The Felix Culpa interview

Planting New Seeds

It’s an unseasonably warm January night at Metro, and the Wrigleyville concert hall is respectably and, surprisingly, full. Respectably because, while not sold-out, the turnout is full of passionate fans, all out to witness the triumphant live return of an act that’s been all but M.I.A. from the local-music circuit for the last few years. Which is also what makes the strong showing so surprising: Who knew fans of The Felix Culpa were just lying in wait, ready to show up the second the band reemerged?

Appearing: Wednesday, April 28th at Subterranean in Chicago.

“It was definitely flattering,” vocalist/guitarist Marky Hladish affirms. “It was nice to see that people hadn’t forgotten about us. We had hoped, obviously, people would still care if we were going to put out more music, and we’d been tempting people for a long time with the idea of putting out a new record — been telling them it was coming for the last couple years. So, it was nice to see that people actually did remember.”

Fans may have remembered, but the band hasn’t left its faithful following with much to remember it by over the past five years. Aside from two EPs released four years apart (2005’s Thought Control and last year’s digital-only So So Remission), The Felix Culpa (Hladish, drummer Joel Coan, bassist Tristan Hammond, and guitarist/keyboardist Dustin Currier) has been noticeably absent from the scene since 2004’s full-length Commitment. The band toured behind the album through 2006, as well as a portion of 2007, but the experience left a “sour taste” in the members’ mouths, according to Hladish. “There was a lot of kind of jump-through-the-hoops stuff that a band is expected to do, and . . . we didn’t really want to have to do all that stuff,” he explains. So the outfit decided to write a new record that year instead, but soon found the new direction didn’t agree with it.

“We started off writing a completely different album that was very much from the perspective of, ‘Hey, we’ve done Warped Tour, we’ve done all these great tours, and we’ve got label attention. Let’s write an album that a label will really love,” the singer recalls. “But it was like, we did a handful of songs, 20 or so songs, we just ended up scrapping, because — they were cool, they were good, we just hated playing them. I mean, they were fine songs, but they weren’t us, really. And, we all kind of felt like the band, through doing that, there was no passion left in what we were doing, and that was really around the 2006/2007 era of what we were doing. That’s why we stopped playing, for the most part. And then, when we started recording, we’re like, ‘Listen, let’s just record an album that we would really feel good about standing behind and playing for the next couple years. Let’s write some songs that actually mean something to us.'”

Those songs would become , an album that easily achieves the band’s goal of creating a more meaningful statement. It’s also somewhat of a complex, challenging, and even impenetrable album upon first listen, as the hour-plus effort is thoroughly cohesive and connective, with practically every song segueing into the next throughout the entire record. It’s the type of album that dares, but doesn’t expect you to meet it on its own terms. Yet upon subsequent spins, not only does Roots take shape, but its album’s ebb and flow begins to reveal itself, exposing a tumultuous and emotionally cathartic experience. From the underlying guitar buzz of the building “Because This Is How We Speak” to the urgently unleashed chaos of “First One To The Scene Of Accident” and the sledgehammer guitars of the harsh and jarring “An Instrument,” Sever Your Roots finds The Felix Culpa traversing in varying levels of melodic post-hardcore extremes. Yet for all of the album’s bluster, Roots begins gradually (the cautiously emerging, seven-minute “New Home Life”) and closes out awash in sensitivity and hinting at almost-apologetic optimism (semi-cynical love-letter track “Apologies”). If it sounds like an emotionally charged listening experience, it’s because it is.

“The main theme of everything on the album is really kind of starting over,” the frontman explains. “Getting into this album, we definitely were very close to not being a band, in a couple of different places, before starting this album and during the album. And, so, a lot of . . . this album was very cathartic in a lot of ways, and kind of the idea of starting over personally and musically [in] a lot of ways was really cool to us, kind of meant a lot, so that’s definitely what that is.

“At that time [recording Roots, there was an awful lot going on, personally, with all of us,” Hladish continues, hinting of shakeups that included Coan marrying and moving to Milwaukee, as well as “crazy personal drama” that the frontman sees “no need to kind of make public.” Yet he also believes the turmoil actually contributed to the feel of the recording.

“The album was definitely designed from the beginning to be like, ‘Let’s make this a cohesive listening experience,'” he says, “because nobody really does that. And it’s not like we were trying to be different or anything, but that’s just what we enjoy. That’s what we, as a band would get all psyched about finding another band doing. We enjoy the idea of sitting down at an actual record player with a couple glasses of whiskey and listening to an album. That’s a good night. So, we wanted to kind of create that experience for other people.”

No matter how long the wait.

— Jamie de’Medici

Tags: The Felix Culpa

Category: Features, Monthly