This is what you'll see: Brady Parr drums hard so you feel it in the long bones of your legs and arms and the little tiny bones of your skull, cymbal crashes like angry waves, snarehits like gunshots. Mat Davis moves slow, curled up over his bass like it hurts, making whipcrack rumbles under everything, until he bursts forward, hair in a blossoming corona around his head, voodoo thunks pounding from the amp like dark things crawling hungry out of a cave. Matt Werm plays guitar - he can make it play anything except "quiet" - and he steps up to the mic with his body trembling under a sheen of fearsweat and his eyes roll way craaaazy back into his skull as he screams and sings about rock and jealousy and darklovesexobsession.
Watch this band and they will make you stumble. One day, the music of Salmonblaster will accompany the montage of a bloody week-long crime spree in a film, and it will be perfect. When you dream about being in a band (which you do, rock fan, you know you do), you dream about being in this band.
Salmonblaster are so good that Salmonblaster will fuck you up permanently.
They have all the second-tier rockstar shit nailed: the album comes out this week, and the tour is in planning stages and they want to do a video ... and it all sounds like such standard yaddyaddayadda until you realize that these are bright people who have their hands on the wheel of the car and their foot on the pedal. Hard.
A lot of bands manage to parlay being the next big thing into a perpetual state, so that they never have to deliver on promise. Not this band. They want to do shit - now. A lot of much-talked-about bands would be scared by the prospect of playing more than twice a year; Salmonblaster are actively trying to get into a tour that will take them everywhere this summer so they can rock for strangers who will start the night saying "who?" and end their night offering the band cash, drugs, their bodies, souls.
The prospect of recreating the stageshow every night might be an intimidating one, but Brady Parr - Mr. Professional - is calm. "No, that's what we want to do. Right now, we're playing at most three times a month. To play every day would just make us tighter, more secure with our set."
But is it going to be possible to recreate the sideshowseizure night after night? Matt Werm, Mr. Smart Guy, has thought about it. "Mentally, it's no problem." Physically, he's a bit concerned about his recently-diagnosed diabetes, for which he was hospitalized for a short while. "I get a little tired around three-quarters of the set, so we have to plan our set list so that I can handle it. I think if we're touring every night that's like exercise. We'll just get stronger."
As for Mat Davis, Mr. Quiet, veteran of too many tours with The M.A.D., his motives are simple: "I enjoy being in this band."
The lads are working with Bob Luhtala and Liquid records, the same "indie" label that's working with Sunfish and Glueleg. The deal is simple; Luhtala works with the bands, puts albums out, helps them in Canada, and tries to get his bands a US deal. The standard holier-than-thou-crap has to be asked: Were there thoughts about staying indie, and working with Bubblegun (who did the VROOOOOM! 7-inch with the 'Blaster) or Sabre Toque or whatever? Matt is real about it all. "If we had money, yeah, but we don't. We don't even have money for another seven inch."
So it's off to a label who can pony up coin and cash for things, like a video. The band are going to do one, but the impetus is to not suck. As Werm explains, "I think we have some strong ideals and our label is behind us. We can make (videos) cool; we don't have to sit around and play with our hair and look like fuckin' GQ boys."
The Salmonblaster repertoire is mostly a screwed-up snakepit of fears and loathing, the monster who lives under the bed fused with the person who sleeps on top of it and the lover who sleeps around in it. "The Perfect Fit," an unromantic lustsong, contains such lines as "I'll be first in line/ for the third degree/ or a second chance/ at my losing spree." Werm talks about it, a bit uncomfortable trying to name feelings, talk about sensations. "It's dealing with relationships and with a tiny bit of self-loathing but not a pathetic amount ... It deals with naivete and sexual politics."
A lot of people have commented that the Salmonblaster sound a little like Nirvana - maybe a lot. Werm nails the question hard while invoking the forthcoming album: " Maybe some songs have the same structure, bass, drums, guitar, singing, screaming ... but, fuck, you listen to the whole thing, and everybody's gonna realize Nirvana would never do some of the things we do." Is Werm suggesting his band is better than Nirvana? Or that they aren't just a standard postpunk band ? Probably neither; he just knows what he's got here. He's part of a band that has, as Davis puts it "that thing."
"That thing" is a simple way of naming a magic, a chemistry, a dark cocktail that can't be named any other way. It's an intangible thing that is very real when it finally gets shoved out into the world though the speakers and the wires and the flailing and the sound. It contains rage, rock,charm, will, apathy, tender love, and bitter failure. It is the music of Salmonblaster. It is "that thing," and "that thing" is good.