As always I received an invite from Chris Carambot; guitarist of Millsted via comment on Myspace, which tends to be the original trend these days for event invites. Nonetheless I was convinced to come by Millsted’s studio because, at the bottom of the invitation, almost acting as a fine print in a legal document, the bottom of the page read: “This is a personal invite so please know that we want YOU there”. If you ask me that is a pretty convincing statement, plus I was due for a Millsted rehearsal/show, it’s been so long since I’ve been around these guys.
Friday, December 26th the date of the event. As I walked out of the elevator and into the hallway, I was greeted by Pete and Sam, along with some smoke in the air, never mind the kind of smoke, but lets just say that Jimi Hendrix would have felt at home if he were in my presence. By the time me and a couple of friends showed up, there were only about six or maybe even seven people there, Rob and Chris were inside just jamming out in their rehearsal space, this was roughly around 9:00 PM. I was curious to know where Kelvin was; it turned out he had a personal situation going on where he had to stop by the emergency room at a local hospital, (don’t worry, it was nothing serious). One of the people with me was Astronaut Down’s drummer Phil Lherisson. Here’s the thing about Phil, as soon as he see’s a drum kit he hops right on it and starts going nuts, you have to admire his perseverance. As soon as he got on Pete’s drum kit he started doing what I like to call “wowing” people in the room. He seems to have that effect. Pete walked in and started playing some nice heavy riffs on Chris’s guitar, with Eric (ex Near Forever bassist) jamming out with the guys on Sam’s bass. After a while it somehow became only Sam and Rob jamming with Phil, the entire session lasted damn near 40 minutes all together.
After about two hours, eight people turned into about thirty. Nice turn out huh? I’d say so. Before Kelvin’s arrival there was a woman that walked in by the name of Xio with a nice handy MacBook and played as the room D.J. She had her Mac plugged into the P.A. system playing some Dance tunes. She was actually invited by Chris himself to come DJ the Millsted shin-dig. As far as her DJ set goes, it was pretty damn good, she knew how to get everyone going, She played everything from: “This is the Radio Clash” from The Clash to “Bonafied Lovin’” from Chromeo. She even played some favorites of mine like “Slow Hands” from Interpol and “She’s in Parties” from Bauhaus. Overall she did a great job. Slowly but surely people from the hallway started seeping into the rehearsal space, trickling in, and dancing their way in… including Kelvin himself, which turned out to be a nice entrance. Still sporting his orange medical bracelet from the emergency room, he wore it as some sort of fashion statement for the night. Besides doing a little dancing and drinking, he was multitasking by doing some band stuff, like setting up his keyboard and equipment. Then and there I knew that the time has finally come. Like usual it was a great time at the Millsted studio, with the occasional smokes and drinks. Speaking of smokes and drinks, Pete was on cloud nine, he had a lot to drink but he did a good job as to not showing it, but he was completely open about the fact that he had a little bit much to drink. He was afraid of screwing up the set, and he wasn’t making any promises.
After a while the dancing, and the P.A. music ceased. Finally Millsted were about to play, and the anticipation was surely there (no pun intended to “The Anticipation Station”). Millsted started their set off strong like always and right then and there that excitement of a Millsted based crowd overwhelmed the room, it’s what everyone came to see. The songs in their set varied from old favorites to new tunes, the new stuff consisted of: “Coffin of Love” which has an upbeat tempo, along with an insane grove to it. “New Japan” is another potential hit; this song has an amazing ambient guitar tone, with mellow echoing vocals, which fits perfect with the song vibe. To add to the list of new songs is a piano driven song called “Belgium”; this song is a brilliant stripped down song what more can I say? Something not really done in Millsted’s past, nonetheless it’s a great move. The last new song they played is my new personal favorite, and I’m not just saying that, this song might be the new “10:43”; the title of this song is “The Gold Red Rocket (I Got Soul)". Oh man, I’m not sure where to start; the song starts out fast paced, something you would open up a set to in Madison Square Garden in front of thousands of screaming maniacs. Towards the middle of the song it goes into a grove that slips to a sing a long, which gets their audience into the theme of the song. This song is very well constructed, and I mean very well, I cannot stress that enough. Please take a listen, you won’t regret it, and if you do regret it please crumble up this article and throw it in the garbage, you might not deserve to read the rest of this article/interview. In simple terms, this song is the shit and I stand corrected. Old favorites included; “Dirty Elvis”, “10:43”, and the last song Millsted performed was “Car Bomb Derby 05”, which was played very well with the exception that Millsted hasn’t played that song in over a year. Those are Millsted classics that need no introduction. Just to add on to the excitement; in good fashion Pete’s drumstick cracked open near the ending of the song, the force of the right stick being shattered on crash cymbals nearly destroyed the drumstick, Pete threw it somewhere into the crowd and just scooped up another stick. By the time the song was over Pete through that stick across the room in rockstar style, which became a great ending to a great set. We’ll have to see what happens next for Millsted, and we are eagerly awaiting Millsted’s next move. Like always, that’s Millsted’s story and that’s one of many reasons why they have such a large fan base, they know how to keep their audience wanting more, and they know how to make them anticipate their next move. Millsted does not keep their fans at bay, they just bring them into their world and that’s Millsted’s reasons for their successful growth. Last but not least, please look out for Millsted’s Dirty Elvis E.P. coming out sometime in March.
