Mar302010
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THE FREQUENCY NEW ERA OF THE ROCK (A Short Essay On Being In a Band)
Over the course of our ever approaching 5-year mark as a band, we have learned a few things. Don’t eat Indian food right before your set. Don’t stress when the headliner takes a two-hour sound check, giving you none. Don’t combine Red Bull and whiskey right after your Indian food. And finally, don’t pack so many laptops, samples, click tracks, and technology that playing becomes ZERO fun.
The last of those is what ultimately could have ended us as a band. We were trying to sound so “professional” and polished that we actually weren’t playing our instruments anymore. We literally became robots. Well, I’m here to say that, we’ve said “fuck the laptop” and we’ve started to freakin’ jam again. If you come to a show now, you will see a raw energy not experienced yet in our career. There will be mistakes, loud feedback, partially shit singing at times; but at last the errors themselves will not include: “the loop we were playing to got cut short.”
If you came to see our free show at the Echo in Los Angeles not too long ago, you wouldn’t have heard any hits, or anything that remotely sounded like the future MTV single. You certainly didn’t hear such aging Frequency classics as “Talk To Me,” and our blackberry commercial “Jim Gordon, pt 2.” You know why? Cause we are getting too fucking old to not have fun onstage. We’ve got a new bass player, a young free spirit named Sam, who has helped bring new life and ideas into the band. He plays Fender bass, and 70’s Moog bass. We asked him if he wants to add a floor tom to bash with mallets as part of his set up. His reply: “the ‘bands with floor toms’ idea is a little tired.”
Our recent band rehearsals have been the best we’ve had in years. Our songs are long, psychedelic, and possibly thunderous–all set to a video projection screen that may cause seizures, or least make you forget that Lady Gaga and Kiss FM still exist. If you want to call us psych-rock, retro, Floydy–none of it matters. We’ve brought back that honesty and soul that me and Marc had back when we were a college jam band many years ago. In short, the music is less produced, more naked, more fun to play, and we hope, more fun to watch. And remember….easy on the curry before backstage band huddles.
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The Frequency is based in L.A. Download two tracks from NME.com off The Frequency’s upcoming LP Absence of Giants. Visit The Frequency’s online store.
