ZapTown

I have to admit I was not excited about the record at first. Their single, “Don’t Dance” did not hit me right away. It sounds at first like any other noisy electronic alt-pop track out now, a la Killers, or a pissed-off Electronic. Upon a few more listens, and seeing the live Chicago performance on their MySpace page, I saw the error of my ways. Yes, it is bouncy and dancey, the lyrics are a bit abstract, but the energy I missed the first time hit me like a sack of doorknobs. With how much I appreciate frenetic music, I should have picked up on this right away.

Anyway,  their new EP, Can’t Stop Not Knowing,” is a fine little gem. Frantic and powerful, the tracks are packed good hooks and harmonies. Radish does well to mix the dance beats with rock beats; they blend rather well.

The New Loud features Jessi on keyboards, Shane on the guitar, Radish Beet (nice name!) on drums, and they all contribute to vocals. Check out their great live performance at the Chicago Dark Room on their MySpace page. Jessi’s screech comes out of nowhere and almost made me pee a little. The folks of The New Loud took time out of their busy schedule of scaring children and elderly people to answer a few questions for us, for which we are obviously grateful.

Link: http://www.myspace.com/thenewloud and http://the-new-loud.blogspot.com/

Your album Can’t Stop Not Knowing was mixed by Mark Trombino(producer of a few Jimmy Eat World and Blink 182 releases, and former member of Drive Like Jehu). What was it like working with someone with those credentials?

Working with Mark is great. He was our was our first choice for mix engineers. After we got his contact info, we sent him some demos of the tracks and he was really into them. The EP mixes sound amazing and we just finished up the LP mixes right now. We love the way everything has turned out. From the outset we intended for both releases to sound different from one another as we didn’t want to make it seem like we recorded 15 songs total and put 5 over here and 10 over here. We wanted each release to have its own sound and atmosphere. Mark definitely delivered on that front. The LP sounds very different from the EP. Both equally good, but very different from one another.

As Mark is in CA, it would’ve been nice to fly out for the mixes, but being a totally independent, self-released band, we just didn’t have any budget for it, so all correspondence has been through e-mail.  We have a pretty strong vision of how things should sound in terms of relative levels and Mark is totally cool when we send him revisions. As we finished up the last of the LP revisions, Jessi jokingly mentioned that we shouldn’t tell Mark the disc is done and keep sending him fake revisions for the LP, even after it is pressed so we can still keep in contact with him – LOL!

According to your blogspot site, you’ve been on a number of tours, including a bad night in NYC. I’ll let readers visit your site to read up on what transpired, but has anything changed in your touring  strategy in light of the events from that night?

Since our last West Coast tour in 2007, our tour strategy has been to slow down a bit and focus on the back-to-back release of our upcoming EP/LP. You hear so many people talk about how touring and playing live is where bands are making their living as music sales decline, but the reality is that the market is completely over-saturated when it comes to lesser known touring bands. Trying to get a foothold when you’re an unknown consumes tons of resources, both in terms of time and money. Over the years we’ve tried to adapt the philosophy of ‘working smarter not harder’. We love playing live and we are definitely up for touring, especially as we consider the intensity of our live performance to be one of the band’s biggest strengths. At the same time, we are less inclined to play shows for the sake of playing shows, hoping that the press around the releases creates an environment where touring makes more sense.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin isn’t really known for it’s powerful music, especially the kind you deliver. What local influences do you cite, if any?

Between 1999-2003 I worked doing sound at a small, 100 person capacity venue called The Cactus Club in Milwaukee. One of the best and, at the time, one of the only places where more underground bands were coming to Milwaukee besides basements. Over those years I saw/ran-sound-for a bunch of different great live bands including The White Stripes, Bright Eyes, The Faint, Cursive, Zen Guerilla, Lonesome Organist, Bad Wizard, Wanda Jackson, etc. Seeing those bands play their sets in the same venue that we play our shows was totally inspiring.

What would be your ideal venue to play- hall size, bands to play with, event to play, etc?

After playing however many shows we’ve played over the years, I can say, positively, that the venue size/shape/capacity/bill doesn’t matter to us at all. The only thing that matters is if there are people there who are getting into the music. Without an interested crowd, its like playing into a vacuum in deep space. A lot of times I go to shows, especially smaller shows and the crowd is just standing there. Even if they’re into the band, they just stand still. I’m not sure what happened over the years, but audiences both larger and smaller seem to be losing their energy. I think a lot of people don’t understand that when you go and see a band play live, despite the band being on stage and the crowd being on the floor, there is a definite interaction that happens. It begins with the band, but the energy should bounce back and forth between the stage and floor. When the crowd is interested, but unresponsive, energy levels drop significantly. Its like trying to play tennis without another person on the other side of the net to volley the ball back. Sure you can hit the ball as hard as possible, but if its not being hit back, most, if not all of the purpose is lost. I think as people use computers for more and more of their entertainment, we are all losing our sensitivity to pick up on this exchange of energy.

