Recently releasing their new album Let’s Get Associated, SoCal-based garage-pop quartet Killola have been making waves in all sorts of ways. With a knack for entrepreneurial skill, the band has managed to team up with Skullcandy for to create a free viral download of their sophomore album I Am The Messer, and used the technology of digital distributor/live recording specialists Aderra Inc. to put the new record out on a USB dogtag. Featuring PushOvr technology, these USB’s allow the band to release new music and performance recordings as they happen. In addition to keeping fans up to date, the USB’s also include Killola’s previous two records, allows them to view videos, photos, and as of July 22nd, steam real-time live performances by the band.
As if that weren’t enough, the group is also producers for the upcoming feature-length film Girltrash: All Night Long, written by The L Word’s Angela Robinson. Along with writing music for the film’s narrative, Killola front woman Lisa Rieffel is starring in the film alongside Gabrielle Christian (South of Nowhere), Michelle Lombardo
(Entourage, Quarterlife), Mandy Musgrave (South of Nowhere), Rose Rollins (The L Word), Kate French (One Tree Hill), and Clementine Ford (The L Word).
A heady dose of rock n’ roll serves as the backbone to Killola’s gritty sound, touting an in your face attitude from Lisa Rieffel’s vocals and shredding guitars, while occasionally delving into a more poppy track to keep their crowds dancing. Let’s Get Associated is about having the kind of fun your mother warned you about, with songs abut partying hard and such exclamatory statements as “I Wanna See Your Dick” and “She’s a Bitch” in its track listing. While the slight crudeness found within Killola’s bawdy brand of rock might not suit all listeners, its impossible to deny the fact that this band is ready for a good time- and isn’t that what rock n’ roll is all about?
Let’s Get Associated is made available on iTunes and through the Killola Merch Store
Johnny, one of the four singularly named members of Killola, took some time to answer a few questions for us. Catch up on your Killola band history, learn more about Girltrash: All Night Long, and hear Johnny’s tour story of a boy, a barn, and a dead body.
Reviewsic: Can you give us a quick recap of what the band has been up to as of late?
Johnny: Basically just touring for the last few weeks. All the details/events/days eventually kinda melt together on tour, like pocket M&Ms… or weird dreams. Every day is a bastardized version of the day before… but its often hotter or cooler, that’s the most discernible difference.
Reviewsic: What is the back-story on how the band came to be what it is today?
Johnny: The band started in 2003. At first, it was like, “hey lets hang out together and write songs and drink beer and have fun”…. and that happened a bunch, rather impromptu. But once you say “hey lets hang out together and write songs and drink beer and have fun…… tomorrow at 2:30… don’t be late”…. I guess that’s when you’ve got a band. Seven years later, you’ve done that routine enough times to make a few albums. If you can keep it all together on tours, you’ve pretty much done it right, in my opinion.
Reviewsic: What are your top three musical influences?
Johnny: Hank Williams, Hank Williams Jr, and Evan Williams.
Reviewsic: Is there any instrument you don’t play, but wish you did?
Johnny: I think the accordion is a great instrument. I have no clue how it works, but it sounds great thrown on stage with a rock band. Not enough people know that. I have this imaginary historical scenario wherein the world’s primary accordion supply factory explodes (like in one of those ‘Lethal Weapon’ type explosions)…. and all the accordions blast WAY out, all landing in Mexico. But then I think I’m just being too ethnocentric… like, why would the factory have to explode in America? Why couldn’t the factory be IN Mexico to begin with? Then I get self-conscious and re-dream the scenario with a Mexico-based factory… but since ‘Lethal Weapon’ never happens in Mexico, I now have a hard time imagining an explosion… so my brain just ends up creating a very LUCRATIVE accordion factory, with a top-notch P.R. team, selling tons of product to the locals, thereby infusing their native-music with a shit-load of accordions. Want some sick accordion? Check out a song called “Montreal”, its on the new Joey Cape record. And it’s not Mexican-style music.
Reviewsic: Tell us about “Girltrash: All Night Long”- how did you get involved in the film? What can people expect from it?
Johnny: Lisa did ‘Girltrash’ the web-series back in ’07, and it was a great story…. the creator (Angela Robinson) rolled it into a movie and kept the same cast. Angela had been listening to Killola songs, and she ended up writing several of the songs INTO the movie’s plot-line, so it became a musical. Characters singing our songs and everything, its totally crazy. People should expect it to rule, and expect to go see it. Then expect to go see it again, and then expect to buy it on DVD.
