It’s no secret that tough times can lead to great songwriting, and in the case of Los Angeles’s Airborne Toxic Event, they can be the reason a band gets together in the first place. That’s what happened in 2006, when frontman Mikel Jollett turned a particularly awful week into a handful of songs, and eventually into one of the most successful rock groups around.

Currently on tour to support their second full-length, All At Once, the five-piece is still busy turning difficult personal experiences into universally appealing songs. We got a chance to chat with guitarist/keyboardist of Steven Chen about the new album, the lingering impact of “Sometime Around Midnight” and the risks of shooting videos with cats.

OS: We hear it’s a sad story, but can you give us the rundown on how this band got started?

SC: Well Mikel and Daren met through mutual friends, in I think the summer of 2006. And Mikel had all these really tragic things happen in his life—his mom was diagnosed with cancer, he got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, he quit smoking, he broke up with his girlfriend and he just spent a year writing a ton of stuff. He met Daren, and then the two of them were just playing, practicing for a whole summer. And then I had known Mikel when we both lived in San Fransico together, and Mikel knew the rest of the people in the band. They were all his friends. So we just all of the sudden sort of came together, having casual meetings at his house where he would invite people over and we would drink and play music and record some stuff. Eventually… I came in and played, and Noah was in there, and Anna was in there, and there was a very palpable chemistry. Eventually it all just worked out, and we played our first show within a month of officially forming.

OS: It seems like you guys gained momentum pretty quickly right after that.

SC: Well I don’t know, it looks a certain way from the outside… It’s hard to figure out what a good frame of reference is. This is my first band, but it’s not Noah’s and it’s not Daren’s. I guess it was like a year where we just played around LA a lot. And then we were just dropping off demos at radio stations and going for the local shows and stuff like that. So you know, we’ve been around for four years, a little over four years now.

OS: You’ve been compared to everyone from Bright Eyes to U2, but who would you say you were inspired by as you worked on All At Once? Who were you listening to?

SC: Oh man, I think we listened to all kinds of stuff. Mikel listens to a lot of Leonard Cohen, and we listened to a lot of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan when we were getting ready to record the album. The Clash is big, everyone in the band loves The Clash. Daren, the drummer of our band, he’s sort of like our resident music historian… Noah is an upright jazz bassist, so he like a weird mix of jazz and like, punk rock. He’s played in jazz bands, he’s played in country-western or punk bands, so that’s sort of where he comes from. And me, I listen to a lot of indie rock or brit-pop like Pulp or Pavement or The Smiths. I’m a big fan of late ‘70s, early ‘80s New York pop—New York Dolls, Dead Boys. And British punk.

OS: The video for your latest single “Changing” starts off with you turning off the radio as it’s in the middle of playing what sounds an awful lot “Sometime Around Midnight.” Was that something that was important to you on this record? Stepping away from that single?

SC: [Laughs] I don’t know if we thought about it too much. It was just more… it was kind of funny. And it’s our song, you know? It’s very much a part of our band, and we thought [“Changing”] was kind of a different vibe of a song. It’s kind of just tipping our hat to “Midnight.” I think it was like, a five minute discussion, and it was in there. People have been talking about it a little bit, but I don’t think we were trying to say, “Oh, screw that,” or anything.

OS: Several reviewers have said that it really sounds like you’re really defining your sound on this album. Did you find that was the case— that you really hit your stride as you worked on All At Once?

SC: You could say anything in retrospect, everything looks different. I think when you’re doing it, you’re not really trying to create a specific sound or a kind of music. If anything, Mikel had a really strong idea of how he wanted to kind of lyrically write around a theme. The songs on the album, from the first track to the last one, they tell a story. It deals with a pretty big concept. But when we were doing the record, Mikel had written all the stuff. He had written upwards of forty songs… and we worked on them the whole summer of 2010. We were just at his house every day, drinking coffee when we were there in the morning. We had a wall of songs that we were working on, and we had moved them around, moved them to the bottom of the pile or worked on them. But we just wanted to create the best songs that we could create. You never think about genre, you know? I think you can just be a rock band. The genre is generally more trouble than it’s worth… I don’t think you need to be pigeonholed, or lock yourself into a certain kind of sound.

OS: It’s interesting that you mention the storytelling aspect of your songs, because it seems like lyrically you always try to paint a really vivid picture.

