were becoming successful in new ways. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, they’re good for a DIY band,” which is always—

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “It was one of those things that became a tradition sort of by accident,” the Saddest Landscape’s Andy Maddox begins. “One year I just didn’t want to be alone again, forced myself to leave the house and walked down to the local movie theater as I had heard on Christmas Eve

—a backhanded compliment.

Yeah. Touché Amoré was redefining what a band like this could do. I didn’t think a band like that was ever gonna play Reading Festival, do these big tours or have records chart in the way they did. I was just so happy for all those bands that this was happening. At the same time, there was this weird backlash against it because they were becoming popular. I wanted to call bullshit on it. That’s why I had lines like, “You can keep your basements if it means we have to be better than our friends.” I want to be proud of this. If I have to have these outdated politics and have been a fan since 1985 or something, I don’t need to be a part of that.

they showed all movies for free. At first this prospect seemed more depressing but upon arriving it was clear that there were a lot of people in the same situation, there was this immediate unspoken kinship and it just felt nice to sit and get lost in the fantasy of all these movies. In the years that followed, I would return, and other friends I had that were alone or just wanted to escape their family would accompany me. We would sit and watch two or three movies, staying until the early hours of Christmas morning, just sort of growing and feeling as if I was finding my place in the world.”

You have a ton of little lyrical references to On The Might Of Princes dropped into “’Til Our Ears Bleed” as well.

I wanted it to be clear to people who didn’t get it that it wasn’t like, “Hey, I’m just sort of liberally drawing lyrics from them.”

No, it’s directly there. A lot of the lines are direct conversations I had with Jason, too. The last time I saw him was at the [Revelation Records 25th Anniversary Festival] in New York City in October 2012, because at that point he had moved to Texas. Being friends with Jason is crazy. Like anyone else, he had things he was dealing with. The very last thing I said to him when I said goodbye was, “You look good!” He did. Part of you felt like, maybe things will be good. It wasn’t long after that I found out what happened. The first line is, “We first met in a Long Island living room bonding over a book about true love and a pack of cigarettes.” That was the first time I knew I was gonna be friends with this guy, because we had the same favorite book. With On The Might Of Princes, it felt like Jason was always one step ahead of whatever I was trying to do creatively. I was constantly looking up to that dude.

What else did you find yourself writing about when you approached this album?

It depends. The next song on the record, “Trimmed And Burning “ was actually about Jason Molina, from Songs: Ohia. He was going through a lot of rehab stuff [and] had this letter he sent to his fans, and he signed it, “Keep the lamps trimmed and burning,” because he was always talking about these gaslights and stuff. It was these two people whose music meant a lot to me, but it’s one I knew really well and one I only knew as a fan. I wanted to put the two together and analyze what that meant for me.

There’s [also] a lot of learning how to accept that it’s okay to be happy, not always having to feel like I have to struggle with everything. There’s a lot of adversity and terrible things that happen all around, but it is okay to just sometimes be happy and be able to just feel good.

Historically, that hasn’t been easy for me. I don’t want to talk about, “Oh, I’ve been depressed and this [and that],” but I have! I’ve had plenty of those songs—part of that gets scary sometimes. But there’s also times where it’s good, and there is a point where I want that darkness to forgive. S

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LOST IN WONDERLAND WOLF ALICE is the newest rock sensation from across the pond. How are they handling the influx of attention? Just fine, thanks for asking.

INTERVIEW: Mischa Pearlman // PHOTO: Jenn Five

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W

ith the release of their debut album, My Love Is Cool, back in June, London four-piece Wolf Alice found themselves at the center of the music industry’s attention. It wasn’t the first time the band—frontwoman Ellie Roswell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey—had been surrounded by a buzz, but the record’s physical existence meant that this time the hype was more tangible and obvious.

A collision of styles and genres, it veers between upbeat pop, light grunge and restrained punk, and has seen the band’s profile raise significantly. Here, Roswell talks about what that means for them now and in the future.

“We’re floaters, in life and in our tastes. We can listen to White Pony by Deftones and then skip to 1000 Forms Of Fear by Sia and enjoy them both equally.

We think in terms of songs, not in terms of genre, and we keep an open mind —and I think our songwriting reflects our lives.”

—ELLIE ROSWELL

Two-thousand fifteen has been a pretty awesome year for Wolf Alice. How are you feeling some six months from the release of My Love Is Cool?

ELLIE ROSWELL: We’re feeling great! It’s been the best year ever.

We’ve been to places that we’ve never been to before, released our album, which we waited to do a long time, and it’s all gone really well.

I’m looking forward to doing more and moving into next year.

Were you ready for the explosion, or were you taken by surprise?

I didn’t really think about it when it was happening. It’s only been in hindsight that you realize how crazy it’s been. But we’re taking it as it comes. We want to enjoy it while it lasts.

There’s obviously been a lot of hype, to the extent that you were even featured in The New Yorker. Does that put any weight on your shoulders?

