By Keith Walsh
It’s very rewarding to find out about regional differences in rock music in the United States. Minneapolis, Minnesota for a few decades now has brought forth a variety of post hardcore bands, with related genres including noise rock, experimental, math rock and prog punk. On June 28th, Upright Forms, the team of Nick Sakes (vocals/guitar), Noah Paster (bass/vocals) and Shaun Westphal (drums) will release their debut LP Blurred Wires, featuring a mix of kinetic, hard and quirky guitar sounds, with catchy riffs and beats, aggressively charismatic vocals, and the sound of Sakes’ poetic heart bursting forth with wordplay and hooky melodies. A range of influences, from classic prog, to British alternative pop, and funk underlay their complex art rock tunes. We had a fun-filled chat about how how their music is made and the meanings within. (My review of ‘Blurred Wires’ is at Punk Rock Beat).
Popular Culture Beat: Alright. Hello everyone. We’re here with the members of Upright Forms from Minneapolis. Did I get that right?
Nick Sakes: That is correct.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay. We got Nick who’s the vocalist/ guitarist, Noah on bass, and also does some vocals at times. And then Shaun who is the incredible drummer with his precise beats that are amazing, fast. Well you are all incredible, guys, -the playing that you do. I was lucky through Dan Volohov to talk to artists he gets, just so many good ones, that pushed me out of bland music into more experimental. Where you’re pushing the envelope, you’re not trying to be commercial, you just do some cool sounds. So lets jump into it.
Nick Sakes: We are trying to be commercial. Yeah we are. We’re gonna be huge!
Popular Culture Beat: You can do both right? I mean, that’s the whole point.
Shaun Westphal: Exactly.
Popular Culture Beat: First of all, let’s start with this — the band’s name, Upright Forms. I find sometimes that a band’s name encapsulates the whole message of everything, like the whole kind of thematic spine. Can you tell me more like, ‘Upright’ has meanings to me like anything from like ironic morality to you know…
Nick Sakes: Oh, weird. I can tell you where the name came from. It came from a part of a lyric in my old band, SicBay. I didn’t recall that until I had these words “Upright Forms’ written down somewhere. I’d always wanted that to be a band with that name because it has a cool, mysterious, connotations, like you stumble across some sort of icon or or mysterious figure. It’s like a vague description of something, but then I realize, holy sh#t. That’s part of the lyrics of a song I already wrote so, well, it’s too late. That sounds like it’s a good band name. (The SicBay song the name Upright Forms comes from is ‘Suspicious Icons.’)
Popular Culture Beat: Nothing wrong with borrowing from yourself right? You can’t get sued.
Nick Sakes: Yeah. I borrowed it from myself. I forgot it. It’s like another person wrote it.
“Bassline wise, Glen Matlock from Sex Pistols is big for me. Very melodic, very tasteful. Then you go to Dead Kennedys and No Means No, that kind of Alternative Tentacles bass tone. And then yeah go to the 90s for me, it’s kind of more pop, I love Blur and Radiohead, I think the bass in both those bands is really cool. So yeah, I’ve kind of got a mix of influences for sure.”
Noah Paster of Upright Forms
Popular Culture Beat: Awesome. Well, the thing is, yeah. You said, mysterious figures. I hear a visual, I mean I see a visual image of like shadowy paintings of figures. So you said mysterious, then the album Blurred Wires, that also has images to me something like technology, but technology is either distorted — and that’s kind of your guitar sound in a way too. That’s the theme of you guy’s lyrics, here we are in this technological world, but we still have passion, and these are the sounds.
Nick Sakes: I suppose that’s true — anyone else care to comment?
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, anybody please.
Nick Sakes: I’ll just hog everything.
Popular Culture Beat: No, I’ll move on. I’ve got stuff for these guys.
Nick Sakes: No. I have a I have a couple of things on that.
Nick Sakes: Yeah. Well, the real source of that name is not very exciting, but I’ll just gloss over that one. Well, in fact, I don’t even want to talk about where that actually came from. But I think the cool interpretation of it is misinterpreted communications.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah. Dysfunctional?
