They might be huge hockey fans, but these five Buffalo natives weren’t in town to catch a hockey game.
The hardcore outfit Every Time I Die stopped in Montreal last Tuesday night as part of their latest North American tour in support of Gutter Phenomenon, which was released on Ferret Records at the end of August.
It was evident that the quintet didn’t only have music on their minds. Halfway through their set the band noticed a fan with a Buffalo Sabres jersey floor punching in the crowd and the singer immediately acknowledged it. As soon as the song ended, the band’s frontman, Keith Buckley started talking about the Sabres had 3 and 0 record which was received with loud booing sounds. A fan quickly pointed out that Montreal also had a 3 and 0 record and the hockey discussion ended there.
The band played in front of a decent-sized crowd at Club Soda with It Dies Today, Haste The Day and Toronto-based band The Cancer Bats. Buckley said that the band is very excited about their new release because they’re finally able to play new songs something which he claims has added a new vibrancy to the band.
Until recently, the band had still been playing tracks off of their 2003 release Hot Damn!, which people considered to be a breakthrough for the band. Not so, Buckley said, the band just got lucky.
“We didn’t really know what we were doing and we were really unsure of everything but for some reason people liked it,” he said.
When it came time to work on new material, the band approached renowned producer Machine who had worked with bands such as Lamb Of God and Clutch before. The recording experience was loads of fun because “he’s just so into what he does and loves every second of it. He has no ego about him so that took a lot of pressure off,” said Buckley.
For this new record, Every Time I Die drew inspiration from older rock. “We were more interested in going back to when people were more sincere about the music rather than the look,” Buckley said. “You look at bands that have just all of a sudden flip-flopped, bands that went from being hardcore bands to now bands that are swaggering, pseudo metal bands like Avenged Sevenfold, and you know they had to have a band meeting where they were like: “Let’s wear make-up.” That, or one band member showed up with make-up and all the other guys were like “What are you doing?” and he’s like “I think we should do this because it’s cool!” For Buckley, a meeting discussing the direction of the band has always been out of the question.
Their discontent with the current music scene has definitely made it harder for Every Time I Die to choose bands to go out on tour with. “There are bands now that we don’t even want to be a part of. There are bands that we do want to be a part of that aren’t big that we’ll take out on tour,” said Buckley. “Though they might not bring an extra 600 hundred kids to the show, we’d rather be associated with them than suck it up and go on tour with bands like Finch or whoever.”
Buckley credits having spent the last little while on the road for improvements in the band’s music. He also said that over the years being on the road with the band has made them become a lot more jaded about everything.
“There’s a lot more conflict with people now. Before we were just very na