Oh yeah. Musically, I don’t think so, because I wouldn’t put out anything that I wasn’t happy with, so it won’t happen if I don’t like it. There’s enough pressure from yourself to worry about, which is the most important thing, but there is extra pressure in terms of all the other stuff that comes with moving into the spotlight, but we try not to overthink it and just stay true to ourselves.

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You formed in 2010 and it’s taken until now for the album to come out. Why the wait and the slow burn?

I think it’s hard to say how long we’ve waited. There’s been different start points. If I went to university to study law, when I became a lawyer would I use that as a starting point and say it took me 10 years or something? Five years ago I maybe played a song in a half-empty room, but I wouldn’t say it took me from then to make a debut album. But I do think we took a slow-burn route in the sense that we didn’t put something out as soon as we had 10 songs. We waited until we had maybe 25 and we could pick and choose, and we waited until we had experience performing, recording and writing. I think pressure from record labels can make some bands put something out as soon as they can instead of waiting until it’s right.

I’m happy that we did that, although you could say it was a tiny bit frustrating, because we’re impatient!

The band started life with you and Joff playing as a folk-pop duo, and the album embraces a bunch of different genres. What inspired that shape-shifting? Just a wide range of influences?

I guess you could say it’s a range of influences, or even a lack of any of them. We didn’t think about it too much. We’re just floaters, in life and in our tastes. We can listen to White Pony by Deftones and then skip to 1000 Forms Of Fear by Sia and enjoy them both equally. We just think in terms of songs, not in terms of genre, and we keep an open mind—and I think our songwriting reflects our lives. I don’t feel one thing all the time, so it comes out in different ways.

Beyond quitting your day jobs, how have things changed for you since everything took off?

I guess that’s one of the biggest things. It’s cool when you can make your hobby your career. But things have changed because we don’t really have a base a lot of the time. We’re always traveling and you have to get accustomed to that and try to keep in touch with your friends and family, which can be quite hard. And there are other things to think about, like how you’re perceived in interviews, and I’d never really thought of that before I’d done a million interviews and had a million pictures taken. It’s a strange thing to think about how other people perceive you without actually knowing you.

With that in mind, there’s definitely a wistful nostalgia to the album, and to the delivery of the lyrics, and I imagine there’s a lot of you and your life in these songs. Are you worried about putting too much of yourself in them?

I wasn’t. Maybe I might be from now on! There was a lot of nostalgia and hindsight on these songs, so I guess I was almost old enough to be writing about someone else, because I was writing about experiences I’d had years before rather than now. But maybe the second album will be a bit more recent, and that might be a bit more scary. I don’t know!

EMILY CHENG I guess now that you have an audience, you’re not just writing for yourself anymore. In some kind of way, you’re writing for them as well, and they’re waiting for the next batch of Wolf Alice songs.

Does that change your approach in any way?

Well, I think I always wrote for other people.

I mean, I write for myself but some things are best left unsaid, and some things should be disguised. Which is the beauty of writing lyrics, because you can. Not to sound wank, but with lyrics and poetry you can say something and disguise it, make it a little bit ambiguous so that it means different things to different people, but you always know what it meant to yourself and you don’t have to show it.

How do you feel being a female in a very male-dominated industry? Does it make things harder? Easier? Or is it irrelevant?

What’s been your experience?

It’s not irrelevant. I think it’s interesting. I’ve always been interested in how different kinds of people experience the same thing. But I also wish people would shut up about it! [Laughs.] My biggest experience that differs from the other guys in terms of being a girl in a male-dominated industry is people want to talk about it all the time.

Do you feel you’re being pushed into this role of being a poster girl for feminism?

And are you happy playing that role?

People expect me to have answers about what it’s like to be a girl in a band and how do we make a more equal amount of men to women and stuff like that because they think I know the answer, or at least have an answer about it, but I don’t, and I don’t really know what I think about it. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t even know what my experiences might be as a girl because I don’t know anything else. I think there’s a lot of pressure to answer to those questions and that can be difficult. But it’s interesting, and I’d ask the same things if I was a journalist.

Are you worried about burning out from having all this success so early on?

Of course I worry about it, but I’m surrounded by such a good team and such good people that I think I have a good support structure. And I’m too boring to do any stupid shit, so I’ll be fine. S

MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY MEMORY “It was New Year’s this year,” recalls Wolf Alice singer Ellie Roswell, “and we were in Australia for the same time and we were all sitting in this hot, tropical pool. We all suddenly realized that we were in Australia for New Year and it was just the best start to the New Year that I’d ever had. We stayed in that pool till we were pruney, and it was just a really nice moment.”

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RECOVERY PROCESS

CHVRCHES has s, ar ye t or sh ur fo In e studio project gone from a secretiv ing electro-pop to a world-conquer as a little bit of goliath. All it took w t of passion. trust and a whole lo // PHOTOS: STORY: Robert Ham

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Mitchell Wojcik

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The

Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, is one of those large-but-not-cavernous venues that are the proving ground for any music act that is on its way to arena-sized success in North America. If you can command the attention of 1,500 young people, all armed with smartphones and possibly under the influence of recently legalized recreational marijuana, you might be ready to take it to the next level.