Nick Sakes: In our modern world and texting, you know, and we take meaning from someone when they say well, ‘how was your breakfast?’ ‘Fine! Everything is sort of, distorted.
Popular Culture Beat: I got it. Yeah, definitely like distorted. There is a communication term for distortion in the science of communication.
(Noah’s screen displays an image of Bart Simpson, briefly.)
Popular Culture Beat: I think Noah went on hiatus ….
Everyone: There he is.
Popular Culture Beat: There he is. I’ll just throw these out and you guys can, whoever feels more like they have something to say. Okay from the chord changes, the guitar sounds to vocals and themes and stuff — there’s a playfulness all of you have. Like you got Noah doing some poppy funky bass, which tells me there’s other genres blending in, and you got Shaun, you got the hyper punk, but you got the prog trickery. And so precise. The question is, I hear a kind of playfulness that I heard coming first from Britain in the late 70s, The Buzzcocks, and The Jam before punk got really cynical and mean and you know, there’s that kind of fun to it. You know. Ok, I saw Shaun nod, so Shaun, go ahead.
Shaun Westphal: I mean, if we’re talking about influence as far as that goes, there are for sure some collective ones. Buzzcocks would be one, Wire is one — you guys could speak to it. But you know, there’s a handful of bands that we all would agree are some of the best bands ever, and then we all have our kind of divergence too. Funny that you said prog, because I spent a lot of time as a teenager and college-age listening to prog records and kind of cutting my teeth, so to speak, with drumming on Rush, and Dream Theater, and Yes, and King Crimson and some of those bands which I don’t necessarily think we sound like any of those bands, but some of it comes from that side for me. And then later, you know, my punk was the 90s –basically Fugazi and Jesus Lizard, and Girls Against Boys, Touch and Go, and Discord. Whereas Noah and Nick you guys speak to your individual influences there.
Noah Paster: Yeah, bassline wise, Glen Matlock from Sex Pistols is big for me. Very melodic, very tasteful. Then you go to Dead Kennedys and No Means No, that kind of Alternative Tentacles bass tone. And then yeah go to the 90s for me, it’s kind of more pop, I love Blur and Radiohead, I think the bass in both those bands is really cool. So yeah, I’ve kind of got a mix of influences for sure.
Popular Culture Beat: Well, can you tell me where, like in “Heaven Knows,” Long Shadow,” and “Regular Multiplier’ there’s that kind of poppy interlude that comes in. It’s like disco almost, you’re being ironic —- or I mean did you ever experiment with genres like that?
Noah Paster: So actually, my first year of bass lessons I ever took, when I was 13 years old learning funk songs, and particularly “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder, Maybe this isn’t funk, “Black Magic Woman” by Santana.
Popular Culture Beat: But there’s almost like a commercial poppy thing that would almost be from, not disco, but something even like stranger, more weird. And but anyway, okay, let’s get into some other stuff Nick. I failed to ask you. Tell me about your previous bands. I want to get specific on that — not so much about the band’s names, but how has your guitar setup changed, and your approach to guitar changed from those?
Nick Sakes: Well, let’s see. I started off this band called Dazzling Killmen, in the 90s, early 90s. Pretty much the same, if you’re talking guitar sound. I’ve kind of had one sound, pretty much. It’s like a basic over driven guitar sound.
Popular Culture Beat: I love it, by the way.
Nick Sakes: But the thing the thing that I did though, in the band SicBay, two bands later, I was in a band called Colossamite, we didn’t have a bass player in Colossamite, there might been three guitar players. And in SicBay, the next band, also we did not have a bass player. I played through a Marshall bass head with a just sort of, a bassier rhythm guitar.
Popular Culture Beat: Was that a stylistic choice, or was it because there was nobody available? Probably stylistic?
Nick Sakes: Good question. I think it was just that we didn’t happen to…. I don’t know. I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter at the time. I don’t think any of those members of those bands really lobbied for it.
