Molosser CRUDE - Interview

Before I say anything check out this completely rad vid and tune by some old friends!!!

 

On top of slaying in the music department, these two remind me that the human race does have some good left in it, in these "crazy times" as my buddy Tom put it.  I think as far as musical duos go, based on completely other stylistic reasons (of fucking course), Molosser CRUDE is right up there with Haus Arafna and Iron Lung...THAT fucking cool.  Having visited with Jahn and Tess on several occasions at the "old blog" I just knew this was going to be massive.  So anyway, Jahn sent me a one-page (as pro reviewers call it) of sorts...

Swedish duo Molosser hit the scene last spring with their debut album Appear, where they created a unique, atmospheric sound with their downtuned acoustic guitars, vocals and drums. This January they followed up with the “Barebones Sessions” where they presented some of those songs in a stripped down live format.

Now Molosser is back with two different lines: a purely acoustic guitar and vocals duo that keeps the name Molosser, and a power duo with electric guitar and drums that’s called Molosser CRUDE.

“After doing the Barebones Sessions and seeing how those recordings reached a lot more people than the album we felt we were standing at a kind of crossroads”, say Molosser. “On the one hand, the new material we’d been working with would work splendidly in the stripped-down acoustic format, fitting into some kind of Americana world. On the other hand there’s always been the riff-heavy element as well, sometimes disguised but always there, and we had really started yearning to dust off the electric gear and the drums again and make some serious noise. So we tried that and got pretty blown away by what you can do with the power duo format, especially when using the kind of interplay that we had developed with the guitars. And it turned out that the same songs that worked so well in the acoustic setting also made perfect sense with massive amounts of distortion. They become something else, and you’d think that was how they were meant to be from the start.”

Rather than trying to mash these two directions up, Molosser decided to go straight ahead, but in two directions at once. The addition of a resonator guitar steers the acoustic duo even more towards a rootsy soundscape of dark Americana with strong elements of blues and jazz. At the same time, the split-off power power duo Molosser CRUDE can go all in making the most of influences from heavier music, but all in a distinctly Molosser way. The result is a kind of bluesy stoner rock with melodious vocals and a sixties groove. In CRUDE Tess plays drums and sings while Jahn chugs away on a heavily distorted hollowbody guitar.

Compared to the subtly complex compositions from Appear, in their new material Molosser play around with somewhat a simpler soundscape, both in the guitar duo and the electric power duo format. There’s still plenty going on, but the roles have gotten a bit more defined, there’s a bit more of a rhythm/lead or rhythm/bass dynamic in the guitar duo, and in CRUDE both the drums and the guitar can go pretty much all in without getting in the way of each other.

You can get a first whiff of the Molosser CRUDE sound in the live video of “Bye Bye Grace” that the duo has released on Youtube. The song already existed as a barebone recording that might be as close to a ballad as anything Molosser’s ever done, but the CRUDE version is anything but. Yes, the melody is still there, but this time it is presented in a harsh and heavy package that brings to mind stoner rock like Kyuss but also the bluesy, organic power rock of sixties acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Tess, who sings and plays the drums, has a jazzy drive that’s reminiscent of Mitch Mitchell and Keith Moon, but with her own unique voice, while Jahn bangs out bluesy riffs, melodious licks and droning basslines all at the same time. The guitar is a chunky hollowbody of a kind more associated with old jazz players like Charlie Christian than with heavy rock, and is run through two amplifiers and a bass preamp to make a mighty mass of sound, alive with barely controlled feedback. The drums are digital, mostly a concession to the limited space and recording possibilities of Evil Ear’s studio shed, but the sound is just as organic as that of their wooden stringed companion. What you hear on the video is all recorded live in one take.

More live-in-the-studio videos will be released, while the acoustic Molosser finalize recordings for a new album, and the power duo Molosser CRUDE will do studio recordings under slightly more controlled forms.

Interview:

Between being blown the fuck away with Bye Bye Grace along with that one-pager, it somehow became a Mission from God to Interview the Band... I got Jahn on the line and he also managed to drag some brief answers out of Tess even though she was busy mixing their next release...

First off, thanks to you both, Tess and Jahn, for agreeing to do this brief interview...I hope it serves to enlighten folks on the phenomenon that is Molosser and Molosser CRUDE!  At what point did you two individually make the transition from listener of music to wanting to play an instrument?  Was there some person or act that spoke to you in such a way that you were like, I gotta do that?  