Reviewsic: What are some of the songs/bands/albums on your summer playlist this year?
Johnny: Every summer, my playlists usually consist of weird reggae from the 1970s, and punk rock from 2 years ago that I’m just getting around to. So, I’m in no way “up” on new releases. I literally just discovered DFA1979 for example. I’m about as hip to new releases as Jaycee Dugard.
Reviewsic: If you could work with one person in the music industry (musician, label, producer etc), who would it be and why?
Johnny: Dead or alive?… I’ll choose DEAD. Ok, The Colonel, from the Elvis Presley camp/empire. That dude was a straight-up G, and he could hustle circles around the most hustleriest rap-dudes (that is, if he were alive today… or if rap-dudes were hustling in the 60′s). Anyways, he had Elvis shooting like 3 movies at a time… concurrent with world tours… AND ON TOP OF THAT, he enrolled Elvis Presley into the FUCKING ARMY. How crazy is THAT? I could totally use some training right now. Also, he called himself “The Colonel”…. who does that??? Badasses, that’s who…
Reviewsic: Who are three of your favorite local bands?
Johnny: Hm. I assume you mean local to LA… because I’m currently typing this in a van, driving through rural Arkansas (literally not a town in site)… I imagine the local bands around here consist of zit jocks who stab cats and draw lopsided pentagrams on everything. Three of favorite LA bands are Tsar, The Dollyrots, and Brother Reade.
Reviewsic: If you could book a tour with any 3 bands, past or present, who would they be and why?
Johnny: Andrew WK (duh, party hard), We Are Scientists (great music + hilarious), and Queen (I’d want the venues/catering to be top-notch).
Reviewsic: Tell us about the Let’s Get Associated – is there a particular concept or creative direction behind it? Where did the idea to bundle and release everything on a USB come from?
Johnny: The USBs were a ‘pre-release’… it was made so fans could get the album first before the CDs/iTunes came out. It was a higher-price item because it was pretty much an accessory type piece of jewelry … The USB contained all our albums (2 previous + 1 new), a buncha vids, and a portal/gateway where we send the owners new shit, free live tracks… and occasionally perform live for you. We’ve worked with Aderra (the tech company) for years, so we decided to really push the capability of USB albums to the max. We were the first band to ever perform LIVE and stream that performance TO an album, real-time. It wasn’t accessible over the standard-web, just over the Dog Tags.
Reviewsic: How would you compare yourselves as musicians at this point as opposed to when you first began playing together?
Johnny: Personally, I feel stronger as a songwriter. I don’t practice bass a whole lot. Its not something I’m pumped-on like that dude from Metallica who poses on magazines with his fingers cocked across the fretboard….all firm and complex like he’s throwing a gang-sign for wizards. We’ve grown as a unit (read:boner), and its easier to play/learn things together now. I think a band grows better (over the years) in communication with each other, more-so than in instrument skills. Experienced bands can communicate an entire idea to one another in just a couple words, or a glance. That secret language takes a long time to cultivate.
Reviewsic: What are some of your favorite cities and/or venues to play?
Johnny: San Diego is fun, we always hang out at our buddy Ryan Green’s house, and we all have a good time there. Chicago is great too (Schubas & Reggie’s)
Reviewsic: What are the best and worst band moments so far in your career?
Johnny: BEST: I liked seeing/playing England with my band. Arriving (at UK venues) to people who knew our songs was delightful.
WORST: I don’t really have any “career low” moments cataloged, per se, so I’ll just tell a fucked up story. It’s a little long, sorry in advance.
One time we played a show in Iowa, and there was like 8 people there. Most of these kids were there to see the opening (metal) band… who I guess were local, because well, the story would be 100 times fuckeder if they weren’t local…. anyways, the show sucked and we were really hot to get outta there and get this one behind us. One of the non-band kids came up to us
and said they had a bunch of beer and that his buddy could get some weed. Oddly enough the smokers on tour had depleted their stash earlier that day… so needless to say we thought it might be worth it (an investment in tomorrow?) to roll with these kids and at the very least get some beer, and maybe meet up with their ‘buddy’. Mind you, this entire town/area has a complete ‘Children of the Corn’ vibe, with crapped out houses, dark expanses and looong stretches of pastures between each farm(?), so we were driving for a while before the kids who we were following finally pull over to the side of absolutely nowhere.
