Pure, inborn, and Native, This band is heavy, trippy, and has a wide sound that melts into liquid gold. Always straight to the point, the songs capture the personality of each member at all times. This clash of egos creates an “end of the world” type of tension and depth. Just likeClose to the Edge and Fragile, they are a constant, gyrating, overlapping machine that is made up of each member’s intent to try and overpower the last. This formula births the most sincere approach to playing music and really leads to a new, original, and unpredictable sound. The mixing of peculiar attitude and teasing the ones you love, only on stage. These guys are nice, polite, young, intellectual, political, and opinionated among many other things, and we love it all. The combination is an explosion of awareness. Native have started to stand up for what they believe in. Listen to the new album this summer and join the revolution. These are songs for tomorrow written before yesterday. In between the lines, that narrow channel bridging life and death. It’s the only way one can go that far and not be afraid for their life. Not even with nn-DMT, folks. 

Music. The trance involved in it. We see this let go and we surrender to Native‘s live performance. We leave it all behind and embrace the inner experience we all carried yet forgot to tend to. We really enjoyed this show. It became clear to us pretty quickly that their sound cannot be contained. Five years later,Native return to their favorite Montreal venue to shed their skin and show us their souls. This was a special night and I’m glad we were able to capture it on tape.

Thanks Native for having us as a guest at your trip down memory lane. Aren’t we all looking for our purpose?

SPREAD: So, everywhere I read about Native I see this word “Punk” being associated to you guys, did you set out to add a punk influence while writing music for this project? Because, I feel the anger, but I wouldn’t necessarily personally classify it as that, so I just want to know what your views are?

ED: It’s hard to say because Punk is such an ambiguous term now. The term Punk now, I think, originally was just meant to not be mainstream, it’s hard because Punk itself has been just so commercialized, you can buy a fucking Sex Pistols shirt at Target. It’s hard to say, but I guess for us, the only way I would say that we are punk, is as time goes on we have given less of a shit, I guess, about what’s going to get us big or commercial. We kind of just play what we love. I guess, that’s really the only way we can say that we sound Punk.

SPREAD: Well, I feel the attitude of Punk, but I don’t consider your music Punk at all, that’s just personally, but…I I was just curious to have your perspective.

DAN: Punk, the genre, in itself is a different entity than motivation… So maybe the motives kind of bleed through a little bit, so, I would kind of consider us Punk. If somebody asked me, who knows nothing about anything.

ED: Like, if my uncle asked me what band I’m in…

DAN: Yeah like “oh I’m just in like a Punk Rock band”, or something.

SPREAD: What was your musical journey growing up? I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone just waking up and deciding to do the kind of music you do? I want to know, what influenced you to take that path?

ED: I’m so happy that these questions are not like “How did you guys form?” I just hate those questions…Ummm, I guess for us, from the time we were young, all we ever wanted to do was be in a band. As time grew on, our styles would change a lot but as we’ve grown up, our motives behind being in a band have changed. Now it’s more than just being in a band, now it’s for a much bigger reason. We are a lot more political and socially driven. It’s a lot more and drives your sound more than just being in a band. There’s something that happens in your mid to late 20s, that you’re like, “alright, I’m tired of being poor”. So, there’s gotta be something more to life.

SPREAD: You’re on a social mission, now.

ED: More or less.

SPREAD: Yeah, I guess that’s kind of part of getting older, too…
You just wrapped up the tour with Caspian, what was the most memorable moment of that tour?

DAN: Basically, it was the best tour we’ve ever done so it’s kind of hard to pick a moment. We played some markets that you wouldn’t expect much from and we got a lot from it. It was just a real pleasant experience, the whole thing.

ED: That makes it memorable to us.

SPREAD: You were probably on “cloud nine”; I respect Caspian a lot. They seem like chill guys…

DAN: Yeah, they are hard workers and professional. They just do their thing.

ED: We couldn’t speak higher of that band, it’s been great.

SPREAD: It seems like you guys tour a lot, so, how do you handle your writing process when you’re always on the road?

ED: I like that, and that’s the funny thing – we don’t. We don’t handle it. For the last two years, we were basically on hiatus, we almost broke up. We were trying to write this next album, and were touring constantly. It was more work than any sort of expression. It basically was like the doldrums of life was just kind of taking a toll so we had to cut ourselves off from touring and the music world in general and focus on writing this album, and from now on, I feel that’ll be kind of the point anyway. Like, whenever we have down time is when we will write. You can’t multitask, we tend to put ourselves completely in one realm or the other. We can’t really split it.

