Saturday, March 24, 2012

Grayceon inteview


This is a dated but still worthwhile interview that was originally done a while back for the Peacedogman webzine.

Three piece San Francisco carry on with the Bay Area’s tradition of producing creative metal tinged music.  Grayceon’s electric cello driven metal edged music grabbed our attention as the creativity was backed with great musicianship taking in and spitting out influences from all over the musical spectrum.  We put some questions to Jackie and Zack.





STO: How and why did Grayceon form?

Jackie: We all happened to be in the right place at the right time, really. After playing in Amber Asylum for almost 10 years I was looking to play more metal-ish music. Max wanted to explore some of his more experimental riffs that weren’t appropriate for his other band, Walken. Zack wanted to play drums again, which was his first instrument, but he had been playing bass for some time. Grayceon came together entirely unexpectedly and then quickly turned into something we couldn’t get enough of.

STO: How did you get your band name?

Jackie: When we started thinking about it, I really wanted a name that didn’t have any other connotations. Max suggested naming ourselves after a stray cat that lived behind his house named Grayson, which is a common last name. So, we started with that, played around with the letters and came up with ‘grayceon.’ Then we googled the word and the search engine said that it didn’t exist. Perfect!

How would you describe Grayceon's music to someone that hasn't heard it?

Jackie: Epic-melodic-guitar/cello/drum-doom-chunk yumminess!

STO: How was the no bass player decision made?

Zack: It never was a decision we made, per se, we just never got around to finding one. Actually we never even looked, because Max's tuning is so low, and Jackie's cello more than covers the low end.

Jackie: Yeah, and if we added another musician it wouldn’t be just the three of us and we were definitely grooving on being a trio. So, we just never really considered another addition to the group.

STO: How does "This Grand Show" differ from your debut album?

Zack: I think this album was brought into the studio as a full album before we even recorded it. The debut was mostly us experimenting and throwing spaghetti against the wall, to see what would stick...

Jackie: The new album is definitely more cohesive than the debut. Not that debut is all over the place, but it definitely exhibits our earliest ideas as a newly formed band. Now that we have been playing and writing with each other for a couple of years, we are starting to find our sweet spots. I also feel that “This Grand Show” is a bit darker and a bit doom-ier than the debut.

STO: What is the reason behind the album title? How did you decide on the order of songs on the album?

Jackie: We wrote the songs in the order they appear on the album, with exception to ‘Love Is’, which was the first song we ever wrote. It didn’t make it onto the debut because we weren’t 100% happy with the tempo, so we placed it within the longer narrative of “This Grand Show” as a dream or a flashback. The new album is loosely a single narrative throughout, but the songs definitely work well in that order, because we wrote them that way. The title of the album is the beginning of a quote by naturalist and nature conservationist, John Muir. The whole quote can be found inside the album artwork and it continues on to imply that the world here on earth (life as we know it) just keeps turning and isn’t it wonderful? So we might as well just sit back and not get so wrapped up in ourselves. This is just my own interpretation, of course. The quote is quite beautiful.

STO: The black brooding sky on the album cover suits the serious feel of your music. Can you tell us about the story behind the album cover?

Jackie: Our friend and one of my former Amber Asylum band mates, Lorraine Rath, created the painting for the cover as well as all the package design, etc. Lorraine worked very closely with us to capture the feeling of the music in the imagery and since we were mixing the album while she was working on the cover art, she got to hear some of our earliest mixes and really got a sense of what we were going for.

Zack: I can't say enough about the great job Lorraine did on the album art. She is a very methodical artist, and puts purpose in everything she sets out to do.

STO: Other than the bands you'd never heard of before, what have been the oddest comparisons you've had and some that you've checked out and liked? I hear lots of different music in your sound from sixties pop to thrash metal to classical but which band do you feel has been the closest comparison?

