Author: Joseph James

Interview: Ash Grunwald

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Ash Grunwald answers the phone and then breaks off to yell to his young daughter to go see her mum.

“Sorry bro” he apologises.”I just saw a snake in the garden, and I wanted to make sure my little girl was safe.’

Living in Byron Bay, Australia, brushes with snakes and spiders are pretty common, he tells me.

“I’m pretty desensitised to spiders. I’m not even scared anymore. I used to be a bit. But snakes I don’t like. Here we have ’em all. We have all the venomous ones because where I live is sort of sub-tropical. We have the big pythons and everything. But the pythons are cool.

“Like I was having a shower – we have this outdoor shower. I looked up and basically next to me was this three metre python, just hanging. I was like ‘…oh. How’re ya goin?’ They’re absolutely harmless. Well… not absolutely harmless. They are harmless, but you don’t want them to bite you. They really hurt if they bite. And they’ll strike you like a machine gun – they just keep biting. You can get big scars and stuff like that. So you’re not going to just go pick one up, of course.”

Chatting with Grunwald is entertaining. He’s laid back and forthcoming. I observe that Byron Bay, with its annual Bluesfest, is a natural fit for a man who is known for his own swampy, blues-inspired music.

“Bluesfest was my ultimate,” he agrees, “I’ve probably played it three or four times. I’m from Melbourne originally – nice culture, shit weather. I’d come up to Byron and be like ‘This is paradise!’ I’ve got a family now. We’re about 20 minutes out, near the beach. It’s a nice little compromise. It’s not too busy and [you’ve] still got access to all those things that you love about it. It’s pretty alternative, and it’s an idyllic location. I probably did 20 laps of Australia [on tour] before I made my decision, after about seven or eight years on the road.”

Grunwald is committed to his local community, recently getting up-in-arms about coal seam gas mining in and around Australia. He has been pressuring banks to divest from mining companies because of the environmental damage that they are causing. It’s a clear theme in his latest album, so I ask him to elaborate on his views.

“For the last album there was a strong message very much influenced by my work trying to stop coal seam gas mining from coming into my area here, and also going to the front line, where they’ve already got it up in Queensland. The lessons that I’ve learnt in that are just passed on in the songs.

“In another interview I was asked about a song titled ‘The Worst Crimes Are Legal’, and I really do stick by that. I’ve done a lot of travelling in the third world and people say ‘oh, it’s so corrupt!’, but the only difference with the corruption is that it’s not legal, and it doesn’t have a lot of papers that need to be filled out in triplicate. But it’s almost, in a sense, more honest. There are many systems set up to benefit multinational companies, to benefit the rich more than the poor. It’s not a fair system.

“We’re all cynical now. For me to say these things, it’s no big deal. Often the sentiment is ‘yeah, we all know that. Get over it. Stop talking about it’. But if we talk about it, we might be able to change it…

“We’ve got farmers committing suicide over here. Because they get bullied by these gas companies. They feel guilty too, because they’ve had these farms for generations.  This is the first time in hundreds of years that the farmers know how the elders feel. We had elders at these rallies, now holding hands with farmers, and they’ve never been buddies really. Now they’re in the same position. Now the farmers know what the indigenous people feel like, because they’re experiencing this second takeover.

“These dudes [Gas mining companies] are getting plucky. That’s the thing that really got me off my arse. Early on it would have been in some regional town, away from where people can see. But now they’ll try for the middle of Sydney and crazy stuff. They were trying to get licences for right in the middle of Sydney, right near the water supply.

“Here in the Northern Rivers area we actually had a win. We never thought we would, but we actually managed to keep them away. They’ve left – poor corporates, they’ve been paid to leave by the council – but at least they’re gone. So it can happen! Things can be done if people do try.

“A lot of people don’t even listen to lyrics. You want it to work on a musical level perfectly, without any compromise, and then still have a message.”

“You want it to work on a musical level perfectly, without any compromise, and then still have a message.”

