At the end of the record-release party for Vol. 1, the debut by the heavy Triangle quartet SOON, the band opted to close with a cover. It was The Cure’s “Plainsong,” a decidedly non-metal selection for one of the Triangle’s most alluring, aggressive new acts.
Still, the version was slow and heavy and crushingly loud, much like all of SOON’s music. His Gibson Firebird’s signal dripping with effects, guitarist Mark Connor translated the euphoric swells of the synth melody. Drummer Thomas Simpson attacked his kit, lit from the front by a strobe light. With his full beard and long curls, bassist Robert Walsh suggested a Germanic barbarian or a hard-touring classic rock veteran. Amid the cleansing wash of heaviness, he was the anchor, the center of the maelstrom.
When it was over, guitarist and lead vocalist Stuart McLamb glanced at the crowd from the Kings stage and said, “See you soon.” Somehow, the statement didn’t seem like a joke. It sounded sincere and reassuring, like an airport farewell for a close friend. Vol. 1 is heavy and dense, fitting for its release on Swedish metal label Temple of Torturous. McLamb’s clarion vocals, though, cut through with surprisingly positive lyrics, making the mood brighter than that of SOON’s bleak metal label mates.
SOON is a natural mood enhancer, forged with hot dogs and beer and presented with an appropriate level of easygoing camaraderie. Music keeps the four members of this band happy, even normal, and their tunes communicate that need. This is mood music, sure, but not for sulking. SOON is somehow jubilant. Without an outlet, its members wouldn’t be.
“I don’t think I’ve ever not played in a band in my adult life,” says Walsh, sitting in the sun outside Carrboro’s Looking Glass Cafe. If it was the kind of thing he could quit, he says matter-of-factly, he would have.
It’s one of the first warm days in February, so Walsh, Connor, McLamb, and Simpson take a table by the sidewalk. They range in age from the freshly thirty to forty-something. They look to beand, in fact area motley crew. They’ve been in more Triangle bands than they can easily recall. Walsh was in the garage rock hounds The Spinns and now works in the psychedelic trio Bitter Resolve. Connor has played power pop with Bright Young Things and space rock with Left Outlet. McLamb and Simpson’s most notable other band, The Love Language, has seen national buzz, though not in metal circlesit’s a summery indie pop outfit.
This compulsion to play in numerous bands, they say, keeps them busy and grounded. Connor and Simpson have dark memories of band-less eras.
“Mid-twenties, I was playing in one band. It fell apart, and then I was going through other life shitjaded, depressed, over it,” Simpson says. “I was homeless. I was living out of the back of a truck, going through that.”
Connor nods. He came to a similar realization that music was a lifestyle, and not something he could simply walk away from. He didn’t play in bands for a few years, and it left him rudderless.
“It took me a little while to realize, ‘Oh, I’m weird now. I’m drinking too much and I’m not going anywhere,’” Connor says. “I wasn’t really listening to music. I was disconnected from it.”
Simpson picks up the thought, as if it were his own: “As a result of the whole experience, I joined multiple bands. I compulsively joined as many bands as I could.”
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Three years ago, Simpson and McLamb were living together in a cottage outside of Chapel Hill. For years, McLamb had talked to Walsh about jamming, despite their wildly different tastes and approaches. Walsh is the archetypal punk-metal bassista hard-living, knuckle-tatted lifer who seems to cuss every fourth or fifth word. The Cary-raised McLamb is a blue-eyed pop-rock crooner with several records out through Merge.
But over heavy drinking and outdoor grilling, McLamb, Walsh, and Simpson found a middle ground.
“It’s a weird mismatch,” Walsh says. “I would come over Sundays with hot dogs and get drunk and we just started jamming.”
Before long, it was happening every week; Sunday became “SOONday.” While melody had been secondary to Walsh in metal and punk bands, it suddenly became the focus. McLamb, on the other hand, was excited to embolden his guitar sound. He’d briefly been in the remarkable Raleigh metal project Grohg alongside Connor, where he got his first real taste for playing heavy and loud.
“That was the changing point, just from the Grohg rehearsals. Mark had helped me chain two Fender Bassmans together,” McLamb says, referring to a Fender amplifier celebrated for its volume and power. The next day, he showed up to The Love Language’s practice and plugged into a Fender Deluxe Reverb, an amp designed for snap and not snarl. He missed the volume and the feeling.
“Damn,” he said. “It doesn’t feed back forever.”
McLamb’s role in Grohg was a supporting one, but it was enough to make him receptive to the Sunday trio jams. Back in Chapel Hill, the three summoned high-test riffs over galloping drums.
“Get a microphone now,” Simpson remembers saying. “We have to put this down or we’re idiots.”
“Or we’re going to forget it because we’re eating too many hot dogs and drinking too much beer,” Walsh adds with a gravelly chuckle.
Not long after the trio invited Connor, they stopped simply jamming and started writing; with a second guitarist, parts had to be assigned. At this point, it stopped being a strictly hot dogs-and-beer hang and inched toward full-band status.
McLamb fiddled with different approaches to heaviness. He came close to trashing one such experiment, thinking it sounded too much like the Pixies, but Walsh, who heard Kyuss in the song instead, wouldn’t let it die. Like the band’s mix of members, the sound had roots in pop-rock and punishing metal but was neither. There were three-part harmonies alongside chugging riffs, soaring choruses alongside concussive churn.
“There’s no way it wasn’t going to be heavy with as urgent and loud as you play drums,” Connor says, nodding to Simpson. “Rob plays pretty powerfully. Those two ingredients would make you play loud and heavier.”
Still, they were having too much fun to become serious or somber.
“It’s hopeful and positive,” says Walsh, whose other bands deliver pummeling, heartbroken punk-blues or dystopian space-metal. “You can be slow but not be singing about the end of the fucking world.”
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Back at the Vol. 1 release show, Connor, Walsh, and McLamb stood side by side in the low stage light, opening their throats and bellowing affirmations with the same power that most metal acts put into harsh screams or animalistic growls. “We are on your side,” they howled in close harmony. Later, they intone a single word, “rise,” over a crawling roar.
In Carrboro, Connor had said that he’s not responsible for anything else when he’s holding his guitar; it’s obvious his bandmates share this sense of relief and release. In the depths of these tunes, the members sported rapturous expressions. Between songs, Simpson stretched his arms and smiled with genuine pleasure.
“When you’re lifers and you’ve committed to enjoying playing music, you get together with your friends and it’s a compulsive thinggo jam, go play, see what happens,” Simpson says.
“Sometimes it’s just proximity,” Connor adds.
“It’s a little bit like prairie dogs,” Simpson says, mimicking one of the little animals poking its head out of a burrow and looking side to side. “Who’s around me that can play?”
This article appeared in print with the headline “Happy Metal”
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