Written by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Thursday 21 April 2022

Getting Both Sides of the Story - Two Interviews for the Price of One!

BLACK RHENO

Bass players – they can be a liability. You’ve got to feed them, keep them away from sharp objects, and make sure they don’t wander off. Hell, they had to tattoo “FRONT” on KING PARROT’s Wayne Slattery so he knows which way he’s pointing. BLACK RHENO don’t have to worry themselves with such trivial matters, touring as a three-piece and creating an unholy racket with just drums, guitar and vocals. They sound like what would happen if WILL HAVEN started playing groove metal, and they’re amazing. Ahead of the release of their new split with U.S. art-rock/punk/metal mutants CHILD BITE, I spoke to axeman Nano …

How did this split come about?

I think back in the day, back in a pre-COVID world, when KING PARROT and CHILD BITE toured Australia … KING PARROT brought them here, and they had a few days off around Sydney, and then Ryan Miller, our singer, he also has a recording studio called Housefox Studios. He said, “Hey, you guys have nothing to do. Why don’t you come to the studio, record a couple of songs?” We threw some microphones in there. I brought the barbeque, sausages, whatever – made a day out of it. So we recorded some music – well, Ryan did – and those songs were just there, sitting in the hard drive. Now, with COVID and everything happening, we were sort of wondering whether it was a good idea to put something out or not, because it’s just such a tricky landscape at the moment, right? You don’t really want to put a full-length album if you could not tour it. It’s just very difficult at the moment … So we were like, “Hey, why don’t we do something? Why don’t we just see if the guys want to get those songs, and we put another couple of songs, and we do a split, which is something that’s a bit safer, right? Rather than putting out a full-length album.” And they were like, “Yeah man! Hell, let’s do it.” All parties were happy … that’s how it was. We met them here in Sydney and recorded some music with them, and started this sort of relationship with them, because obviously we really like them. They have this really cool style … and we really appreciate what they do. So yeah, they were happy to do so. That’s how it came about.

I first saw Shawn in his band SHOCK NARCOTIC, opening for SCOUR on the Housecore livestream. That was my first ever time seeing him, and my jaw was on the floor. This guy, as a vocalist, was just insane.

Shawn and the whole CHILD BITE crew … they’re just talented. [Laughs] They’re just talented in everything! They’re just really, really talented people. Shawn can do anything. He can do SHOCK NARCOTIC, something a bit heavier, or he can do something like CHILD BITE – a bit more noise, weird stuff. He can do beautiful art. He’s such a dude, man. And SHOCK NARCOTIC, I love them. Such a great band. And the members, where they all come from and whatnot, it’s very interesting.

How did BLACK RHENO come together. [Does best Youngy impression] “Explain your music to me!”

[Laughs] So it’s a bit of a long story but I’ll try to keep it short. I am originally from Spain, and I was playing in bands over there in Europe and whatnot, and then I moved to London and I had another band in London, and then from London I moved to Sydney in 2015. I shipped my guitars and everything, so when I got here, I was like, “Oh my god, I need to play music.” So I put an ad on Gumtree or whatever, and met a dude at the time, and we were like, “Alright, let’s make some noise. I just need to make some noise.” So I was like, “OK, what are the rehearsal studios around where I live?” There were a couple … I went to my local music store and I asked, “Where shall I go? Who shall I talk to [so I can] jam or whatever?” So this dude pointed me to Ryan’s studios. So I booked a room in there with this dude from Gumtree, and we just started jamming and playing really fucking loud music. [Laughs] Knowing Ryan now, it’s very weird … but he actually knocked at the door while we were jamming, and he was like, “Fuck, how long have you guys been playing for?” I was like, “We literally just met. This is the first time that I’m meeting this random dude.” He was like, “Do you guys need a vocalist?” [Laughs] We were like, “Let’s jam!” So that was the very first shape of BLACK RHENO that developed into what we are at now. But I just met him in his studio while jamming and playing music. He just grabbed a microphone and started screaming, and we hit it off, and he was like, “How serious are you?” I was like, “Bro, if I do this, I’m going 100%.” He was like, “That’s what I want to hear.” We hit it off, and seven years later, we’re still going! It was pretty funny.

Were you ever interested in employing a bass player?

So when we started, the idea was to get a bass player. We tried a couple of people, and things were either not working, or these people didn’t want to take it as seriously as we did. And then we started booking tours very, very soon after we got together. I think we got together in June or something like that. In August, we were already touring. So I sort of didn’t really have time to think about this too much, and what I did was, “Alright, let’s fake it for the first tour. I’m just going to do this setup. I’m just going to fake the bass tone. I’m going to split my signal, and then we tried it, and I remember the first time that we actually set up all the amps and whatnot, and we started playing, and Ryan looking at me like, “This is it. We are not getting anyone! [Laughs] This sounds very nasty!” I was like, “Yeah, this is pretty cool.” It’s also nice being only three … Obviously, there is less people to organise. Everything is way easier. There’s no, like, five musos trying to get their way, or anything like that. Three just works very well, even for travelling and whatnot. It just works well. It started because we needed to start playing music and touring, and we couldn’t find the right bass player, so we just made lemonade with the lemon we got given, and fuck it.

