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Last Updated:
Apr 8th, 2008 - 11:20:47 |
Child Bite's Caustic Chaos
I Like Friends
Child Bite kidnaps me … for real this time … they wanted to guarantee me an interesting interview …
They’d debated it for nearly two hours in their Ferndale rehearsal space: the basement of singer/guitarist Shawn Knight’s home, ‘the loud house.’ A 3-2 vote led to the quintet calculatedly abducting me in their silver conversion van and taking me to a Thai restaurant against my will.
Before they started another thorough debate over my ‘ransom,’ we talked about all the recent developments with these five fuzzy-faced locals and their adroit style of bizarre-metal, deranged-pop and acrobatic fusing of noise and melody, spasmodic collapses and locked in rhythms.
In 2008 they hit the ground running, officially signing to stalwart local label hybrid Suburban Sprawl / Quack!Media (though they’ve worked with SubSprawl since the beginning) and next they’ll release their second full-length: the glorious and alarming, steady-churning freakout “Fantastic Gusts of Blood.” Over spring rolls and tofu, we chat about butting heads, the policy of liking friends, how this new album is a “mythological Where’s Waldo” and how Child Bite is “really going for it …” but, logically.
On the surface, Child Bite, as its own live rock band creature, seems weird, erratic and abrasive. The music is admittedly melodic and has a lot of hooks (albeit odd-toned with abrasive bends and synthesized blurts), sometimes fording feedback avalanches as they tornado around the stage in a nimble ballet. They’re pale with circles under their eyes and fuzzy beards around their chins that frame disarmingly tender, affable smiles. They’re one of the most original and inventive live bands in the nation, and things are really starting to roll.
It starts with Shawn Knight, who also plays keys and sometimes an electrified circuit-bent. A shining smile through his Amish-Rasputin beard and a soft-toned easygoing voice, offstage, Knight has a sort of crazy-uncle warm-cool-captivating approachability, but onstage he’s a shamanistic lightning god with tattoo-covered arms and fiery eyes, serenading shout squalls and attacking his guitar.
He traces his musical history to high school post-punk and metal bands, eventually getting into “weirder noise stuff” and grindcore in college, which fused with a brief tenure in a rap group (with “orange jumpsuits to look like we were out of prison or something”).
In the early ‘00s, Knight met fellow musician John Nelson as they were taking graphic design courses together at the College for Creative Studies. Then dabbling in electro-noise with his keyboards, he joined Nelson’s sugar-power-pop act New Grenada on synthesizer.
Knight tenured in NG for five years, recording three albums; when he started up Child Bite, it seemed, “like a way — sans the rap — of combining all these different things that I did.” But life became too busy to be in both bands at once and Knight left NG to focus full-time on Child Bite.
It was 2003 when he met the dynamic rhythm duo of Daniel Sperry (drums) and Zach Norton (at that time, bass) who played in fellow SubSprawl band El Boxeo. “Danny and I were sort of like a package deal for a while,” says Norton, the quieter of the group, and owner of the most well-kempt beard, “we would hang out together constantly.” Current bassist, Sean Clancy, chimes in, “You guys were like corn and bacon.” Norton pauses, “I was gonna say peanut-butter & jelly, but ... So, [Shawn] said, ‘Hey, what you two do in [El Boxeo] — why don’t you come do it in my basement?'”
Sperry, responsible for the perfect descriptor “deranged pop,” and the only beard-free member (still mustachioed), slams a fierce, mercurial drum style that forms the heart of Child Bite’s characteristic stable chaos, while Norton has his own amp-rolling freak-outs and heroic hooks.
Sperry met Norton in high school and the two played in a punk band together — forming El Boxeo while Sperry was a junior and Norton a senior. After piecing together material for Child Bite’s debut, Wild Feast, the band enlisted multi-instrumentalist Christian Doble to play various “auxiliary” instruments on recordings.
Doble, who also attended CCS for design, met Knight through his old band, Kiddo, during shared bills with New Grenada. The more bristly-bearded Doble, who’d had plenty of experience as a guitarist and frontman, acted more as Child Bite’s "secret-weapon," flexing versatility for sax, clarinet, melodica, etc. He floated around as an "honorary member" of Child Bite since its beginning, until officially joining on saxophone this past winter.
Meanwhile, bassist Sean Clancy (from the beloved, defunct experimental rock outfit Rescue) got commissioned just as his band broke up to join for live shows and recordings in late-'06, a year before Doble’s admission, taking over at bass with Norton moving to guitar.