Interview from Chris from Millsted
January 25th, 8:00PM Phone rings… starts with the usual what’s up how’s it going small talk; but we’ll go ahead and skip that good stuff.
Jason: “The Great Adventures of the Gold Red Rocket”, when is the expected release date?
Chris: I’m going to say the summer, but I’m not 100% sure. It will be done soon, it’s going to be done by the end of this week actually, and we’re going to release the Dirty Elvis EP before that to get some hype about it, and maybe release a track through Afro Punk as an exclusive track from the record. We’re supposed to be doing a South by Southwest tour in the summer; I would hope it would be out by the summer. The record is going to be done but the art is going to take a while, the company we are releasing it with, it’s all up to them I guess; but I would say summer, it would be a great summer record.
Jason: What kind of vibe does this new record bring to the table, compared to previous recordings?
Chris: It’s a record. It’s a full record, you know? I think it’s our best recording to date. The vibe is, very cohesive. It’s our real first album compared to the last record we released. It’s very cohesive, all the songs go into each other, there’s a theme to it. It’s definitely a concept record; it’s very in the vain of Punk Rock in the 70’s I guess and the late 60’s brit rock, 60’s soul, you know like your Marvin Gaye and your Sam Cooke, compared with The Beatles and The Clash and something like Sonic Youth from the early 90’s, late 80’s. We’re all very proud of the record, it’s something we have huge expectations for, and we’re just trying to change the way people are listening to music now. I don’t know, music is dead and if we can get ourselves out there for some of these kids to listen to, I think they would be amazed that somebody’s doing something like this, something that nobody’s really heard of. It’s a work of art and that’s the vibe of it, it’s a great record and it’s coming out great.
Jason: I get the impression that great things are coming Millsted’s way. To be blunt, is Millsted soon to be signed to a label? And what is the possibility of this happening?
Chris: Yes and no, it’s more of a partnership than anything else. Record labels are dead, and record labels will never ever pay attention to us. What we’re doing is we’re having someone helping us out with this and it’s pretty much like a 50/50 thing where they’ll put out the record and just basically try to move us on to the next step. I guess this is a pretty big step; somebody is going to help us and support us. They’ll promote our record to the press and all that, so yeah we do have help now. They’re basically doing this to get to the point where we want to be for maybe the next record, if there is a next record possible depending on how well this is received in this country and overseas. So it’s a label but it’s not a label, its kind of weird. It’s more of a company supporting us. Their working with three bands and we’re one of them and they’re going to help put our record out. The Dirty Elvis EP is basically about the four best songs off Umm Yea, we’re putting that out our selves in stores for promotion, radio, and press, it’s going to be a limited quantity. That will just support what we’re doing next, there’s going to be this whole campaign on it. The Gold Red Rocket is a concept record/children’s book, it’s not really intended for children but the whole campaign is called “What would you Build” and starting in the Spring time your going to hear a lot from us, so that whole campaign will be starting then and hopefully things turn out the way we want to.
Jason: Sounds like things are progressing pretty well, it seems like you guys are really satisfied as to the direction you guys are going.
So tell me a little bit about your producer Dan Countant, and why was he the chosen one for this upcoming Millsted record?
