Month: July 2015

PVRS

Pvris (pronounced ‘Paris’) are a female-fronted three-piece from Boston, Massachusetts. Following the release of debut album “White Noise” in November 2014, the band have gone from strength to strength, the latest of which is a sold-out headline shows in the UK and a European tour. I caught up with Lynn Gunn (vocalist and guitarist), Alex Babinski (guitarist) and Brain MacDonald (bassist) before their Birmingham show to ask about their European experiences.

 

  1. This is your first trip to the UK, so what have been your first impressions of the UK?

Lynn: It’s way cooler, everything looks way cooler.

Brian: Things are old.

Lynn: Things have been here forever, more than America.

 

  1. What has been your favourite part of the UK so far?

Lynn: I really liked Cardiff and London.

Alex: Cardiff was like the only day we had off so we got to explore.

Lynn: We’re going to be going to Bath tomorrow and I’m looking forward to that so that might be my new favourite.

 

  1. Being an American band, have you been surprised by the level of European support? And I’ve noticed you’ve got a lot of airplay on BBC Radio One recently.

Lynn: Yeah, it’s weird because we can’t really see it over in the States so we don’t like understand it or like see which is kind of cool because when we come over here we’re surprised by it too.

 

  1. Recently, you’ve been on a lot of big tours, The World Tour in America and you’re touring with Lower Than Atlantis at the moment. Has there been anything those bands have taught you that you’ve really taken on board or any great pieces of advice?

Alex: It’s hard to pick but I’ve definitely learnt.

Lynn: I feel like we’ve learnt something on every tour. The one thing Sleeping with Sirens taught us was ‘don’t take yourself seriously just have fun with it’. They’re super fun guys.

Brian: They’re some of our favourite.

Lynn: They’re major goofballs so…

 

  1. So obviously you’re back in the UK next month for Slam Dunk.

Lynn: Yeah!

 

  1. Are there any bands on that line-up that you’re looking forward to seeing particularly or hanging out with?

Alex: Definitely You Me at Six and Taking Back Sunday.

Lynn: Don Broco.

Alex: Just everyone, all those bands. Architects. I was looking down the list and just going ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

 

  1. And I saw you were at the BBC Maida Vale Studios, can you tell us anything about that?

Lynn: I felt very self-conscious the whole time we were there.

Brian: I enjoyed it, it was cool.

Lynn: It was, everything else was great.

Alex: It went great, but it was so scary being in such a cool place.

Lynn: It was just intimidating knowing who else had been in there so we were like err…

 

  1. As a band, what would be your biggest goal? Is it headlining foreign tours or headlining your favourite festival?

Lynn: We want to do everything

Brian: Yeah, we want to try!

Lynn: We want to take over the planet.

Alex: I want to play in space.

Lynn: That would be fun. Would sound even work in space? Maybe on a space station?

Alex: I don’t know.

 

  1. You released the video for “White Noise” in March, how much input do you have into the ideas for music videos?

Lynn: Good to moderate, I’ll usually go to Raul Gonzo, our director, with a concept or basis and then he’ll like explode with it and make it come to life basically and like we’ll give him ideas

 

  1. Your Empty Room Sessions have proved quite popular. Are there plans to do any more of those or release them all together?

Lynn: Yeah.

Alex: Yeah, yeah definitely.

  •  

Lynn: Yeah, we haven’t been home long enough to do that yet.

 

  1. As the first female-fronted band on your label (Velocity/Rise Records), would you say that’s put a lot of pressure on you as a band?

Lynn: No, we look at it as being any other band. I feel like other people are putting pressure on it.

Brian: I don’t even think about it.

Lynn: We didn’t even know. There are also a couple bands with girls on it, but they’re not like the singers but we’re not the first big girl on Rise.

 

  1. Can fans expect any new music soon?

Lynn: It’s being made, there’s a lot already recorded, but I don’t know, we don’t know when it’s going out but we would like to release it as soon as we can but it’s not up to us.

Brian: It’s down to other people.