J: When I was around fifteen, I was hanging with people who played, and realized I wanted to do that, too. Also, I had started listening to Jimi Hendrix and other sixties stuff. When I got started I didn’t do much of anything else for a good while – except drawing Stratocasters and Marshall stacks in my school books, that is. 

T: I fell in love with the extremely physical, lively playing of Keith Moon at a very early age.

Tess and Jahn, what was your first band experience like prior to you two and how did you two come to play music together?

T: I started at 11 with playing Jimi Hendrix covers with a three years older guy who sang and played guitar. The band I had going when Jahn and I met was a hardcore/noise rock trio where I sang, played guitar and wrote the music, with Unsane and Helmet as important inspiration.

J: My first band was in school, we called it Cunnilingus and told the music teacher that it was the name o f a South African berry plant, which he actually fell for. At the time when I met Tess, which was a good bit later, I had a trio where I sang and played guitar and wrote the songs, inspired by the Velvet Underground, PJ Harvey and things like that. 

We had a kind of co-op thing going in Gothenburg, where we lived then, instigated by The Haunted singer Peter Dolving, with bands helping each other with booking, promoting and such, and that caught the attention of Tess and the band she had then. So we met that way, and started playing some punk stuff and putting up gig posters as a pretext to be together. I can tell you, never ever have I put up so many posters before or after.

Molosser itself is it's own phenomenon, how did we go from Molosser to CRUDE, what was the impetus behind that transition/addition?

J: CRUDE is kind of a step backwards and forwards and to the side at the same time, relative to the guitar duo. Molosser actually started as an electric project, playing riff-heavy music with Soundgarden as one of the main inspirations, since that was a common musical ground for us. Then we started rehearsing with acoustic guitars for practical purposes and soon found out that things got much more dynamic and interesting that way. Both of us were much more at home in a rough and noisy territory than in, say, folk or country music, but we saw that you could make things that stretched the limits for what acoustic music usually is. Which was a challenge that we couldn’t resist.

Really, there’s been a part of Molosser that wanted to be more electric all the time, and the goal for “Appear” was to make something that sounded as much as possible like a full band, but with just these two acoustic guitars, minimalistic drums and vocals. It took a while to get there, but it turned out not so bad, I think. Especially considering that quite often the guitars only play one note each.

Then we did the Barebones sessions, with really just the two guitars and vocals, live, and it seemed like this was a more accessible format. The new material we have written was in a somewhat more traditional vein, with a lot of blues and jazz mixed in, and we decided it would be best to let it follow that route and not over-complicate things. Do the acoustic thing all the way.

But that also means that the noise-fiends in us got no nourishment at all, and eventually we just gave in, fired up the electric gear and the drums and let loose. It turned out that many of the acoustic songs worked just as well with loads of distortion, especially the new stuff, and there’s been lots of cross-fertilization between the two projects. Which means that we scrap one version after the other since both projects get better each time we get back to them. It takes a lot of time and is rather frustrating in a way, but it’s great to watch the music evolve and get better. Eventually things get recorded and released, though.

How do you get that sound Jahn?  I'm not a musician but I know enough about music to know it takes something to come up with a unique sound.  And Tess, your drumkit setup and your style are quite interesting as well, what's going on there?

J: The core of the guitar sound in CRUDE is without doubt the guitar itself. It’s a modern, cheapish copy of an old Gibson archtop that we bought second hand when we were looking to do a discretely amplified version of the Molosser guitar duo. It’s got a carved, solid top – as opposed to laminate - which might be a part of its magic, and a neck that’s thick like a log, which I’m sure isn’t. I put some distortion pedals between it and the amp, just for fun, but it turned out to have this monstrous sound that I haven’t been able to nail with any other instrument – and I’ve tried several, solid as well as other hollowbodies. But this one, it’s like a living beast that you have to stroke and wrestle and coax and push, but when you get it on your side it delivers like nothing else. It goes into two different guitar amps, by way of various distortion devices that are often engaged in series, and one bass amplifier. The different sounds highlight different parts of the playing, which makes it possible to sound like two or three instruments at the same time – and I need that, to try and keep up with Tess’s energy.

Just the other day, someone told me that Jack White used an old archtop in the White Stripes, and I thought oh no, now everyone will think we’re trying to copy them with the power duo thing and all. None of us have listened all that much to the White Stripes, though – they have some really good songs, obviously, but the only guitar of theirs I’ve noticed is that red National that’s kind of their trademark. It’s no wonder that Jack White chose a guitar like that, though, since it does fill out rather more space than most everything else. And anyway, I’m happy enough if there’s an “everyone” to think anything at all about us – they’ll figure out pretty fast that we’re doing our own thing.

