Walk The Moon - Raps, Nuns and Sheep

Ohio’s Walk The Moon have taken over our lives. Since the first time we saw them we knew that they were something magical and with spots on the UK’s own Paul O’Grady Show, a sold out headline tour and a new hypnotising album, Talking Is Hard, out here on June 15^th it looks as if they are on track to take over the world.

They are so good in fact that we decided another road trip to Glasgow was in order so that we could catch them on aforementioned sold out UK tour. Let me tell you, we danced our little tartan socks off.

Also, my Mum and Nan watched them on The Paul O’Grady Show and they both said that they were very good, so...

What is the worst place you have ever woken up in?:

Nick: I’ve just thought of some highly inappropriate places that I could say.

Kev: I have one not about me, but about someone else. They woke up in a bathroom, in a fraternity, with a guy standing over them with a sledge hammer in his hand threatening them. He had gone out for a crazy night after a gig and I went to go to the apartment that he thought he was in. He wasn’t there and I didn’t know where to go so I just started walking around the streets. Finally he just came running out of a house. It’s not about me but that is the craziest story.

Nick: That’s better than anything I’ve got. Well, before Kevin and a couple of the other guys were in the band we travelled around and played in London in 2009. I use to study at Goldsmith’s in London so we stayed at a buddy’s house but he didn’t tell us that he didn’t have any couches, he didn’t have any towels and he only had cold water. So I remember we were groggy and got in after playing a show that night and anyway, I woke up on the hard wood floor in my clothes just shivering.

Do you have any phobias?:

Nick: Fear of heights. I am terrified of heights. It’s not about how high it is but more about if you’re secure. I love rollercoasters and high buildings and mountains and stuff but if I’m on the edge of something and there’s no barrier…

Kev: You’re just gonna jump???

Nick: Well I just feel like someone could come and push me off at any time and that I would fall and die.

Kev: I love heights, I get excited by them. We went to the grand canyon and there was a railing that people could stand nicely behind but I’m the one who was 50 feet out on the precipice with my leg out over the big drop. People were like “you’re an idiot!”

Nick: I get weird just thinking about it .

Kev: I use to be really, deathly, afraid of dark water. Water I can’t see into like the deep end of the pool. I was the one who was always like “there’s probably an alligator that has got through the pipes.”

You’re bored, what do you do?:

Nick: Recently I’ve taken to writing raps on the drive to and from various cities. I secretly, not-so-secretly, really want to be a rapper actually. It’s all just about sex, big dicks, ya know, rock ‘n’ roll.

Kev: Slamming chicks…

Nick: Yeah! Sex , Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Kev: We need to make that new track that you’re going to rap on…

Kev: Lately I’ve been listening to albums that I assume I’ll hate or that I have never listened to in the past because I thought they were dumb or whatever. So diving deep into and analysing music that I never thought I would like lie the new Miley Cyrus album which I assumed I wouldn’t dig that much. I love pop music, but for some reason I thought I had seen it all as far as Miley Cyrus was concerned. Usually it’s pretty random, Spotify, Browse, go down to the 40^th song on the list.

Tell us the best joke you have ever heard:

Nick: Oh man, I never remember jokes.

Kev: Donkey dick?

Nick: Ha yeah! Donkey dick! No, I can tell you a terrible one that I love but that only 1 in 10 people think is funny. So, these two guys stumble out of a bar. They’re wasted, drunk, they’re seeing shit, far gone. This nun walks by and one of the drunk guys goes “wait a minute, check this out.” He runs over to the nun, BAM,  he punches her in the face. He roughs her up a little bit and picks her up, she’s in full nun habit. He looks her in the face and goes, “not so tough now are you Batman?”

What is one thing you would like to become better at?

Nick: Diplomacy.

Kev: My surface, quick answer would be golfing. Blake (Tour Manager) is really good at it.

Nick: Blake is good at pretty much every sport.

Blake: That’s not true.

Nick: Well in comparison to us.

Kev: Golfing is something that my grandfather was passionate about. I wasn’t as a kid before he passed away. My dad really liked golfing. I guess my father and my grandfather had that classic, old school, father and son-in law relationship where it took my grandfather a really long time to trust my dad y’know? It was a father of the bride type situation. It wasn't until they played golf together that they finally connected and then it was EVERYTHING. They were both good at it.

Nick: How appropriate for Scotland.

Kev: I would love to become good at golfing but it’s a very time consuming sport. 

