When The Bad Penny caught up with Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse earlier this year, they were living the high life. Fresh off the release of their third collaborative album, the deliberately misspelled Open ing Night, the musicians previously of Joan of Arc and Spa Moans, respectively, were taking a break between tours with Karate by staying at Kinsella’s cousin’s 400-year-old apartment in Italy. The indie-rockers, whose new project is called Kinsella and Pulse, LLC, had just eaten a five-course lunch by the ocean and seemed to be wanting for nothing.
Earlier this month, post-rock and post-metal heathens Wolves dropped their latest record, which is self-titled but features snarky artwork referring to the effort as This Is a Record Called Self-Titled by a Band Called Wolves. Issued through Ripcord Records (whose mascot features a cat’s face), it finds the five-piece gnawing at the confines of genre with a ferocity that commands a feral-like instinct to pay attention on both carnal and cerebral levels.
Wolves, founded in 2016, consist of Mark Howes (vocals, guitar); Andrew “Beard” Rodger (guitar, vocals); Ryan Tyrrell (guitar, vocals); Andy Price (bass, vocals); and Robbie Tewelde (drums). They’re based throughout the Coventry in the Midlands County of England. If you just overlooked the fact that four of the five dudes contribute vocals, you won’t when you hear their seismic onslaught of a sound, which will reel in fans of Dillinger Escape Plan hook, link and sinker:
Incidentally, it’s not just Ripcord that’s obsessed with cats; so are the musicians who comprise Wolves. And many of their names are equally colorful and hilarious. Among Tewelde’s cats is Pharrell Williams, Howes’ cat is named Chairman Meow, (nicknamed “The Chairman” or “Mr. Bitey”). Price has one too, and in celebration of Wolves’ new, certifiably and quantifiably insane beast of a record, we invited him to participate in the latest edition of our long-running series, Pet Sounds.
“Everyone involved in this effort isn’t making a penny. It’s so humbling, it’s hard for me to get over it, to be honest. It makes up for the times when the record industry and the music industry are an absolute shit show. It restores my faith in it a bit.” –The Dogs of Hope compilation creator Tom Bejgrowicz
Punk-rock can save human lives, providing catharsis and community to young people in particular who struggle with being ostracized, anger issues and mental health problems. But just last month, Boston’s Iodine Recordings – which Casey Horrigan founded 30 years ago and is one of the most legendary indie labels in the Northeast – demonstrated that punk can save the lives of dogs too.
The label proved as such by teaming with Tom Bejgrowicz, an industry vet who worked on projects for artists ranging from Quicksand to Johnny Cash, for a uniquely laudable compilation called The Dogs of Hope. Consisting almost entirely of previously unreleased songs exclusive to the collection, participants include Jeromes Dream, Deadguy, Killswitch Engage, Snapcase, Enforced, Walter Schreifels of Quicksand, and other bands Iodine devotees would eat up. All proceeds from sales of the collection support the Randolph County Animal Shelter in rural Alabama.
Bejgrowicz started volunteering for the no-kill, privately run facility five years ago and decided to pursue his Dogs of Hope project as a way to offset the total lack of funding the shelter receives from the public or Randolph County region. To make matters worse, the county has zero public animal control or spay/neuter programs, and the shelter is four years into being at full capacity.
When The Bad Penny caught wind about The Dogs of Hope project, we immediately got in touch with Iodine and Bejgrowicz, as it appeared to be – and, it turns out, certainly is – supremely fitting for our ongoing Pet Sounds series. Here’s what Bejgrowicz had to say about the impact volunteering at the shelter has had on his life, his motivations for making the compilation and the tsunami of support Bejgrowicz didn’t expect to receive for giving a hand to man’s best friend.
“Frisky” is a mild way to describe, Nick Oliveri, one of the most prominent rock bassists of the past 30 years. “Feral” or “untamed” would be much more accurate. The eminently talented Oliveri, who was the bottom-heavy-playing backbone of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, and now Dwarves and his own Mondo Generator project, would likely react to even the wildest stories of John Bonham, Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe with a shrug – and his trademark laugh and smile.
Indeed, there is a tender side to the 53-year-old, Palm Desert-based musician who sometimes goes by the aliases Rex Everything, Pierre Pressure, the Great French Manipulator, Rock & Roll Komodo Dragon and Nikolai Svetlana. Don’t take our word for it: Hear about his deep affinity for felines and check out these photos he sent us for proof.
The Bad Penny recently caught up with Oliveri via video to talk not about the times he played gigs in his birthday suit, his still-intact friendships with QOTSA’s Josh Homme and Kyuss vocalist John Garcia, or how he won over Dwarves’ Blag Dahlia by smashing a vase, but rather about his love for cats.
Lisa Simpson of Boise breakout band Blood Lemon discusses, for New Noise‘s Pet Sounds series, her two tabbies: Gabriel, who is about 8 years old; and Chicken, who is one-and-a-half years young.
This curveball in our ongoing Pet Sounds series is brought to us and you by Glass Noose, an avant-garde/emo project whose leader is Pittsburgh musician Tristan Zemtseff. His coterie of pets is so wild … well, you gotta read this New Noisepost to believe it.
To appease man’s “best friends,” a reputation they’re going to have to do a better job living up to after all the barking they directed at us, we decided to focus our second installment of Pet Sounds on canines—specifically, ones befriended by the frontman of French brutal death-metal act Benighted. Read the interview on New Noise.
The Bad Penny (beta) 