Tag Archives: Nate

mozart season

Repairing Broken Molds • Mozart Season Back and Sick of Breaking Up

When success implodes a band, it’s a tough pill to swallow for everyone involved. Climbing the rungs of regional notoriety can be fun if accomplished over time; but if you’re Mozart Season, and the ladder was as slippery a slope as it was in the band’s formative year, you can almost hear the thud before the fall. After catapulting their traditional NorCal screamo into an arc of sold-out shows in the greater Sacramento area, opening for national headlining acts, and parading their verve for an increasingly rabid mass, the bottom fell out and left the group tattered somewhere in El Paso, Texas, on their first tour. Splintered and salvaged, Mozart Season has endured more lineup changes than they’d care to mention, and more false-starts than Liu Xiang at the Beijing Olympics. But there’s hope around every corner, and thus Mozart Season has chalked up their losses, and finally focused on making up for lost time. The band will release their first recording since 2006 with the Apotheosis EP, an invasive, though somewhat innovative, new disc that swelters under the pangs of drooling metal, with only hints of the melodic underwriting of their previous efforts.

The band will be back in shape, new lineup in tow, Saturday, Jan. 17 at the Boardwalk, playing alongside Dance Gavin Dance and Consider the Thief. Vocalist Nate and bassist Troy were kind enough to give Submerge an update on their new EP, their past and their future.

What was the impetus for the band to reunite after the breakup?
Nate: It all started with wanting to play a reunion show for fun. Once we all started jamming again, we really began to realize just how much we missed playing music. We wrote a new song after about two weeks or so of playing together again and decided that we wanted to get back together. A year later, we’ve got an EP done, the most solid lineup we’ve ever had, and are working at proving ourselves to anyone who has ever doubted us

How supportive has the scene in Sacramento been with regard to you making the decision to reform?
Nate: Well, the two shows that we’ve played have been awesome! But that’s only two shows. I think we still have a lot of work to do to gain back what we had going for us. We were all very humbled by the breakup, and we’ve been thrilled with the response to our new music. We just hope that we can keep playing music for a long time and constantly get better.
Troy: The reception of our new music has been incredible. New fans, old fans and even people who formerly disliked us have now embraced our new sound and it’s been amazing. This is only the beginning for us, though; we want to make our mark in Sacramento and then on an even bigger level.

Explain the consistent lineup changes in the band. What might you point out as the reasons for the constant shift in personnel over the years?
Nate: For some it’s been commitment issues, and for others it’s been because of wanting to better their lives in other ways than music like college, careers or other bands. The band now is stronger than ever. We’re seriously attached at the hip. We are friends before we are band mates, so it works out way better. We respect each other and work well together. When we all started to play together, the chemistry was there. It’s by far the strongest and most solid lineup we have had and none of us are going anywhere.

Do you feel like your almost immediate regional success has helped or hindered the band?
Nate: It’s definitely helped the band. We weren’t expecting such a quick response to everything we’ve been working on and we have so much momentum from it that we’re not going to let anything stop us. We plan on touring the West Coast as soon as possible and playing regionally so we can push this new album.
Troy: We haven’t let anything go to our heads. Although we do have a lot of regional success, we are pushing ourselves constantly to get better and better.
What would you say is the band’s new modus operandi? Or what would be your new philosophy for the continued evolution of the band?
Nate: “Party Hard, Work harder.” We realized that this takes a lot work, and we’re going to prove ourselves in ’09 and for the years after.

What sort of artistic resonance does the title of your new album, Apotheosis, have for the band? Is it a metaphor for the resurgence of the group?
Nate: It’s definitely a metaphor for the resurgence of the group. Mozart Season has been to hell and back, and we don’t have much to show for it anymore because we disappeared for a year. Some of us realized a year after we broke up that it was the biggest mistake of our lives. We felt discouraged, beat down, like no one would ever take us seriously again. We knew if we got back together, it was going to have to be different. We had to be doing it for the right reasons and we had to be writing music that we would want to listen to in our cars, or on our computers or wherever. We have just been taking every challenge and bump in the road head on and as fast as we can.
Troy: We took the name Apotheosis from a part of “the hero’s journey” [an excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces] I remember learning all about it in high school and it seemed appropriate for our situation. As we had heard it defined, the Apotheosis is where the hero’s ego is disintegrated in a breakthrough expansion of consciousness. Quite frequently the hero’s idea of reality is changed; the hero may find an ability to do new things or to see a larger point of view. And that is exactly where we found ourselves while writing this new album. The band had broken up for a year and come back with a new idea of reality and what we wanted to be doing musically and that’s portrayed through our new sound.

