Interview with Oak

How did Oak form?

The band consists of me (Robin) on bass, Carl on drums/vocals and Alex on guitars/vocals. We've all known each other for a very long time, but we started playing together in the summer 2010. Back then, I hadn't been to many hardcore shows, but we went to a one-dayer which The Chariot played and it was completely nuts. Afterwards me and Carl were so stoked about it and started to talk about starting a band. Basically all we wanted to do was the exact same thing as The Chariot. (I didn't even know how to play bass, haha.) So we brought in Alex - the real deal guitar nerd. The first one and a half year consisted of us trying to compromise three very different wills into a common ground for music writing and getting to know each other better, both musically and personally. For our debut EP (under a different band name) we brought in a loose friend on vocals, but he left shortly after the recording. Then we did a bunch of shows with a stand-in drummer and Carl on vocals, but after a lot of discussion it became clear to us that we wanted to do this thing as a three piece. So we re-launched the band with our new band name - Oak.

Have any of you played in previous bands? Links to your material?

Well, this is my first band and where I've learned to play and write music. Alex and Carl used to play in a punk band called Dagligt Intag, but if you want to check out that stuff, you'll have to find it on your own.

What inspired the band to write such chaotic music?

At first, like I said earlier, The Chariot. We were really inspired by the intensity in their live shows, and chaotic hardcore seemed the most suitable music for that kind of stuff. Then that kind of music became part of our musical identity somehow and now, as we have developed as musicians, we've started to involve more of other elements that we're into. I love more riffy old school hardcore, Carl is more into emotional stuff and screamo and Alex has a huge turn on for Botch and Converge.

Have you toured outside Sweden before?

Actually not. We've played a lot in Sweden and done shorter tours on our own and last autumn, with Black Mask and Eternal Sleep from the US. Two bands I really recommend. Great people and insane tunes. Even heavier live.

How are you all feeling about your upcoming European tour?

We're so stoked. It will be our first tour with our new record and it's gonna be really fun playing our new songs live. Also, foremost, it's gonna be amazing to play outside of Sweden for the first time and doing a longer set of dates. Personally I'm most stoked about playing a fest called Punk Piknik in Poland, in a squat in central Warsaw and playing in Berlin.

Your lyrics are beautifully written. Do you write from your own perspective or in a more prose-driven perspective?

Thanks! Both me and Carl are writing the lyrics. Some of them on our own and on a few we've cooporated. The lyrics are written from our own perspective. I'd say the theme of the lyrics for this album is rootlessness (in different kinds) and the feelings it produces, like fear, lonelyness or resignation.

Americans tend to think of Sweden as a hub of death metal bands. Is there a scene where you live for the more screamo/hardcore-oriented music that Oak plays?

There's definetely a hardcore scene in Sweden. Although, there is usually only one or a few promoters in each city and quite small audiences. However, a lot of people tend to go to shows in each others cities to see foreign bands so the whole scene is pretty united. The main focus tend to be old school hardcore, but a lot of more modern hardcore is going on and taking more room as well. For example make sure to check out On the Edge of Forever and Totem Skin!

Is there any way that American fans can order your merchandise? I tried and was told that you don't ship to our part of the world.

Our web store isn't very up to date. Before or shortly after our tour we'll update it with our new merch. However, I'm afraid overseas shipping costs will be too high.. However, you can order our LP, on black or white splatter vinyl, from our labels Woodhammer and Hoborec.

Woodhammer
Hoborec

Do you have any (even far-future) plans to come overseas, potentially to the States?

As for now our future tour plans only include Europe. But we all really would love to tour the States, and another dream is touring in south east Asia. However I'm doing all of our booking on my own, so at this point it seems kind of far away.

Thanks a lot for the opportunity to talk about all this stuff.

Robin & Oak.

-Brian

Oak - Oak (2014)

"Wow."

That was the first thing I said when I heard this Swedish band's self-titled debut LP, and I'm still saying it.