On a recent Tuesday night in mid-October,

that task fell to CHVRCHES—and the Scottish electro-pop trio was ready for it. The hourplus set culled from the group’s two studio albums—2013’s The Bones Of What You Believe and the follow-up Every Open Eye, which was released this past September—and was the perfect mixture of polished and spontaneous.

The music was, understandably, highly programmed with instrumentalists Martin Doherty and Iain Cook directing the dazzling

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synth trills and perfectly sequenced beats from behind banks of equipment. Singer Lauren Mayberry, on the other hand, was a bundle of livewire energy. She spent the night bounding around the stage and pumping her fist in time with dramatic blasts in “Lies” and the colorful array of lights surrounding her. Between songs, she was a charmer, recounting the band’s night off in the city that included watching Cook get sloshed during a screening of a documentary on the American prison system.

“I would feel uncomfortable doing the

whole, ‘Hey Cleveland! How’s everyone doing?

Touch my hands!’ thing,” Mayberry says, speaking pre-soundcheck a few days later in Salt Lake City. “That just isn’t me as a performer.

There are people that do that really, really well, but I don’t think it would feel natural for me to do that. Also I think one of the things people like about the personality of the band is that it is genuine and approachable. We’re not trying to put ourselves on a pedestal hundreds of miles above everybody else.”

It’s not a remarkable statement, and

is probably the same kind of thing that even superstars like Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake rattles off to the press when they want to appear down-to-earth. But Mayberry means every word.

It feels like an honest byproduct of the sweat and toil that she and her bandmates have put into this from the beginning. They’ve reached levels of success with their two albums that none of them could have anticipated, with Bones selling nearly 200,000 copies in the U.S. alone and Every Open Eye landing in the Billboard Top 10 on the week of its release. But unlike any of the pop sensations that have come before them, CHVRCHES isn’t taking it for granted nor are they willing to overlook what got them here.

Key to that is where CHVRCHES chooses to

record. From the beginning, the trio have utilized the same studio space, built into a ground floor apartment in their hometown of Glasgow. This made perfect sense when it came to the first tracks that they trickled out into the blogosphere as well as the first full-length that came along just as the buzz surrounding the band was reaching deafening levels. But with all that wind in their sails, and a new label helping to fund the process, they could have had their pick of any producer and studio in the world. Instead, they chose to stick with what they knew, going back home and handling everything themselves.

“It’s an exciting place. It’s a safe space for us,” Doherty says of their studio. “We have everything we need and we look forward to being back in Glasgow so we can hang out there and work there. I could easily see this band being in that space and never working with anyone outside the three of us for the rest of our careers.

I just don’t feel that it’s necessary.”

Nor should he. The proof is there in Every Open Eye. While the record certainly sounds bigger and brassier than Bones, thanks to the band handing over their finished tracks to the capable hands of Mark “Spike” Stent, a producer and engineer who has worked with everyone from Beyonce to the Cult, it’s also an extremely confidently written and performed collection. The 14 songs bear the imprint of the trio’s collective love for the electronic pop of the past 30 years but the reference points—like the album art, an homage to the cover of New Order’s seminal Power, Corruption & Lies LP— don’t feel cloying or lazy. The individual parts evoke Giorgio Moroder (the sequenced fluttering that runs through “Clearest Blue”), Depeche Mode (the sinister and seething “Leave A Trace” feels like a Violator B-side) and ambient icons like Brian Eno and Harold Budd (“Afterglow”’s warm bath of tones), but the combination of those elements is pure CHVRCHES.

Most of all, every modular melody and programmed beat comes across as impassioned and joyous, in love with the pure thrill of creation.

It’s that adoration of music that, like all the best bands, brought these three together. Cook and Doherty bonded during the former’s days as

a lecturer on recording and engineering at a Glasgow university, quickly becoming friends and collaborators.

“He produced the band that I had at university,” Doherty remembers, “and we worked so well together that when I left that group, he invited me to come in and engineer and do some arrangement work on the last Aereogramme record. So I think we had a well-established dynamic by the time Lauren came into work on what would become CHVRCHES.”

Her injection into the mix came through other musical connections. Doherty helped produce an EP by Mayberry’s former band Blue Sky Archives and invited her to add some vocals to some demos he and Cook were constructing.

In doing so, they found the final element to make their pop anthems really soar.

What took a little bit of time was getting the trio to grow into the idea of being a fullfledged band. Although Cook and Doherty had been bandmates for a while, Mayberry was new to the mix, forcing them, in a way, to become fast friends.

“I think music is integral to our friendship and how we know each other,” Mayberry says.

“We were writing together before we really knew each other that well as people. I suppose that was a gradual thing because we didn’t know each other’s skill sets or how much we trusted each other as writers. I think the thing that was really exciting for all of us was that we were able to write things so quickly. We were so taken aback by how excited we were by what we were making, so that took the front seat.”

