 |
Goldfinger
|
Goldfinger guitarist/vocalist John Feldmann is just slightly preoccupied as he answers questions about the band's current tour as well as questions from the band about where they should be stopping to eat. As he ponders a question about the band's new attitude, he offers up direction to whoever's driving.
"Ooh, Chili's," Feldmann exclaims. "I love that place."
From the tone of Goldfinger's third full-length album, Stomping Ground, it's clear that there is very little on the planet that Feldmann and his cohorts like, let alone love -- so the staffs and managements of Chili's around the globe should be breathing a collective sigh of relief. They're one of the few entities to escape Goldfinger's wrath on Stomping Ground, an album that's vitriolic even by Punk standards.
A number of factors contributed to the tone of the new album. Feldmann uses much uncharacteristic diplomacy to explain the situation, absolutely none of which was used in the making of the album itself. One of the first shifts in the band's thinking was to steer away from Ska Punk, which had been a hallmark of Goldfinger's sound to date.
"I think we just needed a little break," Feldmann says. "I'm sure the next record will have a lot of Ska songs. I wrote like maybe five or six Ska tunes for this record, but they didn't really fit in because the record was already turning pretty aggressive. I'd already written 'I'm Down' and 'The End of the Day' and 'Forgiveness,' and they're all these kind of pissed-off songs. So the Ska stuff just didn't fit in with the rest of the stuff."
The anger of the material on Stomping Ground came from a variety of sources, and Feldmann carefully puts the songs in perspective as he explains their genesis.
"A lot of stuff happened the last couple of years ... we made some mistakes," he says of the blistering tone of the songs on Stomping Ground. "You know, broke the wrong people's equipment. We pissed enough people off that we were having trouble with our record label. A lot of the songs were spawned from wanting to do music on our terms and then having to pull back the reins a little bit. We were getting frustrated on a few tours where we were opening for people.
"The first few tours we did were great, especially like No Doubt, where we just got treated so well. Then these other bands ... I don't know, maybe it was because we were so energetic live, maybe we were making them wary of following us. They would push the barricade further and further and make us have a smaller and smaller stage every show. It got irritating."
That irritation manifested itself in some unbridled Punk songwriting. Feldmann admits that, whatever the subject matter, the songs on Stomping Ground have that underlying menace at their core.
"There are a lot of songs that are pretty pissed off on this record," he understates. "It's kind of vague, but like 'You Think It's a Joke' is kind of an animal rights song, 'I'm Down' is kind of about the record label and 'Bro' is about a fucked-up roommate. So it's not specifically one pissed-off subject. We've always been aggressive live, a high-energy Rock band. So I think this album kind of works for us."
If there was one truly affecting factor in Goldfinger's development since its first album, it would have to be the permanent addition of bassist Kelly Lemieux, who'd been the touring bassist since 1998 but here makes his studio debut with the band. Lemieux and Feldmann had originally worked together in the early 1990s in the band Electric Love Hogs, which broke up, sending Feldmann to Goldfinger and Lemieux to 22 Jacks. Feldmann is glad to have his old bassist back in the fold.
"Kelly kind of brings that French attitude to the band," says Feldmann, again with the cheeking tongue. "He makes the crepes and the French toast. He brings the love to the band, you know, that Frenchman love. Seriously, he just goes off. Our old bass player just stood there, and Kelly jumps all over the place and gets crazy. He actually can kind of sing, and no one else could ever sing in the band."
Like a lot of Punk bands in recent memory, Goldfinger has offered its own amped-up vision of other people's material, first on its own Darrin's Coconut Ass EP in 1997 (where the band covered everything from Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out with Him" to Peter Tosh's "Down Pressor Man") and then on tributes to Duran Duran and The Misfits. Naturally, on an album that's almost obsessively bitter and angry in its tone, the cover song that would fit the format of the album to a T would be ... Nena's "99 Red Balloons"?
"Basically, we wanted to be huge in Germany," Feldmann says, tongue somewhere in the vicinity of cheek. "It was pretty simple. We all knew the song. I learned a verse of it in German -- I actually had to have a German coach to sing that one verse. We just wanted to make it heavy."
The other standard corollary method of exposing music to the world is through soundtrack/movie placement, and Goldfinger has been particularly busy with this maneuver. So far, the band has been included in everything from The Waterboy and American Pie to Kingpin and BASEketball, and Feldmann shares his thoughts on this aspect of promoting Goldfinger.
"If we're doing a movie, we have to really love the actors or the story," says Feldmann. "American Pie is like my favorite movie right now. We all love Adam Sandler, so The Waterboy was a given. These people call and want us to get involved. I don't remember anything about Meet the Deedles, so they must have given us a lot of money. Those are the two requirements -- we have to love the movie or they have to give us a lot of money."
GOLDFINGER perform Monday at Bogart's.
