It's early on a Friday night, and I'm saddled up at the bar at Palo Verde Lounge in Tempe, waiting for the six members of blackened rock 'n' roll sextet TOAD (it's an acronym: Take Over and Destroy) to show up for an interview. The "Dirty Verde" is notoriously small, but I glance around wondering whether one of the six or seven folks in the place is a member of the band. The guy to my left is fashioning a lime into a pipe, and the two gentlemen to my right are discussing shooting things with rifles.
Andrew Weiss
TOAD: Burning for you
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TOAD is scheduled to perform Friday, March 2.
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Interesting, but not the guys I'm looking for.
When the six 20-somethings walk into the bar, I realize how ridiculous the notion that I could have missed them is. TOAD looks unmistakably like a band: all sleeveless denim, tight black jeans, leather jackets, and metal band logo patches. They're regulars here, too, I realize as guitarist Alex Rollins and bassist Trey Edwin order up pitchers of Coors, and the other members of the band — vocalist Andrew Leemont, drummer Shane Taylor, organist Pete Porter, and guitarist Nate Garrett — grab a table near the bar's lineup of arcade machines.
Someone puts The Stooges on the jukebox, and the gutbucket guitars of Ron Asheton make our conversation about TOAD's new record, Rotten Tide, feel natural. The five-song EP undeniably is the work of a metal band, taking cues from the shredded vocals and eerie atmospherics of black metal, the harmonized guitars of classic '70s and '80s bands, and the crunchy heft of doom metal, but what's most curious about the record is its rock 'n' roll vibe: Opening song "Midnight Hunger" swings and stomps with Thin Lizzy-like swagger, and "Embody the Ghost" borrows vintage punk's vitriol before slowing down into a psychedelic swirl.
The band made the record at Flying Blanket Studios in Mesa, with producer Bob Hoag. Though Hoag is known more for recording indie rock acts like Gospel Claws, Sister Cities, and Kinch, he's got heavier bona fides, too: He produced Slut Sister, TOAD's sludgier precursor, and The Bled, a Tucson hardcore band that influenced the members of TOAD at an impressionable age.
"We saw The Bled back at the old Nile," says Edwin, laughing. "I went up to the merch booth and was, like, 'Can I have a copy of that EP?' [A member] said, 'I bet if you ask everyone here for a dollar, you'll have enough for the EP.' I made enough to buy it. I still have it."
"Bob's the man," Rollins says. "He has to give it his own feel, because he's not a strict metal producer or metal engineer. I played a vintage Telecaster, [and] I used a Fender Bassman [amplifier] to get the chugs really thick. I went into M-Tronics and was looking at one, and the guy was like, 'Why are you trying to play metal out of that,' and I'm, like, 'Are you kidding me, motherfucker?'"
The record was recorded to analog tape, and the sounds have vintage warmth. Rather than use modern amps and distortion pedals, Rollins and former guitarist Dan Labarbera (replaced by Garrett when Labarbera left to join the Army) maxed out the tubes on a variety of Flying Blanket's in-house amps. The band played together live in the studio's main room to achieve the interplay of a live set. The band recorded two to three takes of each song, but went with the first take in most instances. "We kind of left the flaws in there for a reason," says Bollins. "We wanted to make a record that had that horror movie feel and kind of a B-movie element."
Leemont recorded his vocals over the live tracks afterward. "He nailed his vocals in one take," Porter says. "That's why we went to Bob. To achieve that natural sound."
The band recorded quickly but took its time mixing and mastering the record. "We went through three different masters, and the third [and final] one wasn't even approved by Bob," Rollins says. "We all liked how it sounds; we're going with it. We're getting it out on Bandcamp and spreading the word."
The band posted the record on the music-sharing website last summer, and metal blogs quickly caught the scent. "If you enjoy truly ugly-sounding music, surely this is the must-hear album of the year for you," Metal Storm wrote, and Demolish Fanzine said, "Kinda reminds me of a low-slung Sepultura and a touch of Celtic Frost!" The reviewers were almost uniformly ecstatic, which surprised the band.
"I thought all the sludge metal dudes wouldn't be into it. Like, oh, this is too rocking or too black metal, but they all loved it," Taylor says, referring to carry-over fans of Slut Sister and Drone Throne, a doom-metal side project.
"I was curious if people would get it," Porter says. "Because it doesn't fit into just one subgenre of metal. As far as our metal friends, we know a lot of purists . . . The subgenre elitists would be, like, 'This isn't black metal enough' or 'This is too black metal.'"
