Friday Heavy: November 11, 2022

Kyle: Welcome to Friday Heavy, Your Guide to the World of Aggressive, abrasive, cathartic, loud, weird, Wild, and Free Vibrations, brought to you, the folks behind Tune Dig. I’m Kyle

Cliff: Oh shit. Kyle came in with the intro that time. I’m Cliff. Our intros got so weird that I didn’t even do it. I love it. We are evolving. Each episode we try to concisely cover right after I try to make Kyle laugh at the top Three things. First one, brand new release in the world of heavy music and why we think it’ll be worth a spin.

Second, a playlist we’ve curated to help you explore heavy subgenre or an artist or a scene or some other really cool idea we’ve had often related to that new release in some way, but otherwise, A bang and playlist to be honest with you. Lastly, and most importantly, we always talk about one organization tackling a heavy issue in their community, doing some sort of critical culture impacting work because well, we need something to do with all that punk energy and we’ve got to find some way to do something in this world that keeps existing.

Anyway, let’s get into it. Kyle why did you start the podcast today and what are we talking.

Kyle: We are talking about a band that we both love. This is a little bit of a special episode. today we’re talking about endless hallway, the seventh. And latest full length release from Wilmington, North Carolina’s. He is legend. It is the, like we said, seventh record for the road worn r Veterans who are going on, and this is some crazy shit to say out loud.

20 years of placing their faith in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath. And they are indeed goddamn electric. when artists do that, this is our most personal album to date thing. I really do think this episode is that for us, because, Unlike most Friday, he bee episodes where we’re going in relatively fresh and unaware about what we’re listening to, and we’re just like, Ooh, that grabs me.

I, I don’t think genuinely, I don’t think there are any two people in the world on planet Earth who are more qualified to talk about this band. Because as much as they’ve been from North Carolina, in and out of Atlanta as like a special second home for them, I, I think one we’ve probably seen them over the years more than anyone and two are just very aware of and connected to their discography.

I would probably venture to say they are my favorite band, if not one of my top, my favorites. We haven’t had a chance to cover them on Tune Dig yet for a multitude of reasons. So I’m excited to have a chance to finally have an artifact to share with the world about what I think is this band’s greatness.

So first and foremost, man, Legend is a guitar band like Capital G, capital B trademark and the heavy. That makes them worthy of Friday. Heavy inclusion comes from guitar. With their guitar. You’re getting the best flavors of grunge, punk sludge, classic rock, and perhaps most importantly, a kind of a bluesy bounce, informed by a deep and real love of southern rap and trap music, which we share.

Cliff: The, one of the primary threads that me and you have together about the band is that even though we probably like opposite ends of their career

spans

this brought to mind how much I still loved, like scr, tuts, and a bunch otherwise not necessarily super great hardcore songs early on that were really fun.

And then, some of those early records, they leaned into songwriting in a way that really hooked me in. But the through line, all the way through to today that me and you both agree on is Adam Tanbus the guitarist. I mean, I think about guitar riffs that he does.

Only one time in a song his riffs have an attitude that other people do not know how to do with a guitar. Whether they’re totally leaning into grunge, like whether they’re in that weird, it hates you thing in the middle of their career or whether you even go back to like all the I Am Hollywood stuff that a lot of people love.

Those seem like different bands, but that the through line you can connect for sure. It’s like the guitar. Just fucks a hundred percent that’s something that we’ve always been able to talk about. We have driven to, He legend shows that got canceled more often than normal people have gone to is legend shows,

so

Kyle: true that is

Cliff: yeah,

Kyle: now more than ever now that other bands we love have imploded I I appreciate that They’re they have persisted so let’s get into it we have gotten two pairs of singles from this new record in this hallway and the first pair was the Prowler and Lifeless Lemonade And in the case of Lifeless Lemonade I’ll quickly acknowledge All the sites that have written about it have talked about the maug eness of lifeless Lemonade which I think is a cliff talking about the riffing that’s a thing to acknowledge But when a spotlight the Prowler first know these guys were on hiatus for a minute in the early two thousands and since coming back in 2014 Each successive new album drop has opened with a clearly more honed sound Like there’s a holy shit He has legend his back type of thing That’s very classic rocky about it all with their last album White Bat which dropped in 2019 they were cresting upward toward what felt like it Might finally be their moment after years and years of not really breaking through and then immediately had that bubble burst by the pandemic and have been pretty public and ruminating on You know how that felt and what it’s been like to deal with that So with the lead off track the Prowler it is the lead off track on the album as well as the first single they released We hear I think the result of that pent up frustration and that like sense of creative urgency it is the fastest and heaviest He is legend yet and it’s got a like I mentioned a holy shit factor it’s a banger like it just bangs start to finish and if you’re new to the band the first thing you’ll notice Like we suggested as the drop c riffing uh especially if you play it loud capital all cats loud like you should in your car or somewhere that will disturb your neighbors but also don’t sleep on Jesse Shelly’s monster drumming

