Faux Ferocious gets real serious with self-releases

Faux Ferocious

KNOXVILLE — Faux Ferocious was once among Knoxville’s most frequent local performers, playing two or more shows a week at the same handful of venues. And the band’s recent move to Nashville has kept it close enough to still schedule more shows than the average resident act. But with a new self-styled label and some unconventional releases in mind, it appears the group’s focus may have finally shifted to the bigger picture, though with Faux Ferocious, even an enlarged picture remains pretty blurry.

Touting its double hometown system, staticky homemade recordings and strange media of delivery, Faux Ferocious is the Kramer of bands. Scatterbrained yet ambitious, the deeper you dig, the more convoluted and unpredictable the motives and goals become. The band’s furious garage rock might be an ideal soundtrack for a surfing contest between Joey Ramone and Stephen Malkmus, a muffled bar fight in an envelope. Perhaps it is only fitting that the group’s home recordings be spatially constricted as the band simultaneously stretches its feet in the bigger pond of Nashville.

“We moved to Nashville primarily for a change of pace,” says guitarist/vocalist Jonathan Phillips. “But it was kind of a drag transplanting, looking for jobs, etc. Now we are settled and we have a nice little home studio in the house three of us live in, and we are going to launch a record label out of here. It has also been good to meet new bands and try to get on interesting bills. … Nashville has so much going on in the music scene. It’s a really stimulating place. You can go see a band like Pujol and hear awesome, original rock and roll, and you can go see some of the best western-swing in the world in the same night, about once a week. Going to see people play has never really appealed to me, but it is the best catalyst for writing music.

“We definitely don’t play as much in Knoxville anymore, but it’s nice to go back and see friends and play a show. It used to be that we were heavily oversaturating Knoxville, taking any show that came along. Now, though, we’ve got a base there and one in Nashville.”

With its second physical EP on the verge of release, Faux Ferocious is zealously presenting its newest demos online. The band has opted to release its 10 “studio quality” tracks incrementally in the form of three 7-inch vinyl EPs, each including a voucher to download the 10 newest tracks already available on FF’s website.

“We think it’s more exciting,” Phillips says. “Having a chance to do new cover art every time and have the release process again. Vinyl is more expensive, but we feel like CDs just aren’t as interesting. If people buy the vinyl, that’s something you hang on to, because the listening process is a lot more deliberate. We are only pressing 200.”

Only theoretical at this point, the Faux Ferocious-exclusive label cooked up by the band has already switched names from Sister Granny to Aloha Fridays. April 1 will tentatively mark the label’s first release as FF unveils its first of three EPs in “Brick Beater.” These releases may be the beginning of a perpetual cycle of self releases as the band has become self-sufficient and comfortable with its rough-around-the-edges, homemade recordings.

“The plan is to move into a more home-recording-centered method, where we’ll take the home-recorded tracks and have them mastered and then pressed, or to take these tapes from the home studio and use them as the base tracks in the real studio, so we can have control over some of the subtleties,” explains Phillips.

“The tapes are just what we want to make right now. They are coming easily, and I think they are more interesting than some of the more polished sounds we got in the studio. We never really cared for music that was too dressed up. If it’s guitar-driven, it doesn’t need any studio veneer. We have always been kind of frustrated after we get out of the studio, because we basically liquidated the money the band had earned, and in order to release it properly, we’d have to wait until we played some lucrative shows. This way we’ve got more control over the process, and it’s free.”

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