Popular Culture Beat: I talked to a lot of bands that they can do without a bass player, it’s convenient. Okay. Let me ask about this the guitar setup. I know you’re using a tube amp. I’m just telling by the sound.
Nick shakes his head.
Popular Culture Beat: Am I wrong?
Nick Sakes: Yeah, I use a little Quilter.
Popular Culture Beat: I was going to say when you tour, there’s so many good solid state choices now, like the Boss Katana…
Nick Sakes: I use a Quilter, 50 watt.
Popular Culture Beat: Wow, is that the little teeny one?
Nick Sakes: Yeah, it weighs about three pounds.
Popular Culture Beat: Wow, throughout the whole album?
Nick Sakes: I can take my whole thing in this backpack.
Popular Culture Beat: I’ve read about those. I’ve never heard that, so that’s a good introduction for me to hear it, for people to hear that.
Nick Sakes: There was a festival here a couple weekends ago, Caterwaul Festival and I was surprised how many of these big noisy bands played through Quilters, like bass players. It just sounds great and they don’t weigh anything. That’s a no-brainer.
Popular Culture Beat: When you’re touring you have a two twelve? A four twelve?
Nick Sakes: It’s an interesting question. I was just talking about this. It’s funny to me. I’ve been doing this since early 90s, when nobody shared equipment. It’s like you brought your own stuff, your own drums, and it just seemed like oh, I’ve got to have my tone, my sound, my own drums. So there were just these big piles of equipment everywhere in the club. Now it seems like everybody decided at some point, we’re just going to share cabs and basic drum kit. We always called ahead.
Popular Culture Beat: You always call ahead, you hope they have what they really say they have when you get to the gig. So, Shaun, what’s your drum kit? How many pieces?
Shaun Westphal: Pretty basic rack, tom, floor tom, snare, kick, two crashes in front, and ride. And again, like Nick said, my last band — I hadn’t played music for 10 or 12 years with a group at least until I started playing with Nick. We always used our own equipment. I always had my own drum kit, and you know, even in our practice space, such a weird kit — a lot of times we’re playing for a club that has a decent kit, everybody will use it and bring their own stuff, you know, so I mean if it wasn’t if there, if there was more room and backstage areas, I’d always prefer to play my own drums, but we’ve gotten used to that as well.
Popular Culture Beat: You like to pitch them pretty high, I noticed, and that’s part of the sound, especially when you play very fast.
Shaun Westphal: Yeah. I have never thought of myself as being very good at tuning drums, but I put a lot into making sure that they sound good and the way Nole recorded them on the record. I think I speak collectively for these guys, we’re all really, really happy with how the drums came out on the record.
Popular Culture Beat: For sure. How did you guys meet Nole Tate?
Noah Paster: Yeah. I used to play music with him. The mid-2000s, Nole had a an alias, a moniker if you will, under the name Askeleton. So like the word skeleton with the letter A with with it, but he had been in bands. I knew of him. He was in a band called Kill Sadie. He founded that.
Popular Culture Beat: Did Sadie survive?
(Laughter from everyone).
Popular Culture Beat: Did Sadie make it through that thing? Kidding….
Noah Paster: The band moved to Seattle, but he didn’t, so I guess not. And then he was in a band called The Hidden Chord. The Hidden Chord must have played with Colossamite and SicBay a bunch back then.
Popular Culture Beat: So you brought him aboard then from there? He’s local to Minneapolis too?
Noah Paster: Yeah. Yeah.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay moving on. Oh, man. Let’s see. Okay, what about Noah, your bass amp?
Noah Paster: Yeah, so keeping in the solid state tradition, I play a Gallien-Krueger 800 solid-state, the one amp I’ve only owned in the 20 years or so I’ve played bass.
Popular Culture Beat: That’s a good ad for them. How about pedals — your guys’ pedals, starting with Nick first.