“If I’m having a day where I don’t feel psychologically prepared to go online and deal with horrible people, then I won’t. Previously, I probably would have made myself do it because otherwise I’m letting people win. It’s been important coming to terms with it, but I’m also not going to change the way I use the internet and interact with our fans because of the minority of people who think I’m a dumb bitch.” —LAUREN MAYBERRY

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Since those sessions in 2011 and 2012, CHVRCHES hasn’t really stopped moving forward as a band. The group gigged relentlessly around the U.K. as they worked on what would become The Bones Of What You Believe and kept dotting the internet with bits of their music. By the time the first LP came out, the trio was already a viral sensation and just needed to fan the flames of this hype with what became almost two years of almost nonstop touring, which included an estimated seven trips to the States for both assorted festival dates and club gigs.

“It took a bit of time acclimatizing to the workload,” says

Cook. “All the bands that I’ve been in have had an excellent work ethic, but there wasn’t the demand that there is now.

Then, it was just load up the van and go play a gig. Now there’s this whole other thing you have to find the energy for—signings and meet and greets and radio sessions—and that’s every single day. It’s all good work and you can actually see it paying off every night with the shows getting bigger and people getting more and more excited about the band, but it’s fucking exhausting.”

If that weren’t enough, Doherty kept himself to a strict

regimen while on the road of trying to write and record something every day in anticipation of the three getting back into the studio for their follow-up. In reality, almost none of the bits and pieces he worked on wound up yielding anything for Every Open Eye, but he says it was important for him to keep his creative mind in shape rather than succumbing to the atrophy of staring out a tour bus window for hours.

Those two years of steady activity only made things

run smoother and faster when they finally reconvened in their studio to commence work on album No. 2.

“We knew each other so much better as people, in both

good and bad ways,” says Mayberry. “But that just means that our communication is much easier.”

And, says Cook, they had a much clearer sense of what

the “CHVRCHES sound” was.

“We had the parameters hashed out so we weren’t

plucking stuff out of the air,” he says. “We have fans and expectations. We couldn’t just completely reinvent ourselves as a Peruvian nose flute ensemble.”

To keep themselves focused, the group put some

guidelines in place to help them stay productive. They would arrive at the studio around noon and work for six or seven hours, leaving them with a batch of demos at the end of each week. After a few weeks of that, they would circle back on the work they had done before. Five months later, the three were left with the 14 finished tracks that make up Every Open Eye. “It really afforded us some perspective,” says Cook. “If

you work on only one idea for 10 hours or so, by the end of it, you’ve lost a lot of judgment and you start making decisions that you’ll have to go and reverse. This way, you’d be given a week or two weeks away from something and you can come back to it starting off on a good foot.”

They also have to know when to let go of the recordings.

By all accounts, Doherty is a relentless tinkerer and might still be working on this album were he not forced to relinquish the wheel. But he and the band also know that the smart play is to hand off their finished songs to someone else to give it that extra buff and polish before releasing them to the world.

That’s how Rich Costey got involved with Bones and why they jumped at the chance to let Stent work his particular magic on their new tracks.

“We deliberately wanted to go with someone who

understood and had two feet firmly in electronic music,” says Doherty. “And his resume is insane. You know you can take a step back and know that he’s gonna do the business. I remember being absolutely blown away by what he sent back.”

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Every Open Eye isn’t simply a strong leap forward for CHVRCHES on a musical level. Mayberry, for her part as the lyricist for the band, picked open what sounded some pretty painful emotional wounds.

The songs are, as ever, open for interpretation, but it feels very clear that either she went through a nasty breakup (“You talk too much/ For someone so unkind,” she sings on “Leave A Trace”) or the death of someone close to her (“I’ll be your guide/So you can see the other side/ And I will never let you get away” goes the chorus of “Get Away”)— perhaps both. Whatever the case, the anguish is evident even in the most upbeat songs on the album.

Though she’s hesitant to talk about the specifics of what inspired these songs, Mayberry is willing to concede that everything she is singing about is deeply personal.

“I’ve never been the kind of person that can write lyrics or amazing stories or narratives about something I haven’t experienced,” she says. “It’s always felt like that for me. It’s genuine emotion. It’s not something that was created to tick boxes off a list, or to push people’s emotional buttons. This is human experience that’s put into a song and hopefully is connecting with somebody.”

From the rapturous praise she and her bandmates were

getting at their show at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, Mayberry is obviously making those emotional connections. That’s the beauty of singing lyrics that are intensely intimate but also vague enough for anyone to relate to. It goes beyond the stage, though. the singer makes herself available at meet and greets for her fans to open up about how they saw themselves and their own lives in a CHVRCHES song, and takes pains to communicate with fans one-on-one through the band’s social networking feeds.

Alas, for all the good that the internet has done for her

band, it has been at times a source of much agony for the singer. In a passionate op-ed for The Guardian in 2013, when she dared to speak out on the CHVRCHES Facebook account about a gross message she had received, it wound up opening the floodgates for every troll to wander out of the woodwork and throw even nastier comments at her. As Mayberry wrote two years ago, it left a huge impact on her emotionally: And, after a while, despite the positive messages in

the majority, the aggressive, intrusive nature of the other kind becomes overwhelming. During this past tour, I am embarrassed to admit that I have had more than one prolonged toilet cry and a “Come on, get a hold of yourself, you got this” conversation with myself in a bathroom mirror when particularly exasperated and tired out. But then, after all the sniffling had ceased, I asked myself: why should I cry about this? Why should I feel violated, uncomfortable and demeaned? Why should we all keep quiet?

