Earlier this year they compared Manchester Orchestra to All Get Out. I’m pasting the interview after the jump. The article is good so read it. Oh yeah and my picture of them is cooler.
Sorry if I’m not too enthused about the Free Times. They have had some choice words for me in the past. I can’t complain too much because their magazine racks are a good place to put my scene SC fliers.
All Get Out craves attention. This need to be recognized has driven the Charleston pop-rock quartet to take to the road for an endless string of live dates, cranking the volume so loud they can’t be ignored.
“We try to make it as loud as we can,” says frontman Nathan Hussey. “So at least they’ll remember they saw us and their ears hurt.”
The band’s name comes from the phrase “loud as all get out,” which Hussey heard while watching television. It became a song title and evolved into the name of the band – fitting, given its predilection for volume.
But the young band, which played its first official show on June 6, 2007 – Hussey’s 22nd birthday – is hardly an earsore. If the band’s headlining slot Tuesday at the 750-capacity Headliners isn’t testament to the band’s appeal, then surely the meaty hooks and earnest melodies that permeate the band’s 2007 Spitting EP are. Or maybe it’s the emotional range that steers the band from the aural blastoff of “Water and God” to the acidic vindication of “Your Girl, My Gun, Her Ghost.”
The goal is for each song to carry an emotional weight all its own, which gives the band room for versatility and the ability to come clean with an audience. Take, for example, “Come My Way,” the speaker of which starts off looking at his dog and winds up pining for a girl, just in time for a dramatic crescendo into the chorus –which, if you know the name of the song you can already sing along to. Hussey’s half-muttered croon, in its hesitance, brings the pain of missing someone. When the chorus hits and his voice escalates, he’s not pining anymore, he’s begging.
“I want people to hear it and go through the emotions of the song; to be happy or sad or mad,” he says. “I don’t want to just be a positive influence, but I want to be an honest influence.”
Not wanting to be a strictly positive influence might be a surprise coming from a musician who is also a self-proclaimed Christian, but Hussey is quick to clarify: “We’re not a Christian band, but we are Christians.” In the music, there’s no dogma to push on other people. The band plays most of its shows in bars and the majority of All Get Out’s roster smokes.
“We do some things that some Christians wouldn’t approve of,” Hussey says, but he adds that faith plays an important role in the process.
“These songs are just things I’ve gone through, or I’m going through,” he says.
“Sometimes it might seem a little off the wall or overboard, but it’s just things that I was going through at the time. And since I am a Christian, it comes out because it’s part of my life.”
Most of that life, it seems, is wrapped up in the band. In the year since its inception, All Get Out has become a regular presence on the interstates with tour dates scheduled through the end of October as close to home as the Village Tavern in Mt. Pleasant and as far-flung as Fort Worth, Texas. Additionally, Spitting will see a second release in the fall, this time remixed with re-recorded drums and two new songs, on the Atlanta-based indie label Favorite Gentleman, also home to Manchester Orchestra’s first recordings.
But for all its accomplishments as a band, All Get Out is still a self-run operation.
Guitarist/keyboardist Mel Washington handles most of the booking himself. The bandmates all work whatever menial jobs they can to make ends meet, without realistic opportunities for advancement.
“There ends up being a lot of couch-hopping,” Hussey says.
Still, they’re living the dream – or at least working toward it.
“We’d love a fanbase that’s nationwide, so we can go tour out for a month and survive,” Hussey explains. “The real goal is to be able to do this and support ourselves with it and keep doing it.” And, of course, to garner more attention.
