Album Review: Coheed and Cambria, The Afterman: The Ascension

05 October 2012

by Poppy Reid

When Coheed and Cambria announced their sixth release would be a double concept album following an astronomer named Sirius Armory through an alternate universe called Heaven’s Fence (a concept picked up by none other than Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson to develop into a live-action feature film) and that its deluxe edition would include a hardcover coffee table book, not one of their zealots flinched.

The New York quartet have been waxing-existentialist and shaping their ever-developing sci-fi tetralogy The Armory Wars - about two protagonists, Coheed and Cambria - since 1995. As for the accompanying tome, well this isn’t the first time the band have gone that extra mile for the project; 2003’s In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 was released alongside a graphic novel (which this year reached #4 on the New York Times Bestsellers list), and 2010’s Year Of The Black Rainbow was offered with a novel.

Touted “the most honest record I’ve ever written” by frontman and creative linchpin Claudio Sanchez, The Afterman’s integrity will be told in two parts, the first The Afterman: The Ascension is out later this month before second instalment The Afterman: The Descension is out February next year. Self-financed and honed in Sanchez’s basement, The Afterman… marks the return of drummer Josh Eppard, who left in 2006, but sees the band journey into new territory with their sound. While Coheed and Cambria have always genre-crossed between their hardcore roots, prog-rock, soul and even intelligent pop on some tracks, The Afterman… is a different dimension altogether.

From the piano-driven opening in The Hollow, accompanied only by three lines of dialogue percolating extraterrestrial ambience, and the multi-pronged attack of Key Entity Extraction | Domino The Destitute where Sanchez wails thick and effervescent about Sirius Armory’s expedition, (punctuated with snippets of what sounds like sport commentary), The Afterman: Ascension pays homage to long-time fans with nods to past classics while stepping in a different direction and forging a whole new legacy.

The title track is where Sanchez goes off the trail to make exceptional exceptions, instead of sticking to his preconceived ideals which consistently fall in line with the tetralogy’s narrative arc, he has used his wife’s personal story of her friend’s death (which she found out through Facebook) and tells it from her perspective. From the darling opening plucks, which remain a subdued constant, to the slow building guitars and Sanchez’ growling whisper, The Afterman was an obvious choice for lead single, fans will be grateful the rest of the record is exempt of any carbon copies, given its charm.

Elsewhere, the flushes in future-scape Goodnight Fair Lady - where Sanchez’ drifting falsetto floats alongside casual, syncopated Thin Lizzy-esque drumming, and the anthemic rise of Mothers Of Men - the cinematic offering where guitars and vocals conduct a dialogue - this release allows the listener to hear and feel what the protagonists are going through, more than ever before.

Whether you want to lose yourself in the cryptic storyline that surrounds this opus, or you simply like to take each record at face value, Coheed and Cambria have created a post-apocalyptic dream that can’t be ignored, no matter how fleeting the experience.

The Afterman: The Ascension is out now.

Label Spotlight: Fat Wreck Chords, with Fat Mike

09 October 2012

by Poppy Reid

More than two decades ago when Fat Mike started Fat Wreck Chords, the NOFX frontman’s motives were simple – he saw friends doing it and thought he could do it just as well. Since starting the label in 1990 with his then wife Erin (who remians his business partner), Mike Burkett has created an iconic brand, home to the biggest names in American punk rock.

With releases from Against Me!, Anti-Flag, Rancid, No Use For A Name and Rise Against in the past and acts like Lagwagon, Descendents, Strung Out and Frenzal Rhomb on the current roster, Fat Wreck Chords is still weaving its legacy and helping like-minded folk keep the culture alive – all on a one-record-deal policy. But as the prolific and candid founder tells TMN, there did come a time when he considered throwing in the towel.

I remember selling Lagwagon records, and I think we sold 2,000 the first year. There was Epitaph and there was Lookout! and Dischord, and there weren’t many good labels besides that. I just saw a lot of good bands on tour and I thought I’d give it a shot, but you know, in the early ‘90s selling 10,000 records was as much as you could sell. Bad Religion’s Suffer (1988) had sold 12,000 records and that was unbelievable; you don’t think you’re going to be a successful label, but I guess I thought I could make money doing it - I had no idea that we’d have bands that would sell millions of records.

I’ve thought about giving it up for the past few years, we had a couple of years where we were losing money, terribly.

Look at the Billboard charts, records sell one tenth of what they used to sell. You sell 50,000 records and you can be #1 on the chart, so it’s just the music industry is failing and it’s going to keep failing but I think to have a small label, if you do it right, you can still survive.