SC: Yeah, Mikel’s very good at that. And it’s vivid because it’s true. All the songs—or most of the songs—are true stories. “Midnight,” you know, we were all there that night. It’s funny because every single member of the band was there that night as the story was unfolding. But yeah, the story is the thing. He really writes from the gut… and that’s what people respond to. There’s a lot of truth in it, and people recognize that story in their own lives. We hear that all the time, people will come up to us after the show or before the show. Some people are near tears, and some people are like, “I just divorced my wife, and this song got me through it.” There’s all kinds of stories.

OS: As you were gearing up to release the album you did an Origins Tour, where you played cities 5 nights in a row, beginning at the smallest venue and working your way up. Why do you think your sound translates so well to both back alley bars and huge arenas?

SC: Well we have a saying in the band: you play the show that you’re playing. You’re not playing another show, you’re playing that particular show—whether you’re playing for fifty people or you’re playing for 50,000 people. You’re playing that show. So if we’re playing at a small place… a lot of those small venues, you kind of just play to that room. If there’s something in the air that’s a little bit unhinged, maybe we play a crazy punk show. But then, if it’s more intimate, maybe we tell our stories and play songs that are a little more intimate and not quite as out of control. We just get a vibe for the room, and we play to that room.

OS: You also did this “Bombastic” series of one-shot acoustic videos to promote the new album, similar to those you did when you were promoting your debut. Why is that something you keep going back to?

SC: A lot of it’s for the fans, you know? When we did it the first time, we got such an overwhelming response. More than we ever thought we’d get. And in the band, we always feel that a good song is a good song in any genre. If a song is a good song, it’ll sound good as a country song, as a punk song, as a folk song. So we just wanted to strip it down and play the song as it was, and do it in one take. I think it’s in the spirit of being able to show the song at its really stripped-down level, and different things come out depending on how you’re playing it. Sometimes we’ll switch parts, so maybe the viola will get the electric guitar part or vice versa. So that happens. It’s the same way we play live shows, we never use tracks. We never have pre-recorded tracks. A lot of bands do that, we just never felt that was appropriate for a live show. We just want to get in that room and play. The big change was the setting—we had a lot of good ideas of different settings where we could play, and we chose the ones that were the most interesting.

OS: So are there any crazy settings that you still want to try out?

SC: [Laughs] I can tell you what we tried to do with one of those settings, that was unsuccessful. With the Bombastic video for “It Doesn’t Mean a Thing,” we had this idea… if you watch the video, unless you watch carefully you don’t notice that there are actually cats sitting on a rocking chair. Kittens. And we originally had, like, fifty kittens. We weren’t terribly loud, but they were running all over the place and it was really, really difficult. There was like, one kitten that stayed in the shot. So that was one that we unsuccessfully executed. We couldn’t execute that one, but we like the idea of it. But we’ve done a few in moving vehicles, we’ve done one in a car, a boat, and then on the new album we’re on a bus. It’s kind of fun to have it be a challenge, where it’s kind of difficult or you have to improvise.

Don’t miss The Airborne Toxic Event on tour, and give their latest single “Changing” a listen below.

In the world of metal sub-genres, there are purists who want to preserve musical tradition and there are activists who want to stretch the boundaries of sound—and never than twain shall meet. One sub-genre of music that is all about being true to its roots is Gothenburg melodic death metal, which started with bands like In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. Though these bands have slowly evolved over time, many diehard fans have chastised their new sounds, and as such not many traditional Gothenburg melodic death metal bands exist now. Bands that boast the traditional Gothenburg sound are few and far between these days, but one band that executes it perfectly is OurStage’s The Neologist.

Formed by James Lewis and Devin Walsh in 2009 from the ashes of their previous project (SeVeR), the two set out to make music that they themselves liked to listen to (favorites include In Flames, Soilwork, Disarmonia Mundi and Dark Tranquillity) and they’ve done exactly that. With clear motives stated in their bio, such as being a musical outlet with no boundaries, they seem to be well on their way to accomplishing their goals for this project. Releasing The 26 Letters of Your Universe in 2010, The Neologist have put out a great and pretty traditional Gothenburg-styled metal album, and have been working on new material since.

The band’s current musical project is a series of In Flames cover songs in which they’re enlisting the help of Facebook to decide which tracks they should record. According to Lewis and Walsh, they have an incredible amount of musical flexibility being a duo, which allows them to make decisions in “1.8 seconds” (as quoted in their Facebook profile). It’s a good thing, too, because the first cover of this series is fantastic, and they’ll be able to create many more in a short span of time. They have reworked the classic “Jotun” from In Flames’ Whoracle, playing it almost exactly like the original but adding a touch of their own signature sound (and making an incredibly silly video to match).

