Brighton, Michigan’s Boneshaker play hyperactive hardcore played at a lightning fast speed. Their raw-throated shrieks and brisk hardcore workouts prompt memories of Bones Brigade, Ceremony, and Trash Talk.
On We’ve Created A Monster, Boneshaker tear through twenty tracks of furious hardcore with an impressive display of not just intensity and agility, but a great amount of intelligence that separates them from their hardcore peers.
How did Boneshaker form?
Ricky: I had some scraps of songs I wrote in Korea, came home and was itching to start something up. I’ve known Sam from way back, and he was busy with The Rev, but interested enough to come on board. His neighbor Wes played drums for a while, and finally we connected with Shawn through Craigslist. We played for about a year, did the record, and then parted ways with Shawn and Wes. Sam P., who we’d played with when he was in Shudders, joined us a few months back, and right now we’re looking for some vocals.
How would you describe the music of Boneshaker?
Sam: As though a comet raced toward the sun, demolishing Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter along its way. It tore through the asteroid belt, unstoppable on its collision course. It slammed into the sun, causing a chain reaction. The sun first contracted, as if drawing in a deep breath, and then in a brilliant exhalation of fire and death, enveloped Mercury, Venus and Mars in flame. The Earth is swallowed by the fire, as it scorches the planet inch by inch. Impossibly you perceive the wave as a wall of heat creeping towards you. You Reflect on your life in your final moments. as the fire destroys your body and the rest of the solar system. That’s as close as you’re ever going to get to putting Boneshaker into words.
Ricky: Raw, fast, snotty.
What other bands are you guys in and what do they sound like
‘To The Ends of The Earth’ by Great Reversals
Sam: I play bass in Great Reversals, which sounds like a dam collapsing, washing away an entire community in a deluge of water and debris.
Great Reversals is so different from what Boneshaker do. What’s the biggest difference between how you guys write songs in Boneshaker and how you write songs with Great Reversals?
Sam: Writing Rev songs is like playing table tennis and writing Boneshaker songs is like consulting a witch doctor.
How liberating is it to play so fast?
Sam: I feel the need….
Ricky: It’s definitely liberating but I think our oeuvre has enough slow and mid-tempo riffs that our music avoids becoming a blur. I don’t want to be a band whose songs are all fast and tight but have no sense of space. That gets boring for both us and our listeners.
You guys write songs that are short and fast. What are some of your favorite short and fast punk songs?
Sam: ”Two for Flinching”
Ricky: I don’t know that I have any particular favorite songs, but pretty much anything by Charles Bronson, Bones Brigade, or Find Him and Kill Him gets me pumped right up!
Who are some of your non punk rock influences?
Ricky: Blood Brothers and Bear Vs Shark come to mind as two bands who have consistently impressed me with their creativity and energy. They do a lot of challenging, genre-defying stuff, and effectively channel punk in directions that offer a real sense of spontaneity and surprise. That’s something I always strive to do, though so far Boneshaker has hedged a bit closer to tradition than either of them.
Max from Where The Wild Things Are is on the cover of We Created A Monster. Any reason behind this? Was Where The Wild Things Are an important part of your guys’ childhood at all?
Sam: I had been spending a lot of time thinking about the idea of the child-king, and how innocence can be both a beautiful and terrible thing. I had been drawing some of the kingly characters that I remembered from my youth, with the intent of showing a darker side of them. When the record was done we didn’t have any proper art and I kind of threw it together for the digital page. We released tapes with different art on them.
Ricky: WTWTA never made any lasting impression on me, but I do think its art is appropriate and gestures toward some of the important subjects in our music; songs like “Feral” and “Oxygen Destroyer” are very much about the liminality of human existence, the possibility that there are subhuman states into which we can descend. Dualism also explores this theme. Of course, the opposite is true, too: we have the option to improve ourselves and the world around us.
What Sam said also reminds me of how historians and colonists, even into the 20th century, have applied both sides of this dichotomy to Indians and tribal societies, who were seen alternately as living innocently in a state of nature but also as brutal or savage, bereft of God, and thus in need of “civilization.” There were obviously some vested interests at work behind such a rationalization, but that juxtaposition of the bestial with the innocent or the holy is significant.
Spike of ‘Cowboy Bebop’
These qualities help in thinking about two aspects of God, too. I once heard that children, being innocent, love justice, while men, who acknowledge their sins, prefer forgiveness. Reconciling these virtues can be difficult, and part of life and growing up is finding some balance between them.
Lots of great art has come out of this dynamic. Remember that Cowboy Bebop episode where the insane super soldier with the four-year-old’s mind escaped and they had to stop him? Innocence makes you a killer! Lord of the Flies, or Battle Royale – same thing. So I think it’s an ongoing conversation, one that I hope Boneshaker has been able to contribute to in some humble way.
How did you first get into hardcore?
Sam: Downloading Minor Threat songs from the internet as a teenager was the start, but it was probably seeing Champion, Allegiance, and Comeback Kid at The Shelter that cemented hardcore and going to shows into the rest of my life. I was doomed after that.
Ricky: I don’t know. I guess listening to Norma Jean and As I Lay Dying and bands of their ilk. I was into Minor Threat way back in high school too but I just saw them as a punk rock band. Eventually I got into faster and older stuff. Agnostic Front and Youth of Today were a big deal to me.
What do you think the biggest difference between hardcore and punk is?
Sam: Depends on how far your head is up your own ass.
Ricky: It’s a tough question. I’m tempted to say that hardcore has more sonic diversity. It’s a genre that can encompass stuff like Converge but also a band like Youth of Today. Punk has a range of sounds too, but the differences between ska-punk and pop punk and skate punk don’t seem as dramatic as those between a heavy metalcore sound on one end and a much faster punk style on the other.
I think another difference is content. Punk tends to be more political and more irreverent. There often seems to be a distance between speaker and topic in punk lyrics, and there’s generally a greater sense of humor. ”Holiday in Cambodia” and a lot of Black Flag lyrics come to mind. And obviously punk is musically a good bit brighter than hardcore. Hardcore tends to be much more personal and sober. Or maybe its just that hardcore is more feminized – “The personal is political” and all that.
That’s just a heuristic of course, there are exceptions in both genres.
When I listen to Boneshaker it makes me wanna do crazy shit, like ride my bike really fast or throw a brick at someone’s face! What bands make you wanna go insane and break shit? Do the members of Boneshaker condone throwing bricks at people’s faces or riding one’s bike really fast while listening to their music?
Sam: Black Breath, Haymaker, Fleetwood Mac, Masakari, Mind Eraser. I condone smashing your own face with a brick while riding your bike and listening to Boneshaker.
Cut the Shit
Ricky: Well, I can’t condone hurting others, but riding your bike real fast is good clean fun. (Please, always wear a helmet though.) Besides the bands I mentioned, I think Cut the Shit and Bracewar really embody the pissed brutality that makes punk and hardcore rule. Outbreak and Nails are up there too.
Anything you wanna plug?
Sam: Go watch Groundhog Day, it’s a great movie.
Ricky: Listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