 

What happened then was we cut down people; we went from eighteen people to five people. We had two choices, the choice that was the smartest one was to stop the label and just sell the back catalogue, and then you have no expense, just money coming in. We didn’t want to do that, so my wife and I at the time were like, ‘Let’s just revamp it and re-work it and see if we can make money out of it still’. So we did. That ended up being a really smart thing, now we’re making money again, and we’re selling records that are pretty good. All we did was trickle back into the label we were igniting.

I want to keep the label as a punk rock label, I don’t want to go into emo or weird shit, I don’t want popular music I want to keep it a punk rock label about good music.

Fat Wreck Chords have recently released new material from NOFX, Morning Glory and Cobra Skulls, and reissues from Lagwagon and Less Than Jake. The Fat Wreck Chords store in California is open Fridays from 3-6pm, they offer free beer to anyone who walks in.

NOFX: Secret Society

16 October 2012

by Poppy Reid

While NOFX fans were gushing over the release of twelfth studio album Self-Entitled, Mike Burkett (aka Fat Mike) was donning leather and exercising his trademark hedonism at Jamaican fetish event Kink In The Caribbean.

“It’s a rubberist's vacation resort where weirdos take over the whole hotel and the beach and get real weird,” Burkett explains nonchalantly down the phone from his home in San Francisco. “It’s fabulous. Are you kinky?” The forthcoming frontman has just returned with girlfriend Soma Snakeoil who makes a living from sharing his perversions – “My girlfriend is a dominatrix but occasionally we’ll switch, occasionally I’m her daddy.”

Although Self-Entitled sees the band take heed from the roots of American punk rock in the early ‘80s - both musically and lyrically (re: the track Ronnie and Mags about Reagan and Thatcher) – Snakeoil’s influence (I Believe In Goddess) and his embrace of the BDSM scene (Secret Society) show a new side to Burkett, quirks he likens to the type of album he set out to make.

“The BDSM world is super secret and fun,” he says before holding the phone away to shout, “we’re having steak tonight, two… It’s fucking dark,” he continues. “It’s very reminiscent to me of early punk rock, because it’s secret.”

It may come as a surprise that Burkett has had a dungeon in his home for over twenty years, but BDSM has been a part of his life since the age of twelve. “It was the first time I was privy to kinky porn,” he remembers. “My mum had a bunch of dirty magazines, you know Penthouse and Playboy and stuff, and none of it ever really did it for me. I read a kink magazine and it had some kinky story, I was like ‘oh, this is what being turned on is’.”

Burkett had been fronting NOFX for six years when he began to practice his leanings to the ‘scene,’ as he calls it. A dabbling which started with a magazine lead him to study Human Sexuality in college, ex-wife Erin – who remains his business partner at his label Fat Wreck Chords – and more recently to Snakeoil, who he now produces fetish films for.

“For me it’s a pre-requisite, there’s been lots of things that I would like to do that my partner didn’t want, and then we ended up doing it and it turned out to be awesome.

“Cutting was never my thing, I was never a cutter. But [Snakeoil], she loves medical stuff. Once she totally bound me and took a scalpel then carved an ‘S’ on my inner thigh. It was deep and she went over it a few times and spanked it, slapped it. It was cool because it was right when we first started going out and she put a permanent mark on me, and it was hers, she made me hers.”

Candid anecdotes like this are almost expected of Burkett, after his performance as alter-ego Cokie The Clown at SXSW festival in 2010 – where he used the stage as a cathartic sound-board to reveal personal experiences – NOFX fans saw Burkett as vulnerable and weathered for the very first time. This melancholy has only bled onto a NOFX album once, in the form of My Orphan Year, a track released a month after the SXSW debacle. Burkett does plan to release more “really dark personal songs” though, in fact he has enough written to record an LP.

 

“My Orphan Year was about as dark as [long-time NOFX] fans had ever seen me go, and that’s not nearly as dark as these songs… I tell the stories I told at that performance, about my mother dying of cancer and how she asked me to kill her earlier so she wouldn’t suffer. “One of the songs is about what I went through to do that, in serious detail.” Burkett speaks clinically about his past as if one-step removed. “Another song is about a rape that me and our guitar player Eric witnessed,” he says. “But it was these gangsters in LA in this really bad neighbourhood and we didn’t do a thing to stop it; I talk about my roommate who hung himself and I had to cut him down, some pretty dark shit.”

