Slaves, a new Sacramento-based band formed by vocalist Jonny Craig (ex-Dance Gavin Dance and Emarosa) and Alex Lyman of Hearts and Hands, is releasing their debut album, Through Art We Are All Equals, via Artery Recordings on June 24, 2014. The album, produced by Kris Crummett, is 11 tracks total and features guest vocals from Vic Fuentes of Pierce the Veil, Kyle Lucas, Tyler Carter of the band Issues and Jonny’s sister, Natalie Craig. Lyman wrote the record and recorded all the instruments, but he and Craig have put together a heavy-hitting, well-seasoned full band featuring drummer Tai Wright of Four Letter Lie and Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows, bassist Jason Mays from Of Machines, and guitarist Christopher Kim, also of Hearts and Hands. We here at Submerge have been keyed in on Slaves for a couple months now, getting early previews of the full album and updates from their management, and we’re stoked for the public to finally hear the epic rock album we’ve come to love. Slaves will play their hometown album release show on Friday, June 20 at Assembly with openers Kyle Lucas, Cemetery Sun, Wrings, Altessa, Overwatch and Imagine This. To hear some tracks off the new album and to learn more about this new group, visit Facebook.com/officialslaves, follow @slavesofficial on Twitter or hit up Arteryrecordings.com. To snag advance tickets ($13) to their Sacramento release show, visit Assemblymusichall.com.

Dance Gavin Dance moves past another bout of offstage controversy and releases epic new album

Considering everything Dance Gavin Dance has been through (or has put itself through, depending upon how you look at it), Downtown Battle Mountain II is a fitting title for the band’s latest album. Released March 8, 2011 it sees the band pick up where it left off after its arguably most successful effort, 2007’s Downtown Battle Mountain. Five of the band’s original members–guitarist Will Swan and drummer Matt Mingus welcomed back bassist Eric Lodge and powerhouse vocal duo Jon Mess and Jonny Craig in 2010–reunited to enter the studio late last year. Despite their years apart, DGD’s put forth similarly remarkable results as they had in the past, in more ways than one.

“Writing started in the fall of last year around September,” says vocalist Jon Mess from San Antonio, Texas, a day prior to the band’s scheduled performances at the 2011 South by Southwest Music Festival. “Prior to that, Will had already started writing new songs. All of November and December was the recording. Tracked drums, bass and guitar through all of November and some of December, and most of December was vocals. I was there for almost a month recording, so was Jonny.”

It may sound like things came together rather quickly. Mess didn’t rejoin the band until summer 2010. His arrival was quickly followed by a tour and soon after the recording process for Downtown Battle Mountain II began. However, for Mess, it seemed much more laid-back as compared to when the band hit the studio for Downtown Battle Mountain, which was recorded in just two weeks.

“On this one [the sequel], we had two months,” Mess explains. “Last time we were in this shitty hotel, and it was freezing cold. I think I was a little sick then, too. This time we were in this house, and we had all this time. It was a lot more relaxed and there wasn’t as much time pressure–at least for me. Jonny came off a tour with Emarosa, so he came in a little later, but it was way more relaxed than prior experiences.”

Life in DGD post-recording has been anything but laid-back. Controversy sprang up once again surrounding Craig’s substance abuse. This time around, he allegedly defrauded his fans by offering to sell his Mac Book to his Twitter followers. When checks were sent, and no laptops were received, the band was once again forced to play damage control. Craig was sent into a seven-day detox program, which he just recently emerged from. Mess spoke with Submerge about DGD’s seemingly perpetual state of turmoil and Downtown Battle Mountain II, which, despite the all the backstage hullabaloo, is perhaps the brightest post-hardcore gem the band has produced to date.

I caught your recent Fuel TV performance. How did that go for you?
I was sick when we did it, so I wasn’t too happy with it. It was in Los Angeles. It was right before our first show. That was interesting. We had a studio audience there cheering and stuff. It was fun, I guess. I tried to have fun even though I was sick.

Was that a different experience for you guys?
Yeah. I’d never done that before. That was awkward. We had to do the songs multiple times and they came in with different angles. Afterwards they were shooting a comedy special with a bunch of people from VH1’s Best Week Ever–those different panelist shows where they have different comedians talking about stuff. A bunch of those people were there doing some little skits, and they asked DGD to be the backing band and play a little jazz riff. I don’t know where people can see that. It might be on Fuel. We’ll probably announce that when we find out.

You just came up with something off the cuff?
Yeah, they wanted us to play some kind of jazz, walking bass line–little flow thing that the comedians could do their little skit over. The guys came up with something pretty quick, and it ended up sounding pretty cool.