 

Cliff: I walk around my damn house and sing that all day. Cuz now that hook and that riff is I don’t know, permanently fixated to the studs of my brain.

Kyle: they do that thing that you really like They do that move where they bring it back real slow

Cliff: Yeah, I haven’t been impressed by that since a good solid, like 2004. not only did they stare directly into the camera and do it anyway, but they did it good enough to make me literal jaw drop somewhere out in public. It was embarrassing.

Kyle: alright So onto the next pair honey from the hive and sour We’re gonna talk about honey from the hive Little sweet and sour I appreciate that Pairing wink winky pairing honey opens with a little bit of like check check out my new pedal tone wizardry from Adam Little bit of Oh look I can do clean tones too Like that story you hear about come as you are Nevermind and then it goes into their sort of like near perfected recipe for All capitalized Big Rock song trademark symbol they have this knack for evolving their old stuff while sounding fresh and like what their current thing is And there’s a track on every New Legend album that feels like a version of eating a book from I Am Hollywood written in a parallel timeline and the best examples of that are eating a book and when the woods were young from white bat So just Bump those two up against each other But sour is a little bit of that same thing here But to your point I particularly love how honey starts out slow And it reminds me how for a long time they would open live sets with just like a a totally unique slow SLU drift like a eater type riff that they would never use any other time ever They would never put it in a song You could only find it on like a 2007 WMV YouTube upload That’s like 12 p quality and I like actually have videos favorited that are that so I’m barely exaggerating But here so we’re not dropping you into the slow intro we’re gonna share some fast punky verse and then some big rock chorus It’s like the most it’s the authentically evil F fighters Studio 6 66 or whatever couldn’t pull off So here’s honey from the Hive

 

Cliff: Skylar is in top. this record the vocals are sick. he’s had so many phases of being a vocal with this band. you know, he really leaned into the southern stuff early on. He was a lot more of a hardcore vocalist early on, and his voice sounds great.

And I that’s worth calling out cuz like I know that he had to have put a lot of hard work into getting on top of his game like that and being able to record like this. It sounds great. Even in the moments where they don’t go in the direction I expected or maybe even wanted the quality of what they’re doing in the recording really stands out and that’s not something that’s always been true for them.

And I love to see it here. It really carries you through to the next song or idea or whatever. I just love to see this band continuing to exist in their better and better forum every

Kyle: Agreed

Cliff: sincerely for me and Kyle, Check out Endless Hallway out now on Spine Farm. Go listen to this however you want, like we always tell you to.

And then just go send the band your money, go to shows. They’re definitely playing shows. They’re on some,

Kyle: They’re going out with Valiant Thor on a little run over the next few days which is gonna

Cliff: that’s right. We’ll be there soon. Yeah. So go to shows if you can grab some merch from them, if you can. And if you run outta ideas, just ask ’em further Cash app or whatever and send them some money with a winky and

Kyle: And or bring them weed so Adam Taboos can continue to do whatever it is his brain does

Cliff: Absolutely. Depending on what state you are in, consider that gift as

Kyle: The most sativa of sativa’s that you can find

Cliff: This was 110% THC Bring it on.

what did we do with the playlist this time? Because usually we just swap this around, but you just aced both of the assignments, so, And what’d you do this

