The New Recruits

Madison Punkers the New Recruits featuring Shinky

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Nevada Backwards

Nevada Backwards are the hellbillys from Sacramento, California. A quartet of acoustic musicians, their sound is an amalgam of alt-punk and jamband bluegrass. Acoustic to Nevada Backwards, however, does not mean quiet. Their tortured sandpaper vocals and driving mandolin/banjo overtones fill each room with primordial savagery.

Brian Ballantine takes care of the vocals and guitar, Keith Lionetti plays upright bass, Troy Kimura bangs a ¾ size drum set, and Mick Stevenson plays mandolin, banjo, and acoustic guitar. “We’re totally unplugged,” says guitar/singer Brian Ballantine, “That’s it. It’s the only way that it can be done.”

In their spare time the four operate Tortellinni in Sacramento, a printing press and studio where they lease practice space to bands and musicians in the area. They work with each other and they are in a band together. “We have some practice space, and we’re releasing a CD on our own label,” says Keith. If this is in any way reflective of their personalities, then that to me is an assurance is that they won’t break up due to an ego issue.

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1956 The Band

All too often, too much emphasis is put on those who create music rather than the music itself. Jim Morrisson saw it and performed whole concerts with his back to the audience. Trent Reznor saw it and performed most of his last tours’ shows behind a curtain. Slipknot saw it and began only going by band numbers behind masks. 1956 is an interesting paradox: similar, yet different.

Placing all the importance on the music, 1956 has been able to alienate the atypical image of the rock band whose visibility and publicity outshines the mediocrity of the music. That is not so with 1956. An assemblage of three men, all dedicated to the creation of strong rock music since 2001, 1956 enter the venue prepared for an aural, yet visceral, onslaught of sounds, pushed to the limits of conventional musicianship.

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National Overdrive

Hard rock served straight up and dirty, NATIONAL OVERDRIVE, comes straight out of Minneapolis with their debut EP, “Welcome to the Nation”. Bassist and founder, Michael Alan (formerly of Twin Cities’ rock juggernaut, THOUGHTCLOUD) started up a recording project with the idea to form a band around it. And it couldn’t have evolved more serendipitously. “I ran into our engineer when my car broke down”, Alan says. “He was sitting over at a convenience store and I overheard him say he had a studio. Found out his studio was right around the corner from my house and then we just started getting together recording. I put a lineup together and now we’re ready to go out and play. Our record is out there and we’re ready to fire it up and go nuts.”

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New Society Of Anarchists

The music industry has been full of bullshit since some cavemen (or cavewomen) started pounding two rocks together at the campfire and one of their tribe members started getting them shows at other campfires. Before long, they demanded no pink Auk eggs in the dressing room, ten clay pots of honey beer, and only the best grubs and Mastodon meat. Eventually the band disintegrated. Oog went solo, Gork started another band and Raag, the only original member, resigned to performing with musicians half his age at backwoods Neanderthal camps.

It seems like nothing has changed in all those years, until I interviewed The New Society of Anarchists. A Milwaukee band founded in 1990 by brothers Zakk (Bass), Arlo (guitar), their cousin Jason (guitar) and a revolving door of drummers. “It’s easy to be together when your family is involved”, said Zakk. “The only people that we ever go through are drummers, but we have a pretty solid unit going now. My old man was playing in bands ever since we were young and Jason’s old man too, so it’s in our blood.”

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Nine Inch Nails

It’s been six years since Trent Reznor released The Fragile, and a lot has changed in Reznor’s world. Nowhere is that more present than in new release With Teeth. Less epic in its structure than The Fragile double-disc, With Teeth is Reznor refined to a songwriting sheen, rather than navigating a colossal musical landscape. The songs still radiate with the thrust and tenacity inherent in Nine Inch Nails, but they do so with a bounce and vibrancy that breathes new life into the band, now featuring former Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White, Icarus Line guitarist Aaron North, returning drummer Jerome Dillon, and keyboardist Alessandro Cortini. At their heaviest, they’re industrial-fueled with a metallic surge, but there’s also an adherence to structural simplicity that harkens back to Reznor’s Pretty Hate Machine. With Teeth isn’t as pissed-off and dark as The Downward Spiral, or as emotionally bogged-down and cumbersome as The Fragile . And rightfully so neither is Reznor.

Maximum Ink sat down with the Nine Inch Nails mastermind to discuss the changes in the new album, as well as the changes in his life… 

MAXIMUM INK: Was With Teeth approached with a different direction in mind than previous albums?

TRENT REZNOR: Well, I went about writing in a different way. The last couple records, Downward Spiral and The Fragile, I realized I had written in the studio. Being that I don’t have a band to rehearse songs with, the studio becomes my instrument, and I had finally gotten a really nice place with everything I needed in it. I was realizing that the writing process was starting to become the same as the arranging and production process. It was all happening at the same time, there weren’t any demos anymoreI’d just go in the studio and come out with the songs finished, pretty much. This time around, for whatever reason, I wanted to get back to doing demos and start from a different place. Instead of starting with sounds and textures and that sort of thing, I started with words and melodies. So I moved out to L.A. and set up a place that purposely didn’t have much in it, just a piano and a drum machine, and a computer to record into. I set an every-week-and-a-half kind of deadline that didn’t allow me any time to really go off on a tangent, and let me just focus on the core of the song, then go back later and flush things out. And I think working that way made the record turn out more song-based, and less soundscape. I don’t think that’s better or worse, it’s just a different way of working that seemed like the right thing to do.

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The Nod

As one of the acts making the most noise from the University of Wisconsin, THE NOD, takes influences from Barenaked Ladies to Weezer to come up with unconventional and fun alternative rock. All the members hail from around Midwest and met here in Madison, a place they refer to as “College Disneyland”. They’re playing a special free show on March 12th at the heart of State Street at The Pub. Last year, they released an EP, Shoddy Heart to the masses and since then, graduated, and are now entering the post-college music scene. We took some time to talk about the band with Brett Newski, the band’s lead singer and rhythm guitarist.

Explaining what people can expect to hear from THE NOD, Brett describes the band, “We’ve always tried to explain the music as the quirkiness of Cake, with the drive of The Strokes, meshed with the early Weezer guitar sound”, he says. “We’ve been told we’re poppy and accessible. The hook brings you back, as John Popper once said. Lyrically, I’ve listened to a ton of Cake and Barenaked Ladies, I work hard on lyrics but don’t want it to be too abstract. I’m not afraid of pop culture, and I despise cliche lyrics. For examples, how many times have we heard ‘save me from myself’? C’mon. It’s my ultimate goal to be interesting.”

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