The Dillinger Escape Plan‘s Calculating Infinity is frequently referenced as one of the most important releases in extreme music history. Never before had such a mathematically-charged violent assault been cast on the listener. There were polyrhythms, jazz breaks and sweeps – perfect for the tech-hungry shrednaut. But most impressively, it was all done with a 100% punk fuck you attitude. Still, Dillinger are never cast as a punk band. Rather, they are almost always considered mathcore or tech metal.
Fast forward to 2009, a decade after Dillinger’s monumental opus.
Detroit’s The Armed are a punk band, but are going to be almost always compared to DEP (although, like Dillinger, the band digs Nine Inch Nails. There is a mighty strong cover of “Gave Up” from the Broken EP on the record). It is not that the band copy Ben Weinman and co., but it is that they have those same elements. However, what make The Armed stand out (and not an attempted clone like many lame tech acts around), is that they are a punk band. They are not a mathcore band. They are not a tech metal band. They are a punk band.
The Armed’s debut full-length – the largely DIY effort These Are Lights – is the surprise of 2009. Not since Trap Them‘s Sleepwell Deconstructor has there been a debut so vibrant and promising that the listener foams at the mouth in anticipation of future releases. Not that These Are Lights isn’t tight – it is a staggering amalgamation of punked-out chord progressions, polyrhythms, and off-kilter riffs and drumming – but you can’t help but expect huge things in the future. As a debut, These Are Lights is a light in a rather dark tunnel in its scene. Songs like “Terrordactyl” and “Kingbreaker” are three-minute headsmashers that will make any fan of heavy music happy, while closer “The Great Fatsby” is one of the best songs of the year. Period.
If you need any more proof, check out this freshly-made promo video for the album, and do yourself a favour by downloading their album (for free…something this good doesn’t usually come for free) right here.
Has your mouth begun watering? Good. Since you’re here, check out the interview Hearwax had with The Armed’s drummer and bassist.
First off, who are you and what do you do in The Armed?
Tony: Tony. I play drums.
Kenny: Kenny. Bass.
I’d like to say congrats on the album – These Are Lights is certainly one of the biggest surprises of 2009. Better yet, it’s free. What made you guys decide to release it for free?
Tony: Thanks a lot man. We put it out for free because it seems like the right move to make right now. As a small independent band, a popular route to take is to put a bunch of money into making an album, a bunch of money into manufacturing it, and then slowly recoup, selling to very small segments at live shows over a long period of time. The problem is that it takes a huge amount of time to establish even a slight “presence” doing this…
Kenny: Right now, the market is absolutely saturated with independently produced music of varying levels of quality. We decided to make it as easy as possible for everyone to hear our songs by just putting them up for free on the internet to anyone who will listen to it.
Tony: Right. So we spent X amount of dollars producing the album, eat that expense, but hopefully get the music to a much much larger audience worldwide. From there, if kids will like it hopefully they’ll come out to shows and hang out…that’s the main point of this anyways- the performance.
Kenny: We made these songs to be heard by people. Not to make a ton of money or anything. Putting everything online was just the easiest way for us to accomplish that goal.
You guys also took a DIY approach to the production of the record. You recorded it in a member’s basement, correct?
Tony: Right…well we at least tracked most everything in my basement. We did vocals and horns in a walk-in closet in our guitarist Aaron’s basement as well.
It’s hard to believe that the record was done by the band. It sounds great. What kind of equipment did you use? As a DIYer myself, I am always interested in what people use for self-production.
Tony: Thanks so much, but it should be mentioned that the final product sounds the way it does largely due to Kurt Ballou who did the mix at Godcity and Nick and Rob who mastered it at New Alliance East. Early on, we decided that we wanted to make the absolute most of our money and pay someone really great to do the mix, but try to cover the recording process on our own. This would eliminate the need to spend all the money bands spend in the studio while tracking their record, which is in many cases most of the cost. We emailed Kurt to discuss, made a gameplan from there, and began.