T: I’m using an electric drum kit, originally because we’re rehearsing and recording in a shoe box, and it just wouldn’t work with an acoustic kit. On “Bye Bye Grace” I used a pretty basic kit that worked OK to trigger MIDI in the computer, but since we upgraded to a better kit it sounds really, really good and will work just fine live, too. And you can get exactly the sound you want on the recordings. 

You guys are out in the sticks is my understanding, which I envy.  What you've done with "Bye Bye Grace" is proof positive that you aren't just studio act, have you performed in front of an audience yet and/or are there plans to do so?

T: Plans, absolutely. We’re getting close to a point where we have presentation material that we can use to get gigs, so that’s a priority. With the electric drums and small amps we use we could pretty much play in someone’s living room as well as in an arena, so I’m sure we’ll get out and blast people off their feet eventually. 

You now have over ten thousand views of this first video instalment of CRUDE, at the end of which you mention "more to come!"  What's next?  Are you going where the wind takes you or is there some fiendish master plan? 

J: We’re working on more videos like “Bye Bye Grace”, live in the studio things, and have already recorded and scrapped a couple of versions since the music gets better all the time and we don’t want to release anything that’s not as good as what we can do now. But this last batch will get out there, for sure …

With CRUDE, we have a few of the newer guitar duo songs that work really well, but we have also started making new songs specifically for this format, and at this point we’re getting really close to having enough tracks for an album. This will probably be recorded with a live foundation, the same drums and split-up guitar as in the videos, but with vocals and maybe some overdubs added later. We aim to keep the raw energy and roughness of the live recordings, just use the benefits of not having to do exactly everything at the same time. I would love to get some of Tess’s guitar playing in there too, to add one more voice and broaden the palette that way. We’ll see. We wouldn’t mind a record deal for this one; DIY has its advantages, but ultimately all the peripheral stuff takes too much time and energy from the music making. If we hadn’t been doing literally everything ourselves with Molosser, we’d probably have had five albums out by now, not one.

What's spinning on your personal turntables, so to speak, at this time?

J: It’s been a lot of stoner rock lately, Kyuss that Tess turned me on to, bless her soul, and also newer stuff. But sometimes I just shuffle my 3000+ saved tracks on Spotify and get these wild jumps between thirties big band swing, noise rock, old blues, grunge and whatever. Lots of jazz, but mostly pre seventies. I just rediscovered Soundgarden, after being off them for a bit – they really were masters of subtle textures within a heavy rock context, there’s so much to hear and discover. Also, I finally got the genius of Steve Albini’s production of PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me”, that I used to think was harsh and difficult – now I can’t imagine why.

T: Swedish stoner rockers Lowriders have been rolling a lot, along with old friends like Kyuss, Unsane and Tool. Ella Fitzgerald is another artist that I come back to again and again.

Do you have any other additional thoughts you would like to share...Swedish life, politics, the outside world, recipes, etc.?

J: I have to say that I’m really, really happy to live in Sweden as things look in the world today. Not that everything is perfect here, and we’re making a pretty good job of botching things up, too, but compared to the craziness in, for example, the US, it really is the best. As a musician, though, it’s not ideal. Being a small pond, there’s only room for so many ducks, and those that get the attention tend to be same ones that have been waddling around for ages, plus people who have earned their right to fame in other ways, like being hatched out of an egg laid by one of those, grand-ducks. Thus, Molosser has been reviewed in the US, in South America, Australia, Britain, various European countries, Egypt and India – but so far not one word has been written about us in Sweden. Not due to lack of information from our part, I might add. 

Hopefully, CRUDE might be in a slightly better position, since there is a scene of Swedish stoner rock and such that we should fit into OK. While the guitar duo has been pretty hard to place. So far – the new stuff won’t necessarily be. We’ll see.

The outside world … the less said about that, the better, don’t you think? As for recipes, I want to share that Finnish rye crisps with salt licorice flavor turned out to be not quite the hit that you might have thought.

Released this this past Friday or was it the Friday before (bizarre world = rift in the space time continuum), with a premiere on Thursday (prior) on a Swedish heavy music web zine, https://www.slavestate.se . The new song is called "Pushing My Way" and is a pretty big step up from a lofty starting point, in all respects...following the predictions we got from the interview...on fucking target Tess & Jahn!!!