Chris: Dan… (sighs) Dan is a genius. If you go onto his Myspace page and listen to the stuff that he has done, his sound is amazing; it’s something new, something we wanted. Umm Yea was just a collogue of noise and it wasn’t mixed well, it didn’t come out the way we would’ve liked it to come out but at the time we didn’t have the money so we kind of just settled for it. But with this record the songs came together so well, I would say we wrote that record in the span of two months. What was happening was, we were hearing our new music differently from our old music and it’s not as heavy or chunky as the last record. We’ve all been listening to awesome old punk rock records like; London Calling… London Calling is what I would love this record to be like. We wanted that sound, that authentic sound where everything sounds so clear and not so noisy and Dan has that. We actually worked with Dan about three years ago. We did a record that was never released, we never finished it because it was garbage basically, and it was just really bad. It wasn’t his fault. We love his work ethic, he’s a real producer as oppose to producers, engineers and everybody that we worked with before we produced it ourselves, because it was our songs and they weren’t very experienced with recording or whatnot. Everybody that we worked with before that really didn’t know what they were doing. We wanted somebody who had more input and somebody with the “ear” and to know what the hell we were doing. So I called Dan sometime last Fall and told him we wanted him to work on the record. He came by and he heard the songs and we kept on sending him Youtube stuff. We’ve been playing the full record for almost a year now, so you can basically listen the whole record on Youtube, the whole record is up live. So we kept on sending him this and sending our opinions and he added the right things. Like Pete went in there and he recorded drums on this old 1970’s Slingerland drum set which is the thickest most classic sound you can get out of a drum set, it had worn out wood and it sounds great. We’re working with different amps, like vintage amps, we got organs on this, we’re using a baby grand piano, and we’re using horn players. So when we come back in April… because we won’t be doing any shows until then, we’ll have seven people in this band and it’s going to be fucking full and fucking amazing when we play live. We just can’t wait till it’s done so we can hear the end product. What we’re going to do (pauses then chuckles)… well what I’M going to do is basically hand out the record for free to all my friends and all my peers and other bands that we’ve known; just for them to give us their opinion on the record and whatnot, because we don’t want to be local hero’s anymore, we’re so tired of it. We want to get out there and we don’t want to be these local bands that keep on playing these local shows, we’ve been together for five years, and I think it’s time for the next step. Not to say we were lazy or anything I just think that we weren’t ready for it you know? It took us a long time to get to the point of Umm Yea, which I still think it’s great; I still love playing those songs and won’t stop playing a good handful of them, but this is something different, in a different direction that we’re going in. It’s more listenable to the commercial audience, well we’ll see about that because everybody who’s listening to music now, Rock n’ Roll is fucking dead and these kids ears are… it’s just horrible what’s out on the radio right now and what these kids are listening to; there’s nothing to think about, it’s just there on the table for you to take in and like. There’s nothing on the radio like when I grew up in the early 90’s there was great shit on the radio, you got your Nirvana, you got your Pearl Jam, you got your Soundgarden, like all this great, great, great music; and it was commercial. There’s nothing wrong about THAT being commercial, it’s just now the shit on the radio that is commercial is just bubble gum bullshit right now. What we want to do is kill that bullshit, just like my favorite band The Beatles killed it, and the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash; they killed all that AM, Blue Oyster Cult crap that was on the radio in the 70’s, and Nirvana killed all of the hair metal. So what we want to do is kill the fucking emo, metal hardcore bullshit and get that shit out of kid’s heads because they’re going to grow up not being artistic. I don’t know there’s just no art in it, it’s just a factory of bullshit basically. It’s lost art; there is no artistic value in it, it’s just an empty canvas. When I was thirteen I heard Nirvana and I never heard anything like it, and what they did for me is opened me up to the shit they were influenced by, then I got it you know? I listen to a band like The Pixies, that’s who I’m influenced by and The Pixies are one of my favorite bands in the fucking world right now, and somebody like Fall Out Boy who are they going to say their influenced by? Crap. Nobody. Nobody important in Rock n’ Roll; Rock n’ Roll is so dead right now. When you see actors like… who’s the guy from 30 Seconds to Mars?
Jason: Jared Leto?