The best part about The Neologist at the moment, however, is the fact that they’re giving away their debut album away for free! That’s right, all you need to do is click this download link and you’ll have twelve tasty tracks of awesomeness to feed your metal-craving ears. Not sold? You can listen to most of the tracks from the album right on OurStage with this conveniently-located player which contain eleven tracks:

To many people, the green movement was a short-lived fad and, eventually, a flop. Fortunately, there are still those committed to the cause including bands like Pearl Jam, The Roots and Green Day. Of course, most bands don’t have that much money sitting around, or really any money sitting around for that matter, so we think it’s important to support the ones with green ideals. The Appleseed Collective, for example, is an Americana/jazz/gypsy band formed just six months ago with startling potential. They’ve already amassed a respectable fan base and want to tour the continent—but how can such travel be environmentally friendly? If only they had a bus that ran on waste vegetable oil… Well with your help they just may be able to buy one by June 18th. Admittedly, Americana/jazz/gypsy is pretty specific and hard to imagine, so check out this video to get a taste of what they sound like:

The band has already met with a specialist and received an estimate on the van. They’ll need about $7,000-$10,000 total for the van and conversion, so they’ve set their Kickstarter goal at $8,000 with plans to cover the difference if need be. Basically, the van will run on diesel for about thirty minutes until the engine heats up and then will switch over to vegetable oil. They’ll be able to reuse waste oil and save a ton of fossil fuels. It might sound like a minor effort since it’s just one van on the road among millions, but they’ll be touring from coast to coast and maybe even to Canada to Mexico. That’s a lot of driving! Plus if you donate over $500 they’ll book a show in your town and drive out there to play for you. They’re also giving out hand-drawn portraits in return for $200 donations.

These guys are talented, full of hope and conscientious about the environment. We think it’s admirable that, despite not being able to afford a van, they’re still going out of their way to respect our planet. We wish there were more people out there with the same mentality. If you think they deserve break, make a donation here on Kickstarter.

Centrevol

The call of the band is one that’s hard to resist. It’s what prompted three Bostonians to pick up and move out west to Long Beach, CA and create Centrevol. Be glad they did, cause now you have something to get your blood pumping. The band delivers supersized pop rock with the melodic punch of U2. Anaconda hooks, rock steady drums and big, hulking harmonies are served up in “Save Yourself.” With “On A Roll,” hand claps rain down throughout the whole song, daring you not to join in. Centrevol is all about rallying, baiting their listeners to dance with something irresistibly kinetic. Nowhere is that device employed more effectively than in “Fifth Avenue Dream.” Beginning with a slinky descent, the track tumbles into percussive dance rock with sailing falsetto harmonies. You can stay seated if you want. But if you do, it’s your loss.

We’ve always been pretty jealous of Ben Gibbard; he’s released eight successful albums as the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie, seen success with the Postal Service and his solo material and is married to ultimate indie chick Zooey Deschanel. And it’s hard to fault him for any of that, since he also comes off as sweet, thoughtful and reserved both in his songwriting and during interviews. But on the upcoming Codes and Keys, Gibbard changes things up with “Some Boys”—the quiet, indie rock equivalent of a diss track.

While he doesn’t explicitly call out anyone in particular, it isn’t hard to imagine some of the bands he could be referring to when he sings that some boys are “making a killing at the top of the billing/It’s their role and that’s all that they know.” He clarifies his criticisms in the second stanza, calling out a few specific character flaws: “But some boys don’t listen, some boys don’t listen at all/They don’t ask for permission, they lack inhibitions/No walls and they get what they want.” Even cavalier sexual attitudes are brought under fire, as Gibbard points out that they’ll be “singing the blues” after “Joylessly flinging with the girls that they’re bringing to their rooms.”

Sounds kind of like getting reprimanded by your dad, doesn’t it? The whole song oozes with that feeling of, “we’re not mad, we’re just disappointed in you.” (Although now that Gibbard’s a married man who’s no longer allowed to be “flinging,” maybe there’s also a tiny bit of jealousy pervading these lyrics.) But either way, he makes it clear that after a while there’s nothing fun about being an asshole and taking part in empty flings. “Some boys are sleeping alone/Because there’s no one that’s keeping them warm through the evening/And they know that they’re on their own.”

Of course, it’s also possible that Gibbard and co. could be referring to younger versions of themselves. After all, two Death Cabbers—Gibbard and bassist Nick Harmer—got married as the band was working on this release. But with the ominous closing line, “They won’t get what they want,” we don’t think that’s the case. As the band gears up for one of the most highly-anticipated releases of the year, it would appear that they have almost everything that they want.

