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The Carp's Knock Your Block Off might be the politically charged rock 'n' roll album of the year, but don't worry, it's plenty of fun as well. This ripping collection of no-frills pro-union anthems is out on September 20th from Total Punk Records, and with its members made up of the Cleveland-based punks who've brought you Cruelster, Knowso, and Perverts Again, the talent bolstering this debut is clear. In the lead up to release day we talked to Nathan Ward, who not only wants you to support the album, but also his eight-year-old son's burgeoning art career.
What have you been up to lately? What have you been listening to, reading, or spending a lot of time doing?
Nathan Ward: I have a really demanding trucking job and kids and such so that is pretty much my whole life aside but I always stay busy working on creative projects and that kind of stuff. Actually me and the other drivers at my work just officially unionized a couple weeks ago after a tough three year stretch of trying. Teamsters Local 293! Truly one of the proudest accomplishments of my life. We are just starting to negotiate our first contract. Music stuff, I've been listening to I guess has mostly been Red Alert, Pogues, Blitz, Steely Dan, Chronophage, and I've been listening to this Redbar Scarsclub a ton. Currently reading The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. Mike (bass/vocals) is a carpenter and very busy doing that and he's doing things every day that I wish I could do. He just casually builds houses daily and never speaks of it. His aunt Linda once called him the least lazy person she knows. Jo (drums) is always doing a weekend tour of some kind and staying very active in punk all over the place, playing in a million bands. We're all in Cruelster and Perverts Again too and both of those bands have LPs coming out in the coming months so we've been busy.
No member of this band is a stranger to the punk world or each other, but how did this specific project get off the ground? Where did the name come from and what are some of your goals/inspirations?
We had a long stretch of inactivity with our bands when we were working on our TV show Little Lions Den. Me, Mike, and Jo have a really fast and easy approach where we can write songs extremely fast and intuitively with each other. We wrote and recorded like ten instrumental punk songs for the TV show. That was fun so then we just wanted to put something out because it had been so long since Cruelster or Pervs had done anything. We released a demo, played some shows, and then Erik Nervous asked if he could come to Cleveland and produce a record. So we wrote some more songs and it all came together really quick. We never really discussed a vision for this band but we knew we never really wanted to take it too seriously and I know I wanted to address some labor-organizing stuff in the lyrics. Maybe I am completely lost but it seems like the only ones still singing about unions directly are the Dropkick Murphys? Mike came up with the band name idea I think kind of based off the Hiroshima Carp baseball team. He saw them play in Japan! But it's also such a good allegory for worker power. Whenever you think of carp, you think of a million of them all clumped together crowding the water. They change ecosystems. Strength in numbers and all that kind of stuff. Mike's lyrics are all throughout this record too and he has a very slick surrealist approach that I love. I love when me and Mike get into this creative osmosis where we feed off of each other without even saying anything or having to discuss. He wrote some lyrics to some music I wrote and vice versa. This record was really all three of us combined which is cool for me at least. I'm not being cocky I just really like this part of making music with friends and we do make music that I like otherwise WTF. It scares me when bands don't like their own music. What are you in this for, then? Surely not CLOUT?
Knock Your Block Off is an absolutely killer debut of an album! What was the vision behind this collection of songs?
I can speak for my lyrics (as I said before, Mike wrote a lot of them too) but I wanted to address some issues I have with punk and art and labor and power structures. I think in some ways this is our most political record. We wanted them to be fun songs I think. I'm not against fast music or hardcore obviously but we just wanted to make a punk record. There are a lot of great fast bands in Cleveland but we wanted to keep doing what we like. I think we just dialed in different components from our other projects (Knowso, Cruelster, Perverts Again) and made something new out of it.
I'm particularly in awe of how good the cover art is from your son Newt! Can you tell us more about it? I've heard that artistic talent runs in the family...
Newt is my eight-year-old son and he is amazing and is drawing every day. He drew the cover of this album based off of these Pieter Bruegel drawings we were looking at and I love his take on it so much. The imagery just felt perfect for the record—fish, peasants, weird. He really wants to keep doing more, so if anyone wants a flyer or record cover that doesn't look like other stuff, let me know. It will be free and he would be very stoked. We don't believe in charging for art in my family. To anyone I have charged money in exchange for art in the past, I am sorry. Anyways, I am thankful Mike and Jo were down to have this be the album cover!
"Fairview Park Skins" was the first single off this album and an Ohio nod right off the bat! What’s the story behind this song?