In what direction did you attempt to push your musical spectrum on your new album?
Nate: We didn’t go into it with any direction or idea of what the album was going to sound like. That was our problem in the past. We were always trying to fit the screamo mold because that’s what people seemed to love. We had all sorts of issues trying to get this album done and those feelings of frustration I think definitely shaped the outcome of this EP. Losing Joel [vocalist], we lost our old sound completely, so this EP is just a mixture of what everyone new to the band and the veterans brought to the table during the writing process.
Troy: When we started to write this album, we had no set plan as to what our sound was going to be. While it’s nearly impossible to be “original,” we wanted to stray away from fitting into any specific “sounds like” category. We wanted to break away from the old sound and produce a more mature album, and I think we did just that. The old music was written nearly three years ago; our skill as musicians and songwriters has gotten far better since then and I think that shows.

Come Together

Pressure Point Celebrates Sweet 15

This year, Sacramento’s own street punk/Oi! prodigies Pressure Point will celebrate their 15th anniversary. An impressive feat in its own right—especially considering the tumultuous nature of the punk rock scene—what makes Pressure Point’s quinceañera even more notable is that they’ve managed to survive on their own terms. Though Pressure Point has shared stages with punk rock giants such as Rancid (Lars Frederiksen acted as their producer on two full-length albums and a 7-inch) the band has managed to survive, and thrive, in what lead singer/cofounder Mike Erickson calls an “underground within the underground.” To commemorate their 15th birthday, Pressure Point will release on Sept. 30 Get it Right, an anthology that re-imagines some of the group’s earlier material and includes a few new songs and covers. Before heading out on a tour that would take them to the Midwest and back, Mike met with Submerge to discuss the new release and the difficulties in bridging punk rock’s generation gap.

You’re heading out on tour pretty soon. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Is it to promote the new album?
Sure. Honestly, one of the biggest reasons that I like to be in a band is that I get to travel, and it’s an unconventional way to see America. I see America through the eyes of people like me. It’s not a tour guide or a travel agent. I get to see this country through the eyes of people who are similar to me, who I enjoy being around, and have similar beliefs and philosophies. We’re not only touring to promote the record, but you know, it’s summer time. It’s a good excuse to get out and be with your friends and have a good time.

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How have you seen the country change in the time you’ve been touring with Pressure Point?
In terms of the punk scene, the scene that I’m a part of, things have changed drastically since we started. There are still people like”¦Anti-Heroes and Agnostic Front—people that we met real early on who are still out there doing it and have the same beliefs and the same attitudes. But what I saw, with really good bands like Rancid—who were able to break through and bring what I consider legitimate punk rock to the masses—the aftermath of that was that every label wanted to get their own Rancid. They wanted to make even more money. They would get their carbon copies. They wanted to dumb them down. They would water them down, sweeten them up, so they could be more mass-produced. And there were some bands that were willing to play ball. When those bands did that, it watered down the punk scene at large and began to split it.

With the latest release, you guys are revisiting older material. What was that like for you guys?
A lot of the material was written by Kenny [guitar] and I really early on. When we started this band, we struggled to find the right fit with the different members because of the style we played. The approach we had and the type of politics we had were all really unconventional, and to be honest, kind of dangerous for this town. There weren’t a lot of promoters or record labels that were willing to work with us, and that was true all over the country. Pretty soon, we were able to connect and hook up and an underground within the underground developed. Because of all that, we always heard the songs a certain way when we wrote them, in our minds’ ear, but it never really came out on tape like we wanted them to. Over the years, we’ve had good friends and good band members and we’ve got the Nates [Hat and Mohawk, bass and drums respectively]. We’re turning 15 years old this year, and we wanted to celebrate that, so we went and revisited a lot of material, and now we were able to update it, refresh it and record it so it sounded the way we originally heard it.