Jackie: I don’t feel like many people even attempt to compare us to a single band. But we have seen some pretty impressive mash-up combos that could perhaps give a reader who has never heard us a sense of what we might sound like. We have been compared to any number of these bands mixed up with each other: Opeth, Tool, Scorpions, Indukti, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Pelican, The Fucking Champs, King Crimson, Ved Buens Ede, Dysrythmia, Slint, The Canterbury Sound, Silent Stream of Godless Elegy, Anekdoten, Isis, Mastodon, Beggar's Opera. My favorite comparison though is this one: “Apocolyptica, Neurosis, and Metallica capped off with a Nyquil fueled lullaby…”




STO: The official release of "This Grand Show" was delayed from August 2008 until November 2008. What was the reason for this?

Jackie: Oh just the usual… design delay, PR delay, printing delay. Considering we finished writing and recording the album in late April, we are pretty anxious for the November release date!

STO: I saw on your myspace player that "Love Is A Dream" was a song from a demo. Why was it used on this album and not the debut? Are any older songs likely to appear on future albums?

Jackie: “Love Is” was the first song we wrote and it has been recorded three times now! I mentioned earlier that we recorded it again for the debut album, but the tempo wasn’t exactly how we wanted it, so we recorded it again for “This Grand Show” and we got a chance to treat it very differently. Because it appears as a dream in the narrative we wanted to shake it up a bit and make it stand out as the most hopeful and happy song on the album. So, we ran the vocals through a Leslie and treated the instruments differently to give it a nostalgic feel. I’m not sure if we have any more old songs that are not released. Well, ‘The West,’ which is on a 7” split with friends Giant Squid may get re-released at some point. Currently, it is only available on that 7” record.

STO: Your music has a movie soundtrack quality. If Grayceon's movie was used for a soundtrack, which type of movie could you see your music being used in?

Jackie: I envision it being a spacious, surrealist Western. Very lonesome, very bleak.

Zack: We actually approached the songwriting as a movie score for this album. I'm glad it translated more or less the way we envisioned it. Morricone was a heavy influence for us in the songwriting process for this album. It is one my personal goals to score a movie someday and I am a huge fan of movies. Music and movies go together like cocaine and waffles!!!

STO: Could you tell us something about Grayceon members other musical projects? How do you all prioritize your time in each band?

Zack: Max and I both play together in Walken as well, which has been a band for 10 years now. It hasn't been hard for me to play with two bands, it just means I get to do what I love more times a week. They require different types of drumming for me. Walken is more aggressive, more relentless than Grayceon, which has a lot more space in the songs.

Jackie: I don’t know, it somehow just works. Sometimes its difficult trying to schedule shows because we have to check with a bunch of other people that aren’t even in our band to do it, but it’s worth it. I know that Max and Zack, like me, need to be playing a lot more than just 1-2 nights a week. So, unless we want to work Grayceon to death we need other projects to keep our chops in shape.

STO: As a relatively young band who consider the internet important, where do you stand on the downloading music issue?

Zack: I don't give a shit if people want to hear my music and download it from the net. I'm already broke, so it's not like I'm losing capital from it. The more people download it, the more people hear it.

Jackie: I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, people are rude because they are giving away our music for free before it’s even released. On the other hand, that is the way that fans feed music to other potential fans and we want as many people to hear the music as possible. Free downloading is really changing the way the Music Industry operates and the way labels operate. We’re just not sure what this means for musicians, like ourselves, yet. We write over 60 minutes worth of music, painstakingly record and market it, then… we don’t even get recouped for our time and effort because other people are giving it away freely. I dunno. Like I said, I have mixed feelings!



STO: I see Zack recently gained a drum endorsement from Po' Boy drums. How did that come about and what exactly does it involve? Is there any chance of other members of Grayceon getting instrument endorsements?

