Less Than Jake: Uncharted Territory
LESS THAN JAKE have just released their latest EP Uncharted and it sees the Gainesville, Florida ska punkers doing what they do best in the most vibrant and high octane fashion. We caught up with saxophone player Peter ‘JR’ Wasilewski to talk about Uncharted and what’s next for LESS THAN JAKE.
We begin with JR telling us about his reaction to how the Uncharted EP has been received. “My mom thinks it’s good! I don’t read the comments. The comment section is where your dreams go to die but everything that people have told me though has been positive.”
JR then went onto to tell us about the experience of having DESCENDANTS drummer and all round punk legend Bill Stevenson producing Uncharted alongside producer Jason Livermore. “Bill’s like a Jedi Master. He knows what to say and how to say it in order to get impact. I appreciated working with him on a lot of levels. We’ve been friends with Bill for a long time, and to actually get to work with him on a musical level that intimately was awesome. Would recommend!”
JR then goes on to tell us about the long standing connection between LESS THAN JAKE and DESCENDENTS. “Our history with DESCENDENTS is pretty deep. LESS THAN JAKE went on the Caffeine Nation tour with them in 1996, when they came back with Everything Sucks after being away for a long time, so we’ve known them for a long time. Bill and Jason have mixed other records of ours, and the Blasting Room has basically had their hands on every recording that we’ve done since 2000 in one way or another, but we just never had the opportunity to go record and be in the room with him working in the producer chair so it’s great.”
JR then revealed what the band are up to next when it come to music and the follow up to the last LESS THAN JAKE album, 2020’s Silver Linings. “We’re always working on stuff, but I don’t look at music as albums anymore. Each thing is like a project, so it leaves a larger interpretation of what a collection of songs needs to be than just saying ‘okay, we’re going to do a record. The way we consume music now is very different than what it once was’. If you release a record now into the world in the streaming sense, you’re almost competing against yourself, because there’s all these songs that are new, and everybody, latches towards one and not these other ones. We’ve just been looking at it like ‘well, how do we release a collection of songs sporadically, instead of everything all at once’. For LESS THAN JAKE, that seems to make sense.”
With LESS THAN JAKE recently celebrating their Hello Rockview album by playing it full in the live arena as well, JR told us about the experience. “It’s done. We’re never performing that record live again, until we perform it live again! We had a great time doing it, we got a great response. I think people had a great time, and we hope that they come back and see us again on the next tour we do.”
Talking of celebrating albums, talk then turned to next year’s thirtieth anniversary of the debut LESS THAN JAKE album Pezcore as JR reveals. “We’re doing a collaboration with Rude Records in Italy, and they are doing brand new 30th anniversary vinyl, CD, cassette reissue of Pezcore We have not done versions of that in a long time, since maybe 10 years ago was the last time we pressed it and we’re doing the same with Losing Streak as well!”
LESS THAN JAKE are coming back to the UK next year for Slam Dunk Festival and JR is excited to be heading back over to these shores. “It should be a lot of fun. I think we’re on a stage with our friends in ALKALINE TRIO, so that’ll be cool. I love Danny and Skiba, they’re just awesome humans and Adam their new drummer, I know him through mutual friends. It’ll be cool to hang out Slam Dunk is always so much fun, and we are stoked to be able to go and play it!”
While the band’s brand of upbeat ska punk is part and parcel of Slam Dunk, LESS THAN JAKE also go down a storm at big metal festivals, although you wouldn’t expect anything less from the band who gave us All My Best Friends Are Metalheads! “Hellfest was a lot of fun! We love to play those metal festivals, like that and Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium. Our first agent in the UK, when we first started playing over there, he was adamant about us playing those super heavy metal festivals. He was like, you’re the ray of sunshine in this gloomy as fuck day for everybody, you sound completely different than anything else that’s happening there. I always thought that was really smart and visionary.”
We end our chat with JR talking proudly about the legacy of LESS THAN JAKE after all these years. “We don’t lose sight of it. We are very aware of what we have, and we’re very protective of it. We just try to do good things, and nobody’s perfect. Like, we all fuck up here and there, but the genuine approach for us is to, make the world better, not worse.”
Uncharted is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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