I could easily see this band never working with anyone outside the three of us for the rest of our careers. I just don’t feel that it’s necessary.”

—MARTIN DOHERTY

Her essay had a similar dual impact as the Facebook

post that inspired it. It was shared thousands of times over

by CHVRCHES fans and supporters of women’s rights, but it also brought a lot more bullshit from the faceless online hordes. That blowback hasn’t dimmed Mayberry’s spirit one iota, however, and in truly defiant fashion, she refuses to completely cut the cord with the web.

“I am the one who gets most involved in the

organizational and administrative side of the band,” she says, “but you have to listen to your own well being as well as your work, you know? If I’m having a day where I don’t feel psychologically prepared to go online and deal with horrible people, then I won’t. Previously, I probably would have made myself do it because otherwise I’m letting people win. It’s been important coming to terms with it, but I’m also not going to change the way I use the internet and interact with our fans because of the minority of people who think I’m a dumb bitch.”

It would be a frustrating state of affairs for any band,

but with CHVRCHES, that feeling is trebled. The band goes to great pains to make sure that they are portrayed as a unit. They make sure every promotional picture features Mayberry, Cook and Doherty, and when interviews come up, they try, when possible, to do them as a unit. This extends to their live setup as well. Although Mayberry pulls focus as the mouthpiece of the band, all three are on the same level, and placed fairly close together in spite of the size of the stages they might be playing on. It’s the egalitarian ideal for a modern pop band. For the two men in the group, this also means that they suffer with their bandmate as she faces the slings and arrows of the world simply because she’s a woman and because she’s putting herself in the position of frontwoman.

“We can only do what we can do in that respect,”

Doherty says. “Magazines will want to interview Thom Yorke more than they will Phil Selway. It’s a natural byproduct of being the mouthpiece. It’s the first point of contact for an audience or for a critic. I don’t have any ill will for that at all, other than the fact that Lauren takes more criticism than I get.

But people have to know that we completely own this project together and if someone is leveling criticism at her, they’re leveling it at me as well.”

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You have to wonder how much longer the band will be able to sustain the level of activity that they have been maintaining for more than three years now, and what effect it might have when they start wandering off on their own. In the latter case, the requests for Cook and Doherty’s musical support on other projects started pouring in fairly soon after The Bones Of What You Believe was released. While they’ve turned them down to date, certainly one opportunity will wind up being too good to pass up. The same goes for Mayberry.

Just recently at the Treasure Island Festival, she hopped onstage with the National to back the band up on a rendition of “I Need My Girl.” With a voice as distinctive as hers, that can’t be the only offer she’s received to do a little side work.

In Mayberry’s vision of her future beyond CHVRCHES, she imagines going back to the life she was heading towards as a student of law and journalism, and working in “a more behind the scenes-y type of role, because I think you can still be involved in stuff that’s really creative and innovative, but you don’t necessarily have to be standing right under the spotlight,” she says. “I look forward to that—to an extent.”

That life is far down the track for Mayberry, though. At the moment, she’s staring at a schedule that has her booked well into 2016, with dates in Australia and New Zealand plus a stint on Paramore’s second annual Parahoy! cruise, then quickly getting deep into

the festival season through the summer and beyond. The idea of a post-band future, or even getting back into the studio to start cooking up album No. 3, is hazy at best.

It seems especially far for that hour or so that Mayberry and the rest of CHVRCHES are onstage, urging a thousand-plus people to clap and sing along with them. For as exciting as it is for them to hole up in their studio for months on end to conjure up new material, and as much as they tolerate the endless interviews, photo shoots and other assorted promotional headaches, the beaming grins on their faces at the Crystal Ballroom reveal that their greatest moments are those spent as a gang of three performing their songs of joy, darkness, sorrow and beauty.

“I think a lot of the last time around, we felt like, ‘Okay, we booked that and did this and played this show,’” she says. “There was just so much time trying to keep the train on the tracks. We were having an amazing time but it was really intense and overwhelming. Now, I’m trying to remind myself to live in the moment and to remember to document things. Because you know, I don’t know how long we’ll get to do this, and in a few years we might not be doing this anymore. So it would be nice to have some memories.” S

“All the bands that I’ve been in have had an excellent work ethic, but there wasn’t the demand that there is now. Then, it was just load up the van and go play a gig. Now there’s this whole other thing you have to find the energy for—signings and meet and greets and radio sessions—and that’s every single day. It’s all good work and you can actually see it paying off every night with the shows getting bigger and people getting more and more excited about the band, but it’s fucking exhausting.” —IAIN COOK

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KURT COBAIN LEAD REVIEW

Montage Of Heck: 10 The Home Recordings UME

TOP TRACK: “And I Love Her”

W

hen Nirvana’s With The Lights Out boxset was released, the world thought it’d heard all there was to hear from the Cobain estate.