Chris: Yeah Jared Leto making this horrible music. He’s a great actor, don’t get me wrong I love his acting but he’s fucking horrible and his band is horrible. But you know what? People are buying this shit. Their fooling all of these kids and fucking people into… I don’t know its just there’s no art in it. Even the bands that are independent now and trying to be so artful, they’re trying too hard to be artful and it’s just all bullshit. We’re putting out a product record, I know that the music industry has changed in the last fifteen years or whatever, it’s hard to sell records now; that’s why we’re bringing out this book, to get people to see the art because we’re combining art and music and it goes hand-in-hand. The concept of the book is so great and the record matches the art. We just want people to think. Nobody thinks anymore when they listen to music and it’s horrible. I haven’t listened to a new band that I really loved in such a long time, I’ve been listening to older records and trying to get into older music. There’s nothing, music is so jaded right now. We’re reverting back to the 70’s punk scene because I got really heavy into The Clash this year even though I was always into The Clash, but I started to pop it on. I remembered how much I loved London Calling, when we were making this record I was like oh man we need horns, we need organs, like London Calling is such a great piece of art; it’s probably is one of the last greatest Rock n’ Roll records to ever come out. So what we’re trying to do is bring Rock n’ Roll back. I just hope that we can get out there so people can listen to us and not look at us because we don’t have tight jeans; you know we’re a Rock n’ Roll band. People can look at us and be like ahh whatever, because we don’t have the “image”. We’re just five dudes who play really good music and I hope people can get pass the image bullshit and listen to the music for what it is, and we’re really proud of it, not to sound egotistical or anything but what we’re doing right now is putting out a great, great record. I sit back and I listen to all of the songs and I can’t believe that I’m part of it. It’s just really shocking to me how good this record is. We’ve been playing the songs from Umm Yea for the last three years and it took a long time for us to get a crowd, finally people are starting to understand that record. The only thing I’m kind of scared about is when we throw this record out; people would get a little confused. Their all great songs, there’s only nine songs on the record, the last song is about twelve minutes long, it’s a big epic thing. It’s about forty-five minutes and change; it’s not going to be short at all.
Jason: It sounds like your definitely proud of just being part of Millsted in general and just being part of this project.
Chris: Yeah I mean we went through some rough times in the last year, so many times we almost broke up because we just couldn’t take the fact that nobody were listening to us. We had a lot of hard times; we were getting sick of nobody paying attention to us. We were still going to brake up, but around the end of the year somebody saved us, the company that we’re working with, I can’t really expose who that is now but their company who’s working with us just believes in us and wants to help us out in a huge way, so we didn’t break up and the fact that we were so proud of these songs, just for them to go to waste is sad.
Jason: In December of 2008 you guys announced that your drummer Pete Belloli was making a departure from the band. December 26th was supposed to be his last rehearsal with Millsted. I see that he’s still in the picture; did you guys convince him to stay?
Chris: I think the music convinced him, I guess when he started doing the tracks, he just had a change of heart and the meetings that we had with this company kind of made him realize this is what he loves, he loves to play drums. He’s the best drummer I ever worked with in my life; he’s a great drummer. To me he’s better than most skilled drummers that I know that probably can be more technical and probably know more about the drums but don’t have the heart, you know? We didn’t want to see him go, we didn’t know what we were going to do without him. We’re very lucky that he’s staying.
Jason: Keeping tabs on Millsted, I’ve noticed that you guys are using the same producer, but you seem to be migrating in between studios, why is that?
Chris: (Laughs) The first time, the dates got crossed up and the studio that we were supposed to record in Queens got booked. So we needed to do this quick, so we had to go upstate with an old friend of mine, he was in this band called Life Before This. He opened up a studio upstate; we went in sometime in late December in the middle of the blizzard upstate, we recorded these tracks in a bind. We had the other dates in Queens booked already so we came back here closer to home, we didn’t want to travel back upstate with all of our equipment and whatnot. So we’re finishing the guitars and the bass, and the organs and keyboards here this week. Then we’re going back upstate, not too far upstate for the weekend for Kelvin’s vocals because we’re doing it at Dan’s home studio. We’re supposed to come back here for one more date to do the horn thing, and brass, saxophone stuff. We should be done by February 8th; well the whole record should be tracked, and then get ready for the mixing part of it.
Jason: What’s Millsted’s set looking like for the next show?
Chris: I really couldn’t even tell you (laughs). A lot of the record I would say, 7 songs from the record at least. We picked four or five songs from Umm Yea that we still loved and that’s popular with the audience. Songs like 10:43 I’ll never stop playing, because it is my favorite song that we have and favorite song I’ve ever wrote. I guess that song puts Millsted in a nutshell; like if you never heard us before and you heard 10:43, that’s pretty much Millsted right there. As far as the old hard heaver stuff, that’s pretty much done for.
Jason: I guess the last thing to ask you before I wrap it up would be; is there anything that you want to say? Something you would like to get out there?
Chris: You know what… lets just let the music speak for itself, that’s pretty much it. Open up your minds and stop listening this crap that people in the media are trying to feed you, listen to something real and that’s what we’re about. It’s heart.
*Millsted’s Myspace: www.myspace.com/millsted
**Dan Countant’s Myspace: www.myspace.com/dancoutantmix
***Photography credit from: Ed Marshall Photography
****Ed Marshall Photography Myspace: www.myspace.com/edmarshall
Go out, have fun, be drunk, buy albums and check out your local music scene-Jason Franquiz