Nick Sakes: Pedals, I have a custom overdrive pedal a guy in another band called Microwaves made. This is sort of a custom-made overdrive, I just use one overdrive pedal and I have a kind of a cheap delay pedal and a reverb pedal I use on a couple songs.
“If it were left up to me, I would just be doing barre chords and made up, weird dissonant chords. I probably wouldn’t be doing a lot of the plinky plinky morse code stuff. I’m I don’t really consider myself much of a technical wizard. I’m more like the vocal guy the front man.”
Nick Sakes, Of Upright Forms, on his guitar style
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah. That’s one thing that impressed me a lot is the guitar — some bands. They don’t really work hard at changing, or trying new changes within the song. Like they have one driving guitar sound throughout — like the Sex Pistols were really dumb that way. You guys….Like what’s the song that has the morse code guitar, ‘Drive At Night,’ or even ‘Heaven Knows,’ like that interlude where it changes with a little kind of, I think it’s Noah’s bass kind of doing a thing, or there’s other songs where you have little plucky things. There’s another that one stood out to me. Well, there’s so many changes like that. Have you always played like that?
Nick Sakes: Well I suppose so, what are you asking?
Popular Culture Beat: Well, I mean the variety of sounds…
Nick Sakes: Am I playing differently in this band than in other bands?
Popular Culture Beat: Well, I mean when you first started playing you evolved, I’m sure. Did you start doing these power chords, or at what point while you’re listening, where you said ‘okay, I’m going to add this little morse code sound, or I’m not going to play heavy chords, you know?’
Nick Sakes: Well, I was in a band with people that were far better guitar players and musicians than me in my past, and they would dictate to me what I was to be playing in their song.
Popular Culture Beat: I hate that.
Nick Sakes: And I had to learn it. I had to learn it. If it were left up to me, I would just be doing barre chords and made up, weird dissonant chords. I probably wouldn’t be doing a lot of the plinky plinky morse code stuff. I’m I don’t really consider myself much of a technical wizard. I’m more like the vocal guy the front man.
Popular Culture Beat: It’s an intuitive style.
Nick Sakes: I’m not much of a practicing guy. I don’t practice much guitar.
Shaun Westphal: May I speak to that a little bit, even though it’s a guitar question? I think Nick you’ll remember — probably when Nick and I first started playing before Noah came on board? It was drums, and those heavy riffs, and we kind of pondered back and forth knowing that the last two, you know, really last two, three bands you were in didn’t have a bass player, if we should add a bass player and there were a couple of kind of realizations when Noah started playing with us that it covered that low end. Nick didn’t have to worry about the low end as much, and he could kind of try different things. You know, try that reverb pedal, try those noisier bits, try those more melodic picking things, and realize kind of that you didn’t have that much of an opportunity before, because you had to worry about covering the low end. So I think that’s part of what opened that up as well.
Popular Culture Beat: Was this like sitting down like at practice and discussing it as a blueprint kind of thing, or was it more like when you’re playing you say, why don’t you try this?
Shaun Westphal: It kind of comes up as we play, sometimes. Noah, you can speak to this when you bring an idea and it starts with bass, you’ll sometimes have ideas for what guitar might be doing as well.
Noah Paster: Well, yeah, I mean I would say it’s pretty organic. For the most part it’s just like a collective thought process when it comes to how things end up sounding. But yeah, every once in a while, you know, if I have a part, I’ll have a kind of a vision in mind for what I think the guitar should be, but I am not really a guitarist, so I try to leave that up to Nick for sure.
Popular Culture Beat: You’re obviously all playing off each other on when you’re in the studio — was it mostly live recorded and adding tracks, or was it more like layering of tracks? Anybody?
Shaun Westphal: Yeah. We played at the same time, and then Nick did vocals later, and then overdubs after that.
Nick Sakes: I doubled my guitar stuff a lot.
Popular Culture Beat: I was gonna ask you — there’s at least couple guitar tracks on most of the songs.
Nick Sakes: Yeah, and Noah played some guitar parts on some songs too. So while we’re talking about it, you say ‘I don’t play guitar’ and you do indeed play very good.