Between the set’s demos and the heartfelt performances on MTV Unplugged In New York, we know what Kurt Cobain sounds like acoustic with and without his bandmates. So what makes this solo album really a solo album? The answer is in that these are all demos— and not all acoustic.

These probably weren’t meant to be heard, but are now being released with the near-definitive documentary Montage Of Heck as the soundtrack.

The film does an amazing job of painting an honest picture of Cobain, both good and bad.

Instead of focusing on his story or strengthening the Nirvana myth, it examines who he really was, sometimes in such a way that fans might even be uncomfortable. Kurt Cobain wasn’t a hero or a god: He was just Kurt Cobain.

Accordingly, the music here does similar: a portion of these works are sound canvases more than songs or demos, more related to the closing noise of “Endless, Nameless” than a song you sing to. Available as a 13-song album and a 31-track deluxe edition, the deluxe particularly shows more than music. “Reverb Experiment” and “Scream” are a one-two punch in this feel, giving you a shot of the human but not the songwriter. The monologues and stories he tells (“Aberdeen”) make more sense in the documentary than they do on the soundtrack.

Some, like “The Yodel Song,” are effective musically but are nearly wordless despite the vocal works, just the sound of “hey”s, “oh”s and “yeah”s. Others show a direct path between what was and what would be (“Something In The Way” appears as a two-chord distorted screamer instead of its beautiful Nevermind

R E V I E WS

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form, while his cover of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” is note-for-note the same but slowed to a fine sadness). But even in a collection without any production, the feel is almost there; the songs are in there somewhere, and there’s a reason why he represented a generation.

Like a normal solo debut, the real gems are those which sound almost nothing like what would make its way to Nirvana. “The Happy Guitar” shows a pretty fingerpicking into a standard country feel, showing it has the potential of a great song even if not one by Nirvana.

Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings isn’t a necessary part of a Nirvana fan’s collection—most will be fine with the shorter, regular album—but the deluxe set is one of the brightest lights we have shining on Kurt Cobain’s musical brain. Fortunately for us, it also has some good tunes. —Dan Bogosian

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HIGHLIGHT REVIEW 8

10

Evolution

GHOST TOWN FUELED BY RAMEN

TOP TRACK: “Mean Kids” Stepping away slightly from the electro-pop which originally caught the attention of fans, the band best known for “Creepy Girls” may be one member down—however this doesn’t allow Evolution to dip at any cost. With tracks which sit more so in the pop-rock category, Ghost Town approaches their junior album with enough fire to light a small city. From lead single “Spark” to the swagger-infused from “Interlude,” it’s evident the LA trio has refined a sound which not only works, but is their own. Evolution is their strongest album yet: Kevin McCullough’s vocals exceptionally shine in “Out Alive” and ballad “Candles”; “Human” features some of the best work from drummer Manny Dominick; and guitarist Alix Koochaki delivers big time in album closer “Let Go.” Evolution may agree with their existing fans, but it’ll also definitely make a whole different crowd look Ghost Town’s way. —Nicole Tiernan

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THE ALL BRIGHTS 10

...Are Wild For The Night! EP RED SCARE (redscare.net) TOP TRACK: “West Coast Fuck You”

The All Brights is presumably a way for Dave Hause to blow off songwriting steam in between his more serious solo LPs—all six songs on ...Are Wild For The Night! are relatively one-dimensional throwback pop-punk about surfing and chicks, basically. But while it might seem tossed off at first listen, repeated plays will remind you that Hause is one hell of a songwriter, and he hasn’t written punk songs this direct and effective since the Loved Ones’ Keep Your Heart. (Hell, he even recycles lyrics from TLO’s “Jane” in the EP’s closing track, “Wild For The Night”). “West Coast Fuck You” winks toward Hause’s buds the Bouncing Souls, references fish tacos and avocado beer, and even swipes the hook from Pennywise’s “Bro Hymn.” So yeah, ...Are Wild For The Night! is kind of a goof, but it’s a goof with surprisingly strong replay value. —Scott Heisel

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GO DEEP 10

Influence 6131 (6131records.com) TOP TRACK: “Slumberland”

Hardcore’s aggression and relentless momentum can make it seem homogeneous as a genre, but bands like Brooklyn’s Go Deep find a way to work within and simultaneously stretch what seem like stylistic boundaries. On Influence, the band’s first full-length, Go Deep employs the genre’s core conventions—guitars flush with distortion and distraught shouts—but to evoke moods beyond mere belligerence. On “Slumberland,” the record’s opening track, singer Kris Kneale laments his insomnia, screaming desperately over a bed of throbbing toms and turbulent chords, whereas “Gentleman’s Club” feels anxious, its panting guitars pacing back and forth like a caged tiger. Though the plodding tempos diminish the immediacy of some songs, and Kneale’s delivery seems sometimes too repetitive (the acoustic “Under My Skin” suffers from both afflictions), Influence’s most dynamic tracks, like “Products” and “Palms,” display Go Deep as a band that bends hardcore’s rules for the better. —Dane Erbach

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GRAVE PLEASURES 10

Dreamcrash METAL BLADE (metalblade.com) TOP TRACK: “New Hip Moon”

Forming from the remnants of Finnish band Beastmilk, Grave Pleasures spans the genre of punk in their debut release Dreamcrash. The quintet touches on subtleties of horror-punk in “Crying Wolves” and “Worn Threads,” producing a melancholy sound that resonates as eerie to the ear, while the group gets to punk ground-zero with drummer Uno Bruniusson leading the movement in “Futureshock” and “Taste The Void,” bringing more up-tempo aggression and energy to the table while still adding the Grave Pleasure style to the mix. Each track possesses a different energy that makes them easy to distinguish, and most of the songs sound natural and cohesive.

