In rock n' roll in general but punk rock in specific, there are few things that bands love more than contradictions in terms. Take emo for example; this sub-set of punk rockers craves the act of soul baring, but can't resist setting it against very plastic or metallic sounds. In the same vein, street punks will regularly come to blows (at least in their lyrical content) with any and all comers but, as any Rancid or Roger Miret record implies, any one of them would lay down and die for a little bit of love and tenderness. There are more contradictions inherent to different sub-sets of punk, but without a doubt the largest and most difficult one to uphold for any amount of time lies in “melodic hardcore.” Think about it – how hard would it be to try and balance heart and honesty with caustic distortion, exacting criticism and tight melody? It's a tightrope – a fact that A Wilhelm Scream singer Nuno Pereira is well aware of. “The 'melodic hardcore' line is a fine one to walk you know,” ruminates Pereira as he takes care of a few last minute preparations before heading out on the road for tour. “Inevitably, everyone ends up falling to one side or the other at some point. I've watched lots of bands do it and only a few have managed to keep it up.
“We don't necessarily write songs to feature both things,” continues the singer, “The songs just kind of happen and end up that way. If we can please the average hardcore punk listener or whatever – let's call it alternative because it's a fun word that I haven't said in about a decade – then I feel we're doing something right.”
In fact, listening to the five tracks on A Wilhelm Scream's new self-titled EP, the band is obviously doing several things right. AWS really embraces the extended play format with both arms on this new release as they distill their sound down to the absolute essentials to make the greatest possible impact. From The very beginning of “Australias,” guitarists Trevor Reilly and Mike Supina orchestrate a set of slash and burn tactics as they blaze through lines that are equal measures hardcore and shred but, unlike so many other bands that have tried to take the same tack, it's done here without a hint of irony or comic resolve; the band sets a single-minded, urgent tone that never lets up, never slows down and never bogarts a riff with extraneous heroics. It's needs-first, but it's also done cleanly and aggressively every step of the way. From there, the unrelenting assault just doesn't stop. Songs including “Every Great Story Needs A Shower Scene” and “Bulletproof Tiger” illustrate that A Wilhelm Scream's energy reserves need no replenishing between songs. There are no tossed-off of throwaway moments in this runtime because, even when the guitars begin to run too fast or threaten to dissolve into static oblivion, Pereira is there to compensate with a gut-wrenching or riot-inciting line like “I guess you didn't get the note on the nightstand about setting the house on fire (from “Bulletproof Tiger”) that seem guaranteed to get kids screaming along from the pit when they hear them live. That theory will be put to the test on this string of dates that has already passed through the Harvest Of Hope Festival as well as a tour of Australia, and has now begun to infiltrate the Canadian border. When GC spoke with Pereira, the band was already ready to go again, and has actually been working out the finer points of how the months following it would be spent. “We don't like to come into a situation empty-handed,” explains the singer, “we always like to have a bunch of songs ready just in case. We like to have some extras around so if we were walking in to record a full-length with twelve songs on it, we'd probably go into the studio with eighteen and even that would be narrowing it down from around twenty-two. We kind of took the same approach for writing for this EP; we just wrote as many good songs as we could and then figured out which ones were the standouts; we do have some left over that'll probably work their way back into the songwriting scheme somewhere down the road, but I don't think we're going to bust any of those out on the road. What we did with this tour was ask each other which songs we wanted to play; we had a couple of practices and brought up a bunch of songs that we actually like playing that we hadn't played in a while. We practiced a couple of those and threw them in, we're definitely going to do “Australias” on this tour and we've thrown “Fun Time” in from the EP. I thought “Fun Time” might be a little 'ho hum' because it's not as fast, but it fits into the sets really well I think.
“After we finish the Canadian dates, we're hitting the road again,” continues the singer with a laugh. “Because it's going to be close to springtime, there are a lot of festivals and a lot of fun bands touring over in Europe so we'll be heading over there to do some touring of our own, join up with a couple of other tours, do some festivals and stuff like that. It's going to be busy – real busy – but we do have a break after that to do some more writing.”
Artist:
www.awilhelmscream.com/
www.myspace.com/awilhelmscream
Album:
A Wilhelm Scream's self-titled EP is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