Give “Some Boys” a listen below, and be sure to check out Codes and Keys—out on Tuesday (5/31)!

Have an interesting story behind your lyrics? Let us know at pr@ourstage.com!

For a guy like Joe Jackson, who’s got a trail of great songs that go all the way back to the late ’70s, it must be tough to strike a balance in his shows between trotting out the tunes his fans adore and demand, and keeping things fresh for himself. Nevertheless, he’s an artist who loves the experience of laying down his tunes in front of an audience. In fact, he’s popped out a number of live records over the years, starting in the ’80s with Live 1980/86, and running up to his latest release, the generically titled Live Music. “I’ve done a few live records, because I’ve always loved playing live,” Jackson told us, “and I’ve always felt like that’s the best part of what I do.”

Jackson’s restless muse and his passion for performance have led him to reinvent his catalog onstage from the beginning. As early as the aforementioned ’80s live album, he was recasting his classic tunes in radically rearranged formats, delivering the new wave/power-pop hit “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” as an a cappella doo wop tune, and finding ways to re-imagine songs originally recorded by a guitar/bass/drums lineup for a band with two keyboardists and no guitarist. He manages a similar feat on Live Music, where he pumps out cuts from all across his career in piano-trio mode. “In some cases they never had guitar in the first place,” Jackson says. “People often forget that Night and Day had no guitars on it.” In fact, Live Music boasts a number of tunes from that 1982 album, Jackson’s biggest ever, including “Steppin’ Out,” “Slow Song,” “Another World,” “Cancer” and “Chinatown.”

Backing Jackson up on Live Music are the bassist and drummer from the original Joe Jackson Band, Graham Maby and Dave Houghton, with whom he seems to have found a brand new groove. “We’ve been doing this together for a few years now and it’s been great,” Jackson says. “For one thing, we’re old friends, and that’s always nice.” But beyond the bonhomie, Jackson enjoys interacting with Maby and Houghton in a trio format. “I feel like the trio is stripping it down to the absolute bare minimum and then seeing what you can do with it. It’s pretty amazing what you can do if you use your imagination. It can sound big, it can sound really varied.”

Besides redefining his old songs with the current live lineup, Jackson mixes things up by including a few carefully chosen cover tunes on Live Music. Probably the only artist whose songs have been covered by both Anthrax (“Got the Time”) and Tori Amos (“Real Men”), Jackson picks his own outside material with an ear for adventure. David Bowie‘s “Scary Monsters,” The Beatles‘ “Girl” and Ian Dury‘s “Inbetweenies” all get Jacksonized. “We actually do a lot of covers,” says Jackson. “I think it has to be something that I can get comfortable with vocally, and that I feel I can sing in my own way. But it also needs to be something where I can see a different way of doing it, because I don’t see the point in trying to imitate the original. I’m trying to make them as different as possible.”

In that spirit, Jackson has also got another project in the works, a tribute to the compositions of Duke Ellington. He’s been performing his own version of Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” for some time, but this recording will find him interpreting a whole host of Ellington tunes in typically eclectic fashion, aided by everybody from guitar hero Steve Vai to The Roots. “It’s starting to come together finally, after years of thinking about it and planning it. I’ve done so much touring over the last few years that I really haven’t had much time to work on anything else. I just spent a week in Amsterdam working with a [Brazilian] band called Zuco 103—they’re so good. We collaborated on two tracks. I’m gonna be in New York again picking it up with Amir from The Roots. We’ll have a good chunk of it done by June. I don’t know if it’ll be out this year, it may not be until next year.”

In the meantime, Live Music will serve to remind listeners that the man who spent the last three decades recording everything from big-band swing to orchestral suites never tires of offering up new sides of his musical personality. “We’ve done so much touring the last few years,” Jackson says, “we’ve done so many great shows—it needed to be captured. I’m really happy that it’s documented.” Of course, that’s no guarantee that by the next time Jackson toddles into your town, some of these tunes won’t have been drastically reinvented once more.

The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus‘ anti-abuse single “Face Down” essentially launched the Florida natives’ career back in 2003, earning them a slot on the Take Action Tour as it helped their fans deal with depression. But since then, things have been a little tough—the band left Virgin after just two records, and are independently releasing their upcoming album I Am the Enemy. We got a chance to catch up with Red Jumpsuit Apparatus frontman Ronnie Winter to talk about the impact of “Face Down,” the band’s genre-jumping abilities and how their split from Virgin just might be the best thing that could have happened to them.

