Part 4: "Somethng, Something" in French

Hello again fellow survivors. It’s been a long while. Sorry. It’s partly because of me being a busy with my current life situation and partly because I had been working on my other blog. I’ll try to resume regular work here.

2008 was yet another non-starter year for Zombie Apocalypse NOW! though compared to the last two years it was the height of success. In a lot of ways it was an extremely frustrating time (As we’ll soon get into) but the silver lining is that I wrote a ton of new songs. Let’s talk a bit about a few of them.

ZAN,  ill-equipped as always.  Possibly playing "Sellout" for the first time

Sellout: Easily one of our most popular and well liked song. It’s the one that people come up to me after shows and compliment me on the most. Toman from our good friends The Common Good loves the song so much that he always tries to get us to let him sing on stage with us whenever our two bands play together. The content of the song is a bit of a mystery due to the no-so-clear lyrics but a lot of people have assumed that it’s a commentary about the state of music these days and bands that have “sold out.” In reality I actually wrote the song about…a girl (WHAAAT?!). And a real girl too, not like Justice Girl where the whole story is obviously fictional. Long story short in early 2008 I met a beautiful girl who I almost immediately fell for but I could never actually pursue her due to many, many hurdles that popped up over the next year not the least of which being that TWO of my best friends “saw her first”. I wrote this song as a way of getting over her, which by the way hasn’t really worked yet. But writing about my “feelings” was lame so as a joke I purposely wrote a bass line that was extremely simple, a repetitive verse and a chorus intentionally poppy and imitable and meant to garner a specific reaction: a catchy tune that is hard to get out of your head, like something you might hear on the radio, that forces you to happily sing along to. Upon hearing the joke Mike Zupke suggested we call it “Sellout” due to its poppy nature. So yeah, no commentary there. Incidentally I laugh every time someone tells me they love the song as it means they fell into my trap (Mwahahaha) but even so it’s one of my favorite songs to play.

More after the jump.

Part 3: The Eternal Damnation Cocktail

Sorry that I haven’t updated recently.  I’ve had some personal hiccups on the road called life lately.  If I can I’ll try to post two uploads this week to somewhat make-up for it.

Let’s talk about “genre” for a bit.  I was chatting with my buddy DJ Muppet not too long ago and when I posed a question about the genre of a certain band (I think it was Asobi Seksu) and she just shrugged and said “There really isn’t such a things as genre these days” or something like that.  I agree with that to a point as even Zombie Apocalypse NOW! doesn’t fall neatly into a category.   Now if you ask the average guy hanging out in the Kalamazoo music scene what type of music ZAN plays they will likely respond “Punk Rock”.   This includes various members of the press and venue bookers who we’ve dealt with before.  This is fair; after all ever since I was seventeen I’ve been all about punk in as much as a kid from Detroit can be.  So it’s not hard to see that, I have a lot of that influencing me when I write music.  Add to the fact that Dave Andrews was actually punk so when he was in the band during our high point he brought us even closer towards that.  But then again Travis is a metal guy and always has been and he writes his guitar parts.  Plus there are a lot of songs we play that don’t fit into Punk Rock.  Bottom line I feel like calling us “punk” isn’t really appropriate; it’s just the closet thing most people can think of.

Originally when people asked me what type of music my band played I would say “Punk Influenced Hard Rock” as that was the best way I could put it without having to answer a lot of offensive follow-up questions (“But what bands do you sound like?”).  Eventually I started thinking that if we were supposed to be a band that opposed zombies then we would n fact be Anti-Zombie Rock.  I liked the sound of it and started using that.  Eventually I started using it was a catch-all term for songwriting outside of the box; song that don’t necessarily fall under typical song tropes.  Theoretically I can write a song about comic book characters, horror films monsters, or how awesome Shingo from King of Fighters is and it could just as valid as any other band writing about their feelings or whatever.  That’s what Anti-Zombie Rock is to me.

Fuck yes, Shingo!

So yeah my point is that if you were to classify us in a genre it must be Anti-Zombie Rock.  Well, I guess Max Brooks-Core works too; that one I’m going to claim as our own (Feel free to become an Anti-Zombie Rock band, though).

Zombie Apocalypse NOW! starts their second year after the jump.

2008-2009

If you haven’t heard of Zombie Apocalypse NOW! before you may be sort of curious of what kind of band we were.  So for you all who wandered onto this blog without prior knowledge of us I figured I’d throw a video at you so you at least have an idea of what this was all about.  Below you’ll find a slideshow of pictures from various sources depicting ZAN from our first public show at the 2008 Fête de la Musique in downtown Kalamazoo up through a year later at the same event in 2009; a full year of adventure.  When I made that video I thought it was a cool way to showcas our past year as well as thank all the people who helped us out.  The music featured here is from our second demo “The Sellout Demo”: Justice Girl and part of Sellout.  I’ll be talking about many of the happenings in these pictures over time, but for now just sit back and enjoy.

The blog will have its proper first blog within the next few days while I continue to finish up a few details.