Popular Culture Beat: Very nice. Nice. You want to give a shout out, or maybe you’re going to post it on Bandcamp, which ones he played on?
Nick Sakes: We already did, we put little asterisks on the song.
Popular Culture Beat: Nick, you do most of the lyrics?
Nick Sakes: Mostly Noah and I.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay, let me ask both. Anybody who writes the lyrics, there is like an awareness of science, on some of the titles. I have some names here: ‘Animositine’ sounds like ‘animosity,’ as in a medical, and also a pill name. Like I’m taking my Animositine. Because it makes me….
Nick Sakes: Are you? I think I should up my dose of Animositine.
Popular Culture Beat: Be careful. Yeah. Yeah. Take it with water and at bedtime.
Noah Paster: So you’re pretty much there, but the medication, it was misheard by myself. Or I made a typo of it. That’s all started out as a bass demo, and I think I sent the file as ‘Animositine.’ You guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but the drug is actually called Atomoxitine.
Popular Culture Beat: What is it for? Is it emotional control?
Noah Paster: It’s like ADD kind of stuff.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay. Yeah, useful.
Noah Paster: Yeah, it was something that I was prescribed, it didn’t really work out for me. But initially that was just kind of what I came up with for the title, it didn’t really have any deep meaning, Nick can clarify….
Popular Culture Beat: What’s this about buying a mansion, is that part of the because doctors are stereotyped as being so wealthy?
Nick Sakes: It’s a personal comment on something.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, you guys have a lot of social comments.
Nick Sakes: That was definitely not social.
Popular Culture Beat: I always ask people, especially in the punk genre where it’s kind of revolutionary in a way, if you could change the world, what would you change? Do you believe music can change the world and what would you change?
NIck Sakes: I think music is a form of communication that is not a language that is verbal, I don’t know, I was thinking of that too…
Popular Culture Beat:. Yeah, I guess it we don’t want to get into deep into what we could change. Obviously there’s all kinds of things wrong. But I’m finding so many bands now, especially in these creative guitar bands of noise rock and experimental and post-hardcore, there is like a pushing back, you know, against all these societal problems. It’s like an emotional reaction where you’re not going to take all this sh#t — you’re going to at least say something. If you can’t change it, your gonna at least say something about it. ‘This is what I feel, and I’m a human being with a guitar and I’m going to make some noise,’ you know. (Most of the lyrics I’m suggesting in this approach are phrased obliquely– KW).
Nick Sakes: I personally have never felt that against society.
Popular Culture Beat: How can I be so wrong?
Nick Sakes: I’m more a personal poetic. I don’t really get political.
Popular Culture Beat: You don’t wear your heart on your sleeve?
Nick Sakes: Well I do, but I don’t ever think about the world.
Popular Culture Beat: All right. What are some of you are your influences, literary, movies…
Nick Sakes: Mostly stuff like John Cassavetes movies, and stuff from like the early 70s, Scorsese, American films. Kubrick.. Noah is way into Twin Peaks and David Lynch.
Popular Culture Beat: What about Shaun?
Shaun Westphal: Similar, Kubrick, David Lynch for sure. That’s agreed upon by all three of us, I think with Twin Peaks and stuff, you know, like the we haven’t had a band movie night yet. We should do that though.
Popular Culture Beat: You guys close to each other Minneapolis?
Nick Sakes: Well, Noah and I live very close together, but I’ve never been to his house.
Shaun Westphal: I live in the sticks. So I’m a half hour drive to hang out every time we do.
Popular Culture Beat: You guys are playing around locally in Minneapolis.
Nick Sakes: We’re doing some weekend jaunts, I’ll say.
Popular Culture Beat: OK. You have a video for the zombie song.
Nick Sakes: That’s so interesting it came across as a zombie theme — I would think of it as a more perseverance. But it’s funny how it can kinda go ‘choose Your own adventure’ on that song –zombie or perseverance. “They Kept On Living,” I believe you’re talking about.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry.
