Clutch: Striving For Excellence

Jean-Paul Gaster has been doing his thing for a while now – 31 years in fact. Across those three decades he and his CLUTCH bandmates have charted a steady course to legendary status, holding down the same core line-up with no real breaks or hiatuses while delivering excellent records at every turn. It’s no surprise then that as he joins us via Zoom from a tour bus in Oslo he speaks with the kind of cool, calm clarity of a man who knows exactly who he is and what he’s meant to be doing with his life. Nor indeed is it a surprise that the record we’re here to talk about – Sunrise On Slaughter Beach – is another killer release from a band for whom such matters have become entirely par for the course.

“We’ve always been pretty good at just letting things happen very organically,” offers Gaster on the process of how album number 13 came together. “Rarely do we have a meeting as to what the new record should sound like or what the production should be, or even the songwriting. It just happens very naturally. We just get together and play and the stuff that sticks, the stuff that Neil [Fallon, vocals] is most excited about putting lyrics on, or the riffs that really float to the top – those are the ones that end up being sort of the building blocks of the record. And it’s hard to predict what they will be.”

“This record especially I think was more experimental in the studio,” he adds. “I think that had to do with the fact that we were not able to play these songs out live. A lot of the songs took shape in the studio and when I was recording the drum tracks, for example, I didn’t really know exactly where the song was going to go or what the direction was going to be until we started adding the other layers and getting more vocals on there. So I think in that respect it’s maybe a more experimental record than we’ve done in quite some time.”

He’s right of course; whether it’s a theremin, vibraphone, or the female backing vocals that elevate the album’s central highlight of Mercy Brown, Sunrise On Slaughter Beach is the sound of a band refusing to coast when they could be forgiven – rewarded even – for doing so. It’s still absolutely CLUTCH though – riffy bangers like Red Alert (Boss Metal Zone), Slaughter Beach and Nosferatu Madre all see to that, as indeed do Fallon’s unmistakable and effortlessly badass lyrics and delivery.

Of course, that desire to push themselves is something that comes pretty naturally to CLUTCH at this point, with Gaster explaining, “We do the best we can not to repeat ourselves and we listen to a lot of music so there’s always new inspiration to pull from. And I think we enjoy the challenge too. We don’t want to be the kind of band that just gets up there and plays the same setlist every night and makes the same record every two or three years. Keeping ourselves engaged I think helps keep the fans engaged and it makes for a more musical experience I think.”

No doubt it’s exactly this mindset that has earned CLUTCH the adoration of so many, whether they got into them via the noisy, punk-informed roots of their early days, the increasingly hypnotic stoner rock fare that followed, or through the juggernaut hard rocking they deliver so well today. Gaster is happy to point out that all that’s still in there though, all the way back to the band’s earliest influences from the likes of THE MELVINS and THE JESUS LIZARD. “I think those influences shine through even to this day,” he suggests. “And I think that goes for most all musicians; it’s those first things that you hear, those first records that really connect with you, maybe the first shows that you saw, those are experiences and life lessons that you never really forget and they really do make an imprint on your DNA.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all of this though is something we’ve already mentioned: they’ve done all this with the same core line-up – Gaster, Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult and bassist Dan Maines. It’s a rare feat indeed, and one that Gaster is well aware of. “The kind of chemistry that we are fortunate enough to have only comes from 31 years of doing it on stage again and again and again and again,” he emphasises. “It really becomes kind of second nature to us. There’s a lot of communication that happens on stage, but we don’t actually speak anything. We have been around each other long enough to know ‘I know where this guy is gonna go…’ It really is a team up there and there’s so much of it that happens that’s just subconscious.”

As for what keeps them coming back, Gaster has no troubles answering that one. “That’s the music. When we started the band we had no intention of making this a career. The other bands that were out there at the time that were popular – the ones that were on the radio or the ones that were on MTV – for the most part we thought they were kind of corny. We didn’t like that kind of music. We didn’t like the fact that a lot of those bands had to put image over music. And so we just said ‘let’s get together and let’s play some shows, the best ones that we can play… let’s write and make the best songs that we can make’ and that was really the beginning and the end of it.”

“We’ve been able to plug away at this thing for 31 years and now it is a career but when we started it was purely for the music,” he continues. “I think that’s what has kept us together all these years because even when times were hard, even when we were bouncing from label to label, or even when we were locked down during the pandemic, we knew the only thing that we could do is make music because ultimately that is our currency.”

As we come to conclude, we return to a theme that’s cropped up repeatedly across our conversation, that being Gaster and co.’s refusal to ever deliver any less than the very best of themselves, night in, night out. That’s how they’ve built their legacy, and that’s exactly how they are going to maintain it.

“I feel that pressure every night,” affirms Gaster. “I’m gonna finish with you here today and then I’m gonna go inside and I’m going to practise and I will practise all day with the intention of having a better show than I did last night. I enjoy that process. I enjoy trying to become a better drummer and a better band member. There is a level of pressure there but I think it’s necessary and I think the fans have come to expect that from us as well. They expect excellence and we do the best we can to provide them with that excellence.”

Sunrise On Slaughter Beach is out now via Weathermaker Music.

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