Artwork: The beautiful wash of color belies the fury beneath. Oak exercises great restraint in covering their album this way, because any number of darker or more evocative images could have been justifiably used instead. It is beautiful, and simple, and hints at the ideas presented within - beautifully poetic lyrics, songs that were clearly labored over at great length, energetic but technically precise performances given, all of which might be lumped in with a host of other "hardcore" album covers. If I saw this in a bookstore, I would think it was either a hip indie band or a New Age compilation.

Structure: The songs are broken into groups, which are labeled as Chapters. Chapter III is available on cassette, but unfortunately, Oak does not ship to the US. The old sedan that I drive only has a cassette player, so trust me. I tried.

Sound: Loma Prieta's I.V. meets Norma Jean's Bless The Martyr & Kiss The Child. "Chaotic" is a somewhat effective label for this album's sound, but it also might lead a potential listener to lump Oak in with other "chaotic" bands before listening, which would be a shame, because Oak's sound is a unique blend of screamo, early and modern hardcore, and early 2000's metalcore.  They tease the listener with a semblance of straight-forwardness just before launching into odd-metered riffage at 100 mph, just to cut to a solo guitar, and in and out of a hundred different dynamic changes before the record is over. The whole thing is interesting to listen to, and truly interesting, not like a strange disgusting animal. Oak is a strange but beautiful animal, who can surprise and awe like Full of Hell but brings a poetry to the table that I would identify with bands like Loma Prieta and Converge.

For Fans Of: Full of Hell, Idylls, old Norma Jean, The Chariot

Favorite Lyrics: I avoid myself
As no company hurts worse

Favorite Track: Chapter II: Haze

1. Prolouge: Modest Hopes
2. Chapter I: Torn Down/Tearing Down
3. Chapter I: Dust
4. Chapter I: Roots
5. Chapter II: Ash
6. Chapter II: Haze
7. Chapter II: Galanty Shows
8. Chapter III: The World
9. Chapter III: Each Other
10. Chapter III: Ourselves

Rating: 4.5 / 5 

Merch: BigCartel
Listen: bandcamp
Follow: facebook

-Brian

LMI - Sleepwalker (2014)

Produced by Phillip Cope from Kylesa, Sleepwalker is the product of frustration. LMI come out of the box here with a classic hardcore punk sound filled with all the angst and anger of adolescence.

Artwork: This album's artwork was done by John Santos, who has done work for big names like Lamb of God, Torche, and Kvelertak. The imagery given all pertains to addiction and vices used to numb mental pain.

Structure: Sleepwalker is ten punk songs, back to back, with no filler or throwaway tracks. Every song counts, every song has a purpose, every song rips.

Sound: Immediately this record reminded me of the early hardcore pioneers - Negative Approach, Poison Idea, Black Flag - and although there are modern elements thrown in throughout the record's length, the overall sound never veers far from simple, bare bones, old school hardcore punk. The opening of "The Web" sums up the whole deal in about five seconds, and immediately conjures images of laced up boots and ripped jeans stomping a circle in the floor a suburban basement while the cops are pounding on the door after a noise complaint.

For Fans Of: Negative Approach, Dead Swans, Gallows

Favorite Lyrics: Hours inch on waiting for it all to end
Trying to deny what I know will happen next
Another pest in the web of misfortune
Another tool for someone else’s dream

Favorite Track: The Web

1. Rats Nest
2. Gutter King
3. Sleeping Machines
4. Rag Doll
5. In The Blue
6. Waiting on Melted Wax
7. Endless Circles
8. Destitute
9. The Web
10. Take and Continue

Rating: 4 / 5 

Merch: Bandcamp
Listen: Bandcamp

-Brian

Code Orange [Kids] - I Am King

The year 2012 gave us Love Is Love // Return To Dust, the devastatingly beautiful full-length debut from Philadelphia-based four-piece Code Orange Kids. Now two years later, having trimmed their name, the genre-bending game-changing youngsters, who aren't so young anymore, are back to proclaim loudly what they have cryptically alluded to for months:

life be no longer hopeless mission

for everything or none at all

see the world with code orange vision

carve the words into your skull

I AM KING

If you watched the video, I don't need to say any more. Produced by Kurt Ballou (Converge) at GodCity, the album drops September 2nd. Be there or be nowhere.