OS: The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus was really popular in your home state long before you blew up everywhere else—what was it like to grow as a band in that Florida scene?

RW: It was pretty awesome. There’s quite a few bands, actually, from our local area. So just growing up there was a lot of really good music to look up to that came from our local town. I feel like that had a lot to do with it. Red Night Scare is basically from our hometown, so is .38 Special. Also Yellowcard is basically from the same hometown that we are. So a lot of bands have become successful from the area. When we were in high school we really felt if you do good enough, you have a shot. I think that’s cool. Lots of kids kind of get that idea in their head, that if it’s not you it’s somebody else, you know what I mean? Then we just started writing songs… And I don’t know, eventually we just decided to play a show, and it was one of those things where literally right after the first show we just had a lot of really great responses. Everybody wanted the CD, and we hadn’t made one yet. We didn’t even have tee shirts, everybody was asking for tee shirts. We had other bands who were there that had CDs and shirts and nobody wanted them, and we didn’t have CDs or shirts and everybody wanted them. So we were like, “Okay, well maybe we’ll put our other bands on the back burner, we’ll focus on this thing for a while.” And literally less than a year later we’re selling out big venues and selling a lot of CDs on our own… we made enough money to quit our jobs and live off the band almost a year and a half before we even tried to get signed, so that was really cool.

OS: A lot of that early success was thanks to your first single “Face Down,” which was a very personal, vivid description of abuse. How did it feel to hear that all over the radio?

RW: It was definitely weird, especially, you know, when my Mom and Dad heard it. [Laughs] That was weirder. But I don’t know. When you write a song, you don’t think about what this is going to sound like on the radio, you know? You just write what you’re thinking, and on that particular day, that’s what I was thinking about. I wrote it, I showed it to Duke and the rest of the guys in the band, and I was like, “You know, I feel like this is a pretty good song, what do you guys think?” It wasn’t really that big of a deal to us at the time, we were just writing a lot of honest songs like that. There’s another song called “Getting By,” which is almost to the same beat that I wrote “Face Down” in, talking about basically after you graduate high school, realizing how shitty the world really is. Everyone goes through a little bit of a depression phase, I think. Either you shoot into college, you get straight A’s, full scholarship or someone helps you out with money, or you’re working full time, so that’s hard to get by. It’s the same kind of scenario. We were just writing from the heart. It was a little interesting to hear it on the radio, but it definitely is a true story, so I’m glad people were able to relate to it. I have thousands, literally thousands, tens of thousands of emails of people thanking me for writing the song, saying that helped them get through a difficult time. That wasn’t the intention, the intention was just to describe what I was feeling, but something positive came out of it.

OS: After that single, you guys did a lot of positive stuff—you joined the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and participated in the Take Action Tour. Do you feel like there’s pressure there because of that—that there are certain themes you have to cover?

RW: Well, not really, because most of the stuff that we’ve done has always been really fan-driven. You mentioned NCADV—they actually approached us and said that they’d had some kids calling in and saying that the song made them want to call in and talk about their problems and change their lives. So they reached out to us and just said, “Hey, we really like your song ‘Face Down,’ would you be willing to do something with us?” And we were like, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” So they actually initiated, you know what I mean? That’s not us. We didn’t like, decide to go grab them. Same thing with the Take Action Tour. As I said earlier, we have a lot of songs that deal with depression and teen suicide because we believe that’s a topic that needs to be talked about. Teen suicide is still happening all over the place, and people talk about it like it’s not a big deal, but it is. It is to us. And we believe that a lot of the time, you can save a life if you just talk to somebody. The Take Action Tour knew that that was kind of our vibe, they addressed us and asked us if we wanted to do the tour even though it’s a charity tour. There’s not really any pressure because a lot of times there’s not anything to be pressured about. People just come to us and ask us to do stuff, and if we think it’s cool and a cool vibe, then we do it.

OS: Speaking of tours, you’ve been with everyone from poppy acts like Amber Pacific to hard rock bands like Shinedown to the current tour with hardcore band Yashin. Why do you think you’ve been able to mesh well with so many different types of bands and fans?

