Until We Wake

Originally Published in The Front Magazine, Issue 1, October, 2004


Three nights a week, for two-and-a-half hours a rehearsal, the five boys from Until We Wake gather in the lower level of drummer CJ's home to knock out tracks that even its members have a hard time categorizing into one genre.

"We get bored really quickly," said bassist Daytron. "We're really scatter-brained, so our songs don't ever come out the same. We don't ever want to write the same song twice."

Collaborative influences include The Beatles, Faith No More and some of the more recently-developed metal. This progressive band comprises of lead-vocalist Mike, Pye as guitarist/keyboardist/sampler (all on foot pedals), guitarist Jon, self-taught drummer CJ and Daytron. The varied tastes mix uniformly into some very nontraditional song structures, eluding to a darker eclectic sound, which Mike has dubbed, "Post-prog-metal-emo-acid-electro-pop."

"It's ver spinal tap," said Mike, with a thick imitation Britich accent. "Back in the 80s, we were acoustic jazz, and now we're straight-up metal."

But hardcore metal bands wouldn't call these boys heavy metal.

"We're more of a soft-core metal band," said Mike.

Most comparable to At The Drive In, without the jazz or jamming, Unitil We Wake is constantly changing their style to suit their interests.

All five members say it's hard for their band to get booked because promoters are unsure of what to do with their sound. Too heavy for the mellow groups, not p[oppy enough to mesh wiht the electric pop-rock scene and too soft for the harder heavy metal, Until We Wake stands alone in their uniqueness.

"We don't write to fit in," said Jon. "We write to what's comfortable with us in the basement."

"We're more bad-asser that way," said Pye.

This affluent sound has since attracted a very diverse crowd of listeners - from electronic rockers to Emo-pop lovers and metal heads.

"We have a really well-rounded group of listeners," said Mike.

"We're very hardworking and persistent," said guitarist Jon, who, along with the rest of the band, spent every Friday for four months promoting their shows.

"We handed out 4,000 fliers for a show a few months ago and had 75-80 people show up," said Jon.

Along with fliers and word-of-mouth, the band has been in The Blasting Room, a local recording studio owned by Bill Stevenson, drummer of Black Flag, Descendents of All, to create their upcoming release of Europa. This full-length LP "represents a year of growth for a band that set out to write a few good rock tunes and failed, producing instead some of the stranges and most challenging music any of us thought we would ever play."

Check out www.UntilWeWake.com for news, shows and more on the band.