Keelhaul

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All photos copyright: Bartolomy, all rights reserved.

Keelhaul, hail from Cleveland, Ohio. The band has been on and off these past 14 years with  ’Triumphant Return to Obscurity‘ being their latest offering dating from 2009. They are back on tour in the EU, which brings it to this show which is their first in like months, they had only three sessions together before embarking on this tour which will take them over Europe with two Russian shows included as well.

In the band are:

• Chris Smith - guitar, vocals.
• Aaron Dallison - bass, vocals.
• Dana Embrose  - guitar.
• Will Scharf  - drums.

The show itself was an exercise in heaviness with a bombardment of riffs, the  odd few lines sung, interlaced with jazz, blues and soul and a grateful crowd who lapped it all up and demanded an encore, something they had only done once before in their entire career. Another interesting fact was the age of the band (in their 40′s) and that of the crowd (20′s) which had quite a few girls in it as well. It seems that the ones that had come (120/150 peeps), had made the effort to see a quality performance, and that they did.

Keelhaul does not do gimmicks or calculated moves for short effect. They are here to play their complex beats and rhythms and that’s it.

Check out their work HERE.

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Nottingham show shots

The interview was done at 2 am after travelling to London from a show in Nottingham, but since my IPhone battery decided to go for a rest I only obtained 7.5 minutes of chatter between Chris Smith, Dana Embrose and me. This was followed up by another talk with Dana 4 weeks later in a pub in the West End.

B.: You have been unknown for 14 years? You guys play sporadically, your last release dates from 2009 and also had long breaks away from being a band?

C.M.: Well yes the last one was the big one, it was 4 years.

B.: Why that long?

C.M.: We just got burned out. We toured a lot then, plus I got married and Will bought some houses. Some of us got really absorbed in our own personal lives, and made it hard to go back to touring and live in a van for a while. You have to put your focus on it too, so it took a while before we got back into the basement, and at first it was just a couple of us here and there and then gradually formed another record.

I mean every big tour I have done I ended up packing my shit up in a locker and quit some job, and you come home broke, so you get sick of that stuff, when you are twenty it’s a blast, but in your forties…..

B.: Yet there’s still that itch to go out on tour though?

D.E.: We never really quit, you know. It’s just that playing the same stuff over and over.

C.M.: That’s another thing why we quit; we got burned out playing our own stuff.

D.E.: I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think everyone is kind of half growing up, but there’s still that itch that you refer to.

B.: This means you are going on tour when you have the time to do so?

D.E.: Yeah, when it is worth it, as opposed to eating shit which we have done long enough during our 14 years of existence. Nor do I want to fuck my life up for 6 months just being away for a month.

C.M.: You tend to come home with a week’s pay after one month being away, you have spent it, partied it and there are a lot of expenses involved in it.

B.: So how does all of this reflect on making new material?

C.M.: We haven’t written a proper song since the last record. When we did our last record we finished writing about a week before going in the studio, and the vocals are always written in the studio.

B.: The lyrics, they are kind of spur of the moment things? Jokey

D.E .:  Yeah jokey, some bits we know  will come into a song way before but the large parts get done in the studio.

B.: Like Edinburg burger burglar?

D.E.: (laughs) Yes (the title is derived from someone who stole a hamburger from a Keelhaul crew member in Edinburgh-B.)

B.: Was it the band’s intention to stay largely instrumental?

D.E.: Yeah, singer’s suck (laughs), we didn’t want a Bono, try to be a soapbox for whatever their political views. If you want singing, almost every band in the world sings, what’s the big deal.  What’s a voice anyway; it’s nothing but a sound.  Nor do we want to be stuck in situation where we would require to play a certain riff 4 x here and another 4x there just to accommodate the singer’s lyrics.

B.: You are quite a jammy band aren’t you?

C.M.: That’s how most of the songs come about. Going into a room and just create some racket and Will always has his hands on the cassette deck and he is always picking up riffs and catalogues them all on the computer and then we have a portfolio of riffs, a folder filled with riffs. I can honestly say we have three albums worth of riffs; it is all about putting them together.

B.: Is that the difficult part?

C.M.: Yeah sometimes it is, because you are jamming you are like playing the same riff for 30 minutes and its hard picking just that bit out of a jam and put together with another bit. Dana writes at home, so does Aaron and me and Will always seem to write in the basement.

D.E.: I usually walk in with a whole written song

B.: So Will catalogues it, but where and how does the chopping up bits and mending them together come in?

C.M.: Sometimes you hear two or three riffs and you just don’t know how to put them in order.

D.E.: For me I write a body of a song and then present it to them and then Will plays a drumbeat that doesn’t go with it at first, but we crunch it to make it fit. Then Chris will add something.

Sometimes Will grabs two riffs and does his drum bits to that, it’s kind of hard to understand him as he is not a straight forward drummer and when he does do that it’s like ‘WHAT?’ (laughs).  Sometimes it’s you would have never thought of it like that and that’s probably because he does it from a drummer’s point of view. He doesn’t know chords or scales so the stuff he comes up with is almost impossible to do, but it is a challenge to do it anyway.

B.: So you all have different ways of presenting material, where does the compromise come in and team effort takes over?

D.E.: I think usually we are all quite stubborn, ‘that’s how I am playing it’’ and I will compromise a little but I am still going to play what I usually set out to play, which in my view works.

If Will has a fucked-up beat and I will have to shave off something of that riff, then fine, but I think in the end everyone is playing their own song in their own fucked up way. I don’t know what Aaron plays until I listen to it on the cd. No one could switch places, they don’t know my riffs and I don’t…..except for places where we all meet and play the same thing. So everyone is playing their own song which makes it better I think.

B.: Listening to your records, there is a gradual dilution from just hardcore music, jazz, blues and soul influences creep in more and more is this something that will continue?

D.E.:  Yeah I think so, there’s nothing pre-meditated in this band, like I said before about how we put our stuff together. Although I have some certain drumbeat in my mind Will’s version will be entirely different. We don’t know what it sounds until we are done; the intricacies of it become clearer when we actually leave the basement and start listening to it.

B.: The future?

D.E.: Your guess is as good as mine. I have a couple of songs written, we have a portfolio of riffs which we try to retrieve since the hard drive that stores them went down.  We might have 6 songs between us, but only two members will know how to play them, it’s just about getting into the basement and churning them out.