However, other areas of Dreamcrash sound as if the group is trying to find their identity and struggling to plant their footing. —Eric Spitz

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7

KINDLING 10

The idea of a shoegaze EP on No Idea is extremely appealing: The label has long been home for quality tunes, and shoegaze is great when done well (and EPs, when executed properly, leave the listener refreshed and wanting more). Massachusetts-based Kindling does shoegaze right: loud, noisy and abrasive but with melodies cutting through, or hiding behind, the wall of chaos at just the appropriate levels. “While Away” hits hard and heavy as sludge metal, while “Painkiller” is gorgeous, but it’s beauty that takes time to appreciate. Remember how you listened to Loveless about 10 times before it made sense? Kindling is a bit easier to grasp on to, but still has the same basic components to their tunes that My Bloody Valentine did: peaceful melodies behind the distortion and serenity behind the destruction, dichotomies well worth exploring on this rich EP. Bring on a full-length. —Greg Pratt

INTRONAUT 10

The Direction Of Last Things CENTURY MEDIA (centurymedia.com)

TOP TRACK: “The Pleasant Surprise” The latest effort from the Los Angeles-based post-metal band Intronaut, The Direction Of Last Things is a collection of songs that compose a sonic landscape of a world entirely their own. Each of the seven songs on the album is a long and winding tale with heavy emphasis on the instrumental aspects of the tracks with the vocals as an added element, as opposed to the main focus of the piece. Hard-hitting drums with crisp cymbals are present in each track, along with intricate guitar riffs that supply a majority of the melody. Creative use of panning with the guitars helps create an expansive sound field that reflects the ambient world their music exists in. The heavy vocals present in songs like “Sul Ponticello” reflect the intensity that is in abundant in across the entire album. —Stephanie Vaughan

Galaxies EP NO IDEA (noidearecords.com) TOP TRACK: “Painkiller”

6

MALFUNCTION 10

Fear Of Failure BRIDGE NINE (bridge9.com) TOP TRACK: “Release”

Since forming in 2011, Buffalo, New York, hardcore band Malfunction has been leading up to the release of this debut full-length with a series of independent releases. Now signed to revered hardcore label Bridge Nine, the five-piece come across in typically uncompromising and belligerent fashion—nine out of the 10 songs that make up this record are monolithic slabs of gruff aggression that pull no punches whatsoever.

“Sonic” is the one exception to that rule, a (relatively) nuanced instrumental that’s more-post-rock, which demonstrates the band’s ability to write beyond a template.

Otherwise, much of this is hardore by numbers—competent and full of conviction, but nothing ground-breaking or hugely inspirational. The heavy drudge of “Final Thoughts” and the sinister crawl of “Release” do stand apart from the crowd, but on the whole, this falls ever so slightly short of the album it could, and probably should, have been. —Mischa Pearlman

HIGHLIGHT REVIEW 6

HANDGUNS 10

Disenchanted PURE NOISE (purenoise.net)

TOP TRACK: “Low Spirits” Even with three full-lengths and a litany of tours with like-minded pop-punks now under their belts, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based band Handguns is still searching for their sonic identity, whether they know it or not. On paper, the band’s latest, Disenchanted, has the makings of a bona fide pop-punk scene staple, from its densely overdriven guitars and frenetic rhythms to its tortured lyrical content, but the album’s 10 tracks blur by with no real impact, aside from the abundance of genre clichés. Musically, Disenchanted holds its own (despite a glaring lack of truly memorable riffs), but the album mostly loses its way with Taylor Eby’s grating vocal assault and penchant for laughably emotive lyrics which strategically hit all the textbook pop-punk touchpoints (anxiety, girls, nostalgia for youth, the grind of touring), belted out by the singer with the same unerring, mono-dynamic whine from one track into the next. The record’s only 31 minutes, and even that seems unnecessary. —Brendan Manley Mo Rodriguez

7

10

MOVING MOUNTAINS/ PRAWN

7

Split EP TRIPLE CROWN (triplecrownrecords.com) TOP TRACK: Prawn’s “Seas” The real surprise on this split is an appearance from Moving Mountains, who told fans in September 2013 they were taking a hiatus. Just two years later, they reconvene to split an EP with fellow atmospheric emo act Prawn. Their two tracks are hearty doses of the style they locked in on 2013’s self-titled album, 12 minutes of a restrained and hopeful melange of Midwestern emo and lighter, wistful alternative rock with a pinch of indie folk.