Jackie: Yeah! He super deserves it, too. I have never played with anyone who needed to buy, fix, and replace more gear than Zack. He’s just such a hard hitter and he must spend $10 every practice on drum sticks alone. So, an endorsement for him was very welcome. I think Max could easily get an endorsement by any guitar company he wanted. Max plays so uniquely and is such a shredder and I can’t imagine anybody not wanting to pick him up. I think its just more an issue of finding the time to court the companies. We would rather practice, honestly. Nobody wants to give away a $10k electric cello. So, I’m screwed in that department.

Zack: That was a nice surprise, to get an endorsement. Po’ Boy approached me through Giant Squid, and I wasn't going to say yes to an endorsement unless I really liked the company. I had heard some of their kits, and started rapping with Tony, and they sent me a gorgeous kit that sounds incredible.

STO: Which bands would you consider your peers and why? If you could play with any band who would it be?

Zack: There are far too many bands in the Bay Area that are our peers, so it would take me all day to write them all, but there have been some very fast friendships between us and bands like Giant Squid, Triclops!, Hightower, and Orb of Confusion, just to name a few.

Jackie: I’ll add to that Ludicra, Asunder, Hammers of Misfortune, Saros, One Hundred Suns, Embers and Amber Asylum. The Bay Area metal scene is pretty tight knit in terms of musicians really supporting one another. Playing a show in San Francisco means you are playing to 50% regular audience and 50% serious musicians. If you can keep that latter half entertained then you are doing something right! If I could play with any band I wanted I would have to say Judas Priest. I know that’s a stretch, but I love those guys.

STO: What is a Grayceon live show like for the band and for the audience? What sort of people do you see at your shows? With a few songs over ten minutes long, how do you pick your live set?

Jackie: We try to mix up our sets with short and long songs, usually playing the newest songs we wrote so we stay fresh and feel challenged. We rarely play the 20 minute songs and the older ones don’t get rotated in very much. The audience is typically pretty attentive. I see some jaw dropping, some head banging, and a lot of smiles. There has been only one air cellist thus far, but I hope to see more of them in the future! As for the type of people that attend our shows I would have to say it’s a very mixed crowd. Short-hairs and long-hairs, rockers unite!

STO: What are Grayceon's short and long term musical career goals?

Jackie: Well, that’s a tough one to answer because we don’t actually know ourselves yet! I can say that we are currently writing new material and are thinking that these newest songs might appear on a 7” split or maybe a vinyl EP sometime in 2009. We also have a possible European tour in the works, but nothing is final. Long term, we just want to keep rollin’. Another album, more tours, more fun for us!

STO: Obviously you all listen to a wide range of music but if your houses were burning down which album would you save first?

Jackie: Oh jeesh… “Appetite for Destruction“. I never get tired of that one. But… I sure would miss the rest of my records if that were the only one I had!

Zack: Well, my favorite album is “Frizzle Fry“, but it never wants to stay with me. I think I've bought that album 6 or 7 fucking times!!!! So I would probably save “Revolver” from The Beatles, stuff “Master of Puppets” into the sleeve, making it a double album!!! Then I would wrap the albums in a blanket, rush them out of the burning building, hurrying to a river where I would place them ever so gently in a basket, floating them away to their safety, where the barbarians couldn't reach them.

Jackie: If he gets a double album, then so do I- “Appetite” with “Then Play On” [ Fleetwood Mac] and I might survive. But, I would be in the same burning building with Zack so I would also get to listen to his two. Thanks, man! Green’s

STO: Thanks for your time. Any last words for our readers?

Jackie: Thank you so much for talking with us. We appreciate the support and are glad you are enjoying “This Grand Show!”

Grayceon are Max Doyle - (guitar/voice), Jackie Perez Gratz - (electric cello/voice), Zack Farwell - (drums).  Their latest disc at the time of this interview, “This Grand Show” and past releases are available from Vendulus Records.





