Melbourne math-punk outfit DriveTime Commute make the kind of unrelenting, lead-heavy tracks that perfectly encapsulate the furious rage many of us feel brimming up inside us when stuck in traffic after a hard day’s work.
Their debut EP Bag Of Snakes is an accomplished first record from the group, and they tear through all five tracks in just 13 minutes. Still, there’s a bit to unpack in each intricately-composed track, so the band have run us through each of them below.
Having just supported Thy Art Is Murder last week, DriveTime Commute will be hammering away at the East Coast for an appropriately brief EP launch tour, dates below.
SHARKITECT
Probably the closest we have ever come to including what one may label as a recurring ‘chorus,’ we typically exercise a ‘no repeat’ rule. The intense raspiness of Roscoe’s vocals were achieve by holding me upside down during vocal takes.
Sharkitect lyrically describes a moment Roscoe (vocalist) experienced on a train. Parents are usually filled with joy by the gleeful tones of their much adored offspring – most of us on the other hand are not very thrilled with the wails of a child on a quiet, carriage of a rural train. Frustration ensues when the child’s parents could intervene but are too busy frothin’ for a fix.
SIR SEIZURE
Written prior to Roscoe and Dave (guitarist) joining the band, Sir Seizure was developed under the working title of ‘Adventure Time’ right up until it was recorded.
Sir Seizure is an ode to those people you encounter who proceed to shovel you all this shit they think they’ve painted for their future. Concrete ideas of what they want to do, where they want to go, and how to get there – but every time they remerge from their desolate reality bubble they inhabit, sure enough there’s still – no new job, no new house, and realistically no new progress.
CHUM FISTS
Chum Fists is a loveless spawn of two separate tracks smashed mercilessly into each other by Max our drummer, emerging as our most complicated song to date. This particular song took months to learn to play as a band. The idea of recording it seemed so far-fetched at the time, that to hear it on the EP now still blows our minds.
It’s about those chronic fibbers – those kind of shitty, but kind of not bad dudes that we don’t know if they’re aware, but they are constantly caught out compulsively lying – all the while, no one knows if we should say anything. In a way, it’s funny to watch. Those fabled, laughable, yet mind-numbing one-uppers – they’re damn sure to try and better anything you even subconsciously think.
MILLIONS
Guitars feature heavily in Millions. Our drummer Max wrote a number of the melodic guitar lines in this track, not considering that some guitar parts could not actually be played by human hands. Even after adaptation, this song has some of the most difficult guitar work on the EP.
Millions point blank is how shit we are – how the human race is the plague of planet Earth. Our exhaustion and destruction of the world, which we greet with deplorable acts of discrimination against class, race, religion, or values.
We take and take, further depleting funds and resources, creating an enormous gap between rich and poor, fucking the Earth not only for ourselves, but for all those that inhabit it.
GENGHIS KHAN’T
This is the song that almost always finishes our live shows. Quite possibly the only thing that is a surety during our sets.
Genghis Khan’t references a Family Guy episode when Stewie Griffin has to stay in a bubble. Think; now you are Stewie Griffin – you are in the bubble, but your bubble isn’t the outside world as he knows it, yours is much more broad.
Your outside is the messages being projected onto you, around you and consuming you. It is the terror instilling messages of hatred and of what we do not understand, trapping each of us in our own little, socially assigned bubble.
DriveTime Commute Tour Dates
Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle (NSW) – 27th August
RAD Bar (AA), Wollongong (NSW) – 28th August
Wick Studios, Brunswick (VIC) – 3rd September