On the new album, did you and Jonny collaborate on lyrics or did you mostly write separately?
We talked about some themes, but it was mostly separate. A very small percentage of the lyrics go together. It was more of a scattered thing. That’s been our style since the beginning.

What sort of themes did you discuss? What were you personally trying to express on this record?
I like to write about all sorts of different things–snippets, fragments of ideas or dreams I have, various little stories. I kind of break them apart and put them together in different songs. One line might relate to another song later, so it’s not a cohesive body of material per song, more fragments of things that range from talking about food to being mad about something. Broad topics–nothing real specific. I don’t want to pigeonhole into having any limitations on what I want to write about it.

You and Jonny have radically different vocal styles, is that also the case lyrically, and is it difficult to get them to mesh from song to song? Is that something you work on closely together?
I think as long as the delivery is good, and you’re hitting the right notes and it’s flowing well, then the lyrical content doesn’t have to mesh in that sort of sense. First we go for the musicality–something that’s melodic or rhythmic or exciting in terms of phrasing and rhyming rather than we need to have these lyrics go together or we need a concept. That comes second.

There definitely seems to be a lot of hip-hop influence in your delivery this time around. You have this growling sort of rap cadence going on in a lot of the songs. Is that something you’ve been working on a lot on this record?
Yeah that’s definitely intended. I like all my parts to rhyme, and when I write them, I think of them as sort of a rap, like if you could rap that part, it would still fit. I’m not into so much the long, drawn-out, heavy screams over the entire thing. I’m more interested in trying to make it not necessarily as complicated as possible, but as unique and interesting that I can think of. It does come across it sounding like a rap because it pretty much is. It’s just a screamed voice rapping.

The record has gotten some good responses so far. Are you happy with the reviews or do you not bother reading those?
Yeah, I read the reviews. The one thing with some reviews is that people who write reviews are English majors, or they’re into writing and they’re not musicians themselves, so they sometimes clutter up the review with colorful verbiage or whatnot instead of actually giving content or criticizing or talking about different parts of the album. For the most part, it’s been good reviews, and I’ve liked what the people have said. Every review has something that I’ll read and I won’t understand how they perceive that about the album, but to each his own. I did watch this Youtube video of someone who hated the album, and his reasoning behind it, it was so funny because it was the antithesis of what Dance Gavin Dance is. The reasons he disliked everything was because, well, you really just don’t like what our band is about, not the album itself.

Jonny just got out of detox. How is everything going with that?
It’s going really well, actually, and I’m saying this as someone who’s not necessarily positive about the situation. He’s being really honest and real about it for once. It’s actually a little surprising to me. We’ll see how it keeps going. So far so good.

South by Southwest is basically a big party. Is that something you’re worried about as far as Jonny is concerned?
He’s doing Narcotics Anonymous. He’ll drink. He’s not getting wasted or anything, but if people are expecting him to not drink, I don’t think that’s what he’s doing currently. I’m assuming after this tour he could go into an actual 30-day program, which would be nice, instead of just a seven-day detox, because that’s not going to do it, obviously. Yeah, Austin’s going to be a huge party, but we’ve got our manager, label guy, all the people who are looking out for him are going to be there. I’m not saying we’re going to babysit him like a little kid, but at the same time we kind of are.

I read the interview you did with Alternative Press, and you later apologized to your old singer Kurt Travis and Jonny on Twitter for some of the comments you made. Given what you said that you’re not always the most positive about the situation, was it difficult for you to rejoin the band and get back into that frame of mind?
First off, that interview was a phone interview, and he relayed what I said in a sort of manner that wasn’t necessarily what I was saying. He asked me why Kurt got kicked out, and there was no real reason. I listed a bunch of reasons and he [the interviewer] picked the one about cigarettes… I said that Will and Matt said that, and then Will and Matt were like, “That’s not necessarily what we said. You spoke for us.” And I was like, “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to speak for you.” Me and Kurt are good friends, so I felt like saying, “Hey man, it came across incorrectly.” It made it look like I was divulging a story that wasn’t my business.

In regards to coming back, I was skeptical. Since I left the band, I reconnected with Jonny. We were skeptical of how the album would go down. We were just thinking, hopefully we’ll get the album recorded and see what happens from there. It wasn’t really a high-risk situation for me, because I could just do the record and if something went wrong, I could just go back to what I was doing before. There wasn’t really a lot to lose.

