GETTING OUR GROWL ON WITH KARYN CRISIS
Crisis is a band that has been horribly
neglected by the popular media for far too long. Unfortunately, they
fail to fit into a neat little package that can easily be digested by the
casual listener. Their latest opus, Like Sheep Led to Slaughter
is a hybrid of sounds punctuated by the astounding vocals of Karyn
Crisis. Songs like “Waking the Dead” and the awesome “Nomad” showcase
her arsenal of gravel-truck rumbles, shrieks, and amazingly pure vocal
lines. antiMusic’s Morley Seaver spoke to Karyn recently by phone
as the band was working on new material, prior to a fall tour with Exodus
and 3 Inches of Blood. She was a great interview; friendly, forthcoming
and articulate. Check out the following where Karyn discusses malevolent
shepherds, throat infections and haunted churches. Then go out and
buy the record, you rascals.
antiMusic: Your music defies classification.
Do you set out to be purposefully adventurous in your songwriting or does
your muse just wander all over the map?
Karyn Crisis: It really does wander.
I mean, when we try to describe ourselves in terms of categories, it doesn’t
always work so well. You kind of have to use a cross-version of this
and that…because we are a metal band but we have elements of hard-core
in there. We have a very punk rock spirit about the way we do things
and the way we write songs is unlike a lot of metal bands. We don’t
bring songs that are already written into the rehearsal space. We
don’t bring parts written. We’re more like a rock and roll band.
We jam things out. It’s about pure discovery and connection and opening
ourselves up and communicating through the music. So especially in
this day and age, that’s kind of a different thing. People tend to
work on their songs and that involves a lot of space even before they get
into the rehearsal space with the rest of the band. We tend to take
a more naturalistic approach.
antiMusic: After you moved to LA, your
drummer quit and your band was at a crossroads. You briefly changed
the name of the band. Was this a turning point in the career of Crisis?
A galvanizing experience that helped make everything clear, or simply another
bump on the road?
Karyn Crisis: Like everything we
do, it was a bump and at the same time we learned a lot about every experience.
It was a set back. We had intended on showing up in L.A. and work
really hard to get a new label going. Find somebody who really believed
in the band for a change. And then we had the drummer situation happen.
And it took quite a while to get into the scene here and get to know people
and find a drummer who wasn’t just somebody who was looking for a paying
gig, which is the most popular thing out in this area. So along the
way, we started writing music in a very different way. We were using
a drum machine and jamming in a very different way than we had before.
So the music was coming out sounding different. And we just kept
the music coming because we’re musicians. What were we going to do
with ourselves if we’re not playing music. We had to earn a living
so we had to keep that going. We ended up changing the name because
we did some recording and we did a couple of shows and it didn’t sound
anything like Crisis. So we didn’t feel like we could call it Crisis.
We always intended on getting back to Crisis. It was a matter of finding
the right drummer. Along the way we learned a whole more about ourselves
and our song writing and the experiences all culminated in the CD, our
newest, which we all feel is our best. So if we didn’t go through
those experiences, we might not have pushed ourselves so hard or grown
so much to come to this point.
antiMusic: How soon after you resumed
the name Crisis, did Like Sheep Led to Slaughter take shape?
Karyn Crisis: After we decided to
start the search for a drummer again, we started jamming and the songs
just started coming. Crisis has been together for about 12 years
now so when you’re doing something for that long…for us anyway…we sort
of created our own language, our own vocabulary, our own world. And
when you go back to speaking that language, so to speak, it just pours
out of you. And that’s what we found happening.
antiMusic: What lyrical ideas were you
trying to get across on that record?
Karyn Crisis: With every record,
I’m trying to break new ground. With this one, I really came to the
conclusion that I didn’t want to write such self-confessional songs…songs
about what was going on in my life. I wanted to deal with concepts…things
that were happening in the real world which happened to be very political.
So I tended to focus on the idea of abuse of power and the idea of our
government being like a malevolent shepherd leading us sheep astray.
That was one of the main concepts for the whole album.
antiMusic: Did switching coasts have
any effect on you lyrically?
Karyn Crisis: I don’t know if it
was really a costal thing. Before we even left the east coast, I
was looking for something more in my writing, in our songwriting, and the
music in general. It felt like the underground was a little limiting
at the point in time, and I started going back and listening to old classic
rock and just sort of doing a lot of historical research. I was already,
at that point, on the move to look for something even deeper, something
more, some way to express myself in a more profound way. And I’m
not sure it had so much to do with the coast as the events of the world.