Plus, you only have to split the band fee three ways, which is great.

[Laughs] Yeah! It was a bit of a headache, but it works. Obviously, it affects the way I write music, because I don’t have a bass player doing something and then I can do a weird harmony or anything like that. Everything has to be kind of the same signal, so it’s a bit of a challenge to write music that is dynamic, but I like a challenge. It works well.

CHILD BITE

A graphic designer by trade, Shawn Knight brings a similar artistic flair to his musical pursuits, bringing his dynamic vocal talents to both the warped punk of CHILD BITE and the abrasive grind of SHOCK NARCOTIC. He spoke to SENSE from Michigan.

If someone was to ask, “Who are you doing a split with?”, how would you describe BLACK RHENO?

The first term that comes to mind is “groove metal”. I feel like you don’t see that as much nowadays. Everything always comes back to Phil [Anselmo] in conversations that I have. But obviously, PANTERA were huge contributors to most would say are the origins of “groove metal”. [BLACK RHENO] don’t sound like PANTERA to me, but I think the groove … that is a good term to apply to them, because so many bands – and not talking shit, not throwing anyone under the bus or whatever – but there’s a lot of … [starts beatboxing a rapid drum pattern]. I think that’s one of [BLACK RHENO’s] strong suits – that sense of groove. They’ve got some faster stuff too, but that’s a big part of it for me. I think it’s also interesting to me that they’re just the one guitar, you know? The three-piece with the freehand singer. I think it’s interesting. You don’t see it all the time.

There are a lot of dynamics in your vocal performances, both in CHILD BITE and in SHOCK NARCOTIC. Who are some of your favourite vocalists?

If somebody asks me about my favourite vocalists, I hope I’m not a cliché, but I go back to my teenage years where music was so influential and forming me as a person … I listen to more modern music as well, but I’m still very fond of a lot of the stuff from those years in my youth. Phil’s one of them, of course. PANTERA was humongous, and his patterns in his vocal delivery, and some of the production stuff he would do on the records – the layering, [the] spoken [word] with a bit more yell-y, singing kind of thing paired together – was pretty influential. I would be remiss to not mention one that people bring up all the time, but Jello Biafra … He was such a unique voice, and I think something about the tone, the biology of my vocal chords and my anatomy, in regards to singing in a band, somewhat line up there. I actually got to meet him once, and said, “Hey, sometimes people say I sound like you with a cold, like if you were sick.” [Laughs] And he’s like, “I sound like me with a cold!” … Henry Rollins, you know, being a big one … I would say Rollins and Glenn Danzig. They both kind of bridged the gap of the punk aspect as well as the metal aspect, you know? Seeing those guys going from one to the other, as far as just seeing how you can do both … To see how their vocals translated as their genres kind of metamorphosised over the years would be big ones. For me, another one … I came later to them, to be perfectly honest. I should’ve been listening to them back in the early 90s when I was getting into this stuff, but it was a little later for me, was David Yow from THE JESUS LIZARD. Just being a totally different kind of style … unhinged. It’s like some homeless guy hopped-up on who-knows-what just stepped up on stage, and it’s happening with the music, you know?

What is the scene like in Michigan? And what are some misconceptions that people have about that part of the world?

When I was growing up in the suburbs, pretty far outside of Detroit – maybe forty-five minutes outside of Detroit, in the 80s and 90s – it still had its reputation … that Detroit reputation. I went to college in downtown Detroit. I went to art school there from ’96 to 2000. That was when I first moved to Detroit. It was still relatively sketchy in a lot of the areas. Since then, over twenty years later, there has been a lot of gentrification, but also a lot of good has come out of cleaning up some of the blight, and certain parts of it. I’m not a big sports guy, but all of our sports teams were far outside of the city, and I think that was a glaring example of how a lot of people … did not live in the city, didn’t want to go to the city. The Detroit Pistons and the Lions, they were forty-five minutes, an hour outside of the city almost. Nowadays, all the teams are down there. It’s not the scary place it used to be. Just like any major city, there are going to be some pockets of crime and places you wouldn’t want to go. I don’t know what the current [perception] of the city is nowadays from the outside view, but it’s not as scary as it used to be. It used to be the cool badge of honour for hardcore and metal guys and gals and whoever – band people. The scene right now? Metal is thriving, that’s for sure. There’re so many bands. That’s going great. We’ve got tonnes of venues. Obviously the pandemic was not kind to venues, but surprisingly, they pretty much all survived. I can’t believe it. They pretty much all survived in Detroit, so that’s great. Shows are coming back. We just went to see CIRCLE JERKS and NEGATIVE APPROACH, and that thing … it was not over-sold, but it was packed to the gills. You couldn’t barely move. It was crazy.

The BLACK RHENO/CHILD BITE split is out April 29 on Dead Set Records

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