Shaun Westphal: Zombies do persevere.
Nick Sakes: They do, they persevered through death.
Popular Culture Beat: That’s a common theme. and when I missed the boat on saying you guys are commenting on society, you’re more like coming from the inside and projecting outwards instead of looking at something outside.
Nick Sakes: Perhaps. Yeah. I’m commenting on the inside.
“Everyone has a body. Everyone’s body falls apart. Everyone’s body betrays them and it’s just like this outrage. It goes back on its ways, you know, the body betrays. I’ve had a lot of bodily betrayals in the last couple of years.”
Nick Sakes, Of Upright Forms, On ‘My Lower Self’
Popular Culture Beat: Where does the science stuff come, from? Nobody answered that yet – ‘Regular Multiplier,’ ‘Biology Of Time,’ “Animositine.’ And in ‘My Lower Self,” you have ‘knocked off the radar, fall off the quasar’, which is a great rhyme by the way.
Noah Paster: Yeah, I mean, like I said, the ‘Animositine’ was a typo for Atomoxitine. ‘Biology Of Time’ was the first song I learned from a demo that you guys sent me. Now, I’m realizing there’s a lot of scientific elements to the group yeah, it seems just maybe sort of accidental.
Popular Culture Beat: It’s kind of a synergy or it’s kind of like a synchronicity thing, because just the sound of your band is like technology kind of accelerating. I want to keep you guys to the time limit. Comment on ‘My Lower Self,’ that song which is so primal. Is it about kind of falling into the trap of making the same physical mistakes again?
Nick Sakes: Lyrically, I can definitely comment on that. It’s just plain and simple. Everyone has a body. Everyone’s body falls apart. Everyone’s body betrays them and it’s just like this outrage. It goes back on its ways, you know, the body betrays. I’ve had a lot of bodily betrayals in the last couple of years.
Popular Culture Beat: I can’t remember which one of the medieval poets wrote something about the evils of old age. And that hit me…(I can’t find this exact author of that quote, but Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau wrote about aging in his book Reveries Of The Solitary Walker).
NIck Sakes: Oh my God, the 60s, tell me about it.
Popular Culture Beat: So how about ‘Heaven Knows,’ maybe there’s something about this lyric that says that there are painful things that happen. They can only be explained when you start thinking a little bit higher about how things are rather than just dwelling on it.
Nick Sakes: Shit, yeah. I like that. That’s good. Yeah, it can be interpreted however you like. There’s no such thing as a misinterpreted lyric in my book.
Popular Culture Beat: Well that’s too easy. I’ve got to be wrong sometime.
Nick Sakes: I don’t have anything specific about that song. It’s word play. A lot of word play.
“There’s nothing better than…the feeling when you’re playing music with your friends, and that feeling of completion, and you know something hits for you. And if other people like it, it sounds cliche, and we’ve had a lot of people really saying they like what we’re doing which is great, but it’s really about…when we’re all in that spot where we know we just did something really cool.“
Shaun Westphal of Upright Forms
Popular Culture Beat: I’m going to try and find the most interesting one to close with. Oh, I’ll do two more. So the songs, when presented with life, and the problems that we have and things like that, so how does music — and please anybody jump in –how does music help you transcend all the kind of challenges and disappointments?
Noah Paster: It’s sort of the ultimate distraction.
Shaun Westphal: That’s kind of what I was going to say. I felt like it’s kind of a basic answer, but for me the best part always about this band is, even if we’re dragging ass a little bit to get to practice, it’s when the three of us are making noise and something exciting happens. That point where an idea that Nick or Noah brought in, and we mess around with it a little bit, and then the three of us together kind of always collectively wrap it up and decide when it’s a song. When that happens, that is one of the greatest feelings still to this day. Like Noah said, it’s a distraction. I’m pretty happy outside of the band and I don’t feel like I have a miserable life, and this saves me from it, but there’s nothing better than that, the feeling when you’re playing music with your friends, and that feeling of completion, and you know something hits for you. And if other people like it, it sounds cliche and we’ve had a lot of people really saying they like what we’re doing which is great, but it’s really about the way, when we’re all in that spot where we know we just did something really cool.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, I can definitely hear a quality and accomplishment for sure. Sure.