SPREAD: That’s always a challenge, right, for a band?

DAN: You mentioned in that previous question about our secret, and that’s our secret. We just work hard when it’s time to write and it takes a long time. Basically, there are no secrets is the secret.

SPREAD: Is there anyone in your band who’s a total gearhead? Is there like a pedal, or something, that you just can’t live without?

ED: I think we are all gearheads. Some of us know a little more about specific things. Dan, here, is a lot more electronically saavy, but we’re all very picky. As for as for each of us, well, I use an Electro Harmonix POG for a lot of things. It broke awhile ago and so I was pretty lost without it. I got it back, and I’m pretty stoked. So I’d say that if I had a piece of gear, well or theAmpeg V4 I use those primarily for a head. So, I guess, that would be my crucials.

DAN: My friend started an amp company called Science and that’s the head I use. It’s the one piece of gear that I would never turn my back on or just leave somewhere. It’s really the only thing I truly love about our gear..oh, except for like our cabs. This guy from our hometown made all of our cabs and we take a lot of pride in those too. Janice Cabs.

Basically it’s like handmade stuff or vintage stuff, or stuff that they don’t make anymore. That’s what we use on tour. Not because of those reasons, but oddly enough…

SPREAD: Right, because the quality of sound is there.

ED: It’s more what we want.

SPREAD: We’ve read that your next anticipated album is coming out later this year and that it is expected to be a lot heavier. Can you elaborate on that and explain what’s in store for your fans?

ED: Sure. I guess if we had to label our stuff, a lot of our older stuff is a lot more technical. In the sense, especially guitar work. For the new album, I would say that the greatest difference is that we rely much more on note choice and overall mood of the song, in general. The songs are much shorter and they are much more direct. We don’t have anymore 5 minute songs or anything like that. And like I said, it’s about much more serious issues than our last couple of albums that were much more introverted, topic wise. The new album is much more extroverted. It’s in a much different place and a much different direction.

DAN: Throughout the writing process we kept saying to each other, no Bullshit. We’d get somewhere and then be kind of wondering about it, like “is this cool”? Then we’d be like, “alright, guys, no Bullshit”

ED: Yeah, like, if you’re wondering if it’s cool, then it’s not cool. It’s a lot of gut reactions. Like everything we wrote on the album is a gut reaction. We wrote it and then knew that that was the part. There wasn’t any mulling it over. It was like, “it’s done”.

DAN: The album’s pretty short but there is no bullshit, there’s no filler, there’s no fluff. That was a big problem with our last album, we were just so excited to be in the studio and we ended up watering the whole thing down a little bit.

ED: Like a track of just a loop, why would anyone ever pop that on? Like “Oh, I’ve been listening to this loop for 40 seconds…” Why waste people’s time?

SPREAD: We see you as being pioneers in this new musical movement, there are a lot of players for sure, but you’re definitely part of this wave going on right now. It can be a blessing sometimes and sometimes it can be a burden. So, I guess my question would be, how does it feel to live with that?

ED: It’s news to me.

DAN: That’s news to us.

ED: I don’t really think we view it that way. A lot of the bands we started with have either blown up to points where they’re like playing on really huge tours or they’re gone. Our mission is that we just wish everyone we meet the best, I’m sure we got better at some point. But, then we kind of got over it. I think that we’re just on our own plane of existence and just forging our path. If people like it, that’s wonderful, if not, that’s wonderful too.

We just don’t like to view us as being part of any sort of wave. Especially in music because waves come and go too, and you kind of want to create something that’s going to be permanent.

SPREAD: I also think if you always remain organic than you can really only ever be just what you are.

ED: We try to maintain our independence, as strongly as we can.

DAN: We’ve made a lot of mistakes so learning from those and just moving forward, I feel like that is more lasting than whatever. It’s hard to say because that’s kind of news to us.

SPREAD: It’s because, I listen to a lot of bands, I honestly scour the net and try to find these bands, and I don’t base my judgements on aything apart from the sound. You’re in common with all the bands that I enjoy. I’m just saying that I see you as part of the movement but that doesn’t mean that that my view counts for anything.

DAN: We get really excited about bands that don’t exist anymore but they were just fucking incredible.

ED:You know like Rage Against the Machine and Kill Sadie, and bands like that. All the bands we like are dead.

DAN: The ones who made the biggest impressions on us are maybe what goes into our influences and maybe that bleeds out.

All photos and videos courtesy of Ginga Takeshima.

To see the entire article and watch video from the show visit SPREAD