Nick: Diplomacy is way better than golf.

Is there anything you know this week that you didn’t know last week?

Kev: That is a good question.

Nick: That is a great question. I learnt that Sheep…uhm…they have a life expectation of 10 or 11 years but after...maybe 5 – 8 years their teeth deteriorate and they aren’t able to eat well and make good wool.

Kev: We were driving through the country and looking at the cute little sheep and we were like “let’s look up the BEST possible fact right now, when we’re in love with the sheep.”

Nick: I was just wondering, oh how long do sheep live? And then they were like well they live this long...but they actually only live THIS long because who wants a ratty sheep?

Kev: And then we were yelling at all the sheep WE WILL FREE YOU!

Nick: Save the sheepies!

Kev: This week I learnt how in love with the new music the fans are here. This is the first time we have had a headline tour in the UK since the last album. Our new album, Talking is Hard, is not even out yet here but everyone in the room is singing along to every song. We would love to find out how they all learnt the words.

Talking Is Hard will be released here on June 15^th.

http://www.walkthemoonband.com/

P.S: We really, really love Scotland and are over the moon that we

have had the opportunity to visit the country twice in the past two weeks. It’s a beautiful drive, a fantastic breakfast and boy do they know how to do gigs. If all of that wasn’t enough, we decided to stay on another night so that we could get ourselves to Edinburgh Zoo, so here’s a picture of a panda. I know how much the internet loves a panda.  

We Took an Epic Journey for Twin Atlantic and Lonely The Brave

Last Thursday another Louder Now reporter and I grabbed some dinner and put the world to rights over cocktails (she read the sign outside said “bitch, its happy hour, get in the restaurant” and ran inside in all her Irish glory.)

We analysed every section of crappiness we could and moaned about how nothing we had planned was happening quite the way we wanted it to.

As most people do when suffering from any kind of life-crisis (we’ve dubbed ours a pre-life crisis) we decided that something drastic would have to happen to get rid of the general crappiness.

36 hours later we were in a Volkswagen Up! driving from South West London to Glasgow. Yeah. My grandmother tells me that I’m brave.

I know that this all sounds slightly senseless or, failing that, like the beginning of some sort of Thelma and Louise re-hash but it all becomes a lot more reasonable when I point out that we were off to see Twin Atlantic rip up their home town alongside Lonely the Brave.

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.1: Twin Atlantic and Lonely The Brave have made the best possible road trip music.

It was a 400 mile trip to Glasgow which took us about 8 hours (we stopped a billion times, all of which were my fault) so we listened to their albums, in each one’s entirety more than once. If you’re ever looking to learn the words to a song, play it on loop on a road trip. But the problem with epic albums is that you can’t help but think to yourself: “It just can’t be this good live.”

Red light. I promise I will get to the show, just bear with me.

Green light. Have you ever sat in a car and stared out the window, with the perfect song playing on the radio, and imagined yourself as the lead in some movie which involves an epic journey of discovery or the like? Lonely The Brave’s The Day’s War, which will be re-released on June 8^th, was 14 spectacular variations of that perfect song. It’s just the right amount of beautiful and moody. Hands-up time, I thought the term “Doom-Pop” was ridiculous when I saw it on Lonely The Brave’s Facebook, but that is accurately  and specifically what it is.

At this junction I should probably mention that I’m pretty infamous for suffering from chronic travel sickness. Ask my mother and she will tell you, in graphic detail, about the time we boarded a plane and was told on more than one occasion that we were SUPER lucky because the plane was brand spanking new. Yeah. I christened the hell out of that plane.

I know, I’m pretty much the idiot with hayfever who becomes a florist, but nevertheless there I was on an 800 mile round trip in a car that should probably never have been forced to do it, and I was freaking loving life. It’s incredibly difficult to even remember that you feel significantly poorly when you’re listening to Twin Atlantic’s Hold On from their 2014 album Great Divide.

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.2: The song The Ghost of Eddie from Twin Atlantic’s first album, Free, makes you feel all sorts of bad-ass.

You remember the crappiness I mentioned? I’m pretty sure we had all but forgotten it by the time we spotted the mountains in Cumbria. (I’ve looked them up and I know that their technically hills but from where I was sitting those were mountains dammit.)   

Anyway, half a bag-for-life of snacks, a thousand re-plays of Heart and Soul, and 8 phone calls from my mother later (no exaggeration), and we arrived in Glasgow.

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.3: There’s a reason people rave about Scottish meat.  

We checked into our hotel, did our hair and make-up (we were owed the girly time), sent a dozen e-mails and headed into Glasgow to explore. We popped into a Bar & Kitchen called Neighbourhood where I had the best burger I have ever had and then laughed because I forgot where I was. Of course the burgers were amazing.

Only marginally recovered from the journey we took the short walk to The SSE Hydro Arena which, by the way, is stunning and an incredible venue which gives Wembley and The O2 a run for their money. 

Amber light: we’ve now arrived at the show, see, I told you we would get there eventually.

First up were the Cambridge doom-pop-rockers. Lonely The Brave took all of my worries about not being as fantastic live and obliterated them in style. Their set was magically moody and really intriguing. These guys have had a pretty eventful year themselves clocking up over 10,000 miles over seven and a half weeks for their UK and Euro tour, being nominated for Best Video at the Kerrang! Awards and preparing to re-release their album, The Day’s War, as I mentioned before.

Track number two on that album, Trick of the Light, is particularly gorgeous and this will not be the last time an arena hosts it.

We were lucky enough to pose a few stupid questions to Lonely The Brave and you can see what ridiculousness ensued here. 

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.4: Chatting to one band during the show means missing another band’s set we’re really sorry Eliza and The Bear!

Twin Atlantic pulled off something remarkable without even stepping foot on the stage. Before their grand entrance the crowd was treated to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, in its full glory, and the arena was more than happy to play along blaring out the words as if there were a band up there.

Then the main attraction burst on to the stage in an explosion of streamers.

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.5: Twin Atlantic are HUGE fans of streamers and confetti and balloons and basically anything it is okay to throw at an audience.

THINGS I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW NO.6: Twin Atlantic fans are HUGE supporters of having stuff thrown at them.  

As they launched into 2011’s Make A Beast of Myself (which may well be the best opener of all time) it was obvious how much this show, and the whole tour, meant to Twin Atlantic. Even people in the very top tier of this 13,000 capacity arena could feel it (like us).

“We might have taken the long way round” admits front man Sam McTrusty, and yeah, he’s probably right (but then so did we). In any event they ended up right where they were supposed to be, headlining the best venues at home and across the country.

What makes this band so special is the broad spectrum they range across. They can fire out trashy rock songs like Make A Beast of Myself and Free but stretch out towards power-pop-anthems like Hold On and Heart & Soul. They can even deliver spotlessly beautiful heart warmers like Oceans and Crash Land. They do all of it quite brilliantly. 

Take a look at the extensive list of bands that Twin Atlantic have supported (sometimes being handpicked by the headliners themselves) and it becomes pretty clear how they do it. My Chemical Romance, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit. Twin Atlantic are influenced by an array of legendary artists stretching from one end of the rock world to the other and that’s really paid off for them. 

It was one of those gigs where you would have been more than happy for the headliners to carry on into the morning. I would have listened to Twin Atlantic play every song they have ever written and I was a little bit gutted when they exited the stage.

We sort of crawled back to the hotel and then collapsed there in a pile of exhaustion. Most people would probably tell you that it’s a little bit stupid to drive 400 miles for a gig. Anything could have happened to us. The car could have broken down (and to all extents and purposes it probably should have done), we could have ended up in a horror hotel and wish that we were back in London, we could have got lost in Glasgow never to return with only a life of kilt wearing ahead of us.

THE ULTIMATE THING I LEARNT FROM OUR ROADTRIP TO GLASGOW: It’s a risk worth taking, to have a life worth living (Twin Atlantic, Hold On, ‘Free’ 2011).   

 

  

Lonely The Brave - Drum kit crashes, being ginger and Thomas the Tank Engine

Last weekend we hauled ourselves to Glasgow, Scotland, to see Lonely the Brave support Twin Atlantic at The SSE Hydro Arena. The gig was spectacular as was our epic journey to get there but you can read about that here.

We got Lonely The Brave to answer some stupid questions for us though! Here’s the ridiculousness that ensued.

Tell us the best joke you have ever heard:

Mark: I can’t, it’s offensive!

Ross: Just do it!

Mark: No I really can’t.

Andrew: Do a child friendly one.

Mark: I can’t that’s the problem.

Andrew: Okay well I’ve got one. Why did the baker have smelly hands?

Mark & Ross: Because he kneaded a poo!

Andrew: Yep. Pretty bad but still the best joke I know.