Though even steadier and more emotionally reserved than much of Moving Mountains, progress is shown via a string quartet right at the forefront and singer Greg Dunn’s breathy, ever-expanding range. Prawn picks up where they last left off on last year’s pretty excellent Kingfisher, spinning nimble guitar melodies à la Explosions In The Sky, wintry metaphors and an easygoing pace with dashes of indie pop. The dense, arresting textures and unpredictable changes of “Seas” make it the prime highlight. —Brian Shultz

6

PUJOL 10

Kisses EP BARTERTOWN CO-OP (bartertowncoop.com) TOP TRACK: “Only Like”

Across five songs and three poems, Kisses has all the charm of your local garage rockers with a little more polish and a noticeable weak point. PUJOL’s quirk and upbeat groove could move any basement crowd, but the songs are delivered with a noticeable ’70s-rock influence. Riffs abound on the guitar-heavy EP, both “Sleepy Doni” and “Only Like” ending with stadium-rock style solos. The pumping “Designer Feelings” has a more modern vibe finished by a psychedelic wash of sound blending old and new. When switching to poetry, though, things fall apart. While the song lyrics occasionally feature awkward symbolism or overly abstract philosophies, the poems wallow in these flaws. With phased guitars and warped voices, the spoken-word pieces indulge in convoluted ideas and big words but lack interesting wordplay or rhythm. Unfortunately, the poems bring down what could otherwise be a strong release. —Cameron Carr

PUNCHLINE 10

8

Thrilled INVOGUE (invoguerecords.com) TOP TRACK: “Tell Me How You Sleep”

Hailing from Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, pop-punk mainstay Punchline has overcome odds and has signed with InVogue Records to release their most ambitious LP to date. While some of their pop-punk roots remain intact, the record focuses more on grand electro-pop gestures and airy resonance. The opening title track has the album’s best blend of the two genres, hooking the listener with catchy guitar riffs and frontman Steve Soboslai’s serenading vocals that only seem to enhance with vigorous electronics and pristine production. “Tell Me How You Sleep” is uproarious enough to be a Killers song; “No Stopping Us” is the most rock-heavy, with some trumpet fanfare mixed in. While it can have its boy-band-esque moments, you’re still listening to the same Punchline that you so dearly missed. —Michael Haskoor

7

SHAI HULUD

10 Just Can’t Hate Enough X 2 – Plus Other Hate Songs EP NO SLEEP (nosleeprecords.com) TOP TRACK: “Sincerely Hated”

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10

Three Man Cannon quickly follows last year’s thoroughly promising Pretty Many People with this half-hour mini-album that improves their down-home indie rock. The band eases up on the slacker vibes some and decks out their sound with piano and guitar effects while retaining the charm and looseness of their punkier roots. Frontman Matt Schimelfenig’s twangy delivery emits a nice mix of plaintiveness and light tension, energizing cuts like “Gold Or Silver” and the slow-paced, mildly Tigers Jaw-tinged “Now Nothing,” which closes the EP with a sprawling, interlocked jam.

TMC drummer Pat Brier (formerly of Tigers Jaw) handles lead vocals on two songs, varying up the tone with the playfully dark “Coma’d” like a falsetto-laden Built To Spill, plus the smoky “Mood.” The EP lands somewhere among Neil Young, a stripped-down Dr. Dog and homespun indie punk as a result. It’s uniquely enjoyable, and the band’s best release yet. —Brian Shultz

9

Album titles like that are endlessly frustrating, but sloppy names aside, this is a fun EP for fans of hardcore band Shai Hulud, who explores 20 minutes of their short, fast, loud side. Opener “Sincerely Hated” gets things started just right: simple hardcore delivered with the slight touches of melody and metalcore that this band does better than most. Love the fact that most every song here has “hate” in the song title (including a cover of A Chorus Of Disapproval’s “I Just Can’t Hate Enough” and one of Sheer Terror’s “Just Can’t Hate Enough,” which is actually pretty hilarious). It ends with a bewildering take on Propagandhi’s “Hate, Myth, Muscle, Etiquette,” which proves that not everything translates to heavy hardcore well. Their next full-length will have more shades and hues, but this EP is a great look at how Shai Hulud can rage with the best of ‘em. —Greg Pratt

THREE MAN CANNON Will I Know You Then EP LAME-O (lameorecords.com) TOP TRACK: “Honest”

WAGE WAR 10

Blueprints FEARLESS (fearlessrecords.com) TOP TRACK: “Hollow”

Defined by the ease with which they walk the delicate balance of melodic hardcore, Wage War pulls no punches in their exhilarating debut LP. Exploring a wide array of material from youth suicide in “Youngblood” to challenging the detractors of their generation in “Alive,” the band shows no hesitation at delving into some of the most impactful matters of the day. “Spineless” sees Wage War add another layer to their vicious sonic approach with hellish growls and crushing breakdowns. While not the most technically diverse sound, the band makes up for it via a relentless attack aided by a gusto reminiscent of the genre’s early-millennia golden age. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination that Blueprints could serve as the catalyst for what has the potential to be one of hardcore music’s newest success stories. —Knial Saunders

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Brand New Photo by Edouard Camus // edouardcamus.com

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