sandiegopunk.com

The Sin Stereo

The Sin Stereo interview conducted September 2005 by Nick Norton.

So who are we here with? Joe: Irish smokes penis. Sorry I just had to get that on tape. What was the question? Cut that part. Oh no we’re keeping that. Joe: Awesome. We’re The Sin Stereo I think. That’s what we’re known as.

Matt: Yeah, we’ve been known to be Sin Stereo. I’m Matt and I play bass.

Irish: I’m Irish, I play guitar.

Chris: I’m Chris, I do throat.

Joe: I’m Joe I play drums. And Chris definitely does throat.

Chris: Aw Jesus, here we go….

Annnd how did you guys form?

Chris: Well I do throat.

Matt: Me and this guy Mike were gonna start a band, and we had some people, and he brought Irish, so we kicked out Mike and kept Irish. Then we got a mutual friend named Eric to sing. Then our drummer left, so we got another drummer. Then our guitarist left, so we got another guitarist. That guitar player left. Then our singer left and came back three times.

Chris: You’ve got to throw a car crash in there somewhere.

Matt: Yeah someone left the band because they lost their arm. Yeah.

Irish: The last show that Eric was supposed to play with us was at Showcase Theater, and he decided not to show up, so we told the crowd “our singer was in a car crash.”

Matt: He quit and was going to do one last show. Sold out Showcase Theater with Dead to Fall. Like two days before it he tells us that his grandpa is sick and he has to go to Puerto Rico. I’m not going to say anything because it might be true.

Irish: So we played without a singer, and we told everyone he was in the hospital so someone should come up and scream random shit, but nobody did. They did clap though; we thought we were going to get booed.

Do you go play LA at lot?

Chris: LA we’ve played 2 or 3 times. Corona we’ve played a few. We play Fullerton again next week.

What do you think about playing San Diego? I mean, doesn’t the booking down here suck?

Matt: Yeah, it does, but if you get your foot in then you’re set. We’ve got some ties at the Epicentre and…wait cut that part too.

Irish: Unless you can draw like hundreds of people, then they think you suck and don’t want you there.

Chris: People don’t come to shows anymore. There are too many bands, there’s too much shit to sort through. It’s very cluttered.

Irish: And nobody wants to give anybody a shot anymore.

Joe: It’s do or die for the venues, and the kids aren’t helping anymore. They don’t stick around for all the bands. They’ll come to watch their friends’ show and then they’ll leave, and that’s kind of fucked. That’s not really supporting your scene.

Matt: This is a pretty pessimistic interview so far.

Chris: Even playing around town. There’s this place we’re playing soon that wants us to sell fifty pre-sale tickets at eight bucks a pop for a Tuesday show! There are problems like this with LA too. We’ve done nothing for the past 4 months, just trained a drummer and tried to write new music. Who is going to come 110 miles and pay eight bucks to see you and six bands they’ve never heard of when gas prices are three dollars a gallon?

Irish: By the way, they’re starting to siphon gas out of cars at my complex now. You go outside and there’s no gas in your car because someone’s come along and taken it.

Chris: Not me, I live in Ocean Beach…fuckin’ hippies.

What can you do as a band to get filtered through and have people notice?

Chris: Ummm…I do throat?

Irish: Scandal gets naked.

Joe: I always get naked though.

Yeah I noticed. We’ve got matching tattoos.

Joe: Do we? Oh sweet.

Chris: He actually showed his dong at one of the first shows we ever played with him.

Irish: Yeah, everybody saw it.

Matt: But yeah, as to getting noticed. Just rocking it. Not being pretentious.

Chris: A big big part of it is just getting flyers and getting out on the streets and going up to people. Just promote like hell. We’ve been good about jumping on shows with no notice. Even though nobody we know may be there, there may be a few kids in the audience who’ve never heard us.

Irish: If one person walks away with your name on their tongue, it was worth it. A show is a show, either way they’re fun to play.

What are your plans for the near future?

Joe: Recording…it’s pretty much coming down to the fact that we’re going to have to start having some new stuff to hand out. We’ve played a good seven songs for almost two years.

Matt: Yeah, it’s time to write some new stuff. Slowly but surely we’ll be getting into that. It’s kind of difficult with new members doing shows, because we have to rehearse the old songs, try to find a time to work in new stuff.

Chris: And there are conflicting schedules at times, you know how it goes.

Irish: I write new music all the time, but it’s a matter of getting us all to coordinate on it, that’s the hard part.

Joe: It’s hard to practice when they can’t concentrate because they’re in awe of how awesome I am.

Chris: For a while we didn’t have a PA, and I would just take notes, and I remember this one time I just sort of stopped and was like “goddamn, this guy’s fuckin’ amazing.”

Matt: Not only that but he came through in the thick of it. Our old drummer seemed to fall off the face of the Earth, so we called and were like “hey we’ve got a show tomorrow, can you come in?”

Irish: When he brought his drums to practice they still had dust on them.

Joe: I hadn’t played in a year and a half, since my last band broke up.

Chris: When he joined we were doing about a show a week, so Joe basically got thrown right in. We had to keep doing shows. Like we said earlier, if you want to stick on the tip of people’s tongues you have to do shows.

Matt: It’s hard to do that and write, but I think the tentative goal is to start recording again by the year’s end, even rough demos.

Chris: We’re working on that, and lyrics, just more material in general to keep things fresh. We don’t want to keep giving the same thing to people who have been coming to see us over and over.

Matt: Recording is a hard part because it’s tricky finding somewhere that’s both good and cheap.

Irish: Double Time can lick my double nuts.

Joe: Boris is a God.

