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KYLESA

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“Man, there were tours where we’d hit Little

Caesars for the dumpster. We made sure

it was alright, we never got sick,” recalls

Kylesa guitarist/vocalist Phillip Cope, between

mouthfuls of a pan-Asian takeaway, which he

has curiously augmented with olives and is

devouring straight from the aluminium tray.

“And this is no offence to any of the other 

Georgia bands, but I think that was something

that we had to do to bust them out of having to

do it. We had to go through it. I was too old tobe living like that but my life had fallen apart.”

“Yeah, it was clean pizza!” affirms fellow

guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants, in what is

possibly the most generous commendation the

US pizza chain has ever received. Mealtimes

for the Savannah quintet aren’t quite so grim

these days. Well, at least no refuse was sifted in

feeding the band tonight. Decamped onto the

tour bus they are sharing with Boston hardcore

crew Converge, Kylesa are making their way

across Europe in a curiously routed tour that

has them ferrying over from Europe to play

London tonight, before flying out to Spain

in the morning, flying back the next day toplay Sonisphere UK and jetting off for Europe

once more. But Cope and Pleasants are not

complaining. This tour gives them some much

needed game time and exposure in lieu of the

release of fifth album ‘Spiral Shadow’, besides,

Kylesa have been in way tougher situations.

Squeezing past Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou

– who is busily tagging all his fridge-bound

foodstuffs with a Sharpie – to a table behind

the driver, thoughts turn to home, the validity

of the widely held notion that Georgia’s scene

is currently the most happening in the US, and

where exactly Kylesa fit.

Mastodon, Baroness, Black Tusk, Zoroaster and, of course, Kylesa; the Southern state of 

Georgia is a fertile land irrigated with bongwater,

a febrile locale for cultivating metal bands

informed by psych, prog, punk, metal and

sludge, in no particular order. The past few years

have been visited by a bumper harvest of riffs.

But, apart from Mastodon, who have their own

problems in fending off the exhaustion associated

with traipsing the perpetual tour treadmill parked

at the commercial apex of underground music,

the Georgia scene is staunchly independent,

accidental, a scene where a nascent Kylesa found

little common ground with the bands they played

with, nor material comfort as they took a high-risk, fuck-it approach to a DIY music career.

Yeah, it saw them eat discarded pizza from a

wheelie bin. But, shit, you have to eat, and to

keep your band going, you can’t be too proud,

you have to tour and take the pledge to perpetual

penury. It’s fucking punk.

“There wasn’t some bright future ahead of us,

it was just survival,” says Cope. “The band gave

us something to work for. Shit was bleak, but

because it was bleak we did shit that most sane

people would never have to do. But it was like,

‘Fuck it, what do we have to lose?’. I mean,

we went on tour with no label, no money,

and we just left and stayed on the road for ayear with nothing, no resources. Magazines

weren’t paying attention to us, we just went

out and did it, and for a long time.”

“I knew I was at a low point when I had

to ride my bike all the way to the Southside

to give blood,” laughs Pleasants. “Like, ‘This

shit sucks, I’m only getting $25 and getting track

marks from it. We were really not making any

money, and I was selling white blood cells for $25.”

Back then, Kylesa were sharing a house,

sharing the bills and living on noodles and

the desire to play some shows and keep

the band going. Cope stopped short

of hawking his white blood cells.“I sat there on the couch, I

was like, ‘Y’all just get those free

track marks, I’m staying here’,”

he says. “I would eat Ramen

for a week, but I was not going

there. I went some other places.

We did all kinds of shit.”

Cope is a Savannah scene

veteran, one who spent his time

booking shows and playing in

various hardcore punk bands;

the most prominent beingDamad, whose punked-up

sludgy exhortations had just

enough crust to form the

exoskeleton of the Georgia

sludge sound, one which

evolved into Kylesa when

Cope, bassist Brian Duke

and drummer Christian

Depken were joined by

Greenboro, North Carolina

native Pleasants. That

was in 2001. Nine

years ago there was no

Georgia scene. EvenMastodon’s success

didn’t help Kylesa

in the early days.

Signed to a punk

label, Prank, they

were awkward

citizens of 

whatever 

scenes

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they were part of on the night of a show. It was

often metalcore bands and thrash/punk bands

who’d share stages with them, just because theywere the only shows to play. Seeing as we’re

sitting here as part of a tour with Converge,

it’s prescient to underscore the importance

hardcore has to the ethos and sound of 

Kylesa. They might sound predominantly

sludge thanks to the sunken registers

they play in, but they’re pretty much

hardcore punk, too, especially in ethos.

“Compared to a lot of the other 

Georgia bands, we definitely have

more punk rock roots to begin with,”

notes Cope. “We go further back than

a lot of them. Just hanging out with

Nate [Newton, Converge bassist], hisearly experiences in the underground

music scene were very similar to mine.

Even though we’ve taken different routes

in our music over the years, the start was

really similar. When I was younger I could

relate to a lot of the anger of hardcore. As

I get older that anger gets channelled in

different ways. It’s not so straightforward

as it was when I was younger; I still get

angry, I just handle it different.”

“I love hardcore punk, it’s definitely

where I come from,” adds Pleasants. “And I

think the ethics of hardcore punk, the ethos

behind it, has stayed with me for years.”Well, fuck, it’s the only ethic to rely

on when building a band’s sound and

profile organically, without the NPK

hype-fertiliser of pushy labels and the

fickle, flighty nature of instantaneous

magazine ardour. Being a hardcore punk

band who play psyched-up sludge is like

giving a unicorn just enough cockroach

DNA to keep it alive through the barren,

lean spells, such as dumpster dining and

blood drives. It also keeps your band

utterly independent. ‘Spiral Shadow’ will

be Kylesa’s first album for Season Of 

Mist; who, on the face of it, might seemlike an odd label for them. But for a band

who like to keep the outside world at an

arm’s length it makes perfect sense.

“We’ve always had to depend on

ourselves to get where we want to be.

We’ve had help from certain people here

and there, but for the most part we take

control of the reins. Everyone in the band

works, outside of just playing music inside

of the band. Everyone has something

that they do within the band besides just

playing their instrument. Over time we’ve found

who is good at what and encouraged that.

We knew when we were starting that it wasgoing to be a long road for us, but I think we

were smart to take the slow and longer road

because we are not losing our shit right now.

We kinda foresaw that we’d be doing this for a

while, and we wanted to look at this band not

to be burned out real fast straight away – and

wanted to play music for a long period of 

time. Our main aim was to build up a fanbase,

slowly, of people who would understand that

we were going to grow and change as a band,

too, that they weren’t going to get the same

record every time. We wouldn’t be so locked

into a scene. And that’s been something that

we’ve been really conscious of, and I thinkthat’s one of the reasons why we always played

lots of different types of tours, too, even when

we didn’t have to. We still played with all

different kinds of bands because we don’t want

to be locked into something like that, which

has been our problem since the beginning.

‘Cos, y’know, we kinda fit into certain things

but we kinda don’t. And because each record

is a bit different from the one before, even the

way there’s this Georgia scene now; when we

were starting it didn’t seem like something that

was necessarily going to happen. We helped

out some other bands, and some other bands

helped out some other bands and now everyoneis trying to make a big scene out of it, which is

cool but I don’t know if that was some grand

plan, it just kinda happened. ”

While there are certain common threads

running throughout this newly minted Georgia

scene, Kylesa are a unique beast. They have

two drummers; two vocalists, male and female

vocals, alternating in and out of transcendental

melodies, shrieks and screams. Their evolution

has seen them wring out the anger, more

prominent in their early work, through the

unkempt experimentalism of ‘Time Will Fuse ItsWorth’, through to the claustrophobic riffola of 

last year’s ‘Static Tensions’. They have always

had the psych-vibe to them. They’ve always

genre-surfed or, rather, opted out of genre.

There is plenty of harsh, disorientating low-end

weight to jams such as opener ‘Tired Climb’, but

‘Spiral Shadow’ resonates with a slacker vibe, of 

alt-rock jams and cleverly disguised pop hooks,

none more evident that on ‘Don’t Look Back’

and ‘Dust’. Pleasants sings way more; though,

her schizo throat is always liable to turn nasty

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That Kylesa’s most sonically positive album

happened at all is still a triumph in itself. It was

written and recorded from the sort of position that

scene trailblazers enjoy, a most assured footing in

terms of profile, kudos and all the sort of things

that help stridently underground artists make

it in the sense of staying on tour, relevant and

exciting. But before the completion of their self-

titled debut, the tragic death of bassist, founding

member and, most importantly a close friend in

Brian Duke, nearly dissolved Kylesa in grief.“I was talking about that the other day,

because I am getting to live out all the dreams

we had, that we’d sit around and talk about;

like right now, sitting doing an interview

for Terrorizer, on a bus, he would have just

been super-stoked about that, really stoked.