When I ask Grunwald to describe his sound, he calls it “an original take, roughly in the region of the blues genre. So it’s modern blues. Sometimes it sounds like blues rock – but not always. Sometimes it sounds like delta blues. . . and sometimes it doesn’t sound anything like blues, but often it’s in that rough region – it’s just a different take on it. And it’s my hope – and it’s up to others to say whether I’ve achieved this or not – my aim is to bring a freshness to the genre. Looking at it afresh and taking it in different directions. Almost going backwards, to the early stuff, to bring it forwards past what people normally think of the blues.”

One way that Ash brings this freshness to the genre is to use less standard instruments. For example, his recent albums eschew the use of electric bass guitar, with  the most recent album, NOW, featuring Ian Perez from Wolfmother using synths to record bass parts, and the album before that featured Scott Owen from the Living End on the acoustic double bass. Grunwald also has a tradition of using weird and creative percussion instead of drums, in the vein of Tom Waits.

“My thoughts on bass is the same as my thoughts on the drum kit” he tells me. “I have conventional drums on those last two albums, but before that I hardly ever had a conventional, straight-down-the-line drum kit.

“Straight-down-the-line drums and normal bass… I’m not really that into. There’s got to be a really good player playing it, or there’s got to be some reason. And if you want to do rocky things, OK, use the kit, use the right tools for the right job. But I love Tom Waits albums where it’s all a little bit different, you know? I don’t think that there’s any point doing things just exactly the same as things we’ve seen a million times before.”

So in order to mix it up and escape from a generic sound, Grunwald tries new things.

“Way back in the day I was getting pots and pans and hitting car doors with a hammer, and just weird things, just anything to break up that same old kit. It’s the same with the bass. If I’d gone and done a psychedelic rock album with the same old drums and bass it would have been too normal. I want to do something that sounds different and bring something new to the table.”

“And as it worked out with that synth bass, moog synth – beautiful warm analogue – it’s way bassier than you can get with a bass guitar. And different attack. A finger on a string is an amazing kind of attack for a bass note, that’s fantastic. But a key from a keyboard is a different matter. So you can have things that go [hums a fast, concise bass line] and it’s really precise, and really, hugely fat. And the fatness isn’t affected by amps, and strings and magnetic pickups, and all those acoustic factors. But still, a warm analogue synth can be impossibly fast. That’s what I like about the synth bass.

“I did one album where I built a cheapie drum kit and detuned it all. And then I just started grabbing bits of metal. And spanners, and pots and pans, and chains… and I just gaffer taped them all to the kit. And when I was overdubbing I would play on this junkyard kit. It was pretty out there. But what I did for years was having a guy play a car door with a hammer. That was pretty out there too.

“The first influence was Tom Waits, who pioneered that kind of thing. After that I went deeper and I went back and listened to a whole lot of field hollers. You know, the black slaves in America working in chain gangs and the only percussion is their tools hitting the earth, or hitting the trees or whatever. It’s almost my favourite genre of music, those work songs. So that influence comes into a lot of my songs over the years. I don’t think I’ve done an album for a very long time where there wasn’t some sort of junk percussion on something.”

Despite having nine studio albums, and numerous awards, I’d hazard a guess that the name Ash Grunwald isn’t that familiar to most New Zealanders. But most of will us have heard his song, “Walking”. Grunwald laughs when I suggest that he may be best known on this side of the Tasman as “the guy from the New World ad”.

“Well I hope I do get that, in a way, because it gets the music out there. They had to use somebody’s track, and I’m glad they used mine. We all go shopping. That song has been so good to me, because it was in a Hollywood movie called Limitless, which was Bradly Cooper and Robert De Niro. Bradly Cooper took this drug which gave him limitless mental faculty. And I was mega-stoked, because when he took the drug they put ‘Walking’ on turned up really loud, and put it in a montage scene. It was mastered really loud, and featured quite a bit in the movie, which was epic! That’s probably why I got that New World ad.

