Better Than Bublé
"It’s freedom from thinking about paying the bills and what’s happening at your day job."
Even if you've never heard the music of New Zealand's Beastwars, you're probably thinking they wouldn't be the type of dudes to lumped in with your mum's favourite crooner, Michael Bublé. But that's how it ended up at the end of April, when the sludge rockers' second full-length record, Blood Becomes Fire, landed at number two on the charts in their native New Zealand, ahead of gauche popstars like Pink and Macklemore, right up their next to Bublé's number one.
“You can see a photo of the charts on the internet and there's this painting of a skull [from the album's cover] right next to Michael Bublé's face,” Beastwars drummer Nathan Hickey says of their unlikely chart position. “We thought it was so surreal that this band that started off making music that we never thought anybody would hear, it was just for us to try and emulate the music of our heroes. We shouldn't ever think about the top 40, because we just do everything to please ourselves… Then to have this kind of mainstream acceptance, you just kind of get bewildered by it.”
The drummer's still coming to terms with the band's chart placing in their home country. While it's unlikely that a band who sound like the best bits of early Melvins, Crowbar and High On Fire would place on a chart, the success visited upon Blood Becomes Fire is anything but undeserved. The album is a tightly produced, pounding monolith of hesher madness, and a marked improvement upon the band's 2011 offering Damn The Sky. According to Hickey, that has a lot to do with how the band started out. “The guitarist probably hadn't picked up a guitar for five years before we decided to form the band, I didn't even know how to play drums when we got together, and so I had to learn on the job,” he says. “So there's a big difference now, because we've all gotten so much better at our instruments and played with a whole bunch of really influential bands who have really made us step up what we were doing.”
Blood Becomes Fire also benefited from being rigorously road tested as Beastwars found themselves playing to increasingly larger audiences in their home country. “Probably 80% of the album we've been playing for the last year,” Hickey continues. “So how most bands' debut albums are good because they've spent a couple of years playing all the material live before they record it, and then the second album sucks because they haven't had time to play it on the road, but we've been playing shows as far back as a year ago where we were playing our entire new album, start to finish.”
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Asked if the guys were a little bummed out that Blood Becomes Fire lost out on the top spot though, Hickey is adamant that the band are beyond stoked to find themselves at number two. It's pretty damn good for a garage band made up of dads. “The band members have got kids, got mortgages,” he says, “so the band is not real life, it's the place where we don't have to think about whatever's going on in real life. It's freedom from thinking about paying the bills and what's happening at your day job.”
Also, Hickey reckons that the number one place was all but sewn up by the competition. “Bublé's a smart guy and always releases his CDs just before Mother's Day.” So were Beastwars similiarly hoping that Blood Becomes Fire was going to sell a lot of copies to a market desperate for Mother's Day gifts? “Well, no but we're just as cynical as Michael Bublé is. We released our album in time for Record Store Day, and we played live at a massive record store here and had three or four hundred people come and check out the record. So we're probably just as marketing savvy as Bublé, but without the big budget.”
Beastwars will be playing the following dates:
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