Is there anything you know this week that you didn’t know last week?:

Mark: That our countries fucked. Well I knew it was fucked before that but it’s even more fucked now. We’re not fans of the Tories.

Andrew: And everyone voted for them for some reason.

Mark: Apart from in the happy country we’re in, which is great!

Andrew: Oops, we got a bit political for a second there.

On a scale of 1 to 10 how weird are you? Explain:  

Mark: Well, Wheat Crunchies have to remain well hidden.

Andrew: Wheat Crunchies are fucking amazing.

Ross: I’d say we were at a level eight.

Andrew: Yeah, well I do have a bit of an OCD thing. This will sound really strange. I have to have my TV on certain volumes. Not necessarily even or odd numbers or anything but only a small selection of volumes are acceptable.

Mark: I have a similar one with letters where the angles in letters have to add up to a certain number. So the letter T is like number two so it has to have two strokes in it. 

Andrew: I probably shouldn’t admit this but I actually have a lifelong fear of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Mark: He really does.

Andrew: It’s actually the music. As soon as I hear that music I shit myself. It’s probably because of some deep rooted suppressed memory. Please don’t mention it again.

When you look in the mirror just after waking up, what thought goes through your head?:

Mark: FUCK I’M GINGER AGAIN! OH GOD!

Andrew: Usually it’s why am I so fat? Followed by, oh that’s right, I’ve eaten kebabs for the last 25 nights on tour.

What is one thing you would like to become better at?: 

Ross: There’s a couple of things. Being a better family member and spending more time with them. It’s hard when you’re on tour though. But I do want to get better at keeping in touch because I feel like I’ve really let that go.

Mark: Start enjoying things more. Worry is a killer.

Andrew: Writing things down I think. Because I always think things, and think “oh that sounds really good.” It’s probably not really good but at least if I wrote it down I could look back and think “you’re a dick that’s actually rubbish” and censor myself.

Which musical instrument do you wish you could play?:

Andrew: Well bass would be a good start. No I use to play Cello until I was about 9 I suppose and then I stopped. Now I’m really gutted because one of the guys from Twin Atlantic plays the Cello on stage and it sounds amazing.

Mark: I wish I could play Cello as well actually. I’m gonna learn it! Fuck it! I’ll show you up!

Andrew: I’ve actually had to learn a few bits on the keyboard for some new music we’re writing so hopefully I can do that on stage.

Ross: I want to learn how to play the piano.

Mark: He can actually play the piano, he’s being very modest but he can actually play.

Andrew: I actually found a bass with a keyboard on it and I think I have to get it.0

What’s your favourite method of apologising?:

Ross: Carrier pigeon.

Mark: I never apologise…because I am never wrong.

Ross: If we go back to the earlier question, the thing Mark would like to be better at is being more modest.

Mark: No, seriously I think the best way to apologise is sincerely.

Andrew: I’m a big fan of the ancient technique of grovelling. On the knees grovelling. The more you humiliate yourself the more you mean it.

What is the stupidest thing you have ever done?

Andrew: Oh my god.

Mark: How long have you got? We did a couple of shows last year, we were playing a club, and we had done the first line of the first song and I fell backwards into the drum kit. We carried on and everything was fine and then the next night about three songs into the set I did the same thing again. Everybody thinks I either did it on purpose or I can’t stand up. The band should probably all wear hard hats and hi-vis.

Andrew: I have thought of one, it’s not very funny but it’s definitely stupid. I once poured a whole bowl of boiling water over myself. I was inhaling smelling salts because I had a cold and I whipped my head up and the whole bowl went over on me. It REALLY hurt.

Ross: Probably admitting that I had a fear of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Mark: *starts to sing Thomas the Tank Engine theme tune*

If you could try any job for a week what would you try?

Ross: Probably something to do with sharks, is that a job?

Mark: What like a loan shark?

Ross: No! Like a Marine Biologist, I’d give that a go.

Mark: I think I would like to be Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Fly F 14’s circa 1986, just for a laugh. Mostly just to wear the glasses. Even if I couldn’t fly the planes, just wear the glasses. Danger zone!

Andrew: I would probably try to be a bin man or something. But I would have to do it in a musical style like swing around lampposts singing happy songs. Mate, you have got to have so much strength to do that job.

Lonely The Brave will re-release their debut album The Day's War on June 8^th and can be pre-ordered now.

Catch them live on these dates .