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Other than rerecording the songs, did you revamp them in any way?
That was a debate within the band. We decided that we were going to do the things we needed to do to make the songs better. Lyrically, I decided I’d leave the songs alone. There were a lot of lyrics that were really naïve when I wrote them. I wrote some of those songs in my early 20s, but I decided that they capture a time and a place and that I should just leave them alone. Musically, we altered and changed some of the songs.

Before you mentioned the songs you were doing were dangerous for the area. What did you mean by that?
Sacramento in the mid-’90s, the punk scene was kind of smoldering. It was suffering from a lot of things left over from the ’80s. Within the scene in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there were a lot of Nazi skinheads that were left over, and they were threatening the entire punk scene at large, so you had that violence and that danger, and then you had on the other side of it people like Kenny, people like me, who grew up in Sacramento lived in Sacramento, lived through that, and were battling, of course, against those kinds of notions. So for us being a straight up Oi! band, a street-punk band, a band that espoused a skinhead philosophy and attitude—of course a traditional one—a lot of promoters around here got scared. A lot of them said, “Oh, I don’t want that.” We were never ones to look at the problem and just sweep it under the rug. We confronted it head-on, recognized it and dealt with it. They were afraid there would be trouble at gigs, that if they put us on bills, it would draw them [Nazi skinheads] to shows. These guys were coming to shows anyway. We did our own shows, and now we have our own scene. It’s fresh and vibrant. We don’t have those same problems, we don’t have those same issues, and over the years, we were able to hook up with a lot of national acts that were really getting big, and if it wasn’t for them demanding that we get on bills, a lot of the promoters around here would not work with us.

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For the new songs you wrote, could you talk about those lyrically?
One of the new songs on the record is “Fuck the Kids,” and it’s a hardcore song in the tradition of New York style or early ’80s style. The American landscape early on, there weren’t many divisions. When we went to shows, you’d have Reagan Youth playing with Bad Brains playing with Sick of It All playing with Gorilla Biscuits. So you’d have straight edge bands playing with skinhead hardcore bands playing with more leftist punk bands. Everyone had a lot of respect for each other and just did their thing.

It seems that over the last 10 years, especially the last five, there’s been a lot of sectioning off and divisions within the scenes at large. I noticed that as a skinhead that me and a lot of my punk rock friends would go to hardcore shows, because we really appreciate that kind of music, and the kids would shun us like we didn’t belong there because we didn’t look like them. And that with the infusion of metal made it so that it wasn’t really connecting with where it came from or where it was”¦or what it is.

I wrote a song called “Fuck the Kids” and Kevin Seconds from 7 Seconds sang on it. I asked him because they were pioneers of the original West Coast hardcore movement, which had more of a positive vibe, bringing people together. Even though we’re not a posi band, we have a similar attitude. It’s about taking people who are outside of mainstream society, or the people who at least don’t fit necessarily. They don’t want to fit”¦they would find their way in this other scene at large as individuals, and that seems to be lost. There seems to be a lot of conformity, a lot of packaging, a lot of formulaic nonsense within the hardcore scene, and it happened in the scene of music we play, too, in the late ’90s, and I think in a lot of ways that’s what killed it. And whenever you lose that identity, you lose that ability to sound original or to be original or to think on your own, then you lose touch with where you came from, and that’s why I wrote “Fuck the Kids.”

Why do you think that the fractioning of the scene has happened?
I think it’s largely people like me who are to blame for that. I’m 38, and I don’t think people my age were as vigilant as they should have been, or maybe in some cases as welcoming as they should have been to the new generation. I also think that, again, hardcore broke and record labels were like, “Oh, package it, sell it, it’s all about money,” so you had a lot of bands that sounded the same, and a lot of kids glommed on to it. The attitude became more of a mob mentality as opposed to a punk mentality. When I overhear people who are into hardcore—and I’ve overheard them telling Kevin Seconds that 7 Seconds isn’t a hardcore band—that’s the attitude right there that I’m talking about.

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