Car Bomb: Mindful Chaos
CAR BOMB are something of a paradox of a band. While they write some of the most outlandish, experimental music in the alternative sphere, they also write – as far as their own minds are concerned – music that follows an internal reasoning.
“I don’t know, I hope that people catch like the little things,” guitarist Greg Kubacki explains while we talk about the density of concentration you have to have to follow along with CAR BOMB. “That’s like a very musical, nerdy thing to do. If you’re playing [as a musician, sure], but if you’re just enjoying metal, I don’t think you’re necessarily thinking that far. I hope that you get that initial onslaught of chaos, but I hope there’s something for people that aren’t really counting along to latch on to. That’s something we consciously tried to fit into these three songs. I think moving forward, that’s something we’re always going to try to keep in mind as well, as opposed to just chaos all the time, you know, and you can’t really tell what’s going on.”
CAR BOMB’s three track EP, Tiles Whisper Dreams, has been long in the waiting, but it’s release and the reason for an EP rather than an album essentially comes down to authenticity. “I’ve been writing since 2019,” Greg tells us. “Ever since Mordial came out, I don’t know what it was just seeing GOJIRA and all these bands play, I just wanted to start writing right away. Blindsides and Paroxysm were songs that were baking for probably four or five years. Tiles Whisper Dreams was something that I wrote right before the drum tracks were being recorded.”
“It was just a quick sketch. And I’m like, ‘this kind of works. Let’s just throw it in there and record’. So that’s more of our old school stuff, where it’s a little looser, song structure wise. But yeah, we’ve also been working on a bunch of other songs for a record. We were supposed to release a record actually for this whole cycle, but the stuff isn’t just ready.”
Taking the time to be really, truly happy with the end result, not just to cobble together a product for consumption, is evidently a big part of why these three incredible songs were released, rather than more songs that the band think ultimately aren’t there yet. “Exactly. You’re absolutely right. And for Mordial, I’m pretty happy with it, like 98% happy with it. Everybody else is too,” Greg continues. “But there’s a couple little moments in there where we’re like, you know what, if we just took an extra month or two, we would have been really happy with it. So, we made a really strong rule in the band just to be like, if we’re not 100% happy with everything, it’s not going out. Let’s just take our time and get it right. We have another thing in the band too against forced ideas. We don’t like to be like, ‘oh, we need something, just throw there and it’s fine’. We want each little millisecond of the music to mean something to us. Yeah, there’s got to be a quality throughout.”
It seems the whole writing process was based around this concept. “We made a conscious effort to for this little EP to make it heavy, sort of like our older stuff.” Greg continues, “like I always said, like for Mordial, we really liked it because some of it sounded just something melodic and different. And then I was really into like soundtracks so I started adding a lot more soundscapes to things. But I think it kind of went a little too far in Mordial. So now we’re trying to like figure out what the correct balance is. And I think the EP is like a good balance so far. It’s like, you know, little sprinkles of pretty stuff, but mostly the heavy.”
The irony of CAR BOMB writing so mindfully, with a result that essentially will blow your head off, is exactly the reason they’re so good at this. It’s the way they want to be read, by those looking to find a new approach to interpreting what music is. The rules they keep between themselves hold together their core, while allowing them to pursue change and new avenues of thinking. “I think there’s people out there still like hear stuff and feel ‘that’s different’. Like there’s something new to listen to as opposed to like, everything is kind of genre based now, which is fine. I like a lot of that stuff too. But I hope we’re sort of fit in that category [of going past just genre,] in a weird sense. I always like to feel like we can do whatever we want. And I love that feeling of hearing something and being like, ‘I can kind of get it, but I still can’t figure out what’s going on’. That’s the kind of feeling I want to like give other people when they listen to our stuff.”
Tiles Whisper Dreams is out now via self-release. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS123 here:
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