Boots Electric, Interview

We caught up with Jesse Hughes of Boots Electric and Eagles Of Death metal for a quick chat before a recent gig at The Cockpit in Leeds.

You're 4 dates into your UK tour now, how are you finding it?
F**king awesome, it's the coolest sh*t I ever done. When we come to the U.K., the audiences are same as ever; beautiful sweaty and ready to rock. Elsewhere it's hard to compare anywhere to Australia, but in the States a lot of the time people just look up on stage at you like they're already bored. Here you get a fair chance, it's like 'you said you were guna rock so if you're guna rock let's see it, you've got about 10 minutes.'

What can people expect from your shows?
You can expect to see women getting impregnated every two minutes!

How did you find working alone on the Boots Electric material?
Making a solo record sometimes is just about being by yourself. When I'm making an Eagles album it's me and my best friend making an album having the best time of my life, when I was making the solo album it was me having the best time of my life without having anybody around to share it with.
That where I met Tuesday (Cross - girlfriend and now bassist for Boots Electric) and she helped me in the making of the record and she's the great love of my life. One the greatest barely legal porn stars ever put onto film and she retired just for me. So you guys can go to the Internet and look her up!

How did you find working with Money Mark (Beastie Boys, Beck) on the album?
Well I found that working with him made the most sense to me 'cause a lot of time what dudes are obsessed with, they are things that you would not consider. The first album that changed my life was Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys, which is a rock album, it's a hip-hop album, it's a punk album, it's all those things. I felt that my album was going to be all over the place, it'll be schizophrenic, so I thought I'd better get this guy to help me on it. I wanted Dr Dre, but I got the best instead.

Do you find that bands rely more on touring now than they have in the past?
The reality is that bands have always relied on touring; the record sales would just be a bonus I guess. Touring would be where you'd sell you merch and the way I've always looked at it is, and the way I've been raise because I was raised in a musical family is that the record should only be a promise of what the live show is going to be like. The music industry is an inevitable conclusion to something that was made many years ago. The standard that I've applied to Eagles of Death Metal and Boots Electric is that I want you to go home tonight and be like 'I want a moustache.'

You were late coming into music, how did you make the transition into the music business?
That's my favourite way of putting that question [laughs]. What happened was I went through a divorce, it was a really bad divorce and I got addicted to speed. A lot of people will stand here before you and try and talk sh*t about drugs but I'm not guna be one of those guys. I don't think drugs are for everybody but I don't think they're not for anybody.

You're quite open with your relationship with drugs, how would you define it?
The way I see it; you don't trust anyone who'd try and hide something from you. I don't like it when someone is high and they're trying to tell me they're not, it's just phony. I've played more shows sober than I will ever play high, thing is every situation is situational. Drugs, for example, don't disqualify you from something. I have a son who I desperately don't want to make some of the choices I've made, but I can now say it from a place of example.

A lot of your sound is very nostalgic, where do you draw most of your influences?
Oh man, where do I draw most of my influence from? Honestly I'll be at The Thirsty Crow where Eden (guitarist for Boots Electric) DJ's and he'll play a song like some weird rock and roll song from the sixties and I won't even know the name of the song but he'll play it and I'll just take instant influence. Like The Monks' 'Oh, How To Do Now' - listen to that song next to 'Complexity' and you tell me which one is which.

Do you listen to many recent releases?
I do yeah, but I've got like really weird standards. Just new for the sake of new and nothing else is not a good reason to listen to something. For me it's just got to be good and I think that we can all agree that a lot of good things took place between 1961 and 1985, but then 1985 to present you can count how many good acts have passed. Black Flag, Crass, even the Red Hot Chilli Peppers as much as everyone hates them. The record labels that started in the eighties like SST, Alternative Tentacles, Dischord; these things influenced me and I think I'm more influenced by their attitude than their sound. Also this has a lot to do with the way I make music, when I was a little kid every Sunday I went round to my grandpa's house to have corned beef and cabbage then afterwards we'd all sit around, pick up a guitar or mandolin and play some hillbilly music. So that's what I do in the studio, I give everyone a guitar, they'll all kinda know what's going on and it'll be intuitive.

Festival season is coming up; can we expect to see you back in the U.K. anytime soon?
[Hands over Leeds/Reading Festival poster] Main Stage, ready to lose. Eagles of Death Metal will be back.

So if you're playing Leeds with Eagles, does this mean we should be expecting some new material from them?
As soon as I'm back from this tour, Josh (Homme) and I are back in the studio and making a new record and I want it to feel like the world is being raped by John Holmes in the most pleasant way possible.

Joe Wilde

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Kris Menace, Electric Horizon Album Review

What is it about Germany and electronic music? Ever since the seventies with Kraftwerk and the experimentation of various Kraut-rock groups the country has become synonymous with producing electronic albums. Since then the country has by far become the capital of trance and techno music, a hard electro beat has become as German as a bratwurst.

Kris Menace is something of a black sheep among most of his fellow countrymen. Rather than sticking with the more conventional choice of producing techno or trance, Menace tends to delve into the more accessible house genre, occasionally steering into slightly more adventurous roads at times, but generally keeping with the whole house ethos of plenty of hi-hats and song breaks that slow down almost completely for no real reason. On what is only his second album, Menace aims to push the house aesthetic to new grounds and on Electric Horizon he mixes equal parts of ambience, pulsating beats and catchy synth-lines to create what is a well-rounded electronic album.

First track and lead single, 'Falling Star' evokes the kind of cosmic landscape that is almost overwhelming with its capacious sound. From the opening binary noises, the song then has a supernova-sized explosion when it builds, then reconstructs itself over the next seven minutes. The track requires your full-undivided attention as it scopes out the outer reaches of the universe. Much like the rest of the album 'Falling Star' looks to present itself on an extraterrestrial scale and may not feature as many spacey SFX as other tracks on the album, this is by far the most emotive and the one most resembling some kind of space odyssey.

The Field, on last years Looping State of Mind, the Swede crafted the kind of ambient trance that someone like Menace would dream of making. He just seemed to tick all the right boxes when it came to making the kind of sonic trance that Menace seems to be striving to make. But then again this is a house record as much as it is trance and on the track 'Fly Me To The Moon' this is exemplified very well. The percussion and piano keys consistently hold up the track as something special, the activities going on around this make it the standout track of the album.

A comparison between the Field and Menace doesn't quite add up, the two do essentially make relatively different music. But what they both have in common is the ability to expand the area they work within and make it seem much more all encompassing of electronic music as a whole. Our friends on the continent really do have a knack for crafting the most entertaining and consuming electronic music, must be something they put in the water, and whilst Electric Horizon is not my ideal album, it still does the job it was sent to do.

8/10

Joe Wilde

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