Muen Magazine

June 23, 2010

The Cool Tour 2010

THE ACACIA STRAIN

Prosthetic Records

Vincent Bennett (Vocals)

Springfield, MA

Myspace.com/theacaciastrain

By: Shauna O’Donnell

HEY GUYS THIS IS SHAUNA O’DONNELL AND YOU ARE LISTENING TO MUEN TALK. WE HAVE VINCENT THE VOCALIST OF THE ACACIA STRAIN ON THE PHONE TODAY.

MUEN: HI VINCENT, THANKS FOR TALKING WITH ME.

Hey, thank YOU, for talking with ME.

MUEN: YOU’RE WELCOME, I’M EXCITED I GET TO TALK TO YOU, THE LAST TIME I WAS SCHEDULED TO TALK TO THE BAND YOU HAD LARYNGITIS AND I SPOKE TO JACK INSTEAD.

Oh yeah that has happened to me a couple times. It never really happened to me before until recently and it has caused me to freak out. I really don’t have anything else I can fall back on. I’m not really good at anything else.

MUEN: THAT’S NOT TRUE.

Umm, no it is. I had to have Brook from Impending Doom fill in for us and he didn’t know any of the words. I swear a lot, so it was kind of weird.

MUEN: WELL YOU ARE GOOD AT SOMETHING.

What’s that?

MUEN: YOU ARE AWESOME ON CAMERA.

Yeah, I’ve been told that, but I think I just look like an idiot.

MUEN: HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT HOSTING?

I would love to honestly, but no opportunities have arisen.

MUEN: WELL YOU NEVER KNOW, MAYBE ONE WILL.

True, we will see what happens. I like to take life as it comes to me.

MUEN: YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT’S AROUND THE CORNER. ON JULY 20^TH YOU WILL BE RELEASING A NEW ALBUM TITLED WORMWOOD. THIS IS YOUR FIFTH STUDIO ALBUM RIGHT?

Technically it is our fifth, but I like to call it our fourth because we don’t really recognize our first CD. We hate it, but technically speaking, yes it is our fifth record.

MUEN: THIS IS THE HEAVIEST RECORD YOU HAVE EVER WRITTEN. TELL ME ABOUT THE WRITING PROCESS FOR THIS PARTICULAR ALBUM.

This one was weird. We always take a different approach every time we go about writing a record. The first couple times we didn’t know what we were doing, so we just wrote what we could. When we wrote The Dead Walk we were touring really heavily and we wrote in between tours. We think it came out kind of sloppy. When we wrote Continent, we took a block of time off from touring and wrote the entire record all at once. With this one, we took the block off from touring, but we really left it up to our guitar player “DL.” He just had a kid, so he wrote when he could and with the technology like it is today it was really easy. Whenever he had an idea or a song, he would just record it right into his computer at home and then we would expand upon it. I think it’s a sign of the times; technology is really helping out as far as this band anyways. There were a lot of times we couldn’t get together because of scheduling conflicts or whatever, but with technology we had a solid base for pretty much every song on this record.

MUEN: WHY THE NAME WORMWOOD?

I have always been fascinated with predictions of what’s going to happen when the world ends, even if it is fiction. Yeah, the Bible is fiction, sorry to all you Christians out there. I actually got introduced to the name Wormwood through a Stephen King short story. It’s called ‘A Home Delivery’ and it’s about this meteor that appears in the Earth’s atmosphere and it is circling the Earth. Astronauts go up to investigate and they all die in a mysterious way. It turns out that the asteroid is causing dead bodies to rise from the ground and start eating people. I did a little bit more research about what wormwood actually is and it’s a biblical term. I know people are going to think “Oh! The Acacia Strain is a Christian band now.” That is not really the case.

MUEN: WELL, YOUR FANS WILL KNOW. CONTINENT WAS THE ANGRIEST ALBUM YOU HAD WRITTEN TO DATE. WHAT WAS THE LYRICAL THEME ON WORMWOOD?

Most definitely! Wormwood is the most personal album lyrically that I have ever written. When I have inspiration, I just go with it. When I wrote Continent, I was a really angry person. I guess I’m still an angry person, but I’m not as angry as I was when I wrote Continent. I took a more personal stab at lyric writing this time and I used rhyming, which I’ve never done before. I think it worked out in my favor. This record is about humanities embarrassments in a way. It’s about the true nature of man, which is that we are all inherently evil and through that evil comes things like the Jonestown Massacre, the Unabomber and Richard Ramirez. I feel they truly reflect the true nature of humanity.