“It was good. It got it out there. I know there’s purists, guys like Tom Waits who would never want his music used for any product. And I’d love to be that much of a purist, but I don’t feel like in the standing of music, that I’m in a position to not appreciate the publicity from it. People are hearing my song, and I do appreciate that.”

Grunwald has covered some Tom Waits songs, and one of his biggest hits was a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’. I ask him to explain his process for choosing songs to cover.

“It’s got to be something you love – it’s a no-brainer if it’s an old blues song. You can bring it to people who haven’t heard it before, and that’s all cool. And when you pick something like a Gnarls Barkley song – I picked ‘Crazy’ – it’s gotta be interesting, quirky.

“‘Crazy’ was funny because it’s huge – everybody knows the song. It was a motivation to think that here’s a huge song that everybody knows, but it’s very soulful and right down my alley. And there’s another song I did on Trouble’s Door called ‘Sail’ by this band AWOL Nation. They’re so different to what I do, but that particular song has crossovers with what I do. So I thought it would be great. It’s like the old-school – someone brings out an album, and somebody else covers it straight away. It’s something that’s not very much done anymore, but it used to be done. I think its good to put an interesting spin on it. Hard to know – usually done on a case-by-case basis.”

I ask Grunwald about his past collaborations, and which people he would like to team up with in the future.

“I’d love to jam with Gary Clark Jr. Never say never in this industry. Never say it will happen, because there every chance it won’t. But never say it won’t happen, because sometimes it does. I’m going to do a recording. We have high hopes – and apparently quite realistic hopes – of getting Tony Joe White and Taj Mahal on the next album, which would be absolutely phenomenal for me. Tony Joe White is actually a huge hero of mine, and Taj Mahal is probably one of the most respected names in blues and roots music these days.

“And that came absolutely out of the blue. that had absolutely nothing to do with me. A producer from America contacted me and said ‘Come over. I’ll get you a flight. Come do an album’. … So weird things do happen at times!”

Grunwald mentions that he gets the chance to meet a lot of these legends in passing at Bluesfest.

“I met Tony Joe White about ten years ago and I frothed. I lost my mind. I thought it was really cool.”

I ask about how he manages to keep his head when has such a busy touring schedule. Initially, for his NZ tour, Grunwald had three gigs planned in a two day space. Now he has tacked a Raglan show onto the following day.

“Is playing Raglan a surf-motivated decision? Well, it doesn’t not factor in. I’m looking forward for going for a wave there, that’s for sure. The gig last time in Raglan was sick anyway so it’s motivation to go back.

“I like being busy. I really have burnt the candle at both ends this year. Part of me wants to slow down, but what opportunity do you decide to miss? That’s a tough one. But you’re not here for a long time, so it may as well be a good time and fit in as much as you can.”

And that’s Ash Grunwald, looking back into the past for inspiration, and then combining that inspiration with creativity to forge a new and original path ahead of him. Whether it’s working with different artists, trying odd instruments or playing in new places, Ash Grunwald is working hard to keep the blues genre fresh and inventive.

 

Joseph James

 

ASH GRUNWALD NEW ZEALAND GIGS:

Friday 27 November
BackBeat – Auckland
www.facebook.com/backbeatnz
1/100 Karangahape Road, Auckland
Tickets $20+ bf:
http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/tour/4966/Ash-Grunwald.utr
Doors open 8pm

Saturday 28 November
Blenheim Brews, Blues and BBQ (afternoon) with Salmonella Dub Sound System, the Nudge plus many more
For info & ticketing info go to http://www.bluesbrewsbbqs.co.nz

Saturday 28 November
Meow – Wellington (evening)
www.welovemeow.co.nz
9 Edward St, Te Aro, Wellington
Tickets $20 + bf:
http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/tour/4966/Ash-Grunwald.utr
Doors open 8pm

Sunday 29 November       
Yot Club  – Raglan
9 Bow St, Raglan
Tickets $10 from http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/ticket/4994/Ash-Grunwald.utr
Doors open 8pm

ASH GRUNWALD LINKS:
www.ashgrunwald.com
www.facebook.com/AshGrunwald
twitter.com/AshGrunwald
www.youtube.com/ashgrunwald
ashgrunwald.bandcamp.com

Buried Treasure: Copeland – Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden cover)

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Buried Treasure is a semi-regular feature that explores some hidden musical gems – the rare and forgotten B-sides, covers, hidden tracks, live versions and alternative takes that deserve some recognition.