Kyle: Well if you love what you do you never work a day in your life and that remains true here this one I did with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder Honestly I this one flowed from my deeply held belief that as if you couldn’t tell already I think this is one of the most misunderstood and therefore underappreciated rock and roll bands in existence and how they wound up that way as a story for a much longer conversation that hopefully we can tell on the main podcast someday But for now consider this playlist like a rebranding Or if you hate marketing terminology an entry into the official record to set the record straight about who they are and why they do in fact rule So the thinking here was primarily these are the bands that legends should be lumped into a list with or should be sharing bills with You should see them on a poster with Also partly informed by the bands that they have nodded to They have they themselves have said we should be in this context by covering them live over many many years and kind of have the benefit of like picking out specific songs that they’ve thrown 30 seconds of into other songs which is a cool move Theres and in the case of bands like the Melvins and Uncle as bands who have the same like cool totally one of one weirdness and musical chops that it seems like legend is finally at long last starting to very slowly penetrate the collective consciousness with And I think lastly there’s a like horror movie or dark aesthetic that informs their vibe So that’s another kind of common thread to be more specific I guess If you take the energy that made white zombie and Alice and Chains so cool and kind of scary in the early nineties and then you take the Melvins and Nirvana’s sort of ironic Gen x dis disaffection you’re kind of starting to get the picture of who he’s legend really is versus they were on a Christian label Maybe maybe not They’re in with these like sea level furnace fest reject bands I don’t wanna go too far down that rabbit hole but like they should be in the pantheon with the cool proper like rock and roll bands that fuck um you know 15 years earlier and they would’ve been a bumper sticker on like a black boogie van or the words he is legend would’ve been carved into a desk So I personally have played this playlist on repeat a shit ton since I made it So I I love it and I I’ll be interested to see if it it gets any spins from other people but at the very least it’s a love letter to a band that I think matters should matter a lot more Than they do And in in my rock and roll hall of fame they’re tops

Cliff: This playlist definitely does what you set out to do. One vignette of it, The run of slit, not corn. Melvins, oid, man, Dan Zig CAAs. That’s it. That’s it. It’s the energy, like how do you care and not care simultaneously so intensely,

Kyle: The caring and not caring thing It’s a total like if you get it you get it There’s an exact attitude like carving out in the middle middle of the half pipe run type thing

Cliff: Half pipes are

Kyle: That’s

right

Cliff: heck yeah. in every episode we always wanna cover one impactful organization doing really critical work. it is midterms week. Yes. we’re gonna scale a little bit off the side, uh, and go a different route.

So if you’re holding. Breathe slowly. It’s okay. But we can launch off from this. It’s midterms week in America as Georgians specifically, we are really distinctly reminded like other states like Texas. We’re reminded that voting will not save us literally. In our states it’s great to see positive outcomes potentially across the country or world.

But there are still pockets where things are deeply entrenched in a really bad way. Georgia is one of them. The system that we have simply is not capable of the degree of change that we need to address the reality that we find ourselves in. And that’s from economics to abortion rights to climate change.

And so one kind of meta topic or theme that we’ve had in this segment of the podcast is we’ve gotta literally fund the change ourselves. We’ve talked a lot of about how people do that, how organizations do it in prior episodes especially in things like discussing community funds, whether those are solidarity funds or abortion funds.

Specifically though, when it comes to climate change, we’ve gotta take a similar approach to that. We’ve gotta fund it ourselves because effectively, like while the government tells you across the world, right? Avoid plastic straws to save the planet. We have studies coming out this week that shows that billionaires a million times more greenhouse gases than the average

Kyle: not figuratively literally

Cliff: lit like yes, just to put a real sharp edge on it real fast and then back away. I don’t know how Cliff and Kyle can be more clear to anyone listening to this podcast that the wealthier killing you and they’re killing our planet and they will never stop. Great. Cool. So one of the endless reasons to, uh, preserve our planet, is to preserve the planet and its outdoors as an active space.

And specifically what we wanna talk about this week is preserving it specifically for snowy winters. And for those fortunate enough to live near snowy mountains and participate in. There or fortunate enough to be able to travel to participate in that. And you know, if that’s not a big part of your life, culture might have you believe that winters in enjoying the winters and snow and all that is only sort of for like rich elites who helicopter into veil and expensive ski resorts.

That’s true, but that’s a fraction of the joy that’s experienced by a lot of people who are sharing public lands set aside by the government so that you can go and specifically not have to pay money to enjoy

Kyle: Just thinking about Kendall Roy flying flying into veil like Kendall Roy in both types of snow he enjoys

Cliff: That’s only one fraction of the enjoyment that people get out of being able to use public lands. It sounds stupid until you individually feel the sensation of freedom that comes from gravity sliding down the side of a mountain on a piece of wood or metal or something, and all of a sudden you go, This is a way to interact with the world that I didn’t know how to do.