RW: We actually have a lot of really different sounding songs. We definitely don’t try to stick to one genre with our music. Both of our first two records, if you put one song next to the other a lot of people say they don’t even believe that it’s the same band… Everybody in my band has completely different taste in music, which is cool. We all sort of bring that into the mix when we write. Some of our guys are really big into hip hop, some of the guys are really into country, I’m mainly into post-hardcore and punk rock, and some of our guys are straight up alternative and old-school rock. I think that helps, the fact that we have enough different style songs that we can mold our set list to whatever band we’re playing with to where it sounds cohesive. Or not! Sometimes we’ll do the opposite, and we’ll want to stand out. If we’re playing with a bunch of hardcore bands, we’ll play a really poppy set so we totally stand out and don’t sound anything like anybody else. One time we played with Fergie at an arena in New York, and we played every song that we have that was all screaming and barely any singing. So we stood out in that scenario. I don’t know, it’s just kind of fun. We do what we want I guess. We’ll find a way to make it work.

OS: You guys went through some tough times after Lonely Road was released, and you ended up firing your manager, Steve Tramposch. Do you think having a manager was important or did you do okay on your own?

RW: Now we have a management company called the Collective. The thing is, we had a guy who was just one guy in his office. When everything started, it really wasn’t that much work. He could totally handle it, and he was a good manager for sure. He worked 24/7 for us, and that’s what we needed. That’s what we always wanted was to pay somebody money to open doors for you. It’s that simple. It’s nothing personal, it’s business… After we had a couple records out, when the workload got to the point to where it’s more than what one person could actually handle, he just wasn’t able to keep up, and we had some conversations, and we parted ways. It’s that simple. We partnered with Collective, which is actually a management firm, so instead of one guy we have an entire team of people behind us. Everybody’s got their own job, nobody gets overworked, and your band is taken care of 100% of the time. I think we just grew as a band out of that situation and into where we are now. Nothing personal, it just is what it is. It wasn’t a lot of drama or anything… we were with him a long time, and we parted ways, and that was that.

OS: In the video for “Choke“, you guys are killing what look to be some record label execs. Was that inspired by your split from Virgin?

RW: [Laughs] I get a lot of questions about that video. The first thing I want to say is it’s actually part one of a three-part series. A lot of people don’t know that, and we did our best to try to explain that, but a lot of kids will throw up one video on YouTube—once they see it, they’ll throw it back up. It’s impossible to embed in their YouTube stream, “Hey, this is part one of three.” But if you go to our page, it explains that in detail. The actual story is a string of characters who are just basically criminals… They go into this place and they kill a bunch of people. In the second video, they go to a little hideout. They’re drinking booze, they’re smoking cigarettes, they’ve got money on the table. Basically it’s a robbery, but you never see the robbery scene. And then in the third scene, it’s them being chased down by the cops and there being like a showdown at the end. We all get shot because we won’t turn ourselves in, we fight the cops. When you look at it from that perspective, it’s just a story like any other video. We wanted to stretch it out and make it three parts because we thought it would be cool. We’d never had an opportunity to do that with Virgin. So we’re like, “Hey, now that we’re independent we can do whatever we want. Let’s do one long story in three songs.” If you look at the video in context, it’s clearly not about a record label. But if you just watch that one video, for sure, it obviously looks like it, because we actually shot it in our management firm’s office. So you can see, like, gold records on the walls and stuff. And we thought that would be fine, because we thought that some people would pick up on that. But obviously, who cares? It’s rubber guns, you know what I mean? And yeah, it was a little bit of a message to Virgin. But the real message was, “We can do whatever we want now.” Not, “We’re gonna come kill you.” Anybody who thought that is basically just out of their mind. It’s stupid. First of all, if you’re gonna kill somebody, don’t make a video of you killing them first and then send it to them. That’s pretty dumb. Basically it was just showing them that we don’t have any kind of restrictions as far as graphic or artistic—we can literally do whatever we imagine now.

OS: So it’s been a positive thing, the split from Virgin?

RW: Absolutely. 100%. You can believe it or not—we’re not going to put a bunch of our personal files online—but in the beginning there was a lot of people who were like, “Oh, Red Jumpsuit got dropped.” And a lot of bands say that they didn’t, but we 100% didn’t. It’s very simple. We actually signed a deal with them that was three solid, two optional. That was the deal. So what that means is we absolutely had to make three records for them, and then if they still wanted to make records with us, then we had to make another two for them. But we only made two for them, because when the third record came around, basically they couldn’t honor their contract. They sent us a new contract with all these weird, additional things in the contract, like “Okay, we can’t honor the contract because we didn’t sign the musician. I’m a new guy, and we don’t have the budget we had back when we signed you, and everything’s changed, and blah blah blah.” And we were like, “Guess what? We don’t give a shit. We had a contract. You’ve been doing this to us for four years, saying, ‘Follow the contract, follow the contract, follow the contract.’ And now that the contract’s in our favor, you don’t want us to follow the contract? I don’t think so. Follow the contract. Take your own advice.” They didn’t want to do that, so there was an option in our contract that said if they didn’t follow their contract, we could get out. So we got out. Bam. It’s pretty rad, actually. Doesn’t usually happen that way. It’s pretty rare.