Sometimes I fear I am getting to live all this out

and he isn’t. I think he’d be stoked. I know he

would. I think a lot of the people we supported

he’d laugh at the thought of playing with.”

Cope left for Florida, screenprinted t-shirts

with a girlfriend – “I wasn’t really doing much

of anything,” he says – before being convinced

by Pleasants to continue, finish the record, in itsown time, and go about building a band again.

It’s what his friend would have wanted. And,

while Damad’s musical legacy can be heard in

Kylesa, in many of the Georgia scene’s more

crusty, shawls of sludgy hardcore, their influence

on Kylesa has been most profoundly positive.

Damad taught Cope to embrace positivity. Which

is why, most of all, Kylesa don’t sit squat in the

nihilism of the sludge movement; they are not

EyeHateGod. But then, you can take them from

all sorts of emotional angles, even if writing the

occasional optimistic vocal line or melody is

something they’ve learned to perfect on ‘Spiral

Shadow’. Only occasional, mind, and that’shealthy; people who make happy music are the

ones who are the most screwed up in the head.

“I learned the hard way that you can’t live that

way; if you base everything in your band around

negativity then that is all you are going to have

around you,” says Cope. “Gary [Mader, EyeHateGod]

is a good friend of mine, he seems like he’s had a

good life but he has had some hard times.”

“I don’t think we could write super-happy

songs anyway, I just don’t think it’s in us,”

adds Pleasants.

“Can you imagine that!?” beams Cope.

“Getting up on stage every night, having had

this horrible fucking day and then just…smiling on stage?”

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at any given moment. If anything, and the

proggy title and lysergic cover art would seem

to attest to this, ‘Spiral Shadow’ is their record

for those days levitated by hallucinogens and

long summer nights. But then – fuck, Kylesa

are such a contrary band – the songs on ‘Spiral

Shadow’ are taut and concise, written during

winter and inspired in no way shape or form

from acid trips and mushroom tea, and the long

hot summer nights which lent the oppressive

dynamic to its predecessor ‘Static Tensions’. It is

the song that is reined in, with a verse/chorusphysiology that defines ‘Spiral Shadow’ without

overly corseting the band’s wanton use of 

transcendent magic, the swirling psych-soup of 

guitar effects and cascading drum rhythms.

“I don’t generally sit at home and listen to

stuff with thirteen minute jam sections in it, or 

stuff that goes too crazy,” says Cope. “I like a

good song, a song that’s catchy, that I can hum

along to, that leaves something in my brain after 

I’m done listening to it. That’s just what I am

into. Even when I did a lot of drugs I didn’t care

for prog much. I don’t hate it, I just was never a

big fan of it. Also, the way people listen to music

right now is so much different. We are definitelyin an attention-span deficit generation right now.

I mean, there is so much to consume. Who has

time to sit there and listen to long conceptual

albums – I know I don’t. Maybe there are some

people who have that kind of time but I don’t. I

think it’s cool to just have a bunch of songs.”

For Pleasants, it was all in the process,

letting the big ideas germinate at home before

studio time was booked and paid for. “I think

they are certainly more concise on this record

as there was a lot of experimentation done

at home.” Having the songs drilled before the

studio time didn’t make it any easier for Cope.

Having two drummers represents all sorts of challenges when mixing the record. But that is

a longstanding practical aside; it is time and

budget that is the biggest problem in executing

Kylesa’s evolving sound.

“For me, this one was particularly hard,”

he says. “But, just because our ideas were way

bigger than our time and our resources. We are

still not working with the resources that some

other bands who we get compared to have.

We have all these ideas of things we want

to do, which can be hard to pull off – and it

was! I didn’t handle all the production; there

was no way I could have on this record. I get

the credit as the producer, but there are threedifferent engineers. I mean, Carl [McGinley,

drums] helped, there were a lot of hands on it.”

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