Bio: Loverman have parasites, they wreck cars, they break amps and bones. At the time of writing, there is a tapeworm of indeterminate length living in frontman Gabriel’s intestine. “I ... (more)
Bio: Loverman have parasites, they wreck cars, they break amps and bones. At the time of writing, there is a tapeworm of indeterminate length living in frontman Gabriel’s intestine. “I think it's talking to me,” he says, “I'm scared to kill it, in case it’s the source of all my power.' Just before he said this he bought two drinks (black ones) at the bar and it came to £6.66. You’d think this was made up but it’s not. This shit follows Loverman around.
On the way to their first ever gig in 2008, the steering column broke on Loverman’s car and they crashed it spectacularly. This was on Halloween night. The car was a write-off. They left the wreckage at the roadside and got a cab the rest of the way. Two hours later, with Gabriel covered and covering the audience in blood, Loverman dredged up the first of their now notoriously harrowing and brilliant sets of black-as-night death-rattle rock n roll. It was pig’s blood, by the way. Everyone survived the car crash fine.
Loverman are a four-piece band from London. Gabriel Bruce plays the baritone guitar and voice, Jon Jackson the electric lead, brothers Adam and Chris Prendergast the bass and the drums. They’ve each spent their young manhood being in and out of enough scene bands to fill up a mass grave. So how did they come to rest in peace in Loverman? "I think eventually we all just had enough of posturing” says Gabriel. “We all realized that it’s the darkness and the horror and the shadows that we’re really into. Making this big menacing death-sound; this is the stuff we all believe in. Once we figured that out, the music came a lot easier. Chris and Adam joined the band and we started making this gargantuan noise, and we realized that this was what we should have been doing the whole time.”
The band went to LA this year, corralled super-producers Atticus Ross [Nine Inch Nails] and Joe Barresi [Queens of the Stone Age, The Melvins] and recorded this collection of songs. In Barresi’s studio in Pasadena, they used the same equipment that had made some of their favourite records going. The results were a recording much grander, much more heavily textured, much more huge and terrible than your average black-clothed, po-faced rock band’s ‘live’ recording. “We make a lot of noise live, and it's really aggressive and visceral” Gabriel goes on; “But just to capture the live sound alone; it isn’t enough. It seems like it would be arrogant, when there’s all this potential you can get out of a studio environment, to just ignore it because you’re a ‘live band.’ So we cut the tracks live, and then we trawled through it with Atticus, putting layers and layers and textures on it.”
The ‘Human Nurture’ EP emerged: a small but perfectly formed clutch of songs, steeped in ominous noise and macabre imagery and a tenderness of the sort you get in half-healed flesh wounds. There’s a surprisingly broad range of musical depth on show in these five tracks, from breakneck thrash, to doomy baroque marches, to smacky, downbeat love sick songs. It does tend to be the extreme and the ghoulish and the blood-soaked that people go for, simile-wise, when they write about Loverman’s sound, but we’re not going to go in for all that here. Yes; they do sound a bit like Nirvana and Beetlejuice claw-hammering The Cramps to death in a burning church. Yes; that sexyboy name can mislead a little bit, and if Nick Cave did happen to pilot a derailed heavy metal ghost train up Satan’s own firery bumhole, it probably wouldn’t sound all that dissimilar to this band. But listen for yourself to the brutal clamour of Loverman and think up your own (bloody) metaphors.
When you ask them about their influences, it’s Nirvana, The Melvins, the hardcore punk scene and Nick Cave that get talked up excitedly. Comparisons with Cave have been made and made again and are already starting to wear a bit thin. “I mean lyrically perhaps, yes,” admits Adam, “but musically I don’t think we really sound like him at all.” They don’t seem to have done themselves any favours in all this by sharing the name of their band with a Nick Cave song. “Yeah that wasn’t actually intentional at all at the time” clarifies Gabriel. “We realize now that it was probably not a great idea.”
So what’s the big idea with all this horror and misery-pedalling? Loverman seem too, like, nice, to be so obsessed with death. “Well when we write songs, I’ll bring my lyrics and some melodies and things in my head, and I show them to the band, and then we all just make it sound like death” explains Gabriel. “But you feel most alive when you’re close to death! That’s what the songs are about. We excite ourselves musically by embracing death. Not as an antidote to life but as an intrinsic part of it. It’s not meant to be morbid or depressing. It’s just: sex and death. Coming and going. I don't know, maybe you can put it more eloquently.” The thing is, as it turns out, I can’t really put it much more eloquently than that. That sums up Loverman pretty good to me. Let’s just leave it at that. (less)
