Words by James Barone • Photos by Phill Mamula

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.

Post from: Submerge Magazine

Words by James Barone

There’s a saying in some parts of the country that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes,” of course referring to a bratty and unpredictable climate. In Northern California, given its multitude of microclimates, you could easily replace “wait five minutes” to “drive 20 miles.” None of that really has anything to do with Ludo, an alt-rock band originally hailing from St. Louis, Mo., but the sentiment behind that old adage sort of applies to the band’s latest album, Prepare the Preparations, released Sept. 7, 2010. If you don’t like one song, just skip to the next track.

You may have picked up from the album’s title that Ludo isn’t a band that takes itself too seriously, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Prepare the Preparation is musically restless with its antsy propensity for genre- and style-hopping. Take, for instance, the Danny Elfman-esque carnival bombast of opening track “Too Tired to Wink,” followed by the space-age speed riffs of “Cyborgs vs. Robots” and throw in a sea chantey (“Rotten Town”) and some folk-inspired rock (“Anything for You”) for good measure, and you’ve got what amounts to a pretty wild musical ride. However, what holds steady through Prepare the Preparations is Ludo’s solid musicianship. For all their quirks and perhaps goofiness, it’s impossible to deny the band knows what it’s doing.

“People want to push you a certain way and neglect the fact that you can really play your instruments better than a lot of the serious bands,” Ludo keyboardist Tim Convy told Submerge in a recent interview.

Ludo got its start in the first half of the ‘00s. The band’s previous album, You’re Awful, I Love You, released in 2008, was the first of the band’s multi-album deal with Island Records. Prepare the Preparations found Ludo working once again with co-producer Matt Wallace (with Mark McClusky), who was behind the board for You’re Awful… Prepare the Preparations was even recorded in the same studio, said Convy.

“If we had worked in a different place with different producers, that might have counteracted the confidence, because we were so comfortable with those people and places,” he said. “I think we got something good out of it.”

Confidence was a major key to Prepare the Preparations. With their sophomore effort for Island, Convy said the band was “just a little cockier.” It was this growing confidence that played into Prepare the Preparations’ myriad sounds.

“Before, we may have talked ourselves out of certain decisions because it was our first major label record, but now we were more confident with what Ludo would do,” Convy explained. “I think that’s part of the extreme eclectic sound of the record, because you try to think about it without limitations. I think going into the studio with that mindset is why it came out the way it did.”

A burgeoning sense of Ludo coming into its own wasn’t the only difference this time around. The band members no longer all living in the same general area played into the writing process. Whereas in the past Ludo’s chief songwriter, frontman Andrew Volpe, would come to the band with skeletons of songs for the other members to embellish upon, this time around, he presented the band with fully realized demos. For Convy, it took a bit of getting used to.

“When something’s that done, sometimes it’s hard to jump in, but at the same time, Andrew was open to everything that we brought in,” Convy said. “You didn’t have to wonder where he was going or what he heard in his head.”

Convy said that he believes the new process was “empowering” for Volpe.

“It’s nice to be in on the ground floor of the creative process, but at the same time, there was a lot less confusion, because he might hear chords and lyrics, and I might picture something totally different than he did,” Convy continued. “Whereas with this, we could both be on the same page of what the end product was supposed to be. I just had to learn to adjust the way I had input.”

Empowerment seems to be a recurring theme in Ludo’s career and music. The band’s sense of humor and inherent geekiness (Ludo takes its name from a character in Jim Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth) has had the band taking some flack amongst snootier music connoisseurs. This may have been a cause for concern for Ludo earlier on, but it’s less of a bother now.

“It’s unfortunate,” Convy said. “It’s something that we used to let bother us, but we don’t anymore. People are going to say what they’re going to say, and we’ll just do what we do.”

Songs about robot battles and leprechauns are certainly imaginative, but may cause eyes to roll at many a hipster venue across the country. Nevertheless, Convy knows you can’t please everyone, and Ludo’s not going to bother to try.

“It’s part of what we do, and people are going to take it the wrong way,” he said. “Someone wrote a review and quoted lines from ‘Whipped Cream’ [the band’s tongue-in-cheek first single from Prepare the Preparations] and said, ‘You’re not going to pick up chicks like that.’ And we were like, ‘No fucking kidding. We’re making fun of people.’ We realize now that not everyone gets it, and almost take pride in the fact that not everyone’s going to get it.”

All you need to get is that Ludo makes fun music; and since geek has become chic, rocking out to a band like this is way cooler than gazing at your navel. Radiohead is so last decade anyway.

Post from: Submerge Magazine

Hannah Teter made her Olympic debut at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy. Just 19 years old at the time, Teter managed to bring the United States gold in the Women’s Half Pipe event, cementing her position as one of the most formidable female snowboarders in the world.

With another Winter Games upon us, Teter is once again a member of the U.S. snowboard team with her sights set on another trip to the podium. She took time out of her busy Vancouver schedule to answer a few of our questions via e-mail, filling us in on her philanthropic endeavors and why she can’t wait to get back home to Northern California.

Hannah’s Gold is a pretty lofty creation in terms of charity work, especially since you started it at such a young age. Can you remember the first moment you became interested in charity work?
My mom says that I always tried to protect little animals when I was a little kid. I had lots of pets that I would take care of. We had a few ferrets, some gerbils, a couple cats, a dog and some farm animals. My parents really raised me to be a caring person. I owe a lot to them. By the way, look for our new charity-funding underwear dropping this month at Sweetcheekspanties.com.

Do you think you would have picked up snowboarding without the influence of your older brothers?
Snowboarding is so amazing that I can’t imagine living life without it, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten involved with it as much without my brothers.
 
When you were young, how much was snowboarding a serious part of your life? When did it go from being a hobby to a staple of your life?
I remember trying hard to push my limits with snowboarding when I was pretty young. I would watch my older brothers just go huge and I wanted to go huge, so I guess I was serious about it from a pretty young age. When I was 15 I started to win some cool events like the Burton U.S. Open, and I knew then that I could really make a living out of this whole thing.
 
How much time do you have for social things like friends or boyfriends?
I try to spend a lot of time with my boyfriend when I’m home. He travels with me sometimes, too, which is nice
 
If you were to attend college, what would you like to study?
I’d like to study something related to nutrition. I think that’s one of the most important things we’re facing right now and a lot of people [don’t] pay much attention to it, unfortunately.

You mention in your bio that yoga is one of your hobbies. How much time are you able to devote to yoga, and what about yoga is intriguing?
Yoga makes you feel great. I try to get at least get an hour or so a week in.
 
For you, what are a couple of the ultimate songs that you like to listen to while snowboarding?
“I Gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas and “Wavin’ Flag” by K’naan.
 
Can you remember a particular moment when you were snowboarding that felt completely blissful and perfect?
There were quite a few moments last year riding powder up at Sierra-at-Tahoe that I felt that way. I can’t wait to get some powder turns in after the Olympics.
 
You’ve been interviewed multiple times for a number of publications. Does it get tiring to be in the spotlight so much?
It does get tiring sometimes, but I feel like to waste that chance because I’m tired is something I’d regret when I’m older.
 
You’re known to be pretty fearless on the slopes. Is there anything that you are afraid of?
McDonald’s and any fast food restaurant
 
After your knee injuries in 2006, are you more hesitant to be as daring on the slopes for fear of being injured again?
I’m 100 percent healthy and feeling very confident.

Watch Hannah Teter and the rest of the U.S. Winter Olympians on NBC. Check local listings for coverage information. For more information about Hannah’s Gold, go to www.hannahsgold.com.

Post from: Submerge Magazine