Lynn: But there is, it is being made, there’s already like enough music for a second record. Second, third, fourth, I don’t know. We’re like always making things so. We all have the recording app and then I’ve got like Logic on my computers and these guys are always doing stuff. Everyone’s always doing stuff.

 

  1. So for the really cliché questions now. What is your favourite song to perform live?

Lynn: “Fire”.

Alex: Mine’s “My House”.

Brian: Definitely “Fire”.

 

  1. What or who is your biggest musical influence?

Lynn: Me, probably Florence and the Machine.

Brian: Marvin Gaye.

Alex: It’s hard to say now, but growing up all I did was play Underoath songs.

Lynn: Yeah, but for like influences like sound wise I feel like we take stuff from everywhere, nothing specific but those would be our personal influences.

 

  1. And three words to describe the band for someone who has never heard the band before?

Lynn: Err… Sad, no not sad, moody.

Brian: Dark.

Lynn: and.

Alex: Elegant.

Lynn: I like that.

 

  1. What’s one piece of advice you’d give your younger self?

Lynn: My younger self?

Brain: My right hand *slaps hand*.

Lynn: Screw school. That’s what I’d say to my younger self. My younger self was so stressed out at school and I didn’t even need it. Well I probably did but you know what I mean.

Brian: Same with me.

Alex: My advice would be things always work themselves out.

Lynn: Yeah, they do.

 

– Eloise Doherty

Danko Jones

The festival season has started once again! Time for us at RMP to have a talk with some artists performing on those festivals. We were at Graspop Metal Meeting and could get a hold of the one and only Danko Jones. With a fresh beer in our hand we sat down to talk to with the charismatic frontman about playing festivals, his latest albums, growing up in Toronto, Canada and his eye surgery.

  1. How is it to play at a metal festival as rock ‘n’ roll band?

I think the audience is open-minded enough. We’ve done it before on Wacken, With Full Force, Hellfest and Metal Town. Usually when we’re booked we’re almost relieved for an audience because they’ve been listening to metal for the last day and a half or two days so a lot of times we get a good reaction.

  1. I remember you playing at Pukkelpop festival a couple of years back and your show really blew me away. Today it just felt the same. What makes your live shows so memorable?

I don’t know, I mean, we’re just a three-piece band. Maybe there is like a connection… no, not a connection but we don’t take the audience for granted. For a lot of bands it could be any crowd. Yesterday’s crowd could be the same as today’s crowd. I think the audience can really understand that the show they’re watching is the same show as yesterday and will be the same show tomorrow and the songs might be the same but really anything that happens in the crowd or like for example today. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. So today has brought other things to the show than yesterday.

 

  1. Do you like playing festivals better than playing venue shows?

The AB in Brussels in a great venue. We like that venue a lot. They know how to treat a touring band and the room is nice. But I will admit playing Graspop with all the bands today and as a fan of music it’s really fun to meet everyone and see every band and so. It’s nice that when we play the AB, everyone’s there to see us, but also here at Graspop with Alice Cooper or Judas Priest it’s really cool to be able to see such big bands in just a couple of days.

 

  1. You just mentioned that you are three-piece band. You and John (Calabrese, red.), also known as J.C., are the real core of Danko Jones. Do you think you two are the dream team of rock ‘n’ roll? Because you’ve been so long together and you changed your drummer a couple of times.

No, no, there is no dream team. But I think we have the same goal and are on the same page with where we want the band to be and everything. And it looks on paper that we’ve been through a lot of drummers… I know how it looks to people but really… whoever is in the drum seat, is in the band. We treat them like they’ve always been in the band. Rich (Knox, red.) is in the band for almost two years now and I don’t think he feels like he’s been overlooked or anything. He’s definitely brought in into the discussions that you have as a band. I can’t really go into past drummers because it’ll be not fair to them. But we’re very happy with Rich!

 

  1. Last year you released a compilation album ‘Garage Rock! – A collection of lost songs from 1996-1998’. How did you feel when you first found those recordings again?

