The Bled : Tight Lips and Loose Hips

You know what you did...

The Bled give their fans the Silent Treatment

Published November 29, 2007  by Christine Leonard

‘[Those bands are] great at what they do. We strive to be great at what we do’ — The Bled: great at standing in bushes

Tracing their roots back to Tucson, Arizona’s tight-knit music scene, music enthusiasts The Bled came together through a restless adolescence spent listening to bands like the Deftones, Converge and Refused. Hashing things out in a process that bass guitarist Darren “HeyGuy” Simoes describes as “natural,” The Bled went through some serious alterations before arriving at their current state as a five-piece thrash-punk ensemble. Singer James Munoz stepped into the role of the band’s front man and Simoes took up the position of bassist while guitarist Jeremy Talley, guitarist Ross Ott and drummer Michael Pedicone kept the original hardcore heartbeat going strong.

“We all know our jobs, so we just get them done,” says Simoes of their collaborative approach. “Usually Jeremy will come up with a few basic random riffs and will bring them to practice where we'll all jam on them for a while and arrange them how they seem fitting. If it sucks, we'll scrap it or alter it to make it flow better, but if it's cool we keep going. [All of us are guitar players first], so everyone seems to figure riffs and things out on a guitar before they're worked out at practice.”

Applying the no-nonsense, full-steam-ahead philosophy of their live shows to their studio sessions, The Bled (formerly Radiation Defiance Theory) have steadily delivered an album every two years since 2003, when they released their rowdy debut, Pass the Flask. Adding to both their prestige and their fan base, the group joined My Chemical Romance and other hotter-than-snot acts on a plethora of tours that have included more than their fair share of Canadian dates — a trend Simoes pledges will continue well into the future. “Canada is great,” he confirms with genuine enthusiasm. “We're trying to play there enough to gain citizenship, so we don't have to pay for health care.”

Preparing to traverse North America in the wake of their latest release, Silent Treatment, the band is geared up to present a dynamic and deafening array of their best material to date. Replete with hyper-intricate guitar runs, thundering metal fury and jarringly brutal vocals, The Bled’s Silent Treatment is anything but. Never afraid to experiment with abstraction and noise, the disc demonstrates a significant progression in the quality and complexity of their sound since their previous album, Found in the Flood, bobbed to the surface in 2005.

“Our main goal was to write a record that we would have fun playing live and not have to worry about it being overproduced, as far as extra effects and tracks go on a recording,” 

Simoes explains of their new 11-track triumph. “Lyrically, it has a lot to do with our lives as touring musicians and the relationships we have with people. It's definitely a difficult thing to maintain healthy relationships with your friends and family at home, not to mention girlfriends. There is a lot of pressure, and not too many ways to communicate other than the Internet or phones. [It’s also about] the relationships we have with each other as a band, touring together, living day in, day out with each other. We wanted it to be a brutally honest record — we didn't want to sugar-coat any of it.”

While that lack of communication is inevitable, Simoes readily acknowledges that giving someone “the silent treatment” as a form of punishment more often than not results in “chaos or alienation.” He much prefers to fill his life with sound and fury.

“We just put out the records we have fun making and have fun playing,” he says. “It just comes out that way. We're a heavy band, but we also want to keep it somewhat interesting and avoid easy clichés to follow, like a bunch of chugs followed by dissonant notes or familiar chorus chord progressions. All of us listen to an array of music from stuff like Radiohead to Fugazi to Meshuggah and even hip hop like Nas or Atmosphere, so we have no problem getting ideas from a broad spectrum other than the world of just metal or hardcore. We have always been our own band. [Those groups are] great at what they do. We strive to be great at what we do.”

KING COBB STEELIE

KING COBB STEELIE

As I speak with Kevan Byrne, guitar player and vocalist for Guelph’s King Cobb Steelie, he’s on Queen Street in Toronto, picking up guitar strings and getting minor repairs done in preparation for their imminent cross Canada tour. It’s been three years since we’ve seen or heard from them, and now they’re back.

Well, two of them at least – Kevan Byrne and Kevin Lynne, the original Ks from KCS, with the assistance of Michael Armstrong on drums, make up the collective’s current incarnation. And by the sounds of their newest effort, Mayday, King Cobb Steelie is a whole new band. Mayday is quite a departure from their previous albums, Junior Relaxer and The Twinkle Project. The songs are shorter and more direct, with uncharacteristically catchy choruses, and female vocal accompaniments. Singer/guitar player Tamara Wilson contributes to several of the tracks on the new album, and will be joining the band on tour. How does this dub-laden, trip-pop, rock ’n’ roll montage translate into a live performance? Lead guitarist and vocalist Kevan has several ideas in mind.

"We try and reinterpret the songs from the record into a live presentation. We don’t try and recreate what we did on the record. We try to give the songs another dimension, a greater depth."

Shrugging off suggestions that Mayday is a back-to-basics album, Byrne acknowledges some similarity to their past works.

"We’re playing very much like the way we used to play. With a live drummer, a bass, a couple of guitars and a percussionist. But we have a whole bunch of loops and samples and other things that we’ve thrown into the mix as well."

King Cobb Steelie is one ensemble that isn’t afraid to venture beyond their musical comfort zone in the quest for superior samples and source materials. They also thrive on leading audiences away from their pre-formulated expectations – for example there is the absence of a DJ on this album and tour.

"There are so many bands with turntablists now. And most of it is quite lame, I find. I don’t really want to add to the heap of mediocrity."

At the same time, Byrne is eager to separate King Cobb Steelie’s avant-garde image from the whole rock/rap fusion scene that has once again become so popular in the mainstream.

