News / Bands

Westin Glass (The Thermals)

SPB: Who is your favorite band you discovered on your last tour?

Glass: The most recent Thermals tour was in Europe. We played with a lot of good bands on that tour, at festivals and club shows all over the place. Our favorite was a band called Brawlers that opened our show at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, UK. Classic, super tight ‘90s style pop-punk, they reminded us of some great bands from California. The singer Harry has a cool voice with a lot of urgency and emotion. Tight riffs too. These guys are friends with the incredible Cribs. 

Monet Wong (L’Assassins, guitar)

SPB: L’Assassins definitely utilizes style as an element of the band in addition to the music. How do you feel the two are intertwined?

Wong: It’s funny that we seem to be able to get asked this type of question a lot - even though style is intertwined almost universally with every band: even eschewing style is a conscious "style choice" of sorts i.e. undoubtedly appearing to "not care about style" sends a specific image message, does it not?

I think that what people are noticing is that we have a "different style" than others particularly in the Minneapolis scene -- i.e. I think we all know what the au courant hipster band uniform is without necessarily acknowledging it -- how many times have we not been able to identify actually which drummer or guitar player that is under that beard and shaggy head of hair?

With that said, for L'Assassins, really it comes down to a few things: We take seriously that people are coming to "watch" as well as hear a band, so why not have some fun with it? Secondly, we really just like to dress like we do. We are dressing to entertain ourselves. Regardless of being in the band or not we'd be rocking aspects of the L'Ass look. We're also carrying on tradition of our influences: garage rock (roots rock of any kind really) is derivative by nature in all aspects. Being influenced by bands like the Cramps both musically, as well as stylistically, is not exactly something we're trying to hide. L'Assassins are more about being in your face, rather than trying to get across a subtle message. If people find that refreshing, all to the better.

Russell Emerson Hall (Tyranny Is Tyranny, vocals/guitar)

SPB: Do you do anything to reduce gas consumption/cost while on tour?

Hall: We downsized our speaker cabinets slightly and got the smallest vehicle we could all fit into (Honda Odyssey). It's a bit weird to think that promotion and distribution can all be handled with a laptop at home, but we're tied to physically schlepping gear in and out of vans and across state lines burning fossil fuel and choking the planet to play a 35-minute set to a handful of people for (maybe) gas money. Shouldn't we have transporters by now?

M. Lehto (October Falls)

SPB: What is your day job and how does it fit (or conflict) with your artistic goals?

M. Lehto: Basically I work as a branch manager at financial sector and, as I'm not a touring artist, it's quite easy to fit any band-related things into my daily schedule. Naturally sometimes the job takes a lot of extra hours, but usually then there's no motivation to work with music anyway due to other things occupying the mind, so that makes no difference really. Of course, there are some personal views that I have and what can be partly seen on the lyrics or interviews, yet those need to be kept out when working, but naturally that's not a problem. Overall, who would want to take care of their business and always have to face the counterparts personal opinions about life, today’s world, or the current situation? No one and [therefore] it’s better to make a difference between your daily life what includes artistic goals and your regular day-job.