Big business band press photo professional#

And suddenly five years of our lives are gone, and we’re five years older, and we had a miserable time. It can’t be pure drudgery-we can’t live our lives like that every single day.

We want to do a good job, and we want people to like our band, but it’s our lives, too. I think, if people can’t quite put their finger on what type of music you play, that’s a good thing. And maybe we’re not doing our job putting across what we’re trying to put across or whatever, but I feel like we don’t fit in with a lot of other bands, and it throws a lot of people off. Every label we’ve ever been on, we’ve always been the odd-duck band that doesn’t quite fit in with everything else.

It’s all part of where we came from and what we like. And if you think about the song structure and the way Jared sings, we love pop music. People are always saying, “Sludge, sludge, sludge!” Jared’s bass tone is distorted and heavy, but our songs aren’t slow and sludgy. There was a time in the early 2000s where it was always like, “This band fucked this band on acid, and CCR went off a cliff in a dump truck.” Mostly we get, like, “SLUDGE BAND!” and “A dump truck fell off the Empire State Building and landed on Black Sabbath!” What’s the weirdest way someone has ever described Big Business? There’s this video interview on YouTube where Jared talks about how weird it is that some lazy journalist decided everything should be called “sludge” years ago. And then it just kind of unravels from there. Our tendency when that happens is just to disengage and start lying about everything. Sometimes interviews are hard because, depending on who’s doing the interview, it can be super tedious. We can control the flavor of it a bit more. Your press releases, your promo videos for tours, your photos, everything. I don’t often see a lot of written interviews with you guys, but everything else you guys have consistently done throughout your career is hilarious. No deep questions or anything.Ĭoady Willis: Okay good. Noisey: All I've got planned is a quick, silly, lighthearted interview. So we’ve been talking about that in a bunch of interviews, because people are like, ‘Is that what the lyrics are really about?’ I love it.” It degenerated into, ‘Can we just drink a beer while we’re all waiting to die?’ I thought it was obvious that it was just a bunch of crap.

And just rambled on about that for about two paragraphs.

“I seriously made up this bullshit in five seconds about how it was a struggle for humanity asserting their will about the unpredictability and power of nature.

Big business band press photo professional#

We were really excited about it, and it felt like a new beginning.”Īfter decades of playing in professional bands (to name a few: the two moonlight as the rhythm section of the Melvins Coady used to play drums for Murder City Devils, and Jared started out playing bass for Pacific Northwest weirdo punk bands Karp, The Whip, and Tight Bros From Way Back When), they are no strangers to poking fun at the album-promotion process, either: “It’s funny-the label wanted us to write something about and what it’s about for the press release,” Coady says. “Going back to a two-piece again, it felt like we really pulled together and did something good. That might have had something to do with it.” But that doesn’t mean their signature humor-and even hopefulness-doesn’t seep into the songs. He is sitting across from me at a bar table in Portland, Oregon where they have just finished playing a set at a mini-festival at B-Side, a beloved East Burnside rock ‘n’ roll dive bar, celebrating its 10-year-anniversary. “We kind of had a rough year parting ways with our guitar player,” Coady admits, when asked about the darker elements of the album. While it certainly carries their signature upbeat heaviness, Command Your Weather features a recurring theme throughout, created with eerie percussion (moody, church bell-esque carnival sounds, which, according to the band, are created with an instrument called “blossom bells”) and lyrics that nod to perhaps deeper subject matters than they’ve delved into in the past, the band set out to create a “wiser, more atmospheric” record. These are two men who are beloved in the heavy music world for their impish grins so ubiquitously plastered on their faces, so when there’s even a hint of darkness in their sound, it’s sure to get people to sit up and notice. The new album, Command Your Weather (out July 8 via Joyful Noise Recordings), is perhaps the band’s darkest recording to date. While barbershop promo photos and tongue-in-cheek song titles like “Diagnostic Front” might paint a lighthearted picture, bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis of Los Angeles two-piece Big Business have returned with a follow-up to their 2013 scorcher, Battlefields Forever, that’ll likely keep everyone on their toes.