It was a trip down memory lane. Like some of the songs we even forget we even wrote. There’s a song on the album called “Rock ‘n’ roll is black and blue”. We had the title but we forget we had a song and named it that. I did a whole press tour saying ‘Yeah, it’s an old title we had.’ And then we found the song and I wouldn’t have known how we named it if J.C. hadn’t written it down on the cassette. Then I heard the lyrics and I remembered everything about it. So yeah it was definitely a chance to relive our memories and remember some songs we forgot we wrote.

 

  1. Were there songs on those recordings that you really disliked? Or did you release every song you found?

Oh yes, they never even made it to that stage we’re I got to… I transferred them. I transferred about thirty or forty songs. I played it for J.C. and then we played it for a few of our friends and people from the label. We got a great reaction from the songs and an even greater reaction from certain songs so we knew which ones were definitely going to make it. And then we got into a point of quality. We wanted to keep the quality up so we had to get rid of a few songs. There’s still about ten that can be released. And they weren’t released only because we couldn’t put more on a vinyl for the quality to endure. So maybe they see the light of day another time.

 

  1. Well, I’m really looking forward to that day. This year you released a whole new album, ‘Fire Music’. How has the response been?

I think it’s been good. I got a lot a positive response of what I gathered from Twitter and social media but I don’t really read record reviews anymore.

 

  1. Why don’t you do that anymore ?

I just don’t like it anymore but from what I hear, people really like the new album so… It already had a better response than our previous album.

 

  1. What bands are your biggest influences? What bands do you really look up to?

Kiss, AC/DC, Black Flag, ZZ Top. A lot of band, I mean Judas Priest, Alice Cooper. They’re playing here today and they found their way into our music somehow. I mean you live with the better music so… I mean punk rock influences and heavy metal or hard rock obviously found their way into our sound. We came about in the mid-late-nineties when there was the garage rock scene, and garage punk scene. Since then I think that scene had really died out. There’s no real thing anymore like it was back then. And we’ve changed. We’re not a garage punk band anymore; we became a hard rock band. That was through, I think, necessity and coming out here and seeing the scene here in Europe. And also you naturally get better at your instrument and to play dumb and try to play garage punk is a joke. The essence of garage punk is people who can’t play but have the passion to play and that appeal to the music. So once you get better at playing your instrument you naturally can’t play that easy anymore. That’s where we come from and those are all our influences.

 

  1. You grew up in or around Toronto, Canada. Is it a good place for starting bands to do their first steps or is it a real struggle?

Yeah, in Toronto there is a really big music scene, even more so from when we started. Mainly because more from an indie rock perspective, there’ve been a lot of worldwide success stories from Toronto, like Feist, Peaches and I’m forgetting a few. But I mean in that whole scene they were a big deal. And so a lot of people kind of followed them.

 

  1. You had an emergency eye surgery a while back. Can you tell us something about the whole situation? And are there still complications or has everything been fine so far?

I was actually playing Pinkpop and I started to get flashes in my right eye. I thought it was just because I was very tired. It was like someone was shining a flashlight in your eye every other minute. I told someone that I they said ‘You have to see the eye doctor!’.And I was like ‘No, no, I just need a good rest. I just need a good night sleep and then I’ll be fine.’ But they insisted, they really got angry so I went to the eye doctor and I didn’t come home that night. He sent me straight to the hospital. My retina had detached and if you don’t fix it you will go blind. There’s no other option, that’s the end of it. So I had to stay on my side so the liquid in my eye didn’t do something, I don’t know what. Anyway I had to stay there for three days and then there was a delay so eventually I got to the operating room. It left me near-sighted on the right side and I was already going far-sighted on the left side so. I’m okay but at the end of the night if I have to read something it looks like a funhouse. I can’t focus so I need glasses. I have glasses with me but I don’t wear them all the time because at festivals like this I cut my hear really short and the pair that I’m wearing now kind of indents my ears [laughs].

 

  1. Last question we are obliged to ask: Do you kiss on first dates?

Yeah, of course. But only girls!

 – Frederik Geuvens

Dutch Rudders

The Dutch Rudders, when hearing the band name one instantly imagines wooden clogs, tulips and something with a rudder, whatever that might be. But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction some scientist punk once said. So we at RMP dove in feet first to find out all about the connection between Dutch Rudders, Flemish guys and the French language. Let's see…

 

  1. Hello, congratulations with your latest release, “On Verra”. It has been released some weeks ago now. How has the response been?

