Hardcore wordt tegenwoordig voornamelijk geassocieerd met muziek van bands als Madball, Sick Of It All, Agnostic Front of Hatebreed. Of met hersenloze house en porno, zo U wilt. Talloze hard-, metal-, emo- en mathcore bands zijn beïnvloed door de roemruchte NYHC of beïnvloeden elkaar, maar ik hoor tegenwoordig maar weinig bands die opzichtig leentjebuur spelen bij de allereerste generatie hardcore. Minor Threat, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Nomeansno: het zijn allemaal iconen in de hardcore, maar voor de huidige generatie blijkbaar alleen relevant voor in de geschiedenisboekjes. Het Nederlandse Otis houdt er gelukkig een afwijkende mening op na. De geest van de originele hardcoresound waart lustig rond op hun tweede album ’Storm Is Coming’, maar is voldoende doorspekt met een geitenkuttenvette productie en genreoverstijgende invloeden om er een modern klinkend album van te maken. Een verdomd gaaf album ook, trouwens. Dat ze ook nog eens uit Nederland komen is feitelijk een trivialiteitje, maar dat maakt mijn chauvinistische hart er niet minder trots op. Brulboei Mario van Meer en drummer Martijn Konings vertellen je meer over Nieuw Neerlands Trots.
To all those people that don’t know you (yet): can you describe who Otis is, what Otis sounds like and where it stands for, without using the words hardcore, Refused, ‘I Love The Eighties’, crazy fucked-up vocals and strawberry whipped cream? Otis is a band from Roosendaal that probably sounds like the bands you named in your CD review I guess: Nomeansno, Fugazi, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Black Flag, Jello Biafra, Coalesce, Breach, Botch, Helmet, Yakuza, Zu, John Zorn's Painkiller and you also named a now defunct band from Sweden I can’t name here. Starts with R.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the Jello Biafra show in Paradiso, last September the first. I feel even worse since I noticed afterwards that you were the support act, because your new album is quite a fucking great album! How was the show and did you get the chance to chat with Jello? It was an amazing experience, the main hall was already pretty crowded when we came on, and our set went well. Afterwards, when we were sitting in the dressing room Jello came in jogging (yep, jogging) and said he liked us and thanked us for opening for him. I have been a Dead Kennedys fan for over fifteen years now so I’m sure I will never forget that moment. Walter took a bunch of photos of Jello getting ready for his show, smashing up a bag of Doritos and making a mess which was pretty hilarious. It was also cool to meet the guitarist (Ralph Spight from Victims Family) and the bass player (Andrew Weiss from Rollins Band), more of our teenage heroes. The photos are up on our website now.
You played with a lot of illustrious bands already. Do you learn anything from those bands, or is it just a great opportunity to hang out with these guys? And what was the most noteworthy performance? You can learn from every band you play with, of course, not only the illustrious ones. For me the most noteworthy performance was the Nomeansno one in Haarlem. One of the tightest bands I ever saw live, and with so much enthusiasm. These guys have really seen it all, but I believe they still enjoy every moment when they are on the road. Their sound check the next day at Vera in Groningen was also amazing to watch. We’ve also played with Baroness and Torche on the ZXZW festival (now Incubate, which is happening as we speak) in Tilburg but unfortunately we didn’t get the chance to see them due to sound check obligations. Both bands are a good example of ‘newer’ bands that inspire us very much. The intensity and dynamic way of playing they both display is something I look up to / envy very much.
Jello and Nomenasno are both illustrious veterans of obstinate 80s hardcore. Are bands like these (as well other bands like Fugazi, Black Flag, Dag Nasty, Melvins and others) your main influences? You’re still living in the eighties? We do listen to a lot of those bands because that’s the stuff we grew up with, but we’re also into the current hardcore-punk-metal-bands like Doomriders, Night Marchers, Polar Bear Club, Genghis Tron and Trash Talk.
Obviously you didn’t stick in the 80s. Your music has a very modern feel and more metallic sound, and with songs like ‘One Year From Now’ and especially ‘Sinking Ship’ you prove to have a broader musical taste than ‘just’ hardcore. With these songs you’ll probably scare the hardcore purists away, or is it also a signal that we may hear more of this diverse material on future releases? We’re all open-minded music lovers and are pretty much absorbing everything ranging from Curtis Mayfield, Dave Brubeck and Frank Turner to Estrus surf or even Ed Banger electro so who knows what’s next. I’m sure we’ll always incorporate new influences because that’s just how we work. We all write together, we have no plan, we just play what we think sounds good and works out, and sometimes just improvise in the studio. We already did stuff like that on our first album with the noise outro of ‘Ex-Gladiator’, and the song ‘The Slow Herd’, a thing we rehearsed twice and left alone for a couple of months, then played it live in the studio and added vocals afterwards. We did the same on ‘Storm Is Coming’ with ‘One Year From Now’. And then there’s the monstrous ‘Sinking Ship’ improv as the album’s finale that I am very proud of. Maybe next time there will be free jazz or surf guitars, who knows. Or maybe it will be Ramones or Madball from start to finish.
Can you tell me more about the guest musicians and the ideas behind that closing track ‘Sinking Ship’. I think its hallucinating jazz-doom-psychedelic-core kinda vibe is sheer brilliant craziness! We thought up ‘Sinking Ship’ on the spot. For this song, I laid down an eleven minute drum track as a canvas and we all painted over it, with the help of Marloes Broeren on saxophone and some guy named Harry on cello. We also overdubbed a lot of guitars and vocals and fucked it all up with lots of effects and background noises. Everything you hear is first take material. We even went down to Renesse (small coast place at the very South-West of Holland) to do field recordings at sea in the middle of the night, although I do have limited recollection of that moment. We are planning on doing it live one time in the near future. We’re also planning things with two drummers by the way.
