They’ve got the whole music history and pounding automotive industry behind their Detroit roots, but when the band Destroy This Place recorded recently up in bucolic Easthampton, Mass., at Sonelab Studios with Justin Pizzoferrato, they got a whole new texture to their crunch. It makes itself known right away on appropriately fearsome new Destroy This Place single, “Macho,” which we’re proud to premiere at these premises.
Pizzoferrato had worked with Speedy Ortiz, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth and amid the studio’s various fuzzboxes and vintage keyboards was an old bass owned by Kim Gordon and Mike Watt. Murph from Dinosaur Jr. even came along to play with the band, using what the guys call, “some weird percussion thing we’ll call a cowbell though it wasn’t really that at all.”
Mostly it was the band itself. Featuring former members of Thunderbirds Are Now! and New Grenada, Destroy This Place sounds like snarling, brawling bad asses but look like a bunch of upstanding suburban dudes who are just about to take the trash out on their weekly duties. This makes them disarming, especially when the thick snarls of guitars by Ryan Allen and John Nelson begin to rattle windows with Monday Busque laying it down on bass and Sean Sommer banging away on drums.
There’s a pop melodicism behind the metal tinge that make the “Macho” single a catchy harbinger for their new album Animal Rights, due out October 23 on Forge Again Records (limited to 300 on blue vinyl). The band says the track is “kind of about wrestling, but not really. More about fake bros hiding behind a character instead of being themselves.”
Now some people could put them in that crowd, spitting out metallic aggression from their comfortable upstanding lives. But, they say in defense, “Most of our songs are about the urgency of living in the moment and just being real guys with lives and jobs and responsibilities, but still wanting to feel that rush and release that playing loud rock music can give you.”
To that we say, more cowbell. Or something closely associated to it.