Kyle: It’s one of those ways that nature is so much better for your mental health than you could ever anticipate before you do it

Cliff: I love to remind people literally, if you’re not sure what to do and you’re feeling real stressed over a long period of time, find a way to climb up a thing and then come back down it. If you just apply that outdoors, you’ll feel

Kyle: And if you listen the past season or two of tune dig there are lots of cliff experiences music and therefore his own spirit and consciousness more deeply by experiencing these albums we talk about as he goes down the side of a mountain so mu music and nature I think it’s becoming a deeply held belief on this podcast that’s a great context in which to uh explore your inner world while in the outer world

Cliff: Yep, a hundred percent. And we have to protect those contexts where we can draw that out of ourselves. It’s not just gonna stay there if we do nothing. So that’s all wrapped up into this. Way of figuring out how to fund climate change ourselves and preserve our own world, cuz other people are not gonna do it for us.

So we wanna highlight one organization doing that specific type of work, specifically protect our winters or otherwise known as p so in, in 2007, Jeremy Jones, a pro snowboarder. He saw what a lot of us do who, like snowboarding or whatever else you start to notice, like , um, the snow is not coming the same way that we used to expect it to.

So back in oh seven he noticed this and he noticed that, you know, it was harder and harder to count on mountains already to produce. The type of snow you would expect so that you can stay safe so that the mountain can open up all that stuff, right. But at the same time, we didn’t find any organizations specifically focused on mobilizing the snow sports community on climate change.

And I think that that’s a nice, just. That’s a nice thing to take away. We’re giving you a specific example in Powell. We’ll tell you a little bit more about ’em But abstract that out a little bit. Look for opportunities to think about ways we need to fund the things we need in our reality and find ways to engage with groups and communities of people and mobilize them towards change.

I mean, this is literally just a snowboard. Found a problem, realized no one was engaging with a whole group of people who were very connected and wanted to bridge that gap. Today they have 130,000 supporters. They engage 50 million outdoor sports enthusiasts globally, right? So this organization protect our winters turns.

According to them, they turn passionate, outdoor people into effective climate advocates. Powell leads a community of athletes, thought pioneers, and forward thinking business leaders to affect systemic political solutions to climate change.

and they go on to say, Our, policy agenda consists of a four pronged approach to climate solutions, including clean energy, clean transportation, carbon pricing, and protecting public lands from fossil fuel extraction.

And not to go like too far in the weeds on it, but one of the reasons why this is, this is so great to bring up, I, as a person who discovered in my own life, the Rocky Mountains in the last 10 years, and. Changed me pretty significantly as a person. Kyle is laughing cuz he knows that that’s a huge understatement.

But focusing on climate solutions by looking at one clean energy, two clean transportation, three carbon pricing, and four protecting public lands. All four of those things have to always be protected in order for a person to be able to get in a car, drive to a mountain and have a safe experience.

Right don’t

protect public lands, they will absolutely be taken and exploited if you don’t have proper transportation.

Listen, I’m very familiar. There’s only one interstate that goes in between Denver and where all these people are trying to get, especially out in Colorado. It reaches a standstill on a regular basis. All of that works together. And you’ve got to have clean energy to be able to do all of the operations it takes to run a mountain on a regular basis.

Like all these things work hand in hand together. And so you need people charged up in a community who understand the implications of all this stuff working together. To make it actually happen. The top down saving of our planet is not going to come. This is how we’re getting it done, and Powell is one really awesome organization doing the type of work that we need to see in a million different

Kyle: I mean, as somebody who is working in his literal day job to close the net zero equation every day I’m super glad that we’re spotlighting this, very personal aspect of it. I appreciate that we made all three phases of this episode, deeply personal. We are gonna need all hands on deck to study the planet.

If I’ve learned one thing in my time in this work is. Climate work is everybody’s work. No matter where you are, you can do something positive in this arena. We need all hands on deck to study our planet and to save it for future generations. You know, whether you have a kid or not, you know somebody’s kid that you love.

And if not, think about the animals. saving it means preserving the things that bring us joy the best we can, right? It’s a, it’s less of a responsibility and more of a privilege. If we love our things, we take care of them. And P is tackling one of those critical joys, so we’re grateful for them and we hope that you will learn more about [email protected] and consider donating or becoming a member even, and especially if.

Never been on a mountain and experience that joy. Maybe that’s sort of the secondary bumper thing. We can encourage here, support P and get out on a mountain and experience why you should support an organization like P.

Cliff: Hell yeah. This has been Friday heavy. We’ll be back in two weeks.

Go to tunedig.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter for links to the new release, the playlist and the organization that we talked about today.