Thursday, December 7, 2017

Fat Formats with Zero Fire

Our recurring interview about music, formats, and albums is yielding some interesting nuggets.

Today's guinea pig is Graham from Hamilton, Ontario's Zero Fire.

As with most of the bands we cover on these pages, they're a bit younger than me.

Graham's reverence for Silverchair is something that took me a little by surprise. I can remember their ups and downs in the 90's like it was yesterday.

Everybody's got something interesting down below.

Check out the rest and be sure to give them a virtual high five via Bandcamp.

1. The first album I ever owned was?

I think the first album I owned when I was a kid was either Vivid by Living Colour or Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

I remember listening to those albums all the time in my room on a little boom box cd player I had. I probably got them from raiding my dad's CD collection. I owe a lot of my musical discovery, especially when I was younger, to my dad.

2. My favorite album of all time is....

This is a tough one! There are so many albums that fight for that title, but I would say my all time favorite album is Freak Show by Silverchair. 

That album to me has some really awesome songs with some really heavy riffs, and you can probably hear some of that carry over to our stuff. 

I've always loved Daniel Johns' writing and how over Silverchair's entire history, each album they've changed it up pretty heavily while still being consistently interesting. 

That Freak Show album though, I think I discovered it around when I was 13 or 14, and that was one of the first albums that just clicked with me and made me want to play guitar and write my own songs. 

I just remember hearing that album and just having it click musically with a lot of how I approach a lot of my songwriting.

3. The album with the best art is...

I really love the artwork on Refused's "The Shape of Punk to Come". Really cool old-school inspired album artwork  I just love that album in general, I would say sound and production wise it's probably top 3 sounding albums of all time. The guitar tones and drum sound on that record are insane.

4. My favorite heavy metal album of all time is...

Favorite metal album of all time would probably have to be Deftones' self-titled album. 

So many amazing songs on that album, and again, they really mix up the dynamics. They just come up with stuff musically that I would never think of in a million years, and Chino's melodies with Stephan's riffs, Chi's bass lines and Abe's drumming just creates this crazy and unique sound that so many people try to emulate, but no one ever comes close. 

There's just something really special about them.

5. My favorite album of all time (Any genre is)

(answered in #2.)

6. My favorite live album of all time is...

I'm not a big live album guy myself, but if I had to pick something, I don't know if it counts as an album, but that Self-Titled Led Zeppelin DVD they put out in like, 2003. 

There's this live version of Immigrant Song that's from 1972 that just completely blew me away the first time I heard it. 

Bonham is completely crushing it on drums, and they play like this alternate bridge that turns the song into this like, crazy extended jam and then they switch up the outro to create this crazy alternate universe version of immigrant song that is just insanely cool.

7. My favorite album format is.....


Vinyl LPs are hands down my favorite way to listen to music. There's something about the physical element, and the level of respect you have for a record and a record player while you're getting everything ready to play. 

The fact that you can't skip any songs. The large artwork, you'd more often get lyrics included with the record, the different colors of vinyl. It just gave you the possibility to be way more creative with creating a full "album" experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment