Artist Entry: Lords' Chris Owens wants you to take that D-beat and shove it

If I hear the phrase "D-Beat" one more time, I'm going to fucking puke.

Seriously.

At some point -- I think around the mid-to-late '90s -- bands all around
the country started to think that it was OK to stop writing their own
songs and start producing lesser versions of what ever happened to be
popular at the time.

Now, it may be that this kind of thing was always happening and I was
simply sheltered from it by growing up on the musical island of
Louisville, KY that was chock full of genre pioneers and other fucked
up exotic punk oddities ranging from Slint to KINGHORSE. But in the
early '90s, when I was first playing in bands and going to punk shows,
it wasn't cool to sound like other bands. If you ripped some one else
off then you got called out and made fun of. There was this
underlying pressure to be better, tighter and different than
everything else that was going on around you, and the end result was
BETTER BANDS.

Anyone who's in a touring band knows the scenario of playing with the
same band in every city, but with different names and different
members. Sometimes you play with the same band several times in one
night and their sets might get progressively better as the evening
progresses, but it's still pretty much the same shit.

Until recently, it was that same shitty generic metalcore band that you
played with every night. Yeah, we get it, you can palm mute and do
sweeps. You wear your stupid Ibanez higher than Paul McCartney's
fiddle bass and you all have wicked cool rack tuners that make your
mesa's look like extras on the Battlestar Galactica set.

Now a days, it's the drop C, "d-beat" nonsense. There are literally
thousands of these bands, a few in every city, and they all sound
the fucking same! I mean, what's the deal guys?

I understand that a lot of you are young and probably haven't heard
much of that one rock band from England that's been playing those same
riffs for 35 years. Or the punk band that the drum beat is named
after, who were playing those riffs 25 years ago. And maybe not even
the guys from Tennessee who moved to Oregon and popularized this most
recent revival seven or eight years ago, but I know for sure that you've
heard of my friends from Louisville who've been playing these songs
for the last five years.

I just don't get it. Yeah sure, every thing's pretty much been
done already, and every band is influenced by other bands, but you
"drop C, D-beat" guys aren't even trying! Seriously.

I mean, I love Voivod and Megadeth. Listen to a Lords record and then
listen to "Rust in Peace" or "Nothing Face" and it should be evident. But
no one's ever going to confuse a lords song for Voivod or
Megadeth. Whatever.

So in conclusion, I think this tuned down dropped C, "D-beat" revival
is already tired, old and run in to the fucking ground -- and I really
wish you kids would start being more creative and original so that it
will make shows on tour a lot more interesting for me.

But that's just my opinion, man, what the fuck do I know anyway?