Check out the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus on tour with Yashin, and give their new single “Reap” a listen below!

What happens when a band’s best and most critically acclaimed work is a genre of music most metalheads vehemently despise, and then the band transforms their sound into something a lot more heavy, removing a large percentage of their screamo legacy? Well, if they’re anything like Underoath, they’ll become really great but still be hated by a vast majority of the metal community. In 2002 and 2004 Underoath release The Changing of Times and They’re Only Chasing Safety, respectively—two incredibly successful releases on Solid State records. Two albums that were by-in-large of the screamo/post-hardcore variety.

In 2006 everything changes. The band releases Define The Great Line, now with producer Adam Dutkiewicz of Killswitch Engage, and their sound takes a drastic turn away from their more pop roots in favor of a more pure metalcore style. Still riding the wave of success from their last record, Define The Great Line helped the band solidify their place among the more abrasive side of mainstream heavy acts. The downside, however, is the fact that the stigma attached to the overly-poppy style of They’re Only Chasing Safety still applies even though their approach drastically changed. All things considered, the album received immensely positive reviews from the likes of Alternative Press, Kerrang!, HM Magazine and Sputnikmusic. The record also debuted Number 2 on the Billboard Top 200, selling nearly 100,000 copies in its first week (not too shabby at all for a heavy record).

Fast forward two more years to 2008 when the band releases yet another increasingly heavy album, Lost In The Sound of Separation. Another giant step towards a heavier sound, further distancing themselves from the stigmatic “screamo” sound. Now filled to the brim with thunderous riffs, roaring vocals and harshly contrasted guitar sounds, Underoath finally had the thing that appeals to nearly all metalheads across the board; they replaced their more angst-ridden screams with rage-filled roars. But still the metal community had not fully embraced the band as a legitimate member of the metal community, despite the heaviness and pureness of Lost In The Sound of Separation as a metalcore record. Sure, there’s a bit of cleanly sung vocals on the record, but make no mistake, the album rips for almost its entire duration.

Even with the release of Ø (Disambiguation) in 2010, a vast majority of metalheads still dislike Underoath about as much as you could, as can be seen on any single MetalSucks comment section that mentions the band and the community scores on the band’s albums at MetalStorm. Whether it’s the band’s strong Christian beliefs, their supposed generic heavy metalcore sound or any other crazy reason, metalheads just aren’t on board.

If you’re reading this and have at least a passing interest in metalcore, I implore you to give Underoath a legitimate shot. Forget about their Christian-rooted themes, or that they used to be a pretty generic death metal band with forceful Christian themes (no, that’s not a joke)—heck, picture them singing all their songs praising Satan if you have to. Their last three albums are all incredibly well produced and feature a lot of cool riffs, choruses, breakdowns, tempo changes, etc. Flush your mind of all prejudices and biases about screamo or Christian bands and check out on of the singles from their latest album, “In Division” (which has a very cool video).

We’re a fan of a good, brain-melting paradox, especially that one about the famous lying puppet Pinoccio: What would happen if he said “My nose will grow”? It’s just impossible to figure out! That’s probably why we’re so intrigued by the track “Paradox” from Serbian metal band Forever Storm. Although it’s far from as playful as the Pinocchio paradox, it’s also quite the brain teaser, exploring both deeply personal and universal themes ranging from vanity to the destruction of the world. Epic stuff, and a lot to cover in a track that clocks in at just under five minutes, but Forever Storm weave it all together beautifully with a soaring chorus and screaming guitars.

If you find yourself thinking that a lyrically-driven metal song is a paradox in itself, Forever Storm bassist and songwriter Vladimir Nestorovic has a few things to say. “The lyrics should be the center point of any metal song, as they should always tell a story about a certain emotion, event or a thought,” he says. Of course, he adds that artists have the right to do whatever they want with their songs. “It is only my opinion that the music and the lyrics should, in most cases, have a hormonal bondage with some kind of subject and with each other as well.”

“Paradox” does meld music and lyrics in a seamless fashion, although as is fitting for a song with that title, its vocals tend to be ambiguous. The track opens with the line, “The night falls around my heart/The dark engraves another scar.” Nestorovic says that was inspired after he thought he was betrayed by someone he loved, but he later found out that he was the one to blame. Hence the chorus: “I’m losing you, losing myself to this demon called vanity/Every day more I die/Killing what keeps me alive.” According to Nestorovic, that’s the central figure of the song, as it “describes the moral paradox that I was in resulting in vanity.”

