It’s on today…we have entered the heavy world of Portland’s damaged sonic wizards RABBITS. This band gets all in your brain with driving tunes that will disturb you & make you jam out at the same time. CVLT Nation had the opportunity to travel into their universe & hear what makes this band do what they do! So after the jump, get freaky & dirty with the RABBITS!
What up Rabbits, how are things in your universe?
Very good. Thanks for asking.
On any level, was there something Rabbits wanted to express with this album that you hadn’t on past albums?
At the lowest level Lower Forms is simply the result of our natural progression as band, the parts that led to the whole. When we started RABBITS the idea was simple songs and simple concepts and that these building blocks would set us up for our own evolution. At the middle level we had a backlog of songs that we hadn’t recorded but had been working on for years. Burn, Flow, Weight, and Rot were constructed together, both musically and lyrically, as an EP about the awesome crushing force of the universe. That EP never happened, so when we had a chance to make a whole album we expanded the conceptual framework to incorporate newer material and concepts. We were able to take the songs or groups of songs we had and compose them into this larger framework. At the top level this sprawling conceptual album about the battle between man and nature emerged, and we fleshed it out with a few new songs.
When listening to your records, I hear the raging guitars & pounding drums that I usually dig, but underneath there are layers of sludgey chaos and other unnerving emotions. Is layering your sounds something you aim for, or is it just how it flows?
Both. Some people (i.e., motherfuckers) think we want to make up for our simple riffs by smashing together disparate parts and generally making a noisy racket, but that’s just about the opposite what we do. We dig the simple and droney stuff (like Spacemen 3) and switching between drastically different parts (like, duh, the White Album), and we all grew up with hardcore so we like when bands play at their physical limits. We just put all those pieces together and what falls out falls out. And when parts are simple or sparse more of the chaotic shit just naturally seeps in. Life does not proceed in an ordinary or orderly way, so, like, you gotta embrace the chaos, man. Let it flow!
Does the inhaling of the sweetleaf effect your sound? Why or why not?
The sweet leaf did introduce us to our minds, but it is rarely present at practice or shows. For better or (often) worse, alcohol rules our world.
What emotion, event, or moment in time influenced the lyrics on your Lower Forms record?
The lyrics are never about particular events, moments, emotions (My girlfriend left me! Religion is bad! I’m fighting dragons in Mordor!) because none of us care about that shit (well, maybe the girlfriend bit, but we’re certainly not going to write a fucking song about it). We’re a heavy band so the lyrics are about heavy shit, man: the earth, space, science, nature, the fucking chaos all around us, the possibility that our lives are completely fucking pointless. You know, fun stuff that we can scream about.
While you were creating Lower Forms, what were things you wanted to achieve as a band & get across to your fans?
How you asked that question is perfect because we made this record for ourselves and for our friends, who were just about our only fans (at least until Lower Forms came out; now we have another dozen or so). It was very important for us to keep doing what we had been doing for the last six years while still taking it to the so-called “next level”. We see plenty of bands who get on some bigger label and suddenly decide that everything they had been doing up until that point to get them there is no longer any good. They have to go record with “the guy” at “the studio” and have so-and-so who did the artwork for blah-blah-blah do the cover, et cetera. Fuck that noise. We recorded our record in Portland with friends of friends (who are now our friends), had our friends do the artwork, and played our record release show at our friends’ club with our friends’ bands. To us, there is no better feeling than having one of our friends tell us how much they like our record or how much they enjoyed a show or asking us to play with them or at their bar (or at their birthday party), and our favorite shows have invariably been playing with our friends’ bands for our friends at our friends’ bars or clubs. Of course, everyone else who likes us is welcome as well, and lots of our friends are people who just kept coming to our shows. We like people with good taste who enjoy a taste.
Does living in the Northwest have impact on your sound & the way you see creativity?
The Northwest has a long tradition of sick, heavy, scuzzy, “outsider” music which we embrace wholeheartedly. All three of us are music lovers, and we have great admiration for all the great bands that came before us, not only in the Northwest but from all over. They made it okay for us to be noisy weirdos, and there’s a slew of Portlanders that eat up that kind of shit. The only other city that maybe loves the noisy, weird, heavy shit as much as Portland is Denver. For the last five years people have thought of this place as an indie-rock town because yuppies like that shit but that’s just a blip in Portland’s longstanding underground dirty weirdo scene. From a practical standpoint, Portland is the cheapest big city on the west coast, so we can afford to practice, we have lots of good places to play, lots of people are able to come out and have fun (i.e., drink), and lots of good bands come through.
What is the greatest joy that creating music brings you?
Bliss.
What was the album you heard that made you say damn, I want to start a band?
Josh: I was really into music since I was a little kid, but it was really two shows I saw when I was a teenager that made me want to start a band. One was Fugazi at a VFW Hall in Albany, NY when Margin Walker came out. Guy’s guitar stopped working a couple songs in, so he was just singing his parts and dancing around when not singing. Then his mic stopped working soon after so he just started throwing himself against the wall. The second was Nation of Ulysses in NYC when 13-Point Program was out. They were in suits and hair nets, set up all their stuff, then went back stage. Then they came back out, and when they started playing it was complete fucking chaos. By the end of the song all the mics and most of the drums were knocked over. Both shows blew my mind and still inspire me to put in some serious physical and mental effort when we play.
Seth: I grew up in a musical household, my stepfather had weekly jam sessions with his buddies and he was constantly playing records and fiddling around with his guitars. I naturally became fond of his record and guitar collections but didn’t really get the band bug until I discovered punk rock sometime around the age of 10 . I started skateboarding that same year and discovered hardcore and metal within the pages of Thrasher magazine. I think the exact moment I decided that I wanted to be in a band came sometime in 1988. We were hanging at a buddy’s house listening to the Northwest Hardcore tape comp which had just arrived in the mail and the first track is Diddly Squat’s DS Theme song. Right then and there we all decided that this was what we wanted to do!
Kevin was born in a band.
Who are some of the bands that you consider peers & what bonds you to these people?
Ancient Age, Basement Animal, Cull, The Cysts, Danava, Dangerous Boys Club, Diesto, Drunk Dad, Elitist, Fist Fite, Get Hustle, Gone To Croatoan, Honduran, Hot Victory, Lord Dying, Murderess, Norska, Nux Vomica, Organized Sports, Red Fang, Salvador, Slam Dunk (R.I.P.), Thrones, Transient, Under Mountains (R.I.P.), Witch Mountain, Wizard Rifle, Yob. What bonds us to these people is that they rule as bands but rule even harder as people.
Is there anything about the band that is never asked in an interview, but you want the world to know?
We’re not metal.
CVLT Nation thanks Rabbits for an epic interview!!
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