We made a lot of a very little amount of gear. We tracked into Logic 8 on my Macbook. We recorded guitars directly into the computer with an Apogee Duet firewire interface. Apogee makes really great, straight-forward low-mid priced interfaces that focus on high quality pre-amps for great sound rather than having a million extraneous features. We used Guitar Rig for amp modeling only for monitoring purposes while recording. Kurt actually took all the guitar DI signals and reamped them at Godcity. So every guitar sound you hear on the album was recorded into a computer in Detroit, then reamped and re-recorded out of an amp at Godcity in Salem. It was a very thrifty way to record…far from ideal, but hopefully as high quality as we could possibly hope to make it on next to no budget.
I’m assuming you guys embrace the internet. If you could say something to the RIAA – you know, the guys who are so focused on money instead of the art itself – right now, what would it be?
Kenny: “See ya.”
Tony: Yeah…it doesn’t matter. The whole game is changing right now anyways and their model of how things work is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Do you guys plan on signing to a label? Have you had anyone interested in you guys yet?
Tony: There has been some label interest, yeah, which has been surprising because we sent our album out to like, no one in the industry. It’s cool to think that people are spreading it around enough on their own and see enough value in it that our songs are making the rounds. To be honest though, “getting signed” isn’t really on any of our to-do lists at the moment. I mean, we are not opposed to the idea but I think with the current industry model in flux, it doesn’t make as much sense as it did before unless you’re getting like a huge U2-esque deal or something. Which we are obviously not going to get.
Kenny: If someone wants to pay for the instruments we ruin every show and let us do what we do, I think we’d obviously all be down…but right now, we’re just trying to do what we can on our own.
I am sure you get this a lot, but you guys have a definite Dillinger Escape Plan vibe, but you usually border on the hardcore punk elements of their sound rather than the mathcore side – other than the polyrhythms of course. “Gave Up”is a NIN cover – a big influence on Dillinger. I don’t mean to classify you as Dillinger’s twin brother or anything, but I have to ask – are they a big influence on you guys? Who are your other influences musically?
Tony: Yeah of course, they are a huge influence. I’ve been a fan forever and I even took a couple lessons from their old drummer Chris Pennie back in the day. They are one of the very few bands that some people classify as “metal” that I like and DEFINITELY the only band that some classify as “tech metal” that I enjoy…although to me, I just think of them more as hardcore/punk. They’re totally on top of the game in my opinion though.
Kenny: As a band, they do so many things so well.
Tony: They are like the Bad Brains of this generation. Kids are just trying to keep up.
Kenny: Yeah, I mean unlike other “tech-y” bands, they are CREATIVELY technical!
Tony: They use technicality and musical ability solely as a means to an end, not the end itself. They have a musical message to convey beyond “we practice our instruments.” They don’t just play arbitrary shit and their arrangements aren’t just lists of parts. They write really great songs that are actually songs. And they put on the best live show, period.
As for the NIN thing, that’s kind of a coincidence to what’s been going on with DEP and them lately. I had Pretty Hate Machine in first grade. I’ve been a fan of that stuff literally as long as I can remember. Covering “Gave Up” is something I’ve wanted to do since I was tiny.
Kenny: In terms of other influences though…I think if you were to ask all of us you’d get pretty different answers. The Cancer Conspiracy is huge for me. Gentle Giant. Jethro Tull…
Tony: I mean everything you hear influences you in some way I suppose. In terms of this band though, I find a lot of influence in bands like Converge, Wolf Eyes, Nerve Agents, F-Minus, Minor Threat, Andrew WK, DKs, as well as bands like The Bad Plus, Radiohead, TV on the Radio…a bunch of stuff really. At least that’s the stuff that I LIKE. I am also influenced by the 4,000 identicore/mediocore bands I hear everyday to try and play nothing like them…
What are your real feelings on The Great Gatsby?
Tony: I’ve never read it, nor have any idea what the subject matter is.
