K: Hobo Sunrise has a few songs dealing with one’s mental acumen? Have you guys, in the past, been dealt with like dullards as a result of your live performances that traffic in more visceral circles than academic ones?
CG: Yeah, we tend to get written off as just another run of the mill garage band or as drunk cavemen undeserving of attention or serious thought. This is understandable and in a lot of ways we are deserving of these tags but I do think that we have grown a lot since we first started. We definitely get a lot of reviews about how “crazy” we are and how we are the “real deal” in garage music and I find this extremely annoying. I guess it would be nice at this point to be taken at face value as a band that was able to expand its sound out of that garage that we started in and into a realm of honest music. Yes we have a singer that might try to chloroform you with his filthy sock. Yes we drink a lot of beer. Yes a lot of our shows are disasters. We also spend a lot of time writing and making our music and we really put our whole selves into it and it would be nice if someone focused more on those things.
At this point we are largely ignored by a lot of the underground “tastemakers.” I think that our garage past and credentials precede us and that a lot of supposedly open minded critics are not as open minded as they think. Most critics are also very worried about their image and potentially going out on a limb and reviewing a band that might make them look less hip or something. I really believe that we have been pigeonholed, locked into a genre, and, as a result, written off very easily. A lot of people will never even consider listening to us for these reasons. I guess ultimately I would prefer it this way but sometimes it is frustrating to not be taken very seriously.
The other side of this is the simple fact that namedroppers and modern music critics and academics and people that just judge but do not create are the worst. They really are the worst breed of human. Tactfully making sure that the music they listen to and the shows they attend meet the secret upper echelon code of approval. Pontificating the philosophical whispers of some noise CDr? Come on. (CON’T)