Clutch
By BLUNT Magazine
After nearly twenty years of beer spilling and swilling, vittles grilling and cold chilling inspiring music, Clutch sure know how to get a groove going. With nine studio albums under their collective belt, the Maryland southern rock overlords have showed fans that they can really do it to you in a myriad of ways – from the raging hardcore of their earlier works through to the swamp bombast of The Elephant Riders and noodling wizard funk of Beale Street To Oblivion, the band has shown a sense of growth that has more often than not of late taken it's lead from the past, the blues most notably, rather than trying to invent the wheel (or record, as it were). As the weather hots up in Australia and the temperature plummets in the band's hometown of Germantown, Blunt got up on the good foot with drummer Jean Paul Gaster over a hot bowl of chicken soup.
With the band's latest album, Strange Cousins From The West being the group's first release on their own label, Weathermaker, Gaster says that for the first time in a long time he doesn't have to worry about dealing with people who really couldn't give a damn about the actual music the band is producing.
“You know, I try to get along with those label guys, but it's tough,” he laughs. “There's always some other band out there that is outselling you or getting more radio play than you. That's all part of the game, but it's really not in Clutch's nature to be like that; we started this band to make good records and play good shows – not to sell out stadiums and have gold records on the wall. Now, with our own label, we can really just concentrate on making the records and playing the best shows that we can.”
The live aspect of Clutch has always been important to Gaster and co (and if you haven't seen the guys live yet, you've been wasting your life) and with the band's return to groove-tastic form (not that there was anything wrong with Beale Street... it was a fantastic experiment that sits very well alongside the group's more stomping moments), the drummer says that he is having more fun than ever, twenty years on.
“I think that the instrumentation on Strange Cousins is a little more stripped down and lends itself to being played live. Because of that, they just kinda rock a bit more, there's less layering but more meat and potatoes and that really makes these songs fun to play live. We never set out to make a career out of this, so that's important. It's not like that bands that were inspiring us ever could have done what we were doing,” he laughs. “I'm pretty sure that when the Jesus Lizard came home from tour, they all had to go and get jobs!”
Each record and tour cycle is an evolution of sorts for the band, explains Gaster, though the group never sit down and pick out what direction they are going to take their stomping rock in next – for the last few albums leading up to Strange Cousins From The West, Clutch had a keyboardist and now he's gone - “when you're a new guy, you'll always be the new guy and sometimes that just doesn't work out,” says the drummer. What the band will add to the mix next (or take away) is as much a mystery to the band as to anyone on the outside of their creative process.
“After Australia, we're going to switch things up a bit, give America a bit of a rest and do a little work in Europe. After that, it'll be time to get these new tunes seriously together and work on the new record. We don't sit down at a meeting and say, let's make this one a bit more punk rock or more blues or anything like that though. There's some ideas we have on the computer and it'll just be a representation of where our heads are at. It's impossible to say what we'll do next until we actually get in there and start recording.”
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