Kick the engines over on the welcome wagon, it's official: Urge Overkill is back! Yes, it's true – after a sixteen-year break, one of the best bands ever to swagger out of Chicago has returned to active duty with a new record (Rock & Roll Submarine), a short set of tour dates and a desire to make the world remember what lean, mean and poppy alt-rock sounds like.
Sounds great right?
It does sound great; but when any band returns after a lengthy absence and the first excitement that said band is back recedes a bit, it's hard to not start wondering how contrived the band's reunion is. First they'll wonder why the band left at all, and then they'll wonder what the impetus for the band's return was; did the band mend the fences which were broken and, in turn, broke up the band the first time? Were the band members out of money, and swallowed their pride to make sure they'd be able to eat? These are the sorts of things that music lovers wonder about, and the cynicism which comes with those questions is what causes listeners to look much more closely at any new music which may come after the band makes its return.
Thankfully, Urge Overkill guitarist Eddie “King” Roeser is the first to admit that orchestrating a return was not the single most simple thing for Urge Overkill, because the band was really, really careful to make sure that they did it right. “I think a lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief that the release isn't a big disappointment, and that includes us,” says Roeser with a bit of wry humor which is very, very welcome in discussions of the razor's edge walk it took to allow Urge Overill to return in a gratifying way. “It leaves everybody feeling a little warm inside that we didn't just throw it all away and put a record out just because we could. We're really proud of it, and we're planning to take it on tour anywhere they'll have us. I'm not sure how long it's going to be before we're looking at making another record, but it's going to be a decent series of dates.
"We started playing around with some of the ideas for these songs around 2005, so some of them do go back to that point,” explains the guitarist of the process which ultimately yielded Rock & Roll Submarine. “None of them go back to the Geffen years or anything like that, but it wasn't all this year either. We didn't record everything we have, to be perfectly honest; we did enough work that we could start making another record, and this one was enjoyable enough to make that it's likely we will. These were the songs that we thought were the best for right now and fit together well as one album.”
Rock & Roll Submarine does indeed fit together like the solid album that any Urge fan would hope for, but the more fairweather fans that the band won with albums like Saturation and Exit The Dragon will likely be disappointed because this is a real Urge Overkill album, from top to bottom and with all the intrinsic “flaws” associated with the band's catalogue gloriously intact. From the opening of “Mason/Dixon,” Urge Overkill (manned by Nathan “Nash Kato” Katruud and Roeser with Mike Hodgkiss and Brian Quast – John “Blackie Onassis” Rowan stayed home) returns as the far more durable and low-fi band it was before all the fanfare and controversy they drew in the mid-Nineties started; complete with some road-tested and hardened (in a Rolling Stones sort of way) guitar licks and a vibe which doesn't try for any flash and dazzle boldness. On songs like “Little Vice,” “She's My Ride,” “Niteliner” and “Touched to a Cut,” Urge Overkill just plows out the sort of alt-rock/post-punk permutation of The Rolling Stones that they initially drew notice for on Americruiser. Simply said, Rock & Roll Submarine is a no frills affair, but it works pretty well as a working-class effort – fans who actually bought those aforementioned records and weren't just “radio fans” will be delighted to discover that the band hasn't lost too many steps in their swagger after such a long period away from the studio. Roeser proves, for example, that he can still bash out an angrily dismissive, arena-ready rocker when he wants to (“Little Vice,” “End Of Story” and “Niteliner” are all excellent successors to songs like “Jaywalkin'” “Honesty Files,” “Back On Me” and “The Stalker”) and, while his contributions are fewer and uncharacteristically subdued here, Kato's songs add some decent color and shine. All of that makes Rock & Roll Submarine an enjoyable listen, certainly, but not a contrived “back on top” release which makes it even better – a fact that Roeser says was most definitely another point with which the band took great care. “It might have come as a surprise to somebody, somewhere, but we knew we weren't going to come back and try to make something that sounded like Saturation again,” says Roeser as he tries to stifle a bit of self-conscious laughter. “Saturation was kind of a departure at the time because it was a little self-consciously slick, if you will. We were trying to be pretty obvious about that at the time but, now, it's almost a bit more of a chore to keep more of the rawness intact, with the development that have been made in recording technology and equipment since then; you have to work to make something sound authentic now, and we used various techniques to get a little bit of grain and grittiness back. Anybody can sound as slick as went out of our way and challenged ourselves to sound in '93 now, and we didn't want to re-present that again; we're a pretty raw band if you see us live – we're tight but it's not a Bon Jovi-level, commercial affair – and this sounds like us more than Saturation ever really did.
"To put it simply, we weren't really interested in making a really slick record again,” continues the guitarist. “The reason to make a really slick record is because you may think that you've got a shot at some sort of commercial marketplace and we did it back when almost as a joke that we'd be able to laugh about with those who knew us. It was fun at the time and it did work, but I think that now authenticity is what people are really hoping to hear in rock music again now and that's what we thought would be best to go back to this time; bring some immediacy back and do it without throwing in layers and layers of instruments so we could deliver it live. It wasn't really planned out, but we had done some recording in various places using different techniques and the ones that we ended up keeping for the record featured the drums recorded on analogue tape. We learned early in the process that we wanted to get into rooms which used tape and where the band wouldn't necessarily be so well-rehearsed; the songs that appear on the record – the versions of them – were earlier takes and we thought that might have had to do with the tape machines and the atmosphere. Some of the songs that appear on the record were never intended to appear on the record actually; they were demos that we ended up keeping.”
After everything was sorted out and the band had a complete record ready to go, the band elected to continue thinking like a pre-Saturation Urge Overikll, according to Roeser, and stay off of major labels – citing the difficulties that record label have been experiencing of late as the reason. Rather than trying to court a boutique label though, the band went a step further and elected to take advantage of technology and simply release Rock & Roll Submarine themselves – a move that the guitarist says has felt surprisingly fulfilling. “I can't complain about Geffen – they loved the band – but this has just been a dream,” exclaims the guitarist excitedly. “After we looked around and did a bit of research, we decided there just isn't a whole lot of upside to the margins now with the major labels. Too many bands I'm aware of have had someone else's money invested in their recordings and, if that label who has invested their money in that record thinks they could cut their potential losses by simply not releasing an album because that would be cheaper, then you're stuck; you have to go back and re-record it or something. I do have to say that we did get some support from the distributor – Red Eye – and proved themselves to be reputable and have been helping us out a lot. They've been doing a lot of work for us, and we really appreciate it. When it came right down to it, they were shocked and dismayed that we were having difficulty finding a label, and came with an offer and a surprising amount of excitement. They allowed us to do what we wanted to do, and they've been helping us out financially and, while that might be the boring business side of it, it really has been the best of both worlds.
"Between the freedom we have to set our own touring obligations – how much we want to do I mean – and the freedom we have to record at a rate we're comfortable with, I really do feel like we're living closer to the rock & roll dream now [chuckling].”
Artist:
www.urgeoverkill.com/
www.myspace.com/urgeoverkill69
www.facebook.com/people/Urge-Overkill
www.twitter.com/#!/urgeoverkill
Further Reading:
Ground Control – Urge Overkill – Rock & Roll Submarine – [Album] – Review
Download:
Urge Overkill – “Effigy” – Rock & Roll Submarine
Tour:
Click here for an updated list of Urge Overkill's upcoming shows.
Album:
Rock & Roll Submarine is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
