Rye Coalition

Curses

[4/5] Thanks to time wasted on a major label during a messy restructuring, Rye Coalition’s latest album has been sitting on the shelf for over two years. But that’s okay: Curses sounds like it’s been ripening since 1974 anyway. With the New Jersey band now fully summoning the powers of AC/DC and Kiss, building on their previous rawk aspirations (as heard on 2002’s On Top) and adding a bit of the noisy punk on which they cut their teeth, Curses is all jutting hips, attitudinal riffs and massive kick drums that demand fists be pumped in the air. In fact, the band nail the ’70s AOR sound so perfectly, one might mistake Curses’ mood for irony (who wouldn’t think you’re goofing when you sample a cheering crowd during a drum solo?). It ain’t; rather, it’s the explosive work of five guys who refuse to stick within a scene’s boundaries, and who got Dave Grohl to produce them–and crank ’em up to 11. This direction won’t do much for fans who got into Rye during, say, The Lipstick Game days, but it sure goes a long way toward keeping rock ’n’ roll fun.
(GERN BLANDSTEN)




Rock’s Like:

Jet’s Get Born • Kiss’ Kiss • AC/DC’s Highway To Hell




IN-STORE SESSION With Rye Coalition vocalist Ralph Cuseglio




You recorded this album years ago. Are you over it by now?


We finished it two years ago. There was time there when we not thinking of these songs too much because it seemed as if they had some baggage attached to them. But the album just got mixed two months ago, and it finally sounds finished. So, even though [the songs] are old, they’re fresh to us again.




Let’s talk about that baggage.


The songs themselves are okay. Just the whole experience at the time was horrible. The hardest part was that after DreamWorks [which signed the band in 2003] was sold, anyone who was behind the record was pretty much gone. We were just in limbo at Interscope [where the band originally ended up], with a record that was, for the most part, finished. The president of Interscope kept telling us to write more songs. We wrote a few, but at one point, we were just done and had made the record we wanted to make. It became, “If you don’t get it, then forget it.” Then we began to butt heads, and we decided to get off the label. We certainly paid for it–not money-wise, because we got out of there not owing them anything and got to make a really expensive record on their dime. But we lost a lot of time as a band.




What did Dave Grohl as the producer bring to the mix?


When we met up with him, we had already demoed all of the songs. He had us pay a lot of attention to nuances that we hadn’t paid attention to before. He really helped us tighten the songs. And the drum sound, he was all about the drum sound at Sound Studios, which comes through on the album.




What’s the DVD that comes with the CD about?


There’s just a ton of footage from making the record; a lot of crazy stuff. I saw the rough cut two weeks ago. It really brought me back. For a while, there was so much outside crap that polluted the experience for us after that fact. It reminded me of what a great of a time we had.




It’s definitely a giant rock record. The opening of “Clutch The Pearls” even sounds just like Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher.”


I don’t know if it was intentional, but we sort of had a nickname for that song for a while. We called it “Deep Halen” because it reminded us of Van Halen and Deep Purple. I could definitely see that, for sure.




Speaking of that rock sound, what brought a punk/hardcore band like yourselves to this point?


We’ve been a band for a really long time, and I don’t think we’ve made the same record twice. That’s one thing that I’m really proud of. This is a natural progression from what we did with On Top, which is a record people labeled as “cock rock” or whatever. But I think songs like “Cigarette Catastrophe” and “Vietnam Veterinarian” could have almost been on our first record. They’re just balls-to-the-wall screamers. That’s still very much part of our band-and always will be.–JR Griffin