"There are some loops on the record that are kind of ‘hip-hoppish.’ I’m not really interested in bands that are combining rock and hip-hop in the sense that Limp Bizkit are. That was done 10 years ago – I can’t believe people don’t remember that! Anthrax did it with Public Enemy!"

Still, Kevan purports that blurring the lines between sample-based and live music is one of the most exciting directions an artist can take. The new release presents a somewhat distilled and concentrated version of KCS’s distinctive slash-and-sample guerilla music tactics. The tracks are more refined, lighter, increasingly poppy, and definitely marketable. Gone are the endless ambient grooves and experiments in human tolerance, replaced by brief musical vignettes with efficient titles like "Home" and "The Situation."

"We’re not doing the 10-minute explorations in sonic textures. There’s a fairly strong focus on the songwriting. The beats are pretty straight-up."

The diminished size of the band has facilitated their transformation, over the past three years, into a computer-orchestrated entity (after all, they do hail from Guelph, Canada’s answer to Silicon Valley). Kevan explains that he discovered a new musical language through composing on the computer, and in the process he came to the realization that KCS had to change with the times or perish.

"If you play long enough, you create a certain vocabulary for yourself. And it’s hard to get outside of that box. You have to create a new grammar."

King Cobb Steelie has apparently set aside their non-conformism and stepped through the commercial looking glass, hoping to score big in today’s international marketplace with the release of Mayday in Europe and the U.S. in the spring. King Cobb Steelie now find themselves standing on a corner of the busy intersection where rock, pop, electronica, dub, house, trip-hop, DJs and everything else come together, wearing brand new shoes and the tattered remnants of their old anti-commercial shroud.

by Christine Leonard

Originally published in Fast Foward Magazine
Performing with Hot Little Rocket and Slow Fresh Oil
Friday, November 17, 2000
The Night Gallery

Zappa Does Zappa = A Musical Primer

You still can’t do that on stage!!!

A Zappa primer for the uninitiated

by Christine Leonard

Zappa Plays Zappa performs at Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium November 22, 2007

Nearly 14 years after his untimely death from prostate cancer, Frank Zappa’s legacy of creative innovation continues to awe and inspire fellow artists and avid listeners around the world. Cited as one of the most influential bodies of work attributable to a modern artist, Zappa’s 50-album oeuvre of recordings, compositions and interviews is a vast and an incalculably complex testament to the twisted genius behind the famous moustache.

The Freak Out! began in the ’60s, when, straight out of college, the restless iconoclast formed The Mothers of Invention. Zappa’s penchant for physical theatrics and musical improvisation made him a natural performer and the band soon hit their stride. With Absolutely Free and We’re Only in it for the Money, they cultivated a small but fervent fan base over three short years. After his solo release Hot Rats, Zappa intensified his artistic focus and reinvented The Mothers, resulting in the über-bizarre groove-fest Chunga’s Revenge, before once again disbanding them.

Things were looking dark, and as Zappa himself put it, he was “tired of playing for people who clapped for all the wrong reasons.” An equipment-destroying venue fire and an overzealous audience member put a damper on Zappa’s activities just as he was finding a mainstream audience during the tolerant ’70s. In one live performance, a fan inexplicably pushed Frank from the stage, resulting in a one-year stint in a wheelchair. Turning his infirmity into opportunity, the digital pioneer took to the studio to record two more stunning releases, Apostrophe and One Size Fits All.

As Zappa’s popularity blossomed, he demonstrated an increasingly sophisticated command of different musical styles, fusing together elements of classical, jazz, rock, electronic and pop music like no other artist had before. His innate talent for delivering sarcastic and sometimes lewd lyrics, combined with his acerbic wit and irreverent spirit put Zappa on the cutting edge of a relatively new medium in an increasingly visual world. His 1979 epic, Joe’s Garage, prophetically mused about what would happen if the music were made illegal. Sure enough, the ’80s saw an unapologetic Zappa drawn into politics in order to defend the creative freedoms he so valued. He fought censorship at the highest levels, even testifying in front of the U.S. Senate, and later described the episode as an encounter with “Mothers of Prevention.”

Despite the popularity of his disco-mocking ’79 hit “Dancin’ Fool,” and the equally absurd “Valley Girl,” featuring daughter Moon Unit (sibling to Dweezil, Ahmet Rodan and Diva) yakking away with that gag-me-with-a-spoon mall-drawl, it is Zappa’s lesser-known successes, such as composing soundtracks for motion pictures and conducting a 52-piece orchestra, that best represent the quality and character of his artistic mettle. Embraced as a classical composer in his later days, Zappa demonstrated that he hadn’t lost his edge when he opened 1992’s Yellow Shark, performed at the Frankfurt New Music Festival by the Ensemble Modern, by instructing the high-brow attendees to “Please direct your underwear to the left side of the stage.”

Dually paying homage to his father’s legacy and showcasing his own musical aptitudes, Zappa’s son Dweezil has assembled a host of accomplished players, including Frank’s contemporaries Terry Bozzio and Napolean Murphy Brock, to join him in a massive tribute tour that encapsulates some of the highlights of his father’s illustrious and often conflicted career. Spanning a massive setlist, the sextet takes audiences on a three-hour, video-enhanced thrill ride into the extraordinary Zappaverse.

Just as Dweezil continues to carry the Zappa torch, others who share his admiration for his father’s work have done their part to preserve Frank’s memory. There are no less than two asteroids named for the man: 3834 Zappafrank and 16745 Zappa. In addition, versions of his moniker have been granted to a certain extinct mollusk, a jellyfish, a goby fish and a moustachioed spider. On a less glamourous note, the so-called ZapA gene belongs to a microbe responsible for causing urinary tract infections — a fitting namesake for the man who penned the songs “Imaginary Diseases,” “Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?” and the immortal “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow.”