J Robbins (Band) / War on Women

J. Robbins (Band) & War On Women

J. Robbins has been the guitarist/singer and primary songwriter (or pushiest collaborator) in several bands since the early ’90s, including Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Channels, and Office of Future Plans. For the bulk of that time, he has also been active as a recording engineer/producer, working with musicians from around the world at his Baltimore based studio, The Magpie Cage.

Basilisk is my second solo record. I’ve been writing and co-writing songs in bands since I was 19, but for a long time the band was always the point, more than anything I personally was trying to express – though there was a lot in there that was always trying to come out. In 2010, Chad Clark invited me to play my first solo show as part of the “Story/Stereo” live series he was curating. That experience focused me on the fact that I had been writing songs for most of my life, and that pursuit was feeling more urgent with time, not less. After this I chose to start writing in a way that was more personal and more portable, where songs would be more adaptable to different formats and not so dependent on the dynamic of a particular band to make their point. Which is to say, Basilisk (and my first record, Un-Becoming) are not anomalies or side projects, they represent the main current of my creative efforts.

My first record, Un-Becoming, came together very slowly over a few years. I’m proud of it and I’m happy at how immediate it feels, but the reality of putting it together was often laborious, full of second-guessing and doubt, and more than a few times I got lost in the process. I swore that whatever I did next, if I could swing it, would be much more in the moment and recorded almost entirely live if possible. I didn’t even want to double the guitars if I could get away with it. A lot of my core musical inspirations remained: Killing Joke, Sugar, Britpop and shoegaze bands, Gang of Four – but I was also listening to a lot of early Sparks, and to Frank Black’s live-to-2-track records. I wanted to go back to the feeling I had when Jawbox recorded Novelty – songs that came out of me as directly as possible, and a recording that captured a moment, with little or no looking back or overworking. Anyway, that was my thinking at the end of 2019.

2020 gave us the pandemic, which despite all its awfulness also gave me a lot of opportunities to write and demo music – but everyone was terrified to get into the same room together to play. Finally, around February of 2021, I called up Brooks Harlan and drummer/dear friend and long-time collaborator Darren Zentek and asked, if we all tested negative for a couple of days in a row, remained masked, etc, would they be down to meet me at the studio and do a 2-day session where we work up the songs on the spot, hit record, and see how it turns out. Brooks and Darren were into the idea – we were all in full cabin fever mode at that point and dying to do anything – so I sent them the demos and we did it. The musical connection had always already been there, but the energy that came from all being in the same room doing this together – something we had just spent a year wondering if we’d ever get to do again – was wonderful. It felt like having been lost in the desert, and then finding an oasis. I’ve never been so happy with a session – both the results and the experience, and the outcome was exactly what I had wanted: something more stripped down and very immediate.

We were all fired up and we did a second session in March 2022. In the interim I worked on vocals and overdubs at home. The lyrics were (as always) somewhat therapeutical: “Automaticity” came out of thoughts on aging and remaining present in a world increasingly going on auto-pilot; “Last War” and “Dead Eyed God” work out fears prompted by January 6th and the rise of neo-fascism. More personal matters were trying to work themselves out as well. Recurring childhood dreams (Deception Island), Surrealist games (Exquisite Corpse), and trephination guru Amanda Feilding (Open Mind) were also in the mix.

Another result of pandemic isolation was that I had also been working on more abstract, electronic based music (inspired by my love of film soundtracks, Peter Gabriel’s music, and by studio work I had done not long ago with the band Locrian), using granular synthesis, sampling, and software synths. So as Basilisk come together, I wanted to see if I could pull those sounds into the flow of the record, open up its vocabulary a little and still make something cohesive.

Connection has always been the whole point of music making for me. There are so many ways to come at it, and I don’t want to close any of those doors. Going forward, I only want to open more of them., War On Women is a co-ed feminist hardcore-punk band. Formed in Baltimore, MD in 2011, W.O.W. use driving riffs and in your face vocals that attack the listener both sonically and lyrically, penning catchy and confrontational songs that touch on rape culture, street harassment, the gender wage gap, transphobia, and other vitally pertinent social issues.

Riff-fueled manifestos are nothing new for War On Women. The co-ed feminist punk troupe has been tackling injustice one song at a time since their 2010 inception. Storming out the gate with teeth gnashing and spitting venom, War On Women’s self-titled 2015 debut crossbred riot grrrl ferocity with the nimble aggression of thrash. Hailed for their crystalline jabs at societal ills, War On Women prove that hardcore can incite change that ripples far beyond the parameters of the stage.

War On Women are neither a crew of young bucks nor a contagion of seasoned legends. They don’t fit neatly into metalloid machismo or hulking hardcore tropes. They have nothing to prove, and there’s nothing more delightfully dangerous than that.

 

Bats & Mice

Website / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook

In 2012, two of the founding members of the seminal punk trio Bats & Mice stepped into the studio to start work on their follow-up to 2010’s “Back In Bat” EP. Then, between babies and careers, life happened, and the project went dark for almost a decade.

Bats & Mice is a band that has quietly crept through the music world. Three members of Sleepytime Trio originally formed the band: Jonathan Fuller (Engine Down, Denali), Dave NeSmith (Rah Bras, Committees) and Ben Davis (MileMarker, Committees). They began writing songs together in a new style that pursued their hardcore roots coupled with a more dark and winding sense of melody. However, the music still maintained the energy and drive of their previous efforts. This line-up produced Bats & Mice’s first work, a self-titled EP released on Lovitt Records in the fall of 2000, to critical acclaim.

Friends Daron Hollowel and Ash Bruce from the band 400 Years joined for a stint in which ‘Bats’ wrote and released the full-length album entitled, “Believe It Mammals”, on Lovitt in the spring of 2002. That line-up toured to support the LP across the US, playing with Fugazi, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, 90 Day Men, Denali, and Gregor Samsa.

In 2004, Luke Herbst joined the band on drums, and the band toured Europe in support of a new EP titled “A Person Carrying a Handmade Paper Bag is Considered as a Royal Person”. Jonathan Fuller rejoined the group and helped write and record the “Back In Bat” EP, released in 2010.

Soon after, Mark Oates (from Wailin Storms) took over the drums for Jonathan and helped write new songs as the band headed into the studio to record the basic tracks for an LP in 2012.

In early 2023, the band reconvened in Chapel Hill’s Warrior Sound to rework the original tracking and finish a 10-song full-length record. Named “PS: Seriously.” the finished LP is finally coming to light in 2024 to be released on Lovitt