Interview

Having Dinner with Black Skies

North Carolina is certainly a city of sludge and Black Skies is one of the best from the southern state. Through struggles and hardship, Black Skies has perservered. With the recent addition of a new drummer, the trio is ready to take on anything that comes their way. I caught up with the band as they were having dinner at a fine restaurant in New Orleans just before their show to discuss a new album, touring, and what they classify their heavy music as. A transcription follows.

Dinner with Black Skies from Emily Hingle on Vimeo.

Buick Mckane: Welcome to New Orleans, guys. How’s the tour been so far?

Kevin: Long, but good. Most of the shows have been great; new places, new faces.

Buick: Awesome. Well, you’ve got a new drummer here, Tim. How is it working out for you playing in this band?

Tim: It’s been good. I’ve known Kevin for a long time. Fifteen years, maybe?

Kevin: Fifteen years. We were roommates back in the mid-90s, and we just kind of played together periodically at the house. Not that we were ever in a band, so we kind of waited for a long time for it to happen.

Buick: Did you play the kind of music you play now or was it different back then?

Kevin: We’d wake up every morning and play Black Sabbath songs.

Tim: Literally.

Buick: What were your favorite songs to play?

Tim: “Black Sabbath.” We started the morning off with “Black Sabbath.”

Kevin: I’d wake up and had a guitar amp in front of my bed, a half stack.

Tim: Drums were in the kitchen.

Kevin: Drums were in the kitchen down the hall. So, I would start a riff, and I was just sitting on the edge of the bed playing [“Black Sabbth” riff], and after about like two measures, I’d see him like sliding down the hallway, wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t look at him. We wouldn’t look at each other, couldn’t see him. And two measures later, he would just hit something. So fittingly, Tim was over in Europe and I asked him if he could play with us. And, you know, he came over to North Carolina to pick up with us and practice before he took off. And the very first day, he woke me up, went to my turntable and put on Black Sabbath. Cranked “Black Sabbath” from Black Sabbath; kicked it off the right way.

Buick: That sounds like a lot of fun. I wake up to a classic rock station, but that’s not as cool. Sometimes it’s Black Sabbath. Anyway, your last album “Hexagon” came out a few years ago. Do you have plans for a new one yet?

Kevin: We’ve had plans for a new one for about two years, but it’s just lineup changes and things like that have kind of gotten in the way. So everything is in the preliminary stages right now. We haven’t actually rented studio time or anything. But when we get back we have some other obligations for work, so probably take care of that, you know, get back into the rehearsal room and start cranking stuff out. Hopefully, in a perfect world, in September we’ll start working on the new record.

Buick: Is there any direction for the album that’s different than previous albums?

Kevin: I think the music is totally different. There’s still elements of what “Hexagon” was, but that was a very simple record we did very quickly. I think the songs…you know, the band itself has evolved over two years, and that shows a lot with the songs we’ve been playing live now. Not so complicated that it’s hard to follow what’s going on. But we try to add a little bit to keep it interesting, you know, to ourselves and also make it listenable at the same time.

Buick: Even though you haven’t released a different album, you released a live album this year on a cassette. What was the decision in doing it in cassette?

Michelle: Yeah, just a friend of ours who released our first recording on a 7-inch, he’s been supportive the whole time, comes to all of our shows, really supportive of what we do. He just to our show one day with some recording gear, recorded it, it ended up sounding pretty good, and we decided to put it out on tape. It was really cool, he, like, hand-typed every single tape. He only made twenty of them. He’s going to keep making batches of them. We sold them all out. Yeah, it was pretty fun.

Buick: It seems like cassette is becoming a more...actual, type of thing to put it out on because vinyl made a resurgence, but cassette seems to be coming back pretty big too.

Michelle: Yeah, people like it, and it’s an affordable item. You know, vinyl can be expensive. So, like, a tape is five bucks, it’s easy.

Buick: What other sludge bands are you into, since you’re music is classified as sludge?

Kevin: I’m wearing a Kylesa shirt as I say this, but I remember seeing an interview with Phillip Cope. And it made perfect sense to me, being asked a similar question…I just look at the things we do, and I think there’s enough elements and I think we’re a heavy punk rock band, really. I don’t really look at it like a sludge band or a metal band, this or that. To me that’s just industry. What’s a good term or label to put on what we do is slight psychedelic elements to it. And you know, there’s good music and there’s bad music. We play with bands that at first glance might not seem like a band we’d be lined up with and end up kicking total ass, then we’re like, “That band was one of my favorite bands on the tour.” At the same time,__ We play every day with somebody who’s doing Slayer covers. It gets redundant, you know. So it’s nice to mix it up a bit and play with bands that I think see outside of that box a little bit, you know.