I felt like I couldn’t focus on myself any longer when so many people were
suffering. I really had to look outward and express my beliefs on
the way things were happening since we sort of share those beliefs in this
band.
antiMusic: Now that you’ve lived with
the record for a year, and have toured for several months, are you still
feeling it or are you beginning to detach now?
Karyn Crisis: I just can’t get enough
of this album. I just really love playing these songs live.
We all do. We’re just having a great time. We just recently
started working with a new drummer, Justin, on all these tours we’ve done
lately so we’re just getting tightly into the grooves with him and just
having a really great time with the songs. We’re going to be touring
again in October with Exodus and Three Inches of Blood and Watch Them Die.
We’re going to be mostly playing the new songs with a couple of the oldies
mixed in. And I just can’t wait. I really love these songs…which
is a good thing (laughs).
antiMusic: Tell us about the Killith
Fair that just completed. How were the shows and how did you get
along with MOD and Jacknife?
Karyn Crisis: That was really fun.
We had known Billy for a while from the east coast and playing guitar with
this guy Scott Sargent who used to be in Skinlab so we knew him from the
scene and the band Jackknife who opened up, they were just sort of starting
off. Their bass player had played a couple of shows in another band.
And we played one show with him, Actually we drove for 24 hours straight
down to New Orleans to play that show with them and we didn’t even realize
that Joe was in Jackknife. So we sort of found out all that on the
first day and the tour was really good. Everybody got along we had
a lot of fun and we pulled some pranks on each other on the last show.
It was good. It was like six weeks of pure humidity and there’s some
crazy stories (laughs).
The only day it wasn’t humid, we played
a show in Oklahoma City. It was like a scene out of a movie.
We got out there and it was cool with gloomy skies. We found out
as soon as we got to the club, which had been a church, now painted white
and hot pink, that two tornadoes were coming towards us. So we were
having to get everything out of the trailer really quickly because the
tornadoes were coming and they were destroying towns and paths to the freeway
had been closed. Also we found out that the club was actually haunted
by the priest who had been at that church when it was a church. But
he had killed himself in the basement because he thought he was possessed
by demons. It was a real haunted house sort of show. The power
went out across the street and the rain was coming down almost sideways.
And as the first band was starting to play, the power went out because
we got hit by lightning and you could hear this big “pow”. The power
eventually came back on and the show went on and the tornadoes didn’t touch
down. It was crazy but it was a pretty exciting night.
antiMusic: I heard you had a throat
infection on the tour. Did it cause much of a disturbance for the
shows?
Karyn Crisis: Well, we had to cancel
a show in Connecticut and that’s the first time I lost my voice in 12 years…ever.
A couple of us had got sick and I had to go to the emergency room and I
couldn’t swallow and they said I had a really bad upper respiratory infection
and they gave me some antibiotics that were way too strong and for too
long a period. So, I started taking them and I started getting better.
Then I started getting sick all over again. So my throat was just
really dried out and I couldn’t even talk. But we had a couple of
days off in New York around the time of the Connecticut show. So
I just stayed in bed and did a lot of yoga and drank a lot of water and
I was fine after that. But it was pretty scary.
antiMusic: With your style of singing,
you must have had throat problems in the past. What precautions do
you take, if any, to keep your voice healthy, both at home and on the road?
Karyn Crisis: I’ve been really lucky
in the way I sing just comes naturally for me. Our style of music
chose us. My style of vocal chose me as well. So I don’t have
problems with it. When I’m healthy everything’s great. It’s
just like exercise. After a show I hang out and talk all night with
everyone and I have not problems. The only time you have to be careful
is when you have a cold. Then you have phlegm and then you’re coughing.
Because it can all disturb your vocal chords. But I know a few exercises
I can do to stay in shape and just in general, I have a really healthy
diet. I exercise and just keep myself healthy. This is my instrument.
I just keep my instrument in tune and in shape. I guess I just have
a good singing technique and I’m just lucky that way (laughs).
antiMusic: There is a certain Eastern
influence prevalent in small doses on this record. Who is responsible
for this?
Karyn Crisis: That Eastern influence
has been there in small doses on all our records. We have a real
international makeup in our band. Our bass player Gia is Taiwanese.
He’s actually from Taiwan and has lived here about 20 years. Our
guitar player is from Pakistan and our other guitar player is half Jamaican
and half Puerto-Rican. Our new drummer…half of his family tree is
from Iran so we have a multi-cultural heritage that we embrace. And
the mid-Eastern influence surely pops its way in and out musically.
I really like those moments like “Nomad”. I know it’s in there and
in some of the other songs we’ve done. I’ve always liked those moments.