MUEN: I SEE, THAT IS WHY SOME OF THE NAMES OF THE SONGS ARE RAMIREZ, JONESTOWN AND UNABOMBER.

Exactly

MUEN: YOU HAD THREE GUEST VOCALISTS ON THIS ALBUM. I LOVE JAMEY JASTA OF HATEBREED.

You love Jamey Jasta? I love Jamey Jasta too. You probably love him in a different way, but…

MUEN: PROBABLY, YOU ALSO HAD BRUCE LEPAGE OF 100 DEMONS AND KYLE CHARD OF BORN LOW. WHY THREE GUEST VOCALISTS?

I don’t really know, I always want to do things with other people that I respect in music. Jamey Jasta approached Zuess and said “Hey, I heard you are recording the new Acacia Strain record. Ask them if I can be on it.” We were like “Of course.” Why wouldn’t we have Jamey Jasta on our record? I’ve always wanted to have Bruce on one of our records because our friendship started off kind of weird. He hated me and he wanted to beat me up because of my lyrical content. He found out that I’m not really like that and that I’m a fun, down to earth guy. We had a discussion about it and we became friends after that. I thought it would be cool and sort of ironic to have him on one of our records. Kyle is from the Albany area, I just moved here recently and became friends with him and his band. They are an up and coming band from the Albany area. I really wanted to include something like that on the record because it helps them out and it helps us out. It’s kind of like a mutual symbiosis.

MUEN: THE RECORD COMES IN AN LP VERSION IN SIX DIFFERENT COLORS.

Yep

MUEN: BESIDES THE DIFFERENT COLORS IS THERE ANY OTHER VARIATION BETWEEN THE ALBUMS?

Actually, going back to the guest vocals, the CD version of “Jonestown” is with my vocals and the LP version is with Kyle from Born Low. That’s the minor variation that we had because labels always want B-sides or unreleased tracks so they can put them on the vinyl’s. We wrote this record as a whole, so it was hard to pick one song to just leave out of the CD and put solely on the vinyl’s. We did the guest vocal thing instead.

MUEN: YOU WORKED WITH ZEUSS, I HEARD HE IS AMAZING TO WORK WITH.

He’s a great guy; he’s probably one of the easiest people that I have ever worked with. There is something about Zuess that relaxes you. You come in and do whatever you want as far as tracking is concerned. “DL” would come in and record a couple guitar tracks and then I would go in and sing over them. It kind of helped me out because the vocals are the only instrument on a record that tires out. Going in one day and doing one song and then going in the next day and doing another really helped maintain a level of balance in my vocals so they didn’t get shot. He is a really easy person to work with, he has a lot of really good ideas and he takes our opinions in stride.

MUEN: I WAS INTERVIEWING SOMEONE AND THEY TOLD ME THAT YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO DO THE SCREAMING VOCALS.

Yeah, it’s one of those things that you can’t just get up and yell. You have to condition yourself to do it so you don’t blow your voice. It’s not something that you should think too hard about because if you think too hard you are going to do something that takes all of the emotion out of it. That is what screaming is all about, you scream because you really have something to say. It’s about the feelings and it’s about the emotion that you put into the screaming. At the same time, you can’t just get on stage the first day and play an hour set; you have to work up to it. I had to work up to it. I’ve been screaming since I was eighteen years old, so it’s like ten years that has got me to this point. I can tell you that five years ago I wasn’t at this point. It is a gradual process. At the same time, I cannot sing clean vocals for anything. It’s a disaster, it’s a train wreck.

MUEN: I LOVE THE ARTWORK ON THE ALBUM. IT IS REALLY EYE CATCHING. WHOM DO WE GIVE CREDIT TOO?

We went a different way this time. We wanted to work with somebody else and our manager knew this guy named Justin Kamerer at angryblue.com. She gave me a bunch of different artists, but he caught my eye the most because he was the direction that I wanted to go with this record. It was really easy because it was basically one email. He asked me what I wanted to do and I told him a thousand ideas and he took those thousand ideas and condensed it to what the album became. It wasn’t a long process, it was amazing how he got it right away and put it down on paper. I’ve never dealt with that before. It came out really well and we are really excited about it.

