Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band. This column offers advice to up and coming artists from the perspective of a professional musician who has thrived with and without label support over the last decade. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
An Introduction:
I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.
Part 8 – Everyone Has To Start Somewhere
To kill a band, you have to start one first. This week I’m going to be diving into the musical influences that hooked me on playing music. I try to write music in some form almost every day and after a recent fit with writer’s block I went back to my early roots to get some inspiration. In past interviews I’ve almost always been asked about my band’s influences but not so much as my personal gateways that encouraged me to start writing my own songs. So here’s the chance to relive my own musical adolescents and discuss the artists that shaped the way I look at music.
Rufio – Perhaps, I Suppose (2001)
This was the first band that really motivated me to become a better guitar player at a technical level. There is simply no other pop punk band that shredded like these guys. Though I don’t remember what made me pick out their debut Perhaps, I Suppose in the first place, I vividly recall leaving the mall and popping the album in my discman as the crescendo into “Above Me” quickly filled my ears. Just fifteen seconds into that lead track was enough to leave me stunned and instantly inspired to figure out what on earth they were doing on their fretboards. I just never knew it was possible to do so much on guitar and still be maintain the ever catchy pop punk spirit that Rufio rooted themselves in. The moment I got back home I grabbed my guitar, booted up the Compaq Presario for a quick Dogpile (yes!) search, and stayed up all night learning that album.
Senses Fail – From the Depths of Dreams (2003)
Running through the gamut of Drive-Thru Records releases, I eventually landed upon Senses Fail’s From the Depths of Dreams EP in 2003. By now I had a large collection of the label’s records filling up my pseudo-leather bound CD booklet that included the likes of The Starting Line, New Found Glory, Allister, Midtown, Rx Bandits, and The Movielife. These were all great bands endemic to a profoundly influential period of pop punk at the turn of the millenium but there was something different about Senses Fail. This band was serious. While their peers were busy with self deprecating humor and the mistrials of high school romances, Buddy Nielsen was singing about death. The band gets right to the point as the lead track off that debut EP, “Steven”, is about a close friend of that name being killed in a car accident. That song gave me chills on the first listen. Buddy’s raw, unique but slightly out of tune vocal delivery coupled with the bands darker melodic arrangement was sort of a breath of fresh air to me. Senses Fail also clearly had hardcore influences and the metal tinged guitar riffs were a gateway into my discovery of early metalcore acts.
Further Seems Forever – The Moon is Down (2001)
Chris Carrabba was only barely in this band long enough to record their first album, The Moon is Down, but it is by far my favorite indie rock/emo release of all time. I’d assume this is a product of a perfect storm where I am going through newly turned teenage angst and Chris’s powerful emotionally soaked lyrics. His vocal delivery, while not tunefully perfect, is undeniably catchy. His choruses come to the verge of screaming several times on this album giving you the ability to tangibly feel the emotion he’s pouring out over every line. The instrumentation here is undeniably second fiddle to the vocally driven tracks but they are subtly complex and provide just the right atmosphere to push each theme to it’s climax. Listening back over the album now, I’m amazed at how much melody is hidden in the guitar tracks while still managing not to detract from Chris’s dense but soaring storytelling. Even when it wasn’t the focus, there seemed to always be something intricate going on guitar wise and that idea propelled much of my early songwriting. One secret gem of this album is Steve Kleisath’s insane drum work. While the guitar and vocal lines on the album conservatively tend to play around the same ideas, Steve makes each song stand apart with a complex yet song supporting drumming that fills the emptiness and creates variety in places where there otherwise are none. This is an album I go back to from time to time for inspiration and a refresher on how instrumentation properly supports vocally driven songs.
Thrice – Identity Crisis (2001)
I was introduced to the wonder of Thrice by Justin Brown, AHAF and Bornstellar vocalist, back in 2002 during our sophomore year of high school. He brought his super awesome mini-disc player to school one day and the first song on his latest mix was “Phoenix Ignition”. The track starts off innocently enough with frontman Dustin Kensrue singing softly over a single acoustic guitar before abruptly kicking in with the full band under the anthem of his now screaming voice. This was the first time I had been intimately exposed to screamed vocals and I was quite taken back by it. It took me a good half dozen listens to come around to the band but once I got past the nascent startle of this new sonic aggression, I realized how amazing and beautiful it all was. The viscerally raw rage that permeated Identity Crisis stoked an undeveloped side of my musical dexterity that changed my perspective of what songs could be. Up until that point, most of my library came out of the Drive-Thru roster who’s pop punk ethos contrasted greatly with this new post-hardcore purposefulness. Teppei Teranishi’s guitar playing was another major influence to my riff building framework. While bands like Senses Fail also had metal influences infusing their guitar sections, Teppei brought a technical level to the hardcore/punk band that was quite novel at the time. His instrumental prowess was a constant inspiration as I continued to develop my guitar playing early on and brings us to another band that Justin introduced me to:
Hopesfall – No Wings to Speak Of (2001)
Being a Charlotte native, I along with nearly all other aspiring local musicians were heavily influenced by the rise of Hopesfall in the early 2000’s. They were the first hardcore band to really put Charlotte on the map and their early success sparked a creative renaissance in our music scene. 2002’s The Satellite Years may have been the band’s most well known album but 2001’s No Wings to Speak Of is the quintessential masterpiece of the entire melodic metalcore genre. This record showed me what was possible if you broke all the rules. There were no defined choruses, verses, or even a semblance of song structure but a weaving path of evolving melodies carried each song like it’s own separate story. The band freely rotates between aggressive hardcore sections and spacious reverb drenched cleans that taught me how much you could change the mood within a single song. This EP is probably the biggest influence to my writing on A Hero A Fake’s first release, Volatile. My fascination with abrupt transitions between heavy and clean passages, soaring guitar driven atmosphere’s, and the orchestration of sporadically changing time signatures is traced back to this amazing record.
Honorable Mentions:
AFI – The Art of Drowning (2000)
Boyhitscar – S/T (2001)
The Starting Line – Say it Like You Mean It (2002)
Underoath – The Changing of Times (2002)
A Static Lullaby – …And Don’t Forget to Breathe (2003)
Thursday – War All the Time (2003)
Misery Signals – Of Malice and the Magnum Heart (2004)