Shaun Westphal: The triumphant choruses of Nick and Noah.
Popular Culture Beat: What sort of microphone do you use, Nick?
Nick Sakes: Whatever the engineer uses works for me. I don’t have any preference.
Popular Culture Beat: How long do you have to rest your voice between shows?
Nick Sakes: I haven’t ever consciously rested my voice between show.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, Okay, so that would be for Nick and Noah, the last question, because you guys have been called kind of anthemic. But this is a different kind of anthem, right? I hear anthems in a way because it’s like a you know, there’s a strong beat and you’re chanting…
Noah Paster: I think that could come from the fact that at least the few times I have sort of a lead vocal, the lines are pretty repetitive, and because I am definitely not a lyricist. So if I come up with like one or two cool lines, I just tend to repeat it. And yeah, maybe that’s like because I’ve seen that anthemic description before and maybe that’s where it comes from because it comes across as like a fist pump.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, fist pump, you have gang vocals in a couple songs. Let me do one more please, and it’ll be like three minutes more over there.
Nick Sakes: Yeah, I’m getting Teams messages. We all have jobs. It’s like okay, when you gonna blah blah blah, people are asking me questions.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay I’ll let you go. After you tell me how math rock couldn’t exist without prog.
Shaun Westphal: How math rock couldn’t exist without prog? was I mean, if you have more to ask, because that’s a bit of a confusing question.
Popular Culture Beat: What is math rock? How is it different? You take away the keyboards and the you know…
Shaun Westphal: Wizards, you take away the keyboards, you take away the wizards…our version of prog rock, Noah and I both have some formal training. So we have a pretty good understanding just kind of drilled into our heads of time signatures. We know when something is not in 4/4 and things like that. Nick is the complete opposite, luckily for him. I think it’s a positive, his brain is not locked into that 4/4 thing. Everything that comes out of him is all by feel and I think we’ve found a really cool balance where he brings in these riffs that your average listener would not be able to make sense of, and because we only think in numbers, we have to figure out how to count it so we can figure out what we’re going to play with it. But we come up with what then you know, could appeal to prog fans or math rock fans. There’s very little 4/4 on the record. But Nick has this uncanny ability that he’s demonstrated in multliple bands…
Nick Sakes: Oh, it’s very canny.
Shaun Westphal: Those shout along choruses, those vocal melodies, the chorus at the end of “Heaven Knows” that starts off the record. That’s one of those Nick Sakes choruses that you can’t get out of your head, and it makes these twisted weird rock songs sound like catchy anthems to me.
Popular Culture Beat: Nick’s going to look at his watch.
Nick Sakes: I don’t know. I just think I think the some of those choruses are hilarious to me. If they don’t make me laugh– they’re just so maudlin. I just think that’s funny.
Popular Culture Beat: It’s the numbers and the passion together…
Nick Sakes: Yeah. You can turn anything into an anthem, I think, if you really try.
Popular Culture Beat: You guys did a great job. Seriously, The first time I heard this I emailed Dan and I said, ‘let me talk to these guys.’
Shaun Westphal: Thank you.
Nick Sakes: Thanks for having us.
Popular Culture Beat: I wish I had more time because we can obviously go deeper in like the recording process. Anyway, congrats. It’s coming out July 28th.
Shaun Westphal: There is another video, just before the release.
Nick Sakes: It’s for ‘My Lower Self.’
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah. I love that one. Hey, have a great week you guys.
Upright Forms: Thank you so much.
Popular Culture Beat: Have a great Minneapolis summer over there. All right. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.
‘Blurred Wires’ Will Arrive On June 28.
Upright Forms Dot Com
Blurred Wires Bandcamp
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Skin Graft Records
Review Of ‘Blurred Wires’ At Punk Rock Beat
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