Sun June 27, Fun House, 9:30 pm, $5.
"I think as a kid growing up in a small town, you're looking for total obliteration," says Coady Willis, the brick-fisted drummer for the gigantic-sounding Seattle twosome Big Business. We're sitting in the Canterbury and after a couple drinks he's reaching back to that magic moment in time when you discover a band that throws your entire childhood record collection on the bonfire and sets you aflame in a whole new musical direction. "The Melvins, and music like that, was [perfect for] when I just wanted something that killed, that made it so I couldn't think anymore and that just crushed me. I think that was the appeal for me. Short of doing something stupid, that was the ultimate escape, hearing something that was that dark and fucked-up and awesome."
After years of playing in various bands, Willis (Murder City Devils, Dead Low Tide, Broadcast Oblivion) and bassist Jared Warren (Karp, Tight Bros from Way Back When, the Whip) have arrived together at a sound that, while not yet as complex and experimentally fucked as the Melvins, still produces necessary amounts of obliteration. (Which Big Business were able to expose other Melvins fans to when the duo opened for their heroes back in March, a show at which one ecstatic--yet broke--new fan even tried to trade mini airline-sized bottles of booze for the Big Business EP.) Together they generate music that resonates heavy and below the belt, like an oversized motorcycle idling inside your bedroom, thundering towers of loaded shelves to the ground.
A large part of the vertiginous rumble comes from Warren's bass. Inspired by the Boner Records catalog (the Melvins, Steel Pole Bathtub), he spent years investing in a simple plan of purchasing "crappy amps and lots of them, and turning them up loud," a trial-and-error process that includes tuning extra low for certain songs. In this current musical incarnation the entire band is the rhythm section, and Warren's aesthetic is impossible to miss. "I just want to keep playing loud and crazy music," he explains. "[This band] is basically the same old vision with a new focus on keeping things together--none of us acting crazy or having a drug habit or whatever. I've also always thought it's way more important to have personal chemistry than musical chemistry--of course they're both important, though."
For a band that started with a phone call between Willis and Warren, the pair have chemistry to burn, finishing each others' thoughts and cracking jokes about the future of the Business (Warren wants to "start our own line of urban wear," while Willis quips that he plans to "release an instructional drumming video called Something Wicked This Way Drums"). When they get serious, Willis echoes Warren's optimistic sentiment, especially after watching his post-Murder City Devils groups start and stall. "I'm definitely striving to be in a band where I feel like we have the freedom to grow," he says. "One of the things I felt with [MCD] is that it became [where] people expected certain things of that band and everybody ended up outgrowing it. I'd love to be in a band that didn't have to be any certain kind of band, and I feel like this is just the beginning."
And this is the infancy stage of Big Business--albeit an impressive one. After playing together for seven months, they've released one EP (on W...ntage Records) and are beefing up their repertoire for the full-length they'll record in August. For a sampler, Big Business is one thick piece of meat. From the opening rev of "O.G." through the lumbering intro of "Off Off Broadway," the four songs texture titan instrumental work with Warren's gruff, classic-rock-style singing. It's not all one dissonant blast, either, as tracks like "Eis Hexe" build on actual hooks. Warren explains that, growing up in Olympia, he was surrounded by pop bands, from Karp on up, whose sensibilities worked their way into his music. "I like things to have balance and to have something you can bop your head to," he says, "like catchy choruses and really triumphant hooks and I'm not ashamed to borrow from that style at all. I think now with a two-person band especially, I have more of a responsibility to find things vocally that fill the gaps, and that's more where my pop sensibility is showing."