While NOFX have watched music and each others’ lives peak and crash, fade and change over almost three decades together, they’re yet to release an autobiography, until now. Apparently it has been in the works for over a year, and is being penned by a journalism amateur known only as Jeff. “It’s pretty crazy how deep people are going,” Burkett says of his bandmates. “I can’t believe some of the stuff that people are sharing, I think it’s going to be a pretty good book… I’m pretty open about my life, I’m happy that the other guys shared stuff that we’ve always been so secretive about.”

With no book release timeframe set, and no plans to tour Australia until 2014, fans can be genuinely placated with Self-Entitled; an album that is as socially awake as it is crude, while nodding to early offerings from genre pioneers Bad Religion and the Circle Jerks – not that Burkett cares about the reaction anyway.

“I always need some kind of inspiration, and it never is: ‘What will I do to please my fans?’ or ‘What will people like?’, it’s not my interest ever,” he states. “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like: ‘If we were around in 1981, what would it sound like?' That was my inspiration, and however this ranks against our other records, I don’t really care.”

Timomatic: Mr. Incredible

05 October 2012

by Poppy Reid

In the not-too-distant past, winning a televised talent show in Australia didn’t necessarily convert to stardom. Some winners were even berated for a chart placing that surmounted a less ‘manufactured’ act. One artist wholly aware of the changing times is Timomatic, the 24-year-old who entered Australian lounge-rooms on two different networks, on two vastly different talent shows.

“When an opportunity comes up where you have the platform to show exactly what you can do to a large amount of people-I took it and I ran with it. I don’t think I’d do it any other way.”
Nigerian-born Tim Omaji is gathering his breath at Sony Music’s Sydney offices after working on a surprise for fans before the release of his self-titled sophomore record. “I wanted to do the whole album a cappella in my native tongue,” he says very seriously. “I’m joking. Can you imagine?” he asks, laughing infectiously as he attempts it. “I don’t know my native tongue!”

Timomatic was actually filming dance accompaniments to each of the thirteen tracks on the album, and while he’s set on continuing his singing career, the hovering reminder of when he first made his name in 2009 (as a top eight contestant on Channel Ten’s So You Think You Can Dance) has only added to his semblance. In fact, it’s a venture Timomatic would never have taken without his mother’s push.

“She was like ‘the one thing you’re lacking is a fan-base, you have no one to perform to’,” he chuckles, imitating his mother. “’It’s all well and good you performing around here and doing your thing, but you need to get out there!’”

Since his formative years studying music and teaching dance in Melbourne, Timomatic placed third on Australia’s Got Talent in 2011, landed a role in Fame The Musical, inked a deal with Sony (and later a worldwide contract with EMI Music Publishing), and watched his single Set It Off become the most played Australian song at radio in the first six months of the year. The triple- threat has been songwriting since the age of fourteen and drummed in his family gospel band as soon as he could pick up sticks - so a career in music was always held above all else.

“When I would hear music I would create things in my head, naturally. I was like ‘I have to find where that part of my brain is going to fit in the real world’ – that was my quest,” he says. “When I heard the feeling I thought I would love to give that feeling to other people.”

Although he felt the parental push to audition for So You Think You Can Dance, Timomatic was very calculating when mapping out his career in 2009. “At that time it was all about Australian Idol and I felt that that show wasn’t exciting anymore,” he says. “It had its day... I guess the golden era of that show was kind of over.” The dance craze was just taking off after a successful season in the US and as Timomatic explains, he didn’t trust his vocal talent just yet. “I hadn’t really established my sound as an artist so I thought, ‘Go with what is established’.”

Televised talent shows are still booming in Australia, with over one million tuning in each night to watch various forms of filmed reality. The community of national winners is also growing as more programmes make their way across international waters, and with successful artists like Guy Sebastian, Jess Mauboy and Justice Crew, Timomatic is content with the epithets thrown upon his talent show populace.

“I think reality talent shows get a bad name too easily,” he considers. “More so from people already in the music industry who have established their names, but people forget that greats of our time got to where they are using that same medium.”

Another misconception about reality show talent surrounds their supposed hurried climb to fame. For Timomatic, it’s been an eight-year journey since he “heard the feeling” he wanted to share, and while the eponymous record marks his second release, it’s his most autobiographical, peppered with intimate nuances and self-production.

“There are songs on there which are more organic and showcase my voice,” he says. “They show I’m more musically inclined than, ‘Hey yo! Let’s have a party’ - you know what I mean?”

Thus is the dichotomy of manufactured fame, on one hand Timomatic is proud of his malleable stage and the associations it garners, but it seems the lead up to this album was largely spent ostracising the past.

“I had that exposure, I’ve got the fan-base to support me and be able to go to the next level and not be associated with it,” he states. “In any artistic person’s career, you don’t want to held by the things you did a year ago.”