Were you starting to think indie music had turned into a sick little kitten who always craps on everything? The crap is usually indie's latest sound, but you're always there, fetching paper towels to clean up.
Me too, until I heard Your Enemies Friends layin' it down right. The band plays with enough force to prematurely knock a fetus out of the womb. Your Enemies Friends writes songs that are heavy with accusation, anger and frenetic keyboards