There are a few thematic changes that mark the start of the winter season here in Montana for me.  First and foremost, snow.  This morning I awoke to the first snow of the year here in the northern hemisphere.  And for reasons I cannot explain, the first smattering of snowfall triggers my brain to start playing my collection of Copeland albums.  Snow and Copeland.  Makes sense right?  Nothing screams snow more than a band from Lakeland, Florida.  All confusing correlations aside, the colder and snowier it gets here in Montana, the more and more Copeland finds it’s way into my music listening rotation.

Curiously enough, along with the morning snow, I was asked by Joseph James to write an entry for the Buried Treasure segment.  I have made it a point to be more in tune to the signs and synchronicities in life and knew that I absolutely needed to write an entry and it absolutely needed to be on Copeland.  Thankfully, Copeland’s long musical career is full of forgotten B-sides, covers, and hidden tracks which made selecting a subject for this entry easy.

For those who may not know, Copeland is an American rock band with a uniquely beautiful quality.  This beauty can most likely be attributed to the voice of their frontman Aaron Marsh.  As a person who tends to lean toward sadder, more angsty styles of music, Copeland tends to be out of place in my record collection as the majority of their work is fairly uplifting and for lack of a better word, nice.

Perhaps it is this “niceness” that caused me to stop and look twice when I first heard the all too familiar lyrics of “Black Hole Sun” being sung by none other than Aaron Marsh.  Granted, I was listening to Copeland’s 2007 release “Dressed Up & In Line” at the time and should’ve known that it was of course Aaron Marsh singing the lyrics of Chris Cornell and Soundgarden’s 1994 hit “Black Hole Sun”.  But nonetheless, the stark contrast between Aaron Marsh’s voice and the gloomy vibe of “Black Hole Sun” was a quick head turner.

It’s always impressive when an uplifting artist like Copeland can take on a sad, dark medium like “Black Hole Sun”, which some say is slang for a particular way of preparing heroin, and turn it into something that listeners, like myself, actually prefer over the original version.  Taking on a cover with as much notoriety as “Black Hole Sun” takes a tremendous amount of courage, especially when it comes from an entirely separate genre of music.

Check out Copeland’s “Black Hole Sun” cover:

And now, with all seriousness set aside, whether or not you like Copeland’s cover of “Black Hole Sun” one must at least take the time to listen to their alternate, hidden-track version of their cover.  This “Bonus Track” was tucked roughly fifteen minutes into the sixteenth track of “Dressed Up & In Line”.  I have absolutely no clue who is singing this version (possibly their drummer Jon Bucklew?), but it’s definitely not Aaron Marsh.  However, this individuals ability to power through the entire song without losing their composure is absolutely commendable.  I challenge you to listen to the entire song without laughing.
Here’s Copeland’s alternate cover of “Black Hole Sun”:
C.J. Blessum

Welcome to the Will Not Fade family CJ Blessum

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CJ Blessum has joined the Will Not Fade team as a contributor. We first met over the internet when he asked me to review something for his band, Ranges. [Review here]. We kept in touch afterwards, and now he has accepted my offer to become a contributor. He offers a great perspective, being an accomplished musician with his own recording studio. He also lives in Montana, which means he will have opportunities to see bands that I’d never get to see in New Zealand. Keep your eyes peeled for his first post this weekend.