Grayceon's official website

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Dry Rib






Dry Rib  “Whose Last Trickle 78-82”, 2008
(Hyped2Death)

Around twenty years back me a friend and I taped some songs using the lyrics of some of our favorite metal bands.  We played using an out of tune acoustic guitar and drumsticks hitting carpet plus my terrible vocals.  If I remember rightly we let my friend’s sister hear the tape before deciding we’d leave music to people who could actually play.  Three months of drumming lessons and no drum set with a guitar player who couldn’t play a note despite an obsession with alcohol and heavy metal doesn’t make for great listening.  We did what every incredibly untalented band should do, destroyed our recording and unofficially broke up within hours.   Dry Rib, it would seem, were slightly better than we were but not by much.   From what I gather, from the long-winded liner notes this disc is a collection of all DRY RIB’s recorded material from between 78 and 82.   They had a guitarist who can play a little and a drummer who seemed to be the talented by being the least musically annoying member of the band.  The first song, “Quail Seed” is a bouncy little number sounds like something that couldn’t quite make the cut for the “Urgh. A Music War” UK post-punk compilation album.

The rest just comes off as the worst of the stuff Flying Nun records were getting rave reviews about in both the NME and Forced Exposure a few years after the initial release of this material.  Chris Knox’s solo output would be the best comparison except for the fact that he actually has some worthwhile songs. It’s jangly indie music with a guitarist and vocalist, who can’t really carry a tune so they improvise.   There are fleeting moments where they get it right but it’s usually not in unison.

Imagine mad English punk poet JOHN COOPER CLARKE performing after swallowing a tube of sleeping pills and that’s what the vocals and lyrics of DRY RIB are like.  There are twenty songs worth of material but it’s the same endurance test that a lot of bands in my hometown in New Zealand offered when they played live.  See, I grew up in a student town and there were a lot of short-lived bands that also considered themselves clever doing this style.  This sort of stuff was generally lapped up and played by cardigan wearing arts degree students. Probably still is.   The local liquor selling music venues loved these types of bands because the audience would drink beer in hope that alcohol enhancement would make the band more enjoyable.  The worse that the band was, the higher the bar takings were.   DRY RIB probably sold quite a few breweries.  Re-releasing this material as EP’s would have been a better move on the record label’s part and also made for less unenjoyable listening.  As it is, this 20 song anthological yawnfest could be administered as an anesthetic.


1.5/5

Dry Rib site

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Vampire Mooose - The Reel







Yet another band obviously boasting extreme stupidity when it comes spelling their own moniker. The extra "o" chosen perhaps because they've soaked themselves in nu-metal or they're pushing the boundaries and the English language deserves a beating once in a while. 


The band take on the listener with monotonous death grunts placed everywhere, chugging over PANTERA riffs, the whole done-to-death stop/start breakdown reigning supreme. These guys want you to know they're edgy: "Pot Pie" has a sample mentioning seventeen swear words (go ahead and take a random stab at what the first lyrics are). The song proves crossing KORN with death metal is as terrible in practice as it is in theory. A hamfisted NOMEANSNO and VICTIM'S FAMILTY jazz-punk guitar bridge swings in "Someone Kill Don Henley", but while those bands knew where to place their off-kilter explorations, it just doesn't work well for VAMPIRE MOOOSE as it's all too clear they're stretching beyond themselves. The TOOL worship of "Angra Manyu" is a square peg in a round hole, and "La Tumba" is a weakly-inked facsimile of the PANTERA song "Walk". The angry pig vocals may be different but this was obviously written in less than two minutes. I'd say credit the band for another daring move, but it won't pay off as we're ten songs in and I seriously doubt many will have the endurance to make it this far. 


