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Signed and delivered
No Trigger go Nitro, Eyes like Knives get Bloody, and a Spider comes home to Allston
BY CHRIS RUCKER
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Dexter Holland’s well-funded California punk label Nitro employs a rad A&R guy named Sean Ziebarth who’s been a boon to New England punk bands, having presciently signed Boston’s Lost City Angels and New Bedford’s A Wilhelm Scream. So even though I’d never heard of Ziebarth’s latest Nitro signing, No Trigger, I wouldn’t bet against them. Who are they and how’d some bald dude from Orange County find them? Turns out No Trigger are a Central Massachusetts hardcore band in the Strike Anywhere/Against Me!/Kid Dynamite mold. They got a hook-up from their friends in A Wilhelm Scream, but not the way you’d think: Ziebarth also runs a custom drum company, and he had No Trigger drummer Mike Ciprari designing kits for AWS and the Aquabats. But after he heard No Trigger’s Extinction in Stereo (a Japanese reissue of the band’s self-released EPs), he flew out here to sign them. No Trigger are shooting for an early-2006 album, and you can check ’em out Tuesday at the Cambridge Elks Lodge, 55 Bishop Allen Drive, on an all-ages bill with Fifth Hour Hero, Marathon, Lock and Key, and Shanghai Valentine. Eyes like Knives guitarist Rebekkah Takamizu is checking in from the band’s Left Coast tour, where they’re being put up for the night in a mountain cabin set on a couple dozen acres of Northern California forest alongside a river where earlier they’d panned for trace amounts of gold. "It’s expansive," she writes via e-mail, a feeling you also get from the two songs on ELK’s half of a split EP with Allston drug buddies Officer May. Although the band just issued an album last October (Slow Distractions, on the NYC label Dopamine), the EP already shows growth — so much so that they’re talking about making keyboards permanent at their live shows, and, perhaps inspired by the experience of covering My Bloody Valentine’s "You Made Me Realise" (included on the split), adding more effects. "We need more pedals!" Takamizu says, adding, "I am having 2 more arms surgically grafted so I will be like the great Hindu g_d Shiva and I can play many instruments at once." With increasingly great boy-girl harmonies, what began as cathartic post-hardcore is now reaching for space rock. Their tour with the NYC duo Mommy and Daddy closes on May 16 at the Middle East. Spider One — Haverhill native, brother of Rob Zombie, formerly signed to DreamWorks — checked into Allston’s Mad Oak Studios last week to record yet another Powerman 5000 album, this one for the band’s own Megatronic Records. After their move to LA and a hit-and-miss major-label run as a sci-fi electro-metal band, Powerman have come full circle: founding guitarist Adam Williams is back on board, as is new guitarist Johnny Rock of Half-Cocked. "From what I understand, it’s gonna be a pretty raw rock record," said Mad Oak proprietor (and Antler frontman) Craig Riggs, an old friend of the Spider man, just before the band arrived. In other news: Antler failed to advance to the Rumble semifinals. So how many Rumbles has Riggs been in now? "It could be five. I’ve decided I don’t want to win it, I just want to be in as many as possible. My goal is 10." Local anarchist/street punks Disaster Strikes have signed to Jello Biafra’s legendary Alternative Tentacles label, where they’ll join a roster that includes fellow Boston icon Howard Zinn (word to the crust: don’t bother checking for his patches at Newbury Comics). . . . In reunion news: on the heels of the Merge re-release of their back catalogue, Dinosaur Jr. announced a summer tour that brings the proto-grunge trio to Avalon on July 15. And the Pixies confirmed their own summer tour, but as yet there’s no Boston date: closest is Long Island on June 14, though "more dates" are promised. . . . Sox hurler Bronson Arroyo has firmed up a release date for his rock debut, Covering the Bases, a grunge-hits cover album; it’s due out July 12. . . . And Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joey Kramer are scheduled to be special guests at the annual Music for Middlesex benefit May 14 at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford; visit www.ticketweb.com for tickets. Chris Rucker is the host of New England Product, which airs Sundays from 9 to 10 p.m. on WFNX 101.7 FM.
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