They’ve always been there in Crisis and I think it’s something pretty different.
I like reacting to it.
antiMusic: Have any ideas emerged for
the next record?
Karyn Crisis: We’ve had a couple
of jams. One jam we started before we hit the road. It’s a
really cool, powerful, brooding kind of jam. The other one kind of
came out unexpectedly. When we were on tour we played Al Rosa Villa
which we’ve played many, many times before and that’s where the whole Dimebag
tragedy happened. So going there, everybody felt a lot of trepidation
about being on that stage again, just because it was such a heavy moment.
It was a real tragedy and it just felt really strange. We all went
to just give our energies and good vibes upward, towards that whole situation.
We were all feeling a little depressed about it and the guys set up to
do sound check and I actually stayed at the hotel to work on something
to say that evening. We were all disconnected and the guys said they
felt OK until they stepped on to the stage to do the sound check and then
a dark mood fell on everyone. So they just started jamming and somehow
they jammed for an hour and a really amazing jam piece came out of it.
So that’s the second piece that we’ll be working on and pretty soon we’ll
start jamming and writing the next record and that’s pretty much all we’re
going to do until the Exodus tour and then afterwards until the next year….we’re
going to write and record.
antiMusic: Can you please say a bit
about the other guys in Crisis? And what symbiotic elements are present
in your working relationship with Afzaal and Gia considering you’ve been
together for 12 years.
Karyn Crisis: We’re definitely really
think of each other as family. Afzaal is sort of the architect of
the band in a way. He’s sort of the one that starts the riff in the
jam. And everyone starts connecting with him. And for most
of the time that Crisis has been around, he was the only person doing the
business for the band. I mean, things have changed now. Everyone
sort of has their job. But he is pretty much the founder of the band.
Gia has also been there as long.
He’s also a founding member. As the bass player, he is also the back
bone of the band in a way. Since Jwyanza has come into the picture,
our songwriting style has changed in the sense that before Gia was doing
what I would call guitar weaving. Sometimes Gia would play lines
that you would think would belong to a guitar player. Very non-traditional
bass player type lines. Now that Jwyanza is in the band, the guitars
have more room to do both atmospheric and rhythmic stuff because Gia can
hold down the backbone in a little more traditional bass player way.
But nothing is ever really traditional with Crisis. And drums are
always very important to me because I respond to the percussion in this
band. I don’t tend to respond to the guitar notes as much.
The guitars inspire me in an atmospheric type of way. But I’m really
different in terms of singing because I’m a very percussive type of singer.
And that’s really weird I know (laughs). And that’s sort of the dynamic
of the band. Every part is really important to this band.
antiMusic: Can you let us in on any
updates about your long-awaited DVD?
Karyn Crisis: Some things have happened
with The End Records and they’re doing some changes so they actually wanted
us to delay the release so that more people can get a hold of it.
So that will be a next year thing as well.
antiMusic: Teenage boys strive to be
part of a rock and roll band, mostly for the girls, followed closely by
the other stuff. What or who made you first of all want to sing in
a band and secondly do it for a career?
Karyn Crisis: I’ve a great, great
grandfather who was a gypsy from Transylvania. I never met him but
he’s the reason I got into playing violin. I grew up right around
Chicago and there was a great music scene there, so I grew up playing piano
and violin. I was into a lot of art and always going into art museums
in Chicago and the local record shops and all of that blended into my dark
mood. I was a loner. I had some guy friends. But I was
a real tom-boy who would get them to lend me their instruments. And
we’d jam and record on 4-tracks. That was in middle school and I
always had a dark sensibility about the music and the art that I’d like
to make. I guess that drove me to find darker kinds of music…you
know industrial, gothic and onwards into metal. I didn’t really know
a lot of metal before I joined Crisis. I had a limited metal vocabulary.
So my influences are different. Chicago was an amazing place to grow
up in because they had so much music going on there. So I would buy
a lot imported magazines from England because they always had much more
cutting-edge music and they would also review the whole indie scene in
America. And that’s how I found a lot of bands. It’s just something
that was always calling to me since I was younger. I always wanted
to be in a band and couldn’t find anybody to work with. So I would
work on my own 4-track. I almost got into one band. We had
some rehearsals. But it wasn’t until I moved to New York City after
graduating to go to art school…I started doing performance art and started
jamming with other musicians in my college dorm. Then the next year
I moved and met Afzaal, the original founding guitar player through a roommate
of mine at the time. So it was a long journey but it was a lot of
me singing in my bedroom, working on my vocal chords. Just singing
towards different male and female singers that I liked. And a lot
of record hunting and a lot of live show going.
antiMusic: It says on the liner notes
that the spine sculpture was carved and built by you. What was the
initial idea behind that and please explain what you carved it out of?