Matt: Boris is an expensive God. We also have to strike out more, head up the coast some, maybe just for a week or a few weekend tours.

And you have a cd out on Give Up Your Ghost records?

Matt: Yeah, that was a label I started with a few friends, and I know we get a lot of shit for having a similar name, but check the legal files. They came to us and asked for permission to use the name. The label was around before Give Up The Ghost was a band. Wes contacted us and said his lawyer wouldn’t let them change the name without written permission from us. So there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Chris: This is obviously a question he’s been asked many times.

Matt: Damn right.

That’s cool, but I was actually asking about running a label, not the name.

Joe: Damn Matt you didn’t even let him finish the question.

Matt: Oh sorry. Yeah it’s a label we started to release some stuff, just a few comps and our own stuff. We had The Red Sky from San Diego on one, Mr. Valentine on another, but yeah, it’s pretty much done. It’s still in existence, but it’s not doing anything right now.

A lot of smaller bands and labels find that funding is a problem. What do you guys do for that?

Irish: Like we said before, Chris does throat.

Matt: It’s all out of our pockets, and we try to get as much stuff done for free as possible, by having friends do it.

Irish: Some of it also comes from playing shows; you get money for merch and can use that.

Chris: It’s good to know people in high places.

Joe: Or high people in low places.

Irish: Yeah that’s pretty much what it is. Some bars pay a percentage of the door, and that helps a lot.

Matt: The only money we actually need is free drinks from bars, that’s pretty much all we ask for. Give us a bottle of Jager and we’re good to go. We’ll play for a few pitchers of beer any day.

Chris: That’s probably why we don’t have any merch.

You could sell Sin Stereo shot glasses, that might make more sense.

Chris: Hey good idea.

Matt: That is a good idea. I’ve got a Lagwagon one.

That’s where I got the idea.

Irish: Have you seen the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes chopping mirrors? We need those.

Chris: Did I tell you about the new shirt design I did? It says Sin Stereo and there’s chopped up cocaine with a little razor next to it.

Hold on that reminds me of something. When you open your cd “The War That Was You,” there’s a picture of a girl duct taped up on a bed. Who the hell did you pay to do that?

Matt: Somebody we met on myspace. A friend of mine named Sierra; she’s a fetish model. That’s how else we get our money. I just asked her to do it. Our old singer, in the song “Words Said But Never Meant” wrote the line “you’re on your own, now live in fear,” and I saw that picture and thought “that’s kind of funny.” I just think it would be funny as hell if someone tied a girl up like that and said “you’re on your own” and walked out.

Chris: Scratch magazine tore us a new one over that picture. The girl who reviewed our cd didn’t even give the music a shot. She just saw that and went to town. No joke. First line of the review was “Not to be a femi-nazi but-"

Matt: She said, “When did women in bondage become album artwork?” and I wrote her back and was like “Have you ever seen a metal or hardcore album in your entire life?” That Dimmu Borgir album Puritanical Misanthropia just has a woman’s torso on the cover, no head, no legs, on a pentagram, covered in barbed wire.

Chris: Wow now we’re pissing off both Christians and women, and probably Scratch magazine by default. Who should we go after next?

[Ed note: At this point in the interview we decided if we were going to offend people, we had better be fair about it and offend everyone. It got pretty hilarious, but in all good taste and protecting the unbiased reputation of this website we’ve decided to cut it. If you would like to hear some jokes contact nick@sandiegopunk.com]

Okay, band drink of choice.

Matt: Guinness or Jager.

Irish: Jack and coke.

Chris: Dirty martini with gin.

Any completely crazy people at your shows?

Chris: I walked outside after my first show with the band, and there’s this dude, and he’s like 45, and he’s wearing a cowboy hat and has braids, and says “I’ve got some herb laced with some something feathers. Want some?” So I said, “Okay, sure.” And he started going off on me like “you’re on old soul and wiser than anyone here,” and kept going on and on, and finally when I had to leave I said, “It was good talking to you, see you later,” and he looked right at me and said, “We will meet again.”

Joe: Whoa, he’s like a dude from Poltergeist or something.

Matt: We’ve had guys wear our booty shorts on-stage. We’ve had girls make out onstage. It’s a fun show. Come to our shows so you can see naked chicks!

Do you have a preference between bar shows or all ages shows?

Chris: For me it’s all ages because there’s so much energy.

Matt: Bar shows because a) free drinks and b) drunk people buy a lot more merch. Plus you’re more likely to have someone come up and either punch you in the face or say they love you.

Irish: All ages shows are obviously the bread and butter but with bar shows there’s some sort of sentimentality. You’re drunk, but nobody cares because everyone else is drunk. It’s awesome.

You mentioned meeting your fetish model on myspace. What do you think about myspace and purevolume and their effects on the scenes today?

Chris: Myspace is a godsend for bands. You can tell your friends, anyone can hear your songs, and as soon as the page loads you can listen to a band.

Matt: The beauty part of it is, say, someone goes to like BoySetsFire’s page and sees that we’re a friend of theirs; maybe they’ll check us out. Even the classifications can help find bands, I think we’re listed as screamo, punk, and rock, and just searching by stuff like that can help.

Chris: The only problem is that here are there there are assholes fucking it up. The “please leave comments on my new picture” people with twenty thousand friends.

Yeah, I can’t stand that. We’re almost out of tape. Any last words?

Matt: Come to a show, it’s good old rock n roll.

Chris: Making music our fathers made for seven generations. 80 proof.

Irish: Every band says they’re a mix of everything, and we say the same thing but feel like we really are. Just come check it out.

mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/sinstereorock
Interview by Nick Norton

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