Tonight at the Bluebird is a doozy of a show: The Queers, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Bomb the Music Industry!, Kepi the Band and one of B-Sides' featured bands, Lemuria are all coming into town as part of the Asian Man Records tour. The show starts at 7 p.m., and tickets are $14.
Lemuria!
Take a listen to a few tracks by Lemuria -- a Buffalo trio for fans of Velocity Girl, Magnapop and the Reputation -- while you're reading outtakes from my interview with the band. Thanks to them for letting me post these!
MP3: Lemuria, "Buzz" MP3: Lemuria, "Mechanical" Vocalist/guitarist Sheena Ozzella: On working with Doug White, on their new LP, Get Better: He’s absolutely amazing. He’s out of Lockport, New York, which is kind of like probably twenty minute away from where we live. He’s recorded everything we’ve done. He’s been doing it for almost twenty years now, so he’s sort of like a magician at this. He knows exactly what to do, when to do it. He offers awesome advice and he’s just really honest with us, which is really cool because it’s nice to have that input for sure when you're recording a record with somebody. He’s an awesome dude, he likes to talk a bunch, we had a pizza party after we recorded our record.In smaller cities, people get so excited when bands come to town. St. Louis is kind of like that; sometimes we get a lot of big stuff, sometimes things skip over. We’ve been to St. Louis a couple of times, but we’ve never played a house venue there. The only time we’ve played in St. Louis, we played at a place called the Way Out Club?
That’s still around. It’s in a very bad neighborhood. I remember the lady who booked the show there was like, "All right, just don’t walk around by yourself." It was a cool venue, though. The inside of it was really cool. I remember we played with some bands that were definitely not punk bands. One of the bands had an accordion. [Alex talks from the background] One was a bar cover band.
Girls are starting to look up to you as a role model, I hear. Have you found that? I’ve definitely gotten really insanely nice compliments, and some ladies that have come up and said, "I really think that you’re doing something really great." I think that’s one of the best feelings in the world, obviously, but it’s been pretty insane. Getting a compliment like that, I don’t think I have ever really…I guess I kind of don’t know how to handle that kind of compliment? We just started and it just kind of happened. I think it’s because you seem very accessible to people. All three of us in this band, I don’t know, we’re just dorky kids. We’re definitely in this because we want to meet people and we want to travel and we want to do fun things, and we get to go to these places and meet people. It would feel weird to be a band that was just touring and make it their living, or touring to make it a business, just because so much of touring and being a part of playing music is like, obviously meeting people and making friends and going to cities and doing fun shit. We’ve been really lucky with that, and we kind of have to be social to make that happen.
"The Origamists":
Drummer/vocalist Alex Kerns:
This is the first band you’ve played drums in. What prompted you to switch over? I kind of picked them up from when I was playing guitar in other bands. When we’d be practicing, I’d always kind of look at them and be very interested. Whenever the drummer of those bands I was in would go for a bathroom break, ‘d quickly put down my guitar and go [makes drum sounds] and sound awful. At one point eventually the guy left his drum set at my house, just cause it’s easier, so I started playing them every once in awhile. I eventually put together a mutt of a kit, a bunch of pieces of my own eventually and practiced a lot. Eventually I became more interested in the drums than guitar -- even though I still play guitar, I still own a guitar. But when I listen to a band, I’m usually focusing more on the drums than the guitar parts. How did you hook up with Asian Man Records? I run a record label called the Art of the Underground. I released all of our first seven-inches and our split LP with Kind of Like Spitting and stuff like that. When we recorded this album, we didn’t really intend on mailing it out for submissions to be released on other labels, we kind of assumed that I wold probably end up putting it out, because it’s easier. But Asian Man had contacted me through the label to see if I wanted to trade records, cause they run a distro where they carry other labels’ records, and so do I.
The stuff they had requested in trade was Lemuria records? So I was like, "We just recorded the full-length album, it’s not pressed yet." I sent them a CD-R of it, just assuming they were into the music because they requested the records. And they wrote us back and were like "Hey, if you want us to put this out, we’d love to." It was like, "Okay!" I figured they would do a better job than me, because I go on tour a lot with the band, the label’s not like my full-time job or anything like that. It’s a hobby of mine.