We're all from Fairview Park, our hard-laced small town. It's really nothing, it's like a boring suburb. It's actually just considered Cleveland if you look in a phone book so I'm not sure why we have a mayor. Neighboring suburbs used to call it "Poorview" which is pretty epic. We were kind of the only people into this stuff in the whole town and played up that angle a lot. We started a band called the Riot Boys and started figuring out how to play real shows when we were 14 and got made fun of a lot. It definitely made us more insular and killed any kind of desire to impress the other punk bands in the Cleveland area and do our own stuff. I still don't care about the old heads but some of them are nice. This song is really just about leaving the town, living in the city for a while, but coming back totally changed mentally and kind of scarred from the things you go through in life. When I wrote the song I was still living in Cleveland, but me and my wife have since moved into a house in Fairview and it's been really nice! There is a lot of good ice cream in this town if anyone would like to know.
The layered vocals throughout the album, especially on "Fairview Park Skins" and "Oh No," are great. How did you achieve this sound and what was the recording process like overall?
I almost want to gatekeep this technique because we use it so much in all our bands but the layered vocals are just a high-pitched vocal (chipmunk/pinhead), a deep vocal (bopper), with a bit of offset reverb. Erik mixed this record so I definitely think he did something else to it because it sounds different than normal but yeah it gives it this weird layering that I am addicted to. The chipmunk vocal has been huge. One of my biggest influences in music is the outro of "Pinhead" by the Ramones. Recording this record was the easiest thing in the world. Erik Nervous drove from Kalamazoo or wherever and recorded all the music in a day at our practice spot. Maybe like six hours. He stayed with our friend/drummer of Knowso, Jayson Gerycz, because they both play in The Spits now which is insane. I like to name-drop that when possible. Me and Mike recorded our own vocals over the next few weeks and sent them to Erik and he mixed it. And then Will from Dead Air mastered it.
What's the significance behind the sample of Utah Phillips covering "Mr. Block" on "Dump The Bosses Off Your Back" and "Everyone I Know is a Snitch?"
I think I wanted to contextualize these songs and lyrics with voices from old-school anarchism because I think a lot of people end up taking our sort of absurdism at face value and miss some of the substance. Maybe that is by design, I don't know. And Joe Hill's songs are public domain and still so relevant. These old-school anarchists were so so badass. The song “Everyone I Know is a Snitch” is about my first experience (unsuccessfully) organizing a union at my job and the paranoia that comes with it. People get freaked out about standing up for themselves, they flip easily, they feed info to the wrong people, and at some points, it feels like the people who you talk to every day are also actively working against you. Dealing with the reality that it is much easier for people to fight on behalf of their oppressor than their own neighbor or themselves. Having the "Mr. Block" sample attached to these two songs kind of links these union-focused songs and punctuates the album a little bit maybe. "Mr. Block," it's such a good song I feel like it should be way more popular, that melody is just out of this world...
"Will You Be The Freak" is my favorite just for how tonally straightforward and raw it is; how did this track come to be?
This was actually the first one we wrote. This was supposed to be a Cruelster song. The lyrics are based off the movie Nightmare Alley (not the new one, EW!) where the main con man performer guy ends up being the "geek" at the end of the movie. The geek is the guy in the freak show who just bites off chicken heads for alcohol or pills and that kind of stuff. Like true primal exploitation. The song links the concept to modern politicians, these people who are really willing to be whatever the money tells them to be.
As the album's closer and its longest song, what was the process behind the spoken-word madness of "Folly?" The ending stab is particularly great.
Mike wrote this song almost completely in full, but I remember we wanted this to be a long song with some chattering over top. I just asked Mike about his lyrics specifically and he said it's about the common and relatable paranoia of restaurant staff hating you because you are fat and also making you more fat.
Anything else you want to say about this release? Might there be a tour on the way to support it?
We are really proud of this one! I love to make music with my best friends and I feel really lucky to do so. I'm really thankful and excited that Total Punk is putting this record out. I love Total Punk and have so much respect for Rich as a person. We worked with him in 2018 when he released Perverts Again's second album and he also did a Knowso 7" so he has always believed in our crew and I think it's really cool he's putting out this new and unfamiliar shit. Also thanks to Erik Nervous for coming out and recording it, otherwise I'm not sure if we ever would have done this. Also, this record is my wife Kaley's favorite music we have made and my son drew the album cover so it is cool and special. I don't know about touring, we are so fucking busy but we will try to do what we can! Thank you so much for the kind words and interview!
Knock Your Block Off is out September 20th on Total Punk Records.