Kenny: Same.
Tony: I know that the main dude in Entourage starred in a film based on it directed by Martin Scorcese IN the show Entourage.
Kenny: We are intellectuals.
Tony: Hahahahaha. For real. But seriously, we just used to call Aaron fat a lot and thought the name (The Great Fatsby) sounded funny. The song loosely follows a pie-eating contest gone horribly wrong…but in very abstract terms.
Detroit’s punk scene was huge in the 80s and 90s. Now, hardly any bands make any splash outside of the local circuit. And yet, if you check out the Wikipedia page for Detroit’s music scene, it features this quote:
“One of those bands are the hardcore/metal Detroiters Walls Of Jericho. Another is experimental/hardcore act The Armed, whose music may be more progressive than traditional hardcore but their live show captures the unbridled energy of that early 80′s scene.”
Had you guys seen this already? Do you think it is possible that you guys could lead a new era of Detroit hardcore?
Kenny: Haha! Wow, no I hadn’t seen that! That’s hilarious!
Tony: I don’t know if it’s possible, but we’d love to try. It’s hard, because if you’re talking about fostering a real “scene,” it’s just really hard getting a lot of kids out to shows anymore. Attendance isn’t what it once was and it’s hard to blame kids because there is so much of the same garbage out there. You don’t get many kids just checking out shows unless they specifically know one of the bands anymore…We would love there just to BE a new era of Detroit hardcore though…even just hardcore in general. I mean, when hardcore happened the first time, it was a violent reaction to a genre that had become a “stale cartoon” to quote the DKs. Funny enough, in like 5 or 6 years, it TOO became a parody of itself. That cycle continues to this day and I think everyone is WELL AWARE of the ridiculous parody “hardcore” genres are of themselves right now. Seriously, go to a club show and see if you can tell the difference (in physical appearance AND sound) between any of the bands.
Kenny: I swear, sometimes I think one more blast beat, pig squeal, detuned breakdown, cookie monster growl, or kitsch-y usage of autotune will make my head literally explode at these things. It’s a bummer.
Tony: Kids are just really complacent and bands are seemingly formed from like…focus group test results rather than wanting to make some kind of unique statement. This is a bummer because it makes it kind of embarrassing to be associated with heavy/aggressive music right now because it really IS so outwardly unadventurous and mundane. That’s not to say there’s not great stuff out there or that everything sucks. It’s just that the stuff that sucks seems to really be dominating right now. So yeah, if we can get kids to go nuts, take a chance, and make something dangerous again, we are all for it.
Following that, are there any Detroit hardcore bands that need to be heard? Everything major is coming from Boston.
Tony: Our good friends The Hunchies put on a sick show every time. They also all look like Stone Cold Steve Austin. Which is cool. Another band hardcore band I really have been digging on live is Regrets from Chicago. That’s not really Detroit but close enough.
What are your favourite records of 2009 so far? Of all time?
Tony: Gallows‘ Grey Britain was great. For All I Care by The Bad Plus is also great and I think that was from this year…The new Converge album will of course be amazing. To be honest, earlier in the year I think I was so focused on our album that I wasn’t taking in too much new music at the time…
Kenny: I don’t think I’ve gotten a single new record this year. I literally can’t think of a thing…
Tony: I watched a lotta TV shows this year…
Kenny: I rode my bike a lot.
Thanks for your time. Come to Canada soon – you can play a show in my garage if you want, I don’t care. Any last words?
Tony: Thanks a lot for talking to us. We will for real play your garage if you will put us up. Also, our band is 1/6 Canadian. Our guitarist Chris is from Vancouver and lives in Windsor. So yeah…don’t really know where I’m going with that…
Kenny: Thanks to everyone who has downloaded our album so far. If you enjoy it, please tell your friends. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please give us a few minutes of your day and do so.
Tony: Together, we can all kill terrible music and make punk rock fun and dangerous again.
Kenny: Word.
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