We get out, and roll up to this wooden building-thing…. side-note: I was stoked because for YEARS we’ve toured and I’ve seen exactly 230,000 of these dilapidated wood buildings in fields all across America, but I’ve never A) had a good reason to go into one B) had the balls to go into one, and C) actually been TAKEN INTO one by people who I (somewhat) have a reason to trust and believe that they aren’t going to eat my face in front of me while some catatonic old guy gets a hick-boner because I’m screaming like a girl.
OK, so we’re in the shack (there’s light in here somehow- it looks like people have had beers here before, maybe in 1974), and everything is mellow (everything is usually mellow as long as there’s beer), and we’re waiting on a guy to show up with some green, when one of the kids asks if we “want to see something messed up”. Now, I’ve seen people who have gotten our logo tattooed onto them THAT SAME DAY by what appears to be their blind, Parkinsons-ridden grandma… and our fan-base isn’t the kind of lot that gets TOO weird, so I’m thinking maybe dude has a bad tattoo or possibly (at the VERY weirdest) has a prehensile tail or some shit. We say to him “absolutely”, and he pulls out a stack of Polaroids and hands them to me.
I casually flip through them, and I’m expecting some hillbilly DIY-porn, or an Iowan do-it-yourself boob-job or something (I guess I’m pre-disposed to think everything in Iowa is DIY)… and nothing jumps out at me. Each photo depicts a few kids hanging out, acting like idiots, posing with beers, making fun of their drunk buddy, goofing around, being lame, hamming it up, etc.
As I flick through, I’m not really reacting… and one of the guys says, “that’s fucked up ain’t it”. Now, I am DEFINITELY in the UPPER percentile for educations amongst strangers in this abandoned, burnt-out Iowan shack, so I immediately sense that I’m missing something. Upon closer inspection of the photo, I notice one guy who I originally thought to be the drunken/passed-out buddy amongst these dudes… is actually, non-other than (I shit you not) a total fucking CORPSE
Each photo, is a different composition of dudes, laughing, just like normal-dudes do when drawing on the face of a passed-out comrade…. except this passed-out dude, has very little skin, definitely no eyes, a decidedly dead-guy posture, and well, pretty much a skull for a face. The exact ‘eureka’ moment, the moment I utter “OH MY GOD DUDE!”, every single one of the guys in this barn who are not in my band erupt in laughter. We pass the pics around, each person feeling compounded-ly creeped out, where the last person left off… like a creeped-out relay race… except our ‘baton’ is a stack of photos where drunk metal-dudes are taking turns pretending to get BJs from some dug-up dead body.
Just like I was saying before, many years in a band totally hones that bands’ collective sense of non-verbal communication, so with just a few glances, we knew that it would serve us best to just roll with this shit, and not geek the fuck out like we just realized we were in an abandoned barn with dudes who have no qualms laughing and drinking Busch next to a dead body.
So long story totally long… these dudes had dug up a dead body, and basically partied with it for a weekend… dressing it up and shit to look like an asshole (with hats, with their band’s t-shirt, putting cigars in its mouth, taking “check-this-dude-out,-he’s-totally-gay-sucking-my-dick” pictures with the guy’s skull and what not). Basically your typical Weekend at Bernie’s action, mixed with a frat-boy humor spin, but peppered with the full-on Columbine recklessness that you can only get in the age of the internet and Grand Theft Auto, topped off with the sheer mind-numbing boredom of the mid-west metal scene.
Turns out one of the kids had even got busted for this… he took the wrap for everybody, and it was all in the papers and shit. The photos never made it to trial. Its the totally fucked up metal-version of Anthony Michael Hall stealing that girl’s panties in “Sixteen Candles”…. so he can share it, like a demented relic, with his rock and roll brethren, out in a barn in the middle of nowhere.
Reviewsic: What are a few items essential to your “tour survival kit”?
Johnny: Ear plugs, coffee from home, and clean socks. And patience.
Reviewsic: What are your plans for music in the next year?
Johnny: We want to tour with the movie… show the film at festivals, then play the party afterwards. That would be badass. Another album maybe? Our own record label? Babies? Perhaps an Iowan barn tour.