You mentioned the interviewer misconstrued what you said. Do you think that happens a lot regarding this band?
I think to an extent, yeah, and I think there are things that I said that I might not exactly feel, but I just said them at the time. I think that happens to everyone. It’s half and half. Some things get misconstrued, but that happens. Sometimes we feel optimistic about the situation, sometimes we feel pessimistic. If we were interviewed one day, there might be different responses. I’m not saying we’re bipolar or anything, just normal changes of emotions that people have.

Dance Gavin Dance’s Downtown Battle Mountain II is available now through Rise Records. The band is also currently on a U.S. tour with I Wrestled a Bear Once, In Fear and Faith and others. The tour will bring DGD and company to Ace of Spades in Sacramento on April 8, 2011.

Jonny Craig is front and center on his solo debut

Jonny Craig is a name many of you might be familiar with. The now Lexington, Ky.-based singer is currently frontman for Rise Records’ indie core sextet Emarosa. However, now that he has a bit of down time from his regular gig, he’s decided to start from scratch, so to speak, with a brand new project—his first ever solo album, A Dream Is a Question You Don’t Know How to Answer.

Submerge spoke with Craig before sound check for his Nov. 23 show at The Door in Dallas.

Has having to start over with a new project reignited your passion for the music—having to rebuild a fan base with your own music?
In a way, it kind of sucks trying to go back and build a fan base, but then again, there’s not so much pressure. Like, “Oh, I’ve really got to nail this one, because everyone’s watching.” It kind of gives me a chance to go back and breathe a little bit and not be so worried about everyone’s opinions. Only I’m the one that matters. The backing band, if I mess up, they don’t care. Instead of having six opinions, you only get one. It makes it a lot easier for someone who fronts a band. It’s like, “There’s only one person writing this stuff; it’s you. So just relax, have a good time.” All you have to do is make sure your band is in place, and you go with it.

From what I’ve heard of the album, there seems to be a lot of different styles from song to song. Were you looking to branch out and try different things?
Like I said, we wrote skeletons to the songs, and then I sang over them. I just sang what I heard on the tracks. And then we were like, “This song’s a little funky, let’s put some weird guitar behind it or piano.” That’s how it really got decided. It was just me singing what I heard, and then it went from there. After we had the skeletons and the melodies down, then we did all the real guitar work and all the stuff that made the album—like the fillers.

So it sounds like a lot of it came together in the studio then”¦
Yeah.

Is that a lot different from how you’ve worked with Emarosa and Dance Gavin Dance in the past?
No, man. I just really like to go off the head when I record. I don’t like to over think melodies, over write things. I just like to go in and bust shit out, and think about it on the spot. If I don’t like it, I’ll start all over and find something new. I like to be 100 percent—I wouldn’t say improv—but not so organized. I like to relax and think to myself, “Hey, I want to go in here and do whatever I hear, because I’m going to trust myself. Instead of being like, “Oh, this needs to be catchier,” you know?

Before you mentioned that with this project, you don’t have to consider other opinions, just your own. Did that give you more leeway to explore the kind of stuff you were hoping to, like maybe stuff you weren’t able to do before with your music?
That’s the best thing about it. I didn’t go in writing anything. I didn’t go in expecting it to be, oh, like, “Let’s write an acoustic album,” or, “Let’s write a pop-y hip-hop album.” I just wanted to get in there and see what we could come up with. It was all about whatever came to my head. I hate people who over think everything and are so critical about what they play and how it sounds. I want to have fun singing. I just wanted to make an entire album just like that and show people that it can be done without stressing, and without really having much of a care except that you love music.

I watched the video for “I Still Feel Her, Part III” while getting ready for this interview. Was that a concept you came up with yourself or was it a director’s idea?
That was my idea.

Is it pretty true to the lyrics?
No, it has nothing to do with the lyrics. It’s a private meaning for me, and I’m not going to give it away.

It was pretty racy in the beginning with the two women making out half naked on the bed. Have you caught any flack for that?
No, you know, it’s whatever. Controversy is my middle name.

It doesn’t seem like something you shy away from.
Yeah, you know. I like to have fun. I like to do what I want, and I don’t care what anyone else does”¦ I just think a lot of people put up a front. Obviously, people aren’t as perfect as they portray. Like, they want to be in this band, and they want to be responsible and be role models for kids and stuff. I make music for myself, and I shouldn’t have to hide who I really am, because I make music to keep myself alive. I’m sorry that I might not be the best role model for someone’s child, or I might not be the best person for someone to look up to, but I want to be myself. If people say, “He drinks too much, or he does this or that.” I’m not going to hide who I am just so I can be bigger”¦ It’s just not who I am.

