Crack Music
Jason Novak is busy right now. Really busy.
It’s 11:30 a.m.-ish on a Thursday morning in September and the Acumen Nation frontman/guitarist/songwriter is tending to his sick daughter, who is home from school with the flu, supervising the painter working on a new addition in his house, trying to finish some Flash web work (Novak has done Flash development for everyone from Touch And Go Records to Tresemme), and preparing the Internet campaign for the presales of new Acumen and DJ? Acucrack (an electronic duo Novak also masterminds with help from Acumen guitarist Jamie Duffy) albums, Psycho The Rapist and Humanoids From The Deep respectively. Both will come out on Cracknation, the label, surprise, Novak runs. He is also gearing up for the tour both Acumen Nation (completed by Duffy and drummer Dan Brill, with Jason’s bro and original member Ethan Novak returning temporarily on bass) and Acucrack embark on this month (21st at Double Door).
“It’s been, I don’t know man, I’m definitely a one-man army over here,” he admits. “Once the tour is over, the addition will be done, the records will be out, and I’m just going to fucking go to bed, man.”
The band have always been mostly Novak’s show – he has been the only consistent writer and producer since their (then known simply as Acumen) virgin full-length, Transmissions From Eville, in 1994, but the amount of responsibility he now shoulders seems a lot even for him. But, Novak says, it’s O.K. Psycho The Rapist will be the first Acumen Nation release Cracknation do completely D.I.Y., and after roughly 15 years of disappointing record deals and questionable distribution, Novak is ready to take his chances. Like he says, at least if it fails he can’t blame anybody but himself. “We can at least not have that misdirected anger,” he says.
“It’s just us against the world. Whoever we can scoop up and bring with us as far as fans, that’s fine, but we will never sign another deal with anybody for anything again. If it’s non-exclusive, we’ll take it. We have a really cool, non-exclusive digital deal now, so all of our music gets out in iTunes and Napster and all that business. We’ve got a couple cool little [distribution] deals that will get us into a couple cool mom-and-pop and specialty stores, and then a couple agents we work with. Everything is loose and we can change our minds whenever we want.”
He’s finally at ease, he claims, with the band’s business set-up. But, there very nearly wasn’t another Acumen Nation record at all. Though never “officially” declaring so, Novak certainly hinted Anticore would be the end of the road, and that was before what he describes as then-label Crash Music’s disastrous – “They were completely, the most non-communicative, not supportive label I’ve ever worked with in my life” – handling of the album Novak and co. spent three years creating. That album was released in September ’06, and Acumen Nation planned on touring through fall, but couldn’t get the right opportunity and ended up playing one show instead.
Spirits were low, and to make matters worse, Novak, the guy who always had extra tracks in the reserves, was tapped of material. Fate intervened, though, near Christmas when Novak was hired for a commercial project (Cracknation is also a production house), forcing him to create again. “I think it was just having everything go down to zero,” he says. “I recharged the batteries and the ideas just wouldn’t stop.”
Out came Psycho The Rapist, a quasi-concept album about the business of psychoanalysis and the ultimate compromise for supporters, who usually side with either the group’s more electro-laden early material like Eville or guitar-oriented recent efforts like Anticore and ’03’s superb Lord Of The Cynics. Fans of the former will likely gravitate toward tracks like “Remedial Math” and “Acumen Trepanation” and those of the latter will undoubtedly dig tunes such as “Sirvix” and “Hatchet Harry” – neither will be disenchanted.
Novak is proud of the album for that reason, but also because, simply put, it’s another Acumen Nation record. Nearly 14 years after releasing their first album, the band are still around. Yeah, he used to be bitter about being overlooked during the ’90s industrial boom that made peers like KMFDM, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails household names, but he also knows he has fared better than many.
“In my 30s, with two kids, it is a privilege to still be able to record albums, release them, and tour occasionally. It is a privilege, not a right,” Novak emphasizes. “So I see it as, so many of my fallen brothers who are no longer performing, no longer producing albums, no longer making music, and I feel fortunate I’ve been able to keep doing it.
“You can’t be disappointed people didn’t see you as a commodity. You can be disappointed more kids didn’t dig your music, but you can’t be disappointed more people didn’t see you as a business opportunity.”
SEEN AND HEARD: The Heaven & Hell Live From Radio City Music Hall (Rhino) CD/DVD package is awesome because it allows you to do exactly what you wish you could have when they played Allstate Arena earlier this year: Skip the boring shit! Heaven & Hell, better known as Black Sabbath, are legends, I know. The stuff Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler did with Ronnie James Dio is timeless, but they struggled with the setlist for the reunion tour, which too often was bogged down in slow-to-midtempo material. Now, with the DVD, you don’t have to sit through “Computer God,” then “Falling Off The Edge Of The World,” then “Shadow Of The Wind” to get to “Die Young” – use the remote’s “skip” button, baby! . . . Avenged Sevenfold: All Excess (Warner Bros.) is exactly that – excess. I like Sevenfold, but these dudes have been together for eight years and released three records – we hardly need an in-depth “Behind The Music”-type look into their careers. There are a few live performances as well as music videos for “Unholy Confessions,” “Bat Country,” “Beast And The Harlot,” and “Seize The Day,” but that doesn’t add much to this DVD either. More interesting would have been a documentary about why stubborn metalheads refuse to recognize this band as “true” metal. That’s a another column altogether, though . . . Speaking of “Behind The Music,” Phil Verone has obviously always felt slighted he and his former band, Saigon Kick, didn’t get the “BTM”-treatment from VH1. So he took it upon himself to produce his own documentary, Waking Up Dead (MVD). Here filmmaker Fabio Jafet follows Varone around the country (beginning in 2001) while he plays drums for Skid Row, does cocaine, and complains about the music industry and touring while getting blow jobs and videotaping groupies’ tits. (Decline in groupie quality, it seems, has been directly correlated to decline in music quality for Skid Row.) Varone isn’t the out-of-control rock ‘n’ roll junkie the filmmaker wants you to believe, and this makes Waking Up Dead sorta lame, especially when, like me, you realize you just wasted two hours of your Saturday night watching a movie about the drummer from fucking Saigon Kick.
GET OUT: So many cool shows this month. Municipal Waste/Skeletonwitch are at the Knights Of Columbus in Arlington Heights on the 3rd, Superchrist are at the newly opened Reggie’s two days later, Down play House Of Blues on the 10th, High On Fire (Double Door) and Maylene & The Sons Of Disaster (Riviera) are in town the 19th, Weedeater do The Note on the 26th, and Cealed Kasket fittingly play Halloween night at Martyrs’.
Fun = mosh@illinoisentertainer.com.
– Trevor Fisher
Category: Caught In A Mosh, Columns, Monthly