While there are some amusing movie samples, the actual music on "The Reel" is a bigger patience-tester than waiting in a queue to see the latest blockbuster movie. But unlike enduring this nu-groove death metal borefest, buying tickets for a decent flick is typically a worthwhile experience. 
1/5




Band website



Monday, March 19, 2012

Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights






Lightning Bolt “Earthly Delights”, 2009

Bass and drum duo Lightning Bolt operate in a world of controlled chaos that shouldn’t make any sense. “Earthly Delights” will provide a smile to the dial of anyone seeking an alternative to easy listening music.  It’s not often that there’s anything that could be defined as soft or wimpy here.  “Sound Guardians”, for example, is the sound of metal against a sanding machine in a workshop as nails are being hit at a changing pace.  It’s difficult to listen to “Nation of Boar” without conjuring up images of cars exhaust fumes, tires squealing as race cars rev up their engines to do lap after lap.  There are vocals here but really they’re utilized as just another instrument as there’s no way of distinguishing them from the rest of the wonderfully abrasive racket.    The “Collusus” is the antithesis of the first two songs as it completely slows things down although the incoherent barely audible warbling is still a mainstay.   Loops go all over place over samples of gregorian or buddhist monks chanting in “Flooded Chamber” and when the instruments come in, the Eastern vibes and chants stay.

If you were looking for a dosey-do country barndance knees-up, there’s one of sorts in “Funny Farm” but only if you were also planning on slamdancing into the nearest wall.  “S.O.S” revisit the racetrack although this time it’s in space with assorted noises quickily coming in and fading out as the band pass the other spacecraft at warp speed with logic defying breakneck rythms. The crash sound at the end of this song is less nonsensical than the warbling utterances over the tribal hammering of the drumkit in the overlong twelve minutes of “Transmissionary”.  

Whilst the quieter tracks on “Earthly Delights” get lost in the ruckkus of chaotic noise.   Lightning Bolt’s capture a listener’s attention on the album best with their full-on aural assaults which don’t just demand attention but shoot piercing arrows right through the ear orifices providing a free lobotomy.  It’s easy to tell that these two guys really feed off other and highly likely melt faces off their audience however I’m left kicking my own ass for missing this noise-rock pair when they recently passed through town.


3.5/5

Official band site

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Electrik Emily - Stiletto Rock




Seattle rocker, Electrik Emily is a DIY solo artist who combines synthesizers and guitar.  She is  a riot grrrl who is aware of the secret of getting a reviewer’s attention.  It’s to get them to listen from the word, go.  Open with a strong song and there’s less chance of your album just blending in or being ignored along with many others in the review pile.  “Stiletto Rock” opens with a song called “Cock Rockers”, which not only a title that causes ears to prick up with its firm middle finger aimed sharply at male rockers egos but also the hard rocking Runaways style.  There’s as much owing to the group here as there is Joan Jett and Lita Ford alone.

There’s an inevitable party element to “Going Out!” and it’s easy to imagine dance floors filling to the catchy tune with its programmed synthesiser beats that bring 80’s Madonna  to mind as much as Pink.  The title track, “Stiletto Rock” is a tough no nonsense rocker filled to the brim with girl power and name-checks a number of Electrik Emily’s female musical influences.  The Lita Ford solo career influence comes across strongly in the ballad “Addiction”.   Emily’s devotion to her musical instruments is clear in the lyrics to the dancey rock of “My Guitar” although the synthesized sound on “My Guitar” betrays the lyrics which proclaim that the guitar is a better lover than you.


Sometimes Electrick Emily gets caught in standard rock cliches like the whoa oh oh opening of  “Does Anyone Ask?” but let’s face it, the cliches are that way because they work.  Although it does mean a  number of songs are commercial rock radio fodder.  Because there is strong songwriting here   “Stiletto Rock” is full of songs with hooks that will often catch you singing along regardless of your gender.   The strongest tracks on the album are the title track and “Cock Rockers” due to their strong upfront driving approach.  As an album"Stiletto Rock" is a fun mix of hard rock and 80's synth pop with a strong riot grrrl attitude.

3/5

Electrik Emily's website

Beastwars - IV

After over a year off for various reasons, we have returned solely because we wanted to review the new Beastwars album. I really w...