Teenage Kicks

The emphatically party band that is Dangerous! has come a long way from their more humble hometown beginnings. Formed in 2007 from the remains of their previous, more hardcore-rooted outfit Wendy Icon, they threw aside the conventions of said scene and decided to have as much fun as they could. In due course the four-piece travelled to Los Angeles to record their debut album Teenage Rampage – releases last September – with none other than Ulrich Wild, the man responsible for the sonic qualities on albums by bands like Pantera and Deftones.

“It's been a long time, definitely,” says Icon of the slow rise from formation to debut album. “We've always had heaps of fun doing what we do, touring and playing in bands. It has flown by. We started Dangerous!, and just like always we have fun with it, record music, release CDs, put stuff up on the net, tour, put on our own tours, manage our own bands, and all that kind of stuff. We put out an EP, and as usual we took it around to record labels, and like usual a couple of record labels would get back to us and say they love us and they want to sign us and stuff. This time it went a little bit further, and Epitaph said they loved the music that we've made, and they loved our band, and were as excited about it as we were. The next thing you know, we're on tour, and Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion who owns Epitaph, called our telephone and said he wants to sign us and fly us overseas to record our first album.”

Icon reveals that the band experimented with unusual means of recording – at least for the international level they were operating at – aiming for an unhinged sound rather than worrying about perfection.

“We tried a bunch of different things in different takes,” he explains of his vocal tracking, “and I ended up recording the vocals like I would live, which was with a microphone in a room, jumping off the walls. I had speakers playing the tracks back at me, so it was like a band was playing in the room with me live, which is totally unconventional to do when you're recording a professional album – you're supposed to use nice expensive mics and have an isolated room, but we cranked it up, man. We just went for it like that, and didn't care too much about it in regards to the sound and everything being perfect. We just went for the performance side of things, and I think we caught that. I think the album sounds pretty live, and pretty real, and pretty raw, and a bit untamed in a sense.”

Despite having left their teenage years behind some time ago, Icon explains the greater reasoning behind their debut album's title.

“I think the album is like an ode to our youth. We wanted to recreate the albums that we grew up on. That's how we found our producer Ulrich Wild. We looked on the back of these CDs from these cool bands that we loved when we were growing up, and we were trying to find our producer on the back of these CDs, and Ulrich Wild's name kept popping up. So we went with him, and we tried to recreate what we grew up with, and create an album that made us feel like we did when we were growing up. The album's very youthful and adolescent. The sound is just very raucous, a lot of energy and stuff. That's the vibe of the entire album and the theme as well.”