Writing music, I’m sure, you put a lot of yourself into that also”¦
The funny thing is, I never hid behind anything. And if you can’t grasp who I am or what I’m about, then that’s your problem. I guess that video—without giving too much away—is just me being like, this isn’t something I care about, people saying I drink too much or party too much”¦ I’m not going to get into it. It is what it is.

Jonny Craig will played The Boardwalk in Orangevale on Dec. 1, 2009 with Tides of Man and Sleeping With Sirens.

The Sweet Brag Tour w/ The Devil Wears Prada, A Day to Remember, Sky Eats Airplane, Emarosa
Club Retro, Orangevale | April 19, 2009
Words and Photos By Russsell Wonsley

Club Retro has not seen or felt such a concert for sometime. Before the show, a line of kids wrapped around the building and then continued onto the back of the church’s property. All of them to soon witness the chaos that would take place within the walls of the venue. Crammed against the newly added barriers, the kids waited for the show to begin.

There was almost a nervous chatter among the crowd of people. No one knew what to expect of such a dream team lineup the Sweet Brag Tour had to offer. Suddenly the lights dimmed, and the men of Emarosa took the stage. Leading the group with his recognizable voice, Jonny Craig started off the show with a great quality performance. Warming the crowd with songs such as “The Past Should Stay Dead” and leaving them wanting more with the song “Set It Off Like Napalm.”

Next to take the stage was the electronic-powered band Sky Eats Airplane. The band brought with them more of a hardcore sound that would continue into the rest of the night. With high stage jumps, Jerry Roush got the kids to start moving within the depths of the pit.

A Day to Remember were next to the stage for an anticipated performance.
They dropped their third album (and fourth overall) with Victory Records, Homesick, just about a month ago. It seemed as though the crowd had already caught on to the many gang vocals that the record contained. With beach balls flying into the crowd, ADTR took the stage playing the first song off the new album “The Downfall of Us All.” Jeremy McKinnon (vocalist) took control of Club Retro with his catchy lyrics and overwhelming stage presence. In addition to new material, the band pleased the crowd with classic hits such as “A Plot to Bomb the Panhandler” and “Why Walk on Water When We Have Boats.” Nearing the end of their set, Club Retro had become a sauna of sweaty teenagers.

Exhausted from what ADTR had just thrown down, the bustle of crew members preparing the stage for what everyone had gathered for beckoned the audience to reach back for more energy.

It looked as though the new label has been taking care of The Devil Wears Prada, as the stage was littered with professional lighting. The set opened with just purple ultra violent lights that casted an almost solid column of light up into the ceiling. The scene was chilling, as the battle was about to break out between good and evil.

It all began out of nowhere. The Devil Wears Prada took the stage and without wasting a second Mike Hranica pulsed the crowd with his heroic growls; he held the energy of the stage in the center. To his left fellow gutarist Jeremy DePoyster sweetened the songs with his soft harmonizing choruses. You could feel the whole band in tune with one another as they pummeled the venue with breakdowns and grueling guitar riffs. Playing every hit song from both records, the band even treated Club Retro to a new song from their upcoming album With Roots Above and Branches Below titled “Dez Moines.” Fans stretched out to the stage hoping that this would bring them closer to the madness.

Also check out our interview with The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil You Know

Two nights in New York City have taken its toll on Jeremy DePoyster. America’s largest city is a lot to take in for new visitors and longtime residents alike, but for a member of a band whose star is on the rise, New York’s hectic pace can reach exhausting levels. DePoyster, guitarist/vocalist for Dayton, Ohio’s The Devil Wears Prada, has been shuffled from meet-and-greets to photo shoots to interviews, not to mention playing two shows at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza, which he says were “probably the craziest New York shows we’ve had.” DePoyster doesn’t mind all the fuss, though.
“I’d still take this over any other job,” he says through intermittent yawns, early in the morning after the band’s second show.

Submerge rustled DePoyster out of bed for the following interview.

What did tuning lower do for your songwriting?
We could still write our same style and still do our same thing, but it had a different feel to it, just because we’re not used to playing in that tuning. Playing our same style of things and our same style of writing in a different tuning, it added a different feel to even the singing parts and everything like that. It was heavier.

Do you think it opened you up creatively?
Yeah, definitely.

