Seattle’s Own Heavy Hitters: Serial Hawk

I’ve been skating by lately, doing the bare minimum, a post here, a post there. I have essentially been avoiding the inevitable. I have been fighting myself to come home after a 13 hour day at my “job” and write this article. Not because I don’t feel motivated by the music, not because I have no passion for it. Yet I cannot procrastinate any longer. I need to share with you, Serial Hawk. Hot damn, my fingers are tingling, my mind is racing and I feel a bit funny in my stomach. What was I waiting for?

Serial Hawk is a Seattle three-piece, loud as fuck, stoner metal band, with Will on guitar, Adam on bass and Justin on drums — a simple formula creates exponential results in an expedition up a mountainous terrain of big stacks, amps clipping, tubes and transistors overheating, big riffs and punishing volumes!

Unfortunately I have not had the pleasure of seeing these guys live, but what I hear digitally is what keeps me interested and satisfied. I got a hold of Will awhile ago, after my HWOIG interview and wanted an interview with another great Seattle band that I had liked for awhile now. Will agreed and I treated it like a one night stand … all the satisfaction of scoring but never calling back.

Shame on me. So I’m back and here to score again with another great Seattle band and see what makes them tick.

Who and what is Serial Hawk?

Will: We’re a band from Seattle that plays loud. I’m Will (guitar/vocals), over there is Adam (bass) and in the kitchen is Justin (drums). As a band we’ve always been a pretty straight-forward group of dudes that loves to play heavy music inspired by countless bands from the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Living Hard in ‘Pus City’: Monogamy Party Vinyl Review

Ok, this is a few months late as far as the release dates go, but “better late than never,” someone once told me. I also tagged this as a “Best of 2011″ because dammit it is! I received my 10″ Monogamy Party Pus City LP just a while ago from Good To Die Records and I’ve been spinning it for as long as I’ve had it. In reality it hasn’t even made it onto the shelf yet.  So let’s get this party started.

Monogamy Party is a three-piece, no holds barred, punk-induced nightmare, landing smack dab in your face. Unlike your conventional three-piece, what this band doesn’t have is a guitarist, and it makes perfect sense. Yos-Wa holds his own on bass duties and vocals, as lead singer Kennedy, belts out fantastic lyrics. Their drummer Keith holds down the fort with solid, yet fast, rhythms. Listening to the album, you don’t even miss the guitar. As partial as I am to bass players, being one myself, I give mad props to Yos-Wa and his heavy, distorted rhythmic playing and his Rickenbacker’s clean mid-range thump. His blend of clean and effected passages really give a 2-dimensional quality to the overall sound of the album. Who needs those extra six strings getting in the way of perfection?

Indian Handcrafts Came to Melt Some Faces

Sargent House just picked up Toronto’s own Indian Handcrafts. I wont lie, I just heard of these guys. I will be honest with you, I was listening to their Bandcamp page for 2 hours before I even started writing this. I easily shelled out the 5 bucks for the digital download. I listened to it on my way to work the next day and even at my desk. I was swept back into my teenage years listening to a dirty, fuzzed-out guitar, strained yet satisfying vocals and solid, hard-hitting drumming. Think subtle hints of the Black Keys, MGMT, Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr. twisted into an album with an aggressively modern take wrapped up in a two-man package.

Boyfrndz: I Saw Them Live, You Can Hear Them Here!

I like genre bending bands, so naturally when I entered the doors to Red7 in Austin for New Year’s Eve I was not only excited to see my favorite band Russian Circles play, I was excited to see the opening band, too. I had heard very little of the them prior to the show, but what I did hear I wanted more.

Boyfrndz is a high-energy band with not-too-subtle attributes in different genres and styles. How unfair of me right? This is just one of those bands you don’t want to label with technical mumbo-jumbo. One moment you’re caught in the hook with eerie vocals, bobbing your head, and the next a complicated guitar riff slams and faster-than-light drums hit you in the back of the head. If music is a journey, Boyfrndz is weaving in and out the back roads on a schizophrenic highway. The drums and guitar complement each other well, weaving in and out from one another with a chaotic sense of push and pull, while the bass stands heavy and anchors it all together, keeping a solid yet technical foundation under your feet.

The bands consists of Aaron Perez on drums, Scott Martin on vocals/guitar and Joseph Raines on bass. Their self-titled album is available here for free download or you can order a pretty cool recycled original art CD for $8.

Boyfrndz Twitter

Video Raid: Only Son, ‘It’s A Boy’

Growing up I knew I could always count on my younger sister, Camille, for some great music. Her ear is amazing; she plays piano, guitar, dabbled on the flute and viola. Still, to this day, we email each other videos, links to bands and can talk about music for hours. For my 34th, she sent me a couple of great mixtapes (with a hand drawn b-day card and all). :) So, when she emails me something, I drop what I’m doing and I check it out.

All jokes aside, she called me one day and asked if I had heard of a band called Only Son. Her description was, “It’s like Bob Dylan and Adam Sandler genetically cloned a child from their DNA and created this guy.” I was intrigued! I said no, I have not heard of him, but email me a link and I will watch it.

Watch it I did … over and over again. I saw my sister’s joke in the man’s looks, but the joke was lost after hearing the song, watching the video and realizing the meaning of the song. It was deep, it was poignant, it was eerie and touched on the materialistic side of America. Not just with people’s possessions, but their children, also. I firmly believe we are a nation of robots, constantly being spit out of the “machine” that is America. I think this song sums up a small fraction with what is wrong with us as a people.

Into The Ethers, with He Whose Ox Is Gored

I’m a dark individual with a heart of gold and I need to tell you about a band that is out there killing it and doing it their own way. A band that stands out from the rest of the pack would be: He Whose Ox Is Gored. Don’t let the name scare you away; this band has been on the Seattle music scene for three years now. Dare I say a staple of what Seattle continues to provide for people who love music. A dark, brooding band that crosses a few genres, but you could ultimately chalk up as an instrumental/doom metal hybrid fueled by beer! If you have ever listened to Isis, M83 or Torche, you will no doubt like HWOIG.

HWOIG caught my eye one drunken night and I’m ashamed to say I don’t know where I was, or how I got there. But the name, of all things to remember, was there early in the afternoon in my subconsciousness when I finally woke up. So I found them on MySpace (yes, this was over three years ago!) and gave them a listen.

Memories flooded back to me of the show and I was hooked. I read up on them, found them on YouTube, and watched them market themselves through a viral campaign dubbed  OXscan 2.0, were one can walk the streets of Capitol Hill and find their 2D barcodes for free music, or for a price of your choosing to support touring, recording costs, and of course beer money! Before I knew of such great places like Bandcamp, I was stuck going to my MySpace page and listening to them.

It would take a move to Houston, the overwhelming sense of homesickness and a what-the-fuck-have-I-done for me to really start plugging myself back into the Seattle music scene. Luckily there are great guys like Nik Christofferson “theseattlerockguy,” who writes, reviews, promotes and takes splendid lo-fi video of some amazing bands. (I may plug Nik a lot … Because he kicks so much ass in the department “Of Kicking Ass.”)