Let’s dig an old cow from the ditch: the band was founded in 2005 and four of the five band members are the same. Only bassist Michel Sleypen was replaced by Onno Pijl in 2007. Michel wasn’t good enough? Or you weren’t good enough for him? Michel became a dad and noticed he had very limited amount of time to do everything we wanted to do. He’s still a good friend though, and sometimes still roadies for us and empties the backstage fridge. And, he does the backing vocals on ‘Blood Money’ on the new album. He opens the song after the drum ‘n bass intro: ‘BLOOD MONEEEY!’
This album is built around his poem ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ (‘The Drunken Boat’) from 1871 by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Can you describe in a few lines the general feeling and meaning of this poem, in relation with the actual lyrics? It’s about a boat sinking, narrated by the boat itself. It becomes filled with water ("drunk") and sinks, and describes the journey to the bottom of the sea. On its way down it sees both beautiful and disgusting things, and wishes for death in the end.
All right, I have to admit: I’m a literary illiterate fool. I’ve never read one single line from Arthur Rimbaud in my entire life. But you will create even a trilogy around this guy. A trilogy! What makes this poet so important for you, and what’s the urge to create three albums around his works? And is every band member into Rimbaud, or are the others more into Suske & Wiske? We’re all hardcore Suske & Wiske fans but ‘De Bezopen Boot’ didn’t sound snobby enough, hehe. Anyway, we’re still toying with the trilogy thing, I think it might get interesting. We’re not really die-hard fans of Rimbaud, but I was reading some a while ago and loved it and wanted to write a song in that way. All of a sudden I had a lot of lyrics so the song became an album, but it’s not really a concept album, it’s more like a constant reoccurring theme, a leitmotiv. The lyrical themes are everyday life, often written in nautical settings and using the shipwreck theme which is endless, I still have lots of ‘leftover’ ideas concerning that. And ‘Storm Is Coming’ is a good title for a part one in such a series, so we’ll see.
Are there already ideas (and chosen poems) for the other two albums? Part two is maybe gonna revolve around the poem ‘A Season In Hell’. We are working on five or six new songs at the moment, I’m really excited about them. So far we got things a little bit similar to Dinosaur Jr, Mission Of Burma and Sick Of It All.
Another favourite song of mine is ‘Cast The First Stone’, which got even an underlying (stoner) rock feel. It got quite strange lyrics (from Arthur I suppose). I’ll bet Mario never sings this song live, because halfway the scream-marathon of the seemingly endless repeating of the song title he must be coughing up blood and guts. In fact these lyrics have the least ‘Rimbaud’ of all the songs on the album. It’s about losing yourself in total debauchery. We play it at every show, it’s real fun to do. [Which you can watch in an excellent fucked-up live recording on YouTube here below, EDS]
This album is the second release. Two years ago you released ’Good Cop, Bad Mood’. What are the differences and improvements between the two albums? We took more time writing the songs without playing them to death even before we recorded them. Actually, we began writing immediately after releasing ‘Good Cop Bad Mood’, so I think one can tell it’s been two years in the making. Musically it’s more diverse than the previous one which has more of a ‘first record’ kinda feel to it, looking back now. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the album, but this one is more mature as they say. Musically, vocally and lyrically. Where we played more standard chords and riffs on GCBM, on SIC we tried to make the arrangements a bit less common.
Patrick Delabie once again produces the album. Instead of Vincent Koreman as the second producer, you helped Patrick yourself. What happened with Vincent? He didn’t like the music anymore, he got too expensive, or you didn’t like him? And what can Patrick do what you can’t do yourself The thing Patrick does which we can not do ourselves is create a unique atmosphere in the studio that is amazing to work in. Absolutely no pressure whatsoever, but at the same time bringing out the best in us. He pretty much has the same sense of humour as we do, and since we’ve all been coming out to his studio for about fifteen years now with previous bands he now knows exactly what we want and what we are able to. He’s someone I admire very much and who inspires me a lot to be the best drummer I can be. As for Vincent: he did an awesome job on GCBM, but this time we wanted a different sound and try to produce it ourselves a bit. Who knows, maybe he will produce our next album again. It all depends on the songs we have finished by then, and the way we want to lay them down on tape. For me personally, it has always been a dream to one day record an album with Steve Albini. Maybe that’s also an option for the next record... But we’ll have plenty of time to think about that (and save money for it so BOOK US NOW!) since the last one is only out for about two months.
Nozzman did the artwork. How did you get in contact with him? Cool illustrator by the way! I didn’t know him, but I like his work very much! It reminds me a bit like Gummbah, although not on the album artwork. We go back a lifetime. He’s originally from Roosendaal, and Walter (Poppelaars, guitar) and Onno (Pijl, bassist) were in a band called Cumshot with him. Legendary band, in which he sung stuff like ‘We don’t surf / We don’t skate / We stay home and masturbate’.
The band members were/are also busy in several other bands, but I may assume that for every band member Otis is the main band? If not, how do you combine this with daily jobs, studies and gigs from the other bands? We all have full-time day jobs so it’s not always easy to play everywhere we want, but we sacrifice a lot of spare time and off-days and get things done. I think Otis is the main band for every member.
Okay, and now it’s confession time: Kim Holland was on your thanks list. Hmmm, a strange case of silly humour? And is Monique Smit the new Kim Holland? Monique Smit the new Kim Holland? One can only hope.
Any infamous last words? Last words? One day they will probably be ‘Don't try this at home, my ass!’ or something.
To all those people that don’t know you (yet): can you describe who Otis is, what Otis sounds like and where it stands for, without using the words hardcore, Refused, ‘I Love The Eighties’, crazy fucked-up vocals and strawberry whipped cream?
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