Was there a particular song that was really benefited by using the lower tones?
There were two songs, I’d say, “Assistant to the Regional Manager” and “Wapakalypse,” that would have suffered if they weren’t in that lower tuning because of the style of the riffs and stuff like that. They were definitely helped by being in that lower tuning. There was this other song that we did that had this really epic singing part at the end of it that I thought was cool just because it was in a different tuning with different chords than we would normally play. I could do some different stuff with it, and if we had done 10 or 11 more songs in drop-D, it would have just been too monotonous. It would have been just like Plagues.

I read a quote by someone in the band that said the new album is “more mechanical” than what you’ve released before. Would you agree with that?
I don’t know who said that. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s more mechanical. Maybe they meant better structured because I think we’ve become better songwriters together than our last two records. Plagues was a big step forward in our songwriting, but I think this one even more so. The songs flow better through out. Other than going into some weird tempos and things like that. We’ve done that before, and that was cool, but it’s not really what we want to do now. We want to write better songs and not just breakdowns and big metal riffs and stuff like that. I think it [With Roots”¦] is easier to listen to and it’s more catchy because they flow so well all the way through. My favorite songs on the last record were songs like “HTML”¦” and “Hey John”¦” and stuff like that, because they flowed pretty fluidly throughout the song. We tried to do that with all the songs on this record.

So it’s less about seeing how much you could cram into one song than it is making the songs cleaner?
Yeah, exactly, and I think we were a lot more apt to, like, if it didn’t make sense in the context of the song, we would just scrap it. As opposed to before, we would be like, “What should we play here, this weird little thing? Yeah, let’s do that. Why not?” This time we were stricter on what made the cut and what didn’t.

I was reading the lyrics for “Dez Moines,” and one of the lines goes, “Profit zero, achievement zero.” I know the band’s name deals with materialism, and that seems to work into that song in particular, as well as being a recurring theme within the band. Do you see materialism as one of the biggest problems this generation has to overcome?
I don’t even know if it’s necessarily this generation. It’s just one of those things where”¦well, it’s hard to say. As a Christian band, we’re working for God first. I know myself, in my own personal life, it’s easy to get wrapped up in other things, whether it’s guitars or video games. I collect DVDs and stuff like that, but none of that stuff really matters in the end of it, by any perspective. It’s not important. It’s just something that’s always been important to us, and Mike [Hranica, vocals] really dove into that again lyrically.

Given what you just said, are any of the songs on the new record inspired by the current financial situation? What’s your take on that?
Reading through the lyrics, I wouldn’t say any of the songs are inspired by the financial situation. We haven’t really talked or thought about that whole business too much. I know we have one political song, but it’s a little bit different than that. It’s obviously a scary time for everybody. Even before all this crap happened, it’s been really hard to sell records, because everyone downloads, and the labels are suffering, and the bands aren’t selling as many records. Someone’s record just came out, I don’t know, Kelly Clarkson or something, and it only sold 250,000 copies the first week, which is insane that she would only do that many, where if it was three years ago, she would have done a million or something. It hasn’t really affected us, because we still have a lot of people coming to shows. We’re really lucky in that. Obviously, it sucks. Industries are crashing—the auto industry and all that stuff—and that’s not cool.

You’re headed out on the Warped Tour, and I guess it’s a nature of the beast, but there’s a lot of marketing that goes on during the tour, in the tents between the stages, does the commercial aspect of the tour bother you at all?
Not really. We’re not a punk rock band or anything. It doesn’t really matter to me, I guess. I come from a different background. I used to go to Warped Tour when it was in the new shape of things—Fall Out Boy and all those bands—and I was really into it. I was telling someone the other day that Kevin Lyman is a genius, and he’s done a really good job of keeping the tour current. He could have kept it all old punk bands just to please people and appease people, but he hasn’t really done that. He still brings back those bands every year, but he also brings in a lot of the new things. We didn’t know what to expect going into it. We thought it was either a pop-punk tour or a punk rock tour, but we went in on the first day and had a huge crowd and that happened the entire tour—the craziest shows we ever played. He does a really good job of building a broad package that still does really well.

You already mentioned that you and the members of the band have strong Christian beliefs, but many bands in the metal genre have a decidedly anti-Christian message. Did you listen to a lot of metal growing up, and why did you choose this form of expression?
Yeah, I definitely listened to a lot of metal growing up—and even more so now. I love Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer, all that good stuff. Musically, I love those bands. I don’t necessarily agree with what they say, but I can appreciate the music. I think the same thing applies to us. I mean, obviously we’re a Christian band, but we’re not preaching. We’re not shoving things down people’s throats. If they do come from a metal background, and they’re really anti-Christian or whatever, I still think they can find something in the music that they like.


Also read The Devil Wears Prada at Club Retro in Orangevale on April 19