Karyn Crisis: It’s made out of sculpting
clay which you can get at a craft store. You can sculpt it and bake
it in the oven and it becomes hard. The concept came from the title,
“Like Sheep Led To Slaughter”. I thought about what that meant and
the idea of somebody controlling a weaker person. They may be exploiting
that weaker person. And I though that sheep was a good symbol because
you have the shepherd who leads the sheep. And the sheep has to trust
that shepherd and I felt that with what was going on with our shepherds,
being our government, were definitely malevolent and they were leading
a lot of us sheep down the wrong path towards destruction. Then I thought
further about that concept to the idea of control. Instead I thought
the idea of using the sheep on the cover was something totally obvious,
I wanted to do something more symbolic. So, for me, the spine was
very symbolic because in every human being, it’s your centre of control.
If you’re paralyzed, you can’t use your limbs properly. People use
the concept of the spine in term of someone’s moral character. “He’s so
spineless” if they’re saying something negative about someone. So
the idea of the spine came out and I wanted to kind of wanted to depict
that spine being ripped out of a person. So even though a lot of
my lyrics are political on this record, I’m really concepts and I really
feel like symbolism allows me to get a message across but at the same time,
you have to go on your own journey to kind of discover what it means.
And you learn your own things and you take your own things from it.
antiMusic: It seems like you’re an exceedingly
creative sort. Tell us about KC Leatherworks.
Karyn Crisis: Sure. That started
back in New York City. There was an underground band there called
The Last Day/No Human Voice. The drummer taught me to make leather
watch bands and from there I just started experimenting on my own and making
cuffs and bags and things like that. I started off just doing custom
work for other bands and then it became something that I did for a full-time
job; wholesale orders, retail orders. There were orders from England,
Canada and a lot of the U.S. But once Crisis started again, I didn’t
have enough time to keep up with it on a full-time basis so what I’ve done
is I’m trying to outsource the place. I haven’t found a place I like
yet…to make some for me, like at a small factory. But meanwhile I’m
just making everything by hand and selling them exclusively on tour.
Right now I’m actually selling some artwork on Ebay, cause I’m using cash
that way to raise money for other projects. I’ve always got something
going on. Right now, I started a t-shirt line for girls called Exorsister.
And that’s something that I can do, that I don’t have to make each piece
by hand. So the people who still want the hand-made leather, they
can buy everything on tour until we sell out. In terms of readily available
items, there is the T-shirt line which I’m going to expand really soon
and I have my blade worm belt buckles and other Crisis t-shirts that I’ve
designed. My store is closed at the moment because I close it down
when we go on tour. But it’ll open soon. This year is going
to be an exciting year because I’ll have the gallery up. And it’s
the year that I really decided I want to make a living on all the music
and artwork that we do. So I’m just trying to invest a lot in all
of those projects.
antiMusic: What is the status of your
graphic novel? Can you give us a snapshot of the story?
Karyn Crisis: That’s something else
that I want to get out this year. I really wanted to put it out myself.
Cuz, I feel like every time I try to work with someone to get projects
out, you can lose a lot. And it’s just quite expensive to do that.
The first graphic novel, “Methodology” which has been out for a very long
time. It’s about the whole idea of the human psyche and it’s a story
about a serial killer and the victim and it’s really hard to describe.
It’s a conceptual graphic novel. It’s a story mostly in pictures,
illustrated by the lyrics. And a lot of the themes you’ll find in
the early Crisis albums. There is the whole idea about how our patterns
are created in human behaviour and what brings about those dark, more evil
patterns. So that graphic novel explores that idea.
antiMusic: What do you anticipate from
your upcoming tour with Exodus and 3 Inches of Blood? Have you toured
with them in the past?
Karyn Crisis: No we’ve never toured
with either of them and I’m excited because a lot of our fans have had
a great response to the tour package. They’re really excited and
that makes us happy. It’s always good when you go on a tour your
fans are going to like and Crisis fans tend to just come out to see Crisis
a lot. So it’s always good for us to play on a package where our
fans like all of the bands.
antiMusic: Thank you so much for this,
Karyn. Good luck on the tour.
Karyn Crisis: Thank you for your
support and to everybody out there…hope to see you on tour.
Morley and antiMusic thank Karyn for taking
the time for this interview. We also thanks Adrian Bromley from The
End Records for facilitating this interview.
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