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| Horse The Band Interview | |||
| Written by Jess@YMM | |||
| Horse the Band: Stop Calling Them Nintendo-core! By Jessica Skelton Experimental metal-core Horse the Band, not to be confused with Horse the animal, brought down the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, CA the day before Thanksgiving. They gave a killer performance opening up for none other than Gwar, bringing the audience along on a musical voyage that brought them from head-banging, head-splitting metal to synth-y, new wave dance beats and back again. Known for their 8-bit video-game influenced sound, Horse the Band’s new album “A Natural Death” is a step in the right direction to being recognized for their savage musical and lyrical talent, instead of just those guys who write about Mario and Zelda. Many people have no friggin’ clue what to make of this group of eccentric guys, so I got in the back of their tour van to interview vocalist Nathan Winneke to see what I could make of them. YMM: I have some questions prepared, but since it is pretty dark in here I’ll probably just wing it. Nathan: Skip anything that says Nintendo on it. It doesn’t really go anywhere [laughs]. YMM: So this is your last show. How has the tour been? Nathan: This is the last show for us for this whole immense tour that we’ve had. It’s been great, I have no complaints. We did three weeks with Fall of Troy in September, went home for a little over a week and a half. Then we did about a month and a half with Between the Buried and Me, and we have been with Gwar trailing our way home, working our way up to Canada and working our way back. As soon as this show is over tonight, we get to go home. YMM: Any good Thanksgiving Day plans? Nathan: My daddy is going to pick me up and take me to my aunt’s house. It is going to be great. YMM: How long has it been since you’ve seen your family? Is being away from them one of the harder parts of being out on the road? Nathan: Six, seven weeks or so. Its not hard, cause ya know, my family consists of my father period. It is not hard because he is super like go where every you can. He is super cool, I talk to him all of the time. We’re like buddies. My only fear is that I’ll go away and he’ll have like a heart attack or something, but that’s just me being psychotic. I still have my mother but she is crazy and doesn’t talk to me. I tried to call her for like six months and I finally got an email from her and it was a picture of a naked baby with a clip phone stuck to its dick. She’s different. I think that’s where I get my artistic side. My dad’s side of the family are all like farmers who work their asses off and on my mom’s side it’s all like people who are convicts and on pills. Really nice people though. YMM: How did you manage to get into music coming from that background? Nathan: I did that on my own. I grew up with my father and his parents, who are all just quiet. I got into music from friends in junior high and evolved my own tastes, I guess. I don’t have any friends who like the same stuff as me. YMM: Like what? Nathan: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Well, I can’t say that is actually true. Erik is sitting back here, our keyboard player. He showed me my passion for At The Drive In and stuff like that. Apex Twin, King Crimson I got from my dad. But I’m not so much a fan of them anymore, but I was. All over the place, all over the bored. YMM: So would those be your major influences? Nathan: Oh, and add Duran Duran. YMM: How has the new album [Natural Death] been received so far? How has it evolved from “Mechanical Hand”? Did you guys purposefully try and stray away from the whole Nintendo-core label? It seems like the record is more serious than your previous albums. Nathan: Great, best reviews we’ve ever gotten. That [the Nintendo-core aspect] was always in people’s head more than anything. I think we started evolving, like Erik started using more varied keyboard sounds, not just the really digi-sounds, more broader synth sounds. He started incorporating a dash of salt and pepper seasoning. Also on this album, I took a different approach lyrically, than on the other ones. The older ones [songs] were kind of more eclectic, just random imagery, impressionistic lyrics; it was like random pictures that added together to a whole. And this one is more of a storyteller, straight out, everything is interpretable, but very descriptive and straight forward and kind of drew you through and they all have this nature theme through almost every single song. Anybody who pays attention long enough is like “Wait, this isn’t a Nintendo game [grunts to mimic an idiot coming to an epiphany].” I put an immense amount of time and effort into the lyrics and I know the band stretched themselves musically as well, incorporating new things that weren’t there before. We have a new drummer on this album who is the best we’ve ever had. Dash, our bass player, has been with us for three albums now and his influences are starting to seep in. So all the little things, we’re gelling. YMM: How did you guys get hooked up with Gwar? Nathan: We have a booking agent in common. And not this summer, but the summer before, we did Sounds of the Underground with them and we had a chance to talk with them and meet them. They knew who we were, and obviously, when I was like 14 I had “Scumdogs of the Universe”. But I think I am the only member of the band who was an actual fan at some point. We just got into each other’s collective consciousness; they needed some support, we needed a tour to go home with. YMM: Have you received any good advice from the members of Gwar? Nathan: No [Laughs]. They’re advice is “Fuck it, who cares?” But we already knew that, they just reinforced it. That’s the best advice. YMM: Have any good stories from the last few weeks on tour? Nathan: There are some good ones but they are not ready to be made public until this tour is over. Our drummer missed the show two nights ago because he went home with some girl that he comically laughed about. He was like “hahaha I am going home with a girl who is not hot.” He did not even make it to the show the next day because it was like a nine-hour drive and the decided to stop at the mall. Yea, that was kind of sucky. There was an amazing, amazing story. But it is not really legit to share yet because not everyone who works with us knows that it happened yet. I think we’ll save that one for like a year before it goes public. We’ve definitely strained some relationships on this one from just being so carefree. But a show has never gone wrong. YMM: What about your fans? Nathan: We’re kind of a weird band in the respect that some people will just hate us with a passion, and then we will have these diehards who are bound for a mental institution. Those are my favorites. Those guys are the ones that speak to my heart. There is a group of them who I am starting to get to know on a personal basis cause they seek me out and stick knives in my arm. We’ve got something going. I can’t explain it, it is beyond me. Maybe in the future I can write a book about it. The dangers of being completely unique and having psychotic geniuses enjoy you. YMM: What was the process of recording the new album like? Nathan: It was pretty cool. It was like three months. Our basic songwriting process is Dave our guitar player thinks up a bunch of over elaborate odd time-signature pieces of garbage that are really cool and brutal. Then our keyboard player will write amazing pieces of music and then they’ll meld them together into some kind of balance between. Get the bass player and the drummer and solidify a whole song, then I’ll take it home and spend literally 24 hours plus on each song, writing, rewriting, rethinking. On “Mechanical Hand” there were several songs that I rewrote so many times that I didn’t even know what I was talking about anymore. But I learned a lot from that and was able to do cohesively do exactly what I wanted to do. Something I’ll have already written and they’ll see and then they’ll write music to, but that didn’t happen as much with this album. The only things on this new album that were prewritten were the interlude “Cricket” and “Sex Raptor.” “Sex Raptor” predates Mechanical Hand, but I didn’t think we had it in us to do a full, funky sexual dance song. That was a set of sexy fucking lyrics. YMM: Is there any meaning or significance behind the song? Nathan: It is a double meaning song. Half of it is about a dinosaur going through the jungle pursuing prey and the duality is like a modern day club fiend, who goes to clubs and lurks on girls. Every single lyric has the double meaning. It is one of my most perfectly conceived dualities. It’s awesome. I am really proud of that one. It was obvious from the time it was written that it had to have a dance beat. YMM: Well that’s pretty much sums up all the questions I have for ya guys, unless there is anything you’d like to add for your fans… Nathan: Seriously, no. Everything I have to say to the fan is in the songs. [Giggles] you guys are nice! From Issue #55 |
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