Even with less polish, Chevelle shines
MUSIC: Alternative metal trio returns to road and airways with stripped-down sound
By Gene Triplett
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Published: November 6, 2009
From left, Dean Bernardini, Pete Loeffler and Sam Loeffler are Chevelle. Photo by Jerad Knudson
There’s no heavy polish on this Chevelle. Not in the studio, not onstage. Not this time out.
On its fifth studio album, "Sci-Fi Crimes,” the
Chicago-based alternative metal trio went for a more stripped-down sound than fans might be used to, a shifting of sonic gears that hasn’t slowed it down a bit, if sales are any kind of gauge. The new record debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and No. 3 on the digital albums chart, and the first single from the disc, the guitar-stormy "Jars,” quickly hit Top 10 speed at modern rock radio.
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"There was a whole production thing that was different, where we didn’t use Auto-Tune or anything like that,” drummer
Sam Loeffler said in a recent phone interview from a
Las Vegas House of Blues tour stop.
Auto-Tune is an audio processor that uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances and disguise inaccuracies and mistakes. It allows musicians to produce more precisely tuned recordings.
"We just went in and played the songs and used the takes, the actual sounds that we made,” Loeffler said, referring to himself, his singing, songwriting, guitar-playing brother
Pete Loeffler and bassist brother-in-law
Dean Bernardini. "No samples, any of that stuff.”
Sympathetic producer
Brian Virtue (
Jane’s Addiction, Korn, Audioslave) had a hand in the new sound as well.
"I think it makes it sound better, makes it sound more like the real band instead of that super-perfect record that all these bands seem to be making these days,” the drummer said. "I think that makes them all sound the same.”
The title, "Sci-Fi Crimes,” is derived from one of the album’s best tracks, a mid-tempo grinder called "Roswell’s Spell,” which was inspired by a visit to the
Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center in New
Mexico.
"There’s a couple of songs, like ‘Roswell’s Spell,’ which deals a little bit with the whole idea of
Roswell trying to convince you that there are aliens,” Loeffler said. "But if you go to the museum itself, it kind of leaves you with more questions. And then there’s a song called ‘Highland’s Apparition,’ which is about this house that we lived in that, you know, may have been haunted. So that was the couple of songs that inspired the (album’s) title.”
"Highland Apparition” is itself haunting, an acoustically-driven song that grew from the band’s experience in a small house in suburban Chicago, reportedly afflicted with an overall eerie vibe, where there were several instances of "unexplained physical contact” that woke them during the night.
"So that was kind of a weird thing,” Loeffler said.
What’s even weirder was the possible existence of a grave in the backyard.
"One day I came out of the house because there was somebody standing in the front yard,” Loeffler recalled. "It was this woman, maybe in her mid-40s, and she was dancing in the front yard. She’s like, ‘Oh, I used to live here. I come back here every couple of years to say "hi” to my father, because he’s buried in the backyard.’ We said, ‘What? You can’t bury a person in somebody’s backyard.’ But it was a long time ago, apparently. ... I never dug it up to check it out.”
Another song, not so sci-fi in nature, is the angry-yet-melodic, wall-of-distortion accompanied rant, "Letter From a Thief,” stirred by the theft of the band’s equipment during its last tour, and the eventual return of
Pete Loeffler’s custom-made guitar by somebody who’d bought it on the street.
"They sent it back to us, basically not wanting anything in return,”
Sam Loeffler said. "So that was great. But it was a struggle. It wasn’t just like, go to
Guitar Center and buy some more gear. Imagine getting up and going to work and the entire building is gone. So you’re starting over from there. You can do it; it just takes a little bit of time and costs you some money.”
A couple of years and a lot of rebuilding later, Chevelle is back on the road again and ready to regale its fans with provocative stories and powerhouse rock, minus any sonic or visual frills.
"It’s definitely a rock show,” Loeffler said. "We are not about glamour or glitz; we’re all about the music. So there won’t be any gimmicks to grab on to .... We call it the big dumb rock show. It’s a way to really escape your everyday life and have a couple of beers and see a show and know a lot of the songs.”
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