![]() We were really excited about it, and it felt like a new beginning.”Īfter decades of playing in professional bands (to name a few: the two moonlight as the rhythm section of the Melvins Coady used to play drums for Murder City Devils, and Jared started out playing bass for Pacific Northwest weirdo punk bands Karp, The Whip, and Tight Bros From Way Back When), they are no strangers to poking fun at the album-promotion process, either: “It’s funny-the label wanted us to write something about and what it’s about for the press release,” Coady says. “Going back to a two-piece again, it felt like we really pulled together and did something good. That might have had something to do with it.” But that doesn’t mean their signature humor-and even hopefulness-doesn’t seep into the songs. ![]() He is sitting across from me at a bar table in Portland, Oregon where they have just finished playing a set at a mini-festival at B-Side, a beloved East Burnside rock ‘n’ roll dive bar, celebrating its 10-year-anniversary. “We kind of had a rough year parting ways with our guitar player,” Coady admits, when asked about the darker elements of the album. While it certainly carries their signature upbeat heaviness, Command Your Weather features a recurring theme throughout, created with eerie percussion (moody, church bell-esque carnival sounds, which, according to the band, are created with an instrument called “blossom bells”) and lyrics that nod to perhaps deeper subject matters than they’ve delved into in the past, the band set out to create a “wiser, more atmospheric” record. These are two men who are beloved in the heavy music world for their impish grins so ubiquitously plastered on their faces, so when there’s even a hint of darkness in their sound, it’s sure to get people to sit up and notice. The new album, Command Your Weather (out July 8 via Joyful Noise Recordings), is perhaps the band’s darkest recording to date. In spite of losing the battle, they have won the war.While barbershop promo photos and tongue-in-cheek song titles like “Diagnostic Front” might paint a lighthearted picture, bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis of Los Angeles two-piece Big Business have returned with a follow-up to their 2013 scorcher, Battlefields Forever, that’ll likely keep everyone on their toes. For as Jimmy lights up his exploding cigar, they are the ones lucky enough to have gotten in their last licks. And, in a strange way, unlike so many of their other films, Stan and Ollie are triumphant as they run from officer Tiny Sanford into the fade out. ![]() Produced on the cusp of the talkies, Big Business is also a sort of frantic paean to a lost art. But each step in the progressively destructive game is almost reasonable its just when one contrasts point A with point Z that the absurdity, and the comedy, of the situation is so apparent. The snowballing reciprocal destruction starts innocently enough: an errant branch of Christmas tree-that symbol of peace and goodwill to men-gets caught in Jimmy Finlayson's front door once too often and ends up with extensive property damage on both sides. There is something downright innocent about the long-lost freshness of those semi-developed streets of Culver City and environs on that sunny December morning in −8 and they add a quality of mise-en-scene which was surely never foreseen back then. I find the simple, deliberate nature of it immensely appealing. As an avowed Laurel and Hardy fan, I must say that Big Business falls into a special category all its own. ![]()
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