Preorder CD/LP: Deathwish
Listen: BandCamp
Merch: Deathwish /// Cold Cuts /// All In

"That Album"

It's safe to say that every hardcore kid has "that album" - the album that originally sparked their interest in heavy music. I'm old, so I hear kids saying all the time how [Album A] from [Band A] came out way back in 2009 and changed their life, and I laugh a little inside, not at the kids' expense, but at the generation gap that exists in hardcore. Regretfully, I got into it right at the tail end of what seemed to be a golden age of hardcore, in 2005, a year after what is now my favorite album (Converge - You Fail Me) had come out. A friend yanked me out of my heavy radio-rock milieu and took me to a show at the New Brookland Tavern in Columbia (still the smelliest venue I've ever been to) to see Norma Jean, The Handshake Murders, Darkest Hour, Haste The Day, Still Remains and At All Cost. I remember nearly every detail, down to the beads of sweat hitting me from The Handshake Murders' set, and I still have the Norma Jean shirt I bought at the show (and I have to pretend the phantom smell of century-old cigarette smoke doesn't still emanate from it.)

All of this to say, "that album" for me is Norma Jean's Bless The Martyr & Kiss The Child. Not only did this album bring me into a headspace where I could understand heavy music as album-oriented and artful, instead of the violent garbage that the mainstream portrays it as, it has remained for me through music trend after music trend after cheesy music trend (there are no synth-lead dance beats or auto-tuned passages of melodious effeminate singing) to be one of the heaviest and most immersive albums in my mental catalog of hardcore albums.

So very many bands mix synth-leads and auto-tuned singing in what may be unintentional efforts to make their music more palatable, more packagable, more attractive to the average person. They straighten their hair and jog in place, they swing their guitars over their heads in synchronized fashion, they add any element of pop music that they can get their grubby little hands and throw it in their blender in order to shamelessly dilute what hardcore was meant to be in the first place - a rejection of all things mainstream. On Bless The Martyr . . ., Norma Jean kicks off the first song and doesn't stop playing until the last track is over, adding very few overdubs after the fact. The album was recorded live to tape in one hour-long playthrough and was never run through a computer until the final conversion to CD format. Every instrument sounds live and fresh, rich and full and the whole band is all over every beat, every note, every odd-metered passage. I won't go into the technical descriptions of every song, but suffice it to say that this album simultaneously showed me that heavy music can be artful and that music can be intense while not being straight-ahead 4/4 headbanging.

I go back to this album once every few months, and I imagine that for the foreseeable future, I always will. It holds a charm that cannot be matched by modern offerings, and I'm sure that there are legions of hardcore kids older than me who would laugh at getting into hardcore in 2005 when they were in it in 1995 (or 2004, depending on the person). Age is relative, and I find that the longer I go to shows, the older I feel than those around me. The local scene in Augusta used to consist mostly of people three or four years older than me, but the majority of them grew up or dropped out and now I'm above the average age by a few years, which is fine. It is being passed down, as it should be. But in my mind, it began for me in a dimly lit bar when I walked into a raging sea of bodies and The Handshake Murders were playing "Apostate", guitars and sweat flying, all knobs at 10 and a 14 year old me with my eyes wide watched, feeling at once so out of place but so at home.

"RUNNING AWAY . . ."

-Brian

Satin Sulfur #5 - Shifting Shadow

Shifting Shadow is a testament to time. A few years ago, I drew a whimsical sketch of two boys running up a tree to a treehouse. The person who inspired the treehouse sketch and I are both avid Converge fans, and the band Converge put out a record in 2012 called All We Love We Leave Behind whose cover features what amounts to a stylized chart of moon phases. After several years of friendship, during which the person and I grew a great deal, I wondered what we would be like in twenty or thirty years, even fifty. Shifting Shadow is a simple piece, featuring two friends under a passing moon, beneath the tree they played on as children. I could try to cram a profound statement at the end of this, but I won't.

Oddly enough, the fourth piece of the series is not complete yet, although this, the fifth, was complete a week ago. Plans are coming together for publication in the near future. Just a little longer.

-Brian