How much planning was put into covering the Radiohead song ’2+2=5′?  Did it just come out one day in practice, or was there a specific idea you had before hand?

The song was originally released on a Radiohead tribute compilation in which we did the mix for it. When it was set that Mark Trombino was going to mix our releases, we decided to include our interpretation on the EP.

For the tribute, we were given a list of possible songs to use. Jessi initially was shooting for the song ‘Lucky’, as it is one of her favorites, but when I heard it under the pretense of covering it, my mind was blank. We listened to a few more tracks and upon listening to ’2 + 2 = 5′ I immediately had ideas for how to re-work the song into something that I thought was both different and representative of The New Loud. Sometimes people are more receptive to cover songs from newer band’s than originals, so int he event that was going to be the case, I wanted this to not just be a cover of ’2 + 2 = 5′, but I also wanted this to be The New Loud, as a band, in a 2.5 minute microcosm, showcasing as many of our strengths as possible. We wanted incorporate my vocals and Jessi’s vocals, both as their own entities and in harmony. We wanted to have singing vocals, softer floatier parts, as well as gang shouts. We wanted to incorporate Radish Beat’s use of both electro drums and live drums and have the rhythm parts range from something groove oriented with deep dub-ey bass to something super aggressive with thrash drums and saw tooth bass. We wanted to add melodic keyboard parts as well as filter noise keyboard parts. We made sure to not do anything we wouldn’t incorporate into one of our own songs which is why we decided to skip the arpeggiated guitar part in the beginning, instead substituting a more random keyboard sequence and almost progressive bass line.

All in all I think we did exactly what we set out to do. Mark’s mix on the EP really gave the whole track focus and consistency which was missing from the tribute CD version.

On your press release you mention that some songs on  Can’t Stop Not Knowing had 60-80 tracks that were used in the songs. When playing these tracks out, do you bring all the tracks with you, do you set them up on site, or do you do without?

We travel with an Alesis Masterlink, a hard disc recorder with just a L/R output. We have all the sequences mixed to the left channel and a click track in the right channel. We’ve mixed all our bass and some keyboard and vocal effects into the sequence channel. We’re trying to get as close as possible to the CD, but we still want to bring as much live playing to the audience as possible. Except for a couple parts none of the drums or percussion sounds are sequenced, Radish just plays all of that live between acoustic drums and electronic drum pads. I play all the guitar live and Jessi plays as much keyboard as possible. We haven’t started sequencing any vocal parts except for effects, yet, but in the future we may try and layer some of the bkg. parts so they’re more full sounding. Live we’re relying more on the intensity of performance, plus at the stage we’re at you don’t want to make anything too complicated for whoever is running the sound, as in smaller venues the sound engineers can be pretty spotty at best.

How has media attention affected your playing, your reception at shows? 8. How, if at all, has professional representation changed the band?

Getting the band’s name out there definitely helps. Its opened some new doors for us, for instance we played CMJ this past year which is positive, despite the forced brevity of our performance – LOL! Fingers crossed we get into SXSW, but you never know. Everything is all about what kind of connections you can build and having press and professional representation of some kind definitely helps with that. Aside from having legal and PR representation the band continues to be totally self funded/released/managed. We are looking to retain as much control as possible, so, we have not even pursued any labels at this point and probably won’t. Management is something that may interest us in the future, in order to let go of some of the day-to-day which would leave us more time to focusing on the most important part of the band which is creating new, interesting music.

Based on the number of releases you’ve put out, the band is relatively young. How long has the band been together, and what influences drew you each to one another?

Individually The New Loud is influenced by a huge variety of different bands and styles – everything from new wave/post punk to dub/reggae to hip hop/R&B to punk/hardcore to 90′s indie to African and more. The New Loud as a band is trying to blend all the elements we love about all the disparate genres and create something that sounds like a cohesive group. Radish and I formed The New Loud in 2001 as a power pop band working on writing good, catchy songs. When Radish added the electronic pads and kick drum to his acoustic drum set, and we added Jessi on keyboards in 2004, it was to open up our options. We didn’t want to relegate ourselves to just playing ‘guitar rock’. In 2007, we adopted the sequences to further branch out. We don’t want to sound like a new wave band or a punk band or a R&B band, but we want to use some of the elements that identify those archetypes. After all I don’t really think the world needs another caricature of a ‘hardcore’ or ‘reggae’ band – what we need is something we haven’t heard yet. Something new is out there and we can’t stop not knowing what it is.