“As a trio,” says Clancy, “part of what they wanted to do was have friends play and be a part of it. For the first six months I wasn’t ‘in the band.’” But slowly, Clancy was absorbed into the friend-friendly consortium. “Then I had to learn how the process went.” Their process is paradoxical: intensely deliberate, tedious analysis when dealing with various aspects of band maintenance or impulsive, shoot-from-the-hip spontaneity when writing and recording.
Take the band’s name: “It started a trend for us where we can’t necessarily agree on things,” recalls Knight. “We decided to have a vote. At the time, it was just the three of us so we each contributed three names, with 15 friends voting on nine potential titles. We tallied the results, put together some charts ’n' graphs and ranked favorites ... yeah, we had a recall.” The next question I ask is what inspired certain songs, and Clancy delivers the flipside answer: “The inspiration was that we had days booked in the studio.” Adds Knight, “We booked studio time for the mixing of [Gusts] not only before we had a studio booked for recording, but before we had even written a song for it.”
Songs for Gusts were written in three weeks and recorded in less than four days. But, at the same time, assures Doble, “We spent a long time discussing whether we should kidnap you.”
But this is crunch time. The record’s coming out and they're feeling out how to work with a label. Doble’s getting acclimated; Sperry is rubbing and ribbing with his new rhythm partner, Clancy, and Norton’s getting comfy as a guitarist while Knight’s looking forward to some heavy touring in the fall. “That’s why we’re having all these talks,” said Clancy, “'cuz we’re trying to get shit going.”
“There’s five of us,” says Doble, “who, on our own, could lead a band. We’re all very headstrong, we all have a lot of ideas and they’re all different. We never get mad at each other, it’s just … very passionate.”
And that passion pours out on the stage.
“There’s this energy that all of us are trying to get a handle on,” says Clancy. “We don’t totally have a grasp on it and we’re not totally in control — shit gets away from us, but, if we can buckle down and get a super solid foundation, then whatever happens on top of that isn’t arbitrary, but it has more freedom.” Which brings us to Fantastic Gusts of Blood, which, “in a way,” says Knight, “could be considered a concept album.” At this, Doble and Clancy glance knowingly at each other while Clancy whispers, astonished, “He said it!”
On previous works (06’s Wild Feast, 07’s Gold Thriller], lyrics came from Knight improvising shout-on-the-spot phrases along to recordings, but he wanted to try tying ideas together on Gusts. “I was always interested in Greek mythology,” says Knight, “I like the idea that these stories have been passed on and changed."
“It becomes a new reality,” adds Doble. “People might write about [Gusts’ lyrics] and get it wrong, 'cuz the lyrics are like snippets and they’re cryptic, and then it fucks it up even more and that’s been the idea.”
“It happened so quickly,” recalls Clancy, “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on and then, all of a sudden, there’s this album! I, personally, have listened to a lot of music, so I feel like I have a frame of reference when I say I have never heard anything like [Gusts]. There’s so many weird sounds on it, we recorded it well (at Key Club), it was mixed really well (overdubbed by Mike Majewski from the Silent Years) and it’s all over the map, but there’s this continuity to it that’s beyond just lyrical.”
“I think,” says Norton, “without trying to sound full of ourselves, it’s more ‘fully realized.’ I’ve never listened to something we’ve recorded as much as I’ve listened to [Gusts].” Having released a remix album, Exquisite Luxury, various illustrations and inventive merchandise to coincide with Gusts, including upcoming tours and more songs ready to be recorded, this could well be Child Bite’s time to shine. As Norton puts it, the band is, “pretty gung-ho and we’re ready to go get it.”
“It’s not like we’re saying,” Knight mocks an overly enthusiastic surfer-dude tone, “’Let’s quit our jobs and jump in a van!!’ That’s commendable, but you get your life to a certain place ... a lot of us are at very different places. We’re trying to do this,” he pauses. When he says "this," it’s as ominously loaded as Norton referring to going out and getting "it."
“You have to decide when things are worth sacrificing what you’ve already set out for,” surmises Knight. “It’s tricky.”
This Saturday, their CD release in Pontiac will be a “big party for the city of Detroit,” with door prizes for the first 100 attendees; various costumed characters from Gusts’ mythology in attendance and a raffle for a SubSprawl-packed iPod, and the Friendly Foes and Blasé Splee will open up.
“It’s gonna fucking rule,” says Clancy. “No pressure … but ... you should be there ... whoever you are. I would be there!” | RDW
Child Bite • 4/12 • Crofoot
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