Here’s CJ’s story:

“I didn’t start digging into music until I was about seventeen years old.  Before this, music was just whatever was being played on the local radio stations.  Growing up in rural Montana before the internet became what it is today, it was almost impossible to know anything outside of what the radio was playing.  It wasn’t until I saw/heard a cousin of mine play Green Day’s Time Of Your Life on an acoustic guitar at a family reunion that I realized I could be the one making the music people listen to.  That day changed my life and completely redirected where I was headed.  I started finding bands I’d never heard of and would download whatever songs I could find by them on Napster and then add them to mixtapes that I would listen to over and over again.  Eventually, I got together with a few friends and started my first band.  We sucked really bad.  But it was a starting point.

College opened new avenues for me with music as I was able to find friends dedicated to their musical craft enough to start recording EPs and full lengths ourselves, designing and packaging the albums ourselves, and then taking our creations out on small tours around the American northwest.  Realizing how much can be done by “doing it yourself” is a very empowering thing.  The idea that people were actually consuming our music was phenomenal and it reestablished a belief in myself that I was supposed to be doing this.  Though bands would eventually fall apart and disappear I never stopped making music.  During this time I took some online recording classes from the Berklee College of Music and eventually became a professionally certified Pro Tools engineer.  With this I’ve built my own studio, called The Low Country, and have been recording local bands ever since.

Even after getting married and having kids I’m still making music.  Along with a friend and bandmate, I’ve also built a graphic design and screen-printing business called A Thousand Arms that I’m lucky enough to call my job.  We work with a bunch of local bands and have found a true passion in helping bands get great looking merchandise to sell at their shows.  With all of this I am also a guitarist and lead song writer for a post-rock band called Ranges.”

Album Review: Killing Joke – Pylon

Killing Joke Pylon Cover Art
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It was inevitable that I would become a Killing Joke fan.  Funnily enough, one of my teachers at high school introduced me to them.

This teacher probably made one of the best impressions on me in my last year of school. He made of point of looking out for me and we often discussed our mutual love of music. He was from Birmingham – or “the town that GBH were from”, as he’d say. He loved telling me about the festivals and concerts he’d attended. Glastonbury was a perennial favourite. He’d attended Foo Fighters Wembley show that I had a DVD copy of. And most of his stories were about the early days of punk. I loaned him a few punk CD’s of bands I’d recently discovered – stuff like Rise Against and Anti-Flag – and he loaned me a few Killing Joke records in return.

I remember him showing them to me in class one morning. There was the original eponymous album, along with the 2003 album of the same name, with the bright colours and the creepy clown on the cover. He also had the second album, What’s This For?, and possibly Night Time. He gave me a cheeky grin and explained that this was the music he liked to play loudly when his wife wasn’t home.

I was transfixed when I gave the CD’s a listen. Listening to the music was like taking part in some kind of cult ritual.  It was raw, heavy and unique. The way that frontman Jaz Coleman hissed, shrieked spat and shouted his lyrics was so unconventional. The primitive tribal rhythms of the drumming was so powerful. The guitars were heavy and dynamic.

I quickly sought out my own copies of albums that featured two of my favourite drummers – Pandemonium, featuring Tom Larkin from Shihad, and Killing Joke [2003] featuring Dave Grohl. I read more about the band. It turned out Jaz Coleman was New Zealand citizen. He owned York St studios, and his influence as producer was obvious in the first Shihad album, Churn (and more recently, FVEY). I bought each successive Killing Joke album that the band released, and attended the Wellington gig of their first ever NZ tour in 2013.

Killing Joke

Pylon is studio album number 16, and third in a triptych along with Absolute Dissent (2010) and MMXII (2012). It follows the same formula that we’ve come to expect – crushingly heavy and abrasive post-punk with lighter new wave moments. There are the typical doom and gloom dystopian themes of paranoia, mistrust of the powers that be and protesting against surveillance. What are the odds that all four band members have prepped for the apocalypse, each owning bunkers filled with protective tinfoil suits and enough emergency supplies to last them a few decades? But in all seriousness, at least the lyrics contain some substance. Give me protest music full of conspiracy theories over mindless pop music any day.