MUEN: I LOVE THE TURQUOISE AND RED TOGETHER.

Yeah, our first two records on Prosthetic were kind of dull looking and they didn’t really catch the eye. Continent really popped and I wanted to do the same thing with this record. The contrast between the turquoise and the red is amazing. I’m sure people walking by are going to say “Oh, what’s that?”

MUEN: YOU GUYS RELEASED A DVD THIS YEAR TITLED THE MOST KNOWN UNKNOWN. WHAT IS ON THE DVD? IS IT LIVE FOOTAGE?

We have two live shows. One is at our hometown venue of The Waterfront Tavern and it’s about forty-five minutes long. We did that before Continent came out. The other live show is about twice that, about an hour and a half. We did that after Continent came out and we play about twenty-three songs. It was really exhausting. There is a documentary about how the band started. We interviewed our family and our friends. There are a couple of music videos and we did this thing when we played the Palladium show where we had a “golden ticket.” If you bought the “golden ticket” then you would get a bunch of extra stuff like t-shirts and posters. The real seller was you have ten seconds to say whatever you wanted on the DVD. That end result became the ten seconds of fame part of the DVD. We didn’t realize that people were going to be so awkward. It was kind of comedic because people were like all amped up and then when the camera turned on they became speechless. If you watch it, it’s like watching a car wreck and you can’t turn away.

MUEN: I COULD TELL FROM THE VLOGS ON YOUR MYSPACE PAGE THAT DURING THE RECORDING PROCESS YOU WERE REALLY BUSTING YOUR ASS, BUT THE OTHER GUYS DIDN’T SEEM TO APPRECIATE IT AT ALL. HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL?

They don’t appreciate anything I do. They say “Oh well we play instruments and you just stand up and scream. All you have to do is scream into a microphone.” That is not the case. I have the hardest job in the band I feel like. I am the only member of the band that uses a physical part of my body to emote music. Kevin plays the drums and uses his entire body, but if I get laryngitis, there is nothing I can do. If Kevin gets laryngitis, he can still play drums. I feel like I’m under appreciated.

MUEN: HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF MAKING A DVD WHERE YOU HAVE ALL OF THE VLOGS TOGETHER?

Most definitely, this was our first try at a DVD and we didn’t really know what to do. There is only so much you can put on a disc and obviously we wanted to put a couple shows. It ended up taking up two discs so we couldn’t do anything else. If we ever do another one, I think it will be more comedic.

MUEN: YEAH, DO A FULL LENGTH MOVIE.

I would love to.

MUEN: I WAS THINKING ABOUT THAT BECAUSE YOU GUYS ARE REALLY FUNNY AND ENTERTAINING. YOU GUYS ARE REALLY GREAT ON CAMERA TOO.

We have a behind the music type thing to promote the record. It’s going to be really funny and well thought out.

MUEN: I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO THE COOL TOUR.

Me too.

MUEN: EIGHT BANDS AND EVERY SINGLE BAND IS SO AWESOME. I AM SO EXCITED.

It’s a really good mix of bands. I haven’t been on tour since December so I’m excited to go back out on the road again.

MUEN: SINCE THERE ARE EIGHT BANDS, HOW LONG IS YOUR SET TIME GOING TO BE?

I think it’s thirty minutes. I don’t pay attention. People tell me things, but I don’t care until the day of.

MUEN: THE REASON I ASK IS THAT I WAS WONDERING IF YOU WERE ONLY GOING TO PLAY SONGS OFF THE NEW ALBUM OR IF YOU WERE GOING TO INCORPORATE SOME OF THE OLD ONES TOO.

We are going to play something off every record.

MUEN: ARE YOU STILL IN THE BAND COCK PUNCH?

Cock Punch is on a weird hiatus right now. Everyone in the band is really lazy and nobody is really motivated. I think if I threaten to kick everybody out, they will get motivated.

MUEN: I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOUR FANS TO JOIN YOUR STREET TEAM.

I think it is all filled up. We only took 150 people because we wanted to keep it exclusive. We wanted to make sure we got people from all over the country.

MUEN: I’D LIKE TO THANK YOU FOR THE INTERVIEW. KEEP MAKING THOSE VLOGS. BEFORE I LET YOU GO IS THERE ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO ADD OR SAY?

If you are going to buy our record, buy it in the first week because that is the only time it really counts. After that, you can download the crap out of it!