HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: We Are The Romans – Botch

Surely we can say BOTCH are back now? A new label became a new song, a new song became a surprise live reunion, and now they’ve got two full shows on the horizon – their first in two decades. Every twist and turn has sent waves of excitement through our little corner of the internet, always tempered by a healthy dose of realism that this really might be it. And of course, if this as far as a BOTCH reunion goes, that would be ok. The band have already given the world more than enough; they made We Are The Romans.

Yes, their other output is great – 1998’s American Nervoso would be a career-best for most, and you can’t go wrong with any of their various splits and EPs either – but We Are The Romans is the masterpiece. This is the album they’re reissuing first via their new home of Sargent House; this is the album they’ve added the killer One Twenty Two bonus track to; and most importantly this is the album which no-one in their right mind could leave anywhere outside of the top three metallic hardcore records of all time.

It all came together in relatively humble circumstances – as these things often do – with the band hunkered down in a rehearsal space beneath a car dealership in their hometown of Tacoma, Seattle as they set about crafting a swift follow-up to their aforementioned debut full-length. “Really the plan was just to try and make an EP or something,” explains bassist Brian Cook. “We had gone on tour in the summer of 1998 in support of American Nervoso and we knew that we wanted to go on tour again in September 1999, so we decided we were going to write as many songs as we could and put out an EP in time for the fall tour.”

“We’d always been really slow writers,” continues Cook. “It took us over two years to compile all the material for American Nervoso, so we didn’t have very big expectations for coming up with a lot of material, but for whatever reason We Are The Romans was the one really fruitful time period in the lifespan of the band and it all came together pretty quickly. I think it was just the perfect moment in the band where everyone was on the same page musically. We wanted to be a bit braver and try things that we hadn’t done before.”

That bravery saw the band pushing into more angular extremes, rejecting power chords and conventional time signatures to emerge with a masterwork of mathy metallic fury. Recorded in little more than a week at Studio Litho in Seattle with their friend Matt Bayles, the album’s urgency stands undiminished today, on which Cook offers, “I think labouring over a record is never really a good thing, which isn’t to say that spending time and focus and effort into making a record doesn’t have good results, look at MY BLOODY VALENTINE’s Loveless, people still love that record and man they laboured over that thing. But I think more often than not, especially in the world of punk and hardcore, if you spend too much time trying to polish it up you’re just diminishing the immediacy of it.”

“A record is really just what the musicians involved can do given their toolset and their skill set,” he adds when we ask if there’s anything he wishes they’d done differently. “If everything that you’re writing resonates with you, then you’ve done the right thing. Especially with BOTCH, no-one ever came into the rehearsal space with a finished song. It was always Dave [Verellen] would have one or two riff ideas and we would just jam on them until the song unfolded on its own. There would be moments where we would stop and tinker with a part or try to refine a part, but really it was always just trying to capture lightning in a bottle.”

Even with that lightning so clearly captured, Romans wasn’t some platinum-selling success – something which was certainly possible for heavy bands in 1999, but unlikely for one as wild and wiry as BOTCH. Their evolution had always been slow and steady, and it would remain so until their initial dissolution, but those in the know at least could tell this one was something special. At Romans‘ unofficial release show in Seattle, fans came running in to buy the CD before the band had even played a note. “We sold $1,000 in merch or something like that,” smiles Cook. “We’d never ever sold $1,000 of merch at that point, and we’d done that before we even played. It was just this thing where we all kind of looked at each other like, ‘this is bizarre’.”

Of course, BOTCH weren’t the only band with something special on their hands around that time. Often lumped in quite lazily alongside the likes of CAVE IN, ISIS, THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN and CONVERGE, BOTCH were keys players in a fiercely creative and fondly-remembered underground scene centred largely around Aaron Turner’s Hydra Head Records, which released both Romans and Nervoso before it.

A student at the time, and reading “all the things you’d normally read in college if you’re a dude, like Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg”, Cook was certainly cognisant of the power of a good peer group. “I remember thinking it’d be so cool to be a part of something like that where you have this creative camaraderie with other artists, but you’re not all just doing the exact same shit. I think with the Hydra Head scene and the people that were even tangentially affiliated there was a lot of camaraderie because we were all arriving at a similar juncture in terms of what we wanted to achieve with our music, but we were pulling from slightly different influences and specific artists. We were all doing our own thing, but seeing a reflection of ourselves in other people.” 

All good things must end though, and for BOTCH it did on 15 June 2002 when they played what was until recently their last show, leaving Romans as their final and defining full-length. The decades since have seen some excellent posthumous releases, and a slew of genuinely essential post-BOTCH projects like RUSSIAN CIRCLES, MINUS THE BEAR, and THESE ARMS ARE SNAKES to name a few; and as we said, if BOTCH wanted to leave it at that, that would absolutely be their right.

And yet, our conversation takes place just days before Cook, Dave Knudson, Tim Latona and Dave Verellen would rip through Saint Matthew Returns To The Womb at a birthday party for Romans’ aforementioned producer Matt Bayles. Naturally, Cook never let any of this on, so we honestly don’t know what else they might have up their sleeves, but we’ll leave him to conclude. “The whole thing with us was always that it was more important to make something that had some sort of lasting impact than to be a hype band in a timeframe. I’m happy people still give a shit and I’m happy the legacy goes on; I’m glad it means things to people.”

We Are The Romans was originally released on November 2nd 1999 via Hydra Head Records and the reissue is out now via Sargent House.

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