The paradoxes aren’t limited to emotions. Perhaps the most thought-provoking conundrum is the one frontman Stefan Kovacevic belts out during the song’s final stanza. “Amazingly you see the future while you’re destroying it,” he wails. It’s both true and depressing; in order to obtain the future we desire, we find ourselves destroying it with pollution and destruction. But the very pollution that will destroy us is a necessary byproduct of having the things we want. Whoa. Paradoxical indeed. But if you find yourself gleaning a different message from this metal mindgame, Nestorovic says you needn’t worry. “I think that it is for the listener to decide what he wants from the song, which is the beauty of art; you experience the lyrics in a way that suits your thoughts.”

If you’re ready for a song that makes you mosh as it makes you think, check out “Paradox” below— it’s heavy in more ways than one.

Have an interesting story behind your lyrics? Let us know at pr@ourstage.com!

When Battles frontman Tyondai Braxton quit the band about a year and a half ago to concentrate on his solo career, leaving behind an and-then-there-were-three scenario, it was certainly reasonable to assume that the move might have been a death knell for the group. The three remaining Battlers announced their intentions to continue, but without the wildly inventive Braxton on board, their future looked like an uphill climb at best. While Battles certainly seemed like a collective effort, it was impossible to deny the notion that Braxton—who seemingly inherited some of his iconoclastic spark from his father, avant-jazz legend Anthony Braxton—had a fair bit to do with the sound that earned so much attention on the foursome’s 2007 debut album, Mirrored.

Nevertheless, Dave Konopka, Ian Williams and John Stanier have beaten the odds on their first album as a trio, Gloss Drop. Battles 2011 may be a smaller band, but they make as big a noise as ever. To be honest, they don’t sound hugely different from the Braxton-era lineup. That’s not to suggest that the second Battles album is in any way a rehash of its predecessor, simply to praise the current incarnation of the band for picking up the hefty amount of slack left in the wake of Braxton’s departure.

Of course, the most immediate and obvious difference is that Braxton was, among other things, Battles’ mouthpiece. Granted, much of their sound was focused on instrumental interaction, but the question of what to do about vocals must surely have been an elephant in the band’s rehearsal room. Go all-instrumental? Let one of the remaining members try their hand at singing? Bring in a new member for the job? On Gloss Drop, Battles bypasses all of these options by partnering up with various guest vocalists for a third of the tracks and leaving the rest wordless. And quite a wide-ranging lineup of guests it is at that: Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead, Yamantaka Eye of The Boredoms, South American DJ/singer Matias Aguayo and…wait for it…Gary Numan.

Before we go any further in describing Gloss Drop, though, this would be an excellent time to point out a chronic fallacy about Battles. Despite popular misconceptions (or myth conceptions), they are not a math-rock band. Never have been, probably never will be. Admittedly, both Williams and Konopka have done time in legit math-rock outfits (Don Caballero, Storm and Stress, Lynx), and yes, the Battles sound does include challenging instrumental passages and tricky time signatures, but that’s pretty much where the connections end. If anything, Battles are second-generation post-rockers (even we’re not ready for the term post-post-rockers), taking up the torch of inventive, unpredictable, boundary-crashing music from ’90s indie-rock heroes like Tortoise, Isotope 217, et al, and using it to light the path to a new direction.

This was true of the band that made Mirrored, and it’s true today on Gloss Drop. Battles’ inclusionary approach on their second album applies not only to the aforementioned guest list, but also to a kaleidoscopic sound that freely draws on prog, hip hop, minimalism, metal, fusion, pop, electronica, Caribbean flavors, African and Brazilian grooves, and on and on until you’re forced to stop logging the influences and simply experience the band’s approach as a whole. Still, for all their quirkiness and eclecticism, the vocal cuts on Gloss Drop ought to be able to curry favor with anyone enamored of, say, Deerhoof, and in an indie-rock landscape where the likes of Dirty Projectors and Tune-Yards are deemed accessible, even the album’s most off-kilter instrumental tracks shouldn’t seem too far beyond the pale.

But ultimately, it’s not really important whether Battles can build on the Next Big Thing status they earned with their debut record four years ago. Such distinctions are fleeting at best. In the long run, what matters the most is that instead of falling apart when an important puzzle piece was removed from their midst, they found a new way to fit together, and Gloss Drop is the sound of the next step in the journey they refuse to abandon.