Saturday, April 11, 2009

Alex in Time Off

Alex was inteviewed by Time Off's Matt O'Neal a few weeks back. Click here to read the accompanying article.

We'd blush at the description of our band as 'The unlikely meeting point between Black Flag’s nascent ferocity, Kyuss’ expansive sludge-rock and Steve Albini’s caustic abrasion' if it weren't partially true.

Now all we have to do is somehow get half as good as any one of those bands. But...

I used to hate Black Flag a little bit. In a sense, they represent much of what Alex and I dislike about underground rock music (overly macho, overly self-referential, overly violent) but at the same time we now totally feel a weird connection with their sludged out long-hair phase and I've always loved Greg Ginn rocking the circle pit doche bags in a collared shirt.

Kyuss are a band I really love and I think Alex has a healthy respect for/appreciation of. These dudes pretty much get lumped with some weird originators-of-modern-stoner-rock tag but from what I've read they were just modern stoned out dudes trying to play punk rock (they loved Black Flag). If anything they were probably tapping into Black Sabbath thru late-era Black Flag; which is the way I've found it works. You don't ever get to the heart of the matter with music until you've been listening for 10 or 15 years. That's why everyone ends up listening to Funhouse by The Stooges eventually.

Steve Albini is the most interesting person you've ever read when you're seventeen. We're both fans of all his bands but I'm also really wary of what the whole 'Albini-disciple' tag and what it can do to a band. Hey guess what everyone! We cheat like motherfuckers every time we make a record. And I would happily let someone else book and manage my band if they shared even half of our ideas about music. But alas...

Amen.

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