The response has been pretty good. People seem to like the new album a lot, which is great! We worked really hard on it and we had some pretty stressful moments while writing the songs. We’re very pleased with the way everything came together in the end.

 

  1. It was released as a tape on Lost Youth Records and a CD, LP version on Monster Zero. How did these deals come up?

We had the new record ready so we started talking to a lot of people in Europe. We knew Kevin from Monster Zero a bit because he’s a famous rock star with his band The Apers and we knew he liked some of our songs. Apparently he liked them a lot and helped us out in a fantastic way. It’s the first time we release something on vinyl and we’re honoured that we can do it together with him. For Lost Youth Records, it was quite simple, Karel Geuens is a fantastic dude who likes us and he presented us to the rest of Lost Youth and they liked it.

 

  1. The band name ‘The Dutch Rudders’ must have caused some laughs along your career. Could you go into more detail about the choice for that name?

It comes from the movie ‘Zack And Miri Make A Porno’. It’s probably the most depressing position in the sexual history. We thought it was funny when we were 17, we still do in fact.

 

  1. You recently made a video for the new track “I Was A Teenage Antichrist”. It features 80's aerobic dancers; any athletic ambitions for the band?

In fact we are all very athletic. But in the first place, we thought it was funny to see those athletes jump and dance to the beat of one our darkest and most hardcore songs.

 

  1. The band seems to like travelling back in time, from 80's aerobic to That 70's Show references with the song #Redforman. What's the connection here?

This song is about not feeling okay in whatever situation you get. You get up every day with the feeling that today’s a new day, let’s make the best of it. But it gets tiring knowing that by the end of the day, you’re still not okay. And in some ways that made us think of Red Forman. No matter what happens, he always seems an old and grumpy man who wants to stick his foot up your ass.

 

  1. Your Facebook band page states ‘Tormented punx’. How tormented is the band and its music according to you?

We thought it sounded cool. Tormented is a beautiful word even though its meaning is less beautiful. But besides the aesthetic side, most of our songs are written with memories of certain events in our head that still haunt us. Seeing someone you love pass away, breaking up, hurting people, those are mostly our main topics we write about. They’re not very happy themes but we can find comfort in writing down what we feel. In the song “I Was A Teenage Antichrist” we sing, “I don’t know why I’m writing this down, I just keep writing and writing.” And that’s true, we don’t know why we write this but it helps.

 

  1. Does that torment express itself in the rough sound and hoarse vocals?

The hoarse vocals are necessary because we can’t sing very well with our clean voice. If we sing hoarsely or shout, suddenly it’s much better. Also because we like bands like Off With Their Heads and Dillinger Four.

 

  1. For the song “Avoid The Crazy Eyes” you used an intro with a quote about God jizzing in your eyes and so on. Where did this come from?

Californication, Season 3 Episode 10: Dogtown. The two protagonists go out on heavy drinking and they wake up in their car completely wasted. It’s a reference to the song as it’s about lying to yourself, lying to your loved ones about drinking. You tell them every time you’re not going to make a fool of yourself and that you won’t end up drunk but in the end they’ll find you on the floor wearing nothing but bathrobe.

 

  1. A Flemish band singing in English, using French songs and album titles like “Ceci N'est Pas La Mer A Boire” and “On Verra”. International plans?

We love the French language, it’s way more sexy and sensual than English. Dries writes most of our lyrics but because his English is terrible but his French is great, he writes everything in French. So before our song is ready to play, we have to translate the lyrics from French to English.This always results in beautiful lines like “Ce n’est pas la mer à boire” being raped. So we end up using them as song titles. And “On Verra”, was the line we used almost every time we had to decide something regarding the new album. So instead of being well prepared, we love to dive in and see what happens. “On Verra” became our new running gag in the band.

 

  1. Any future plans we need to know about?

We’re writing new songs right now, we’re hoping to record them somewhere this summer. We’ll see what happens! It would be very cliché to end this interview with ‘on verra’, isn’t it?

 

 – David Marote