Album opener “Autonomous Zone” signals a return to the familiar KJ sound. The bridge is especially good, with a drum solo leading into a driving middle eight. Listen out for the stunning bass guitar fills as well. “Dawn Of The Hive” is relentless, with a synths in the chorus sounding glossy yet dangerous. We have the same barrage of sound found in Absolute Dissent married with some of the poppy catchiness of Night Time.

What I like about Pylon is that despite the subject matters and heavy riffing, it isn’t too oppressing. There are more electronic sounds than I would have expected in light of their recent albums. “Euphoria” sounds, well, euphoric, along the lines of “In Cytheria” and “You’ll Never get To Me”. “New Cold War” features a Nine Inch Nails styled offbeat dance beat. “New Jerusalem” borders on jangly. The brighter new wave style brings balance to the music, and prevents it from becoming a boring sludgefest. This is not to say that the band has gone soft on us, but too much chugged riffing can start to grate.

In this current technological era Killing Joke could be seen as irrelevant cynics – old men angrily yelling at clouds. But then you consider their legacy, influencing and inspiring bands like Metallica,  Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Shihad and Tool and it becomes clear that their importance doesn’t correlate with mainstream recognition. And if anything, Killing Joke should be celebrated for being underground and different. They’re not quite punk, metal or industrial. They’re not conventional. And their insistence on forging their own sound is what makes them so special.

After 16 albums, you could have forgiven Killing Joke if they had started to sound a bit stale. But they don’t. MMXII wasn’t my favourite, but Pylon is able to stand up on its own merit. It’s dense, murky and aggressive, without being overly depressing. It’s a visceral roar that pummels your ear canals. It’s paranoid and dark, subversive and political.  It’s the sort of music to blast when the wife is out.It’s exactly what you want to hear from Killing Joke.

 

Joseph James

EP Review: Kacy Hill – Bloo

Kacy Hill Bloo EP cover
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It sounds like Kacy Hill is one of those lucky right-place-right-time people. She started out as a model (which could explain why she looks familiar, especially if you’ve ever seen American Apparel advertisements). This modelling work somehow led on into dancing, which landed her a role as a stage dancer on Kanye West’s Yeezus tour. Hill somehow managed to capture Ye’s attention, and after listening to her demo backstage, he decided to sign her to his label G.O.O.D Music.

If you’re not a Kanye fan, don’t let this put you off. This isn’t a hip hop release. Although it is definitely manufactured pop.

HIll has a great voice. The most similar name I can think of is Florence Welch (of Florence + the Machine).

First track “Foreign Fields” features crackles and static to give it a warm, vinyl-like feel. It’s a simple song that showcases Hill’s stunning voice, accompanied by crisp piano. There is a trip-hop vibe to it, with a handclap metranome transforming into an electro drum beat. The chorus feels messy with extra effects that make Hills sound distant and echo-y, but it helps to contrast against the slightly sterile verses.

EP highlight “Arm’s Length” takes us into Florence + Machine territory, with upliftingly cooed choruses and ethereal bridges. It’s a joyous anthem that marries delicacy with club music.  “Shades of Blue” brings the mood down. The thunderous drums are cool, but I question why Hill chose such a gloomy song as the closing track. When a début EP like this only contains three songs, each song needs to be strong enough to all make a positive statement. Ending on a depressing note taints the overall experience.

The piano-led gospel-come-pop works well, although the overproduction and excessive effects don’t always serve to enhance the music. The songs work best when striped right back to the basics of just piano and vocals. As they say, less is more. Hill’s voice is gorgeous, and I’d far rather listen to her than half the tripe that plays on the radio these days. This short taster is a promising show of Hill’s potential. Let’s just hope that in the future she can let the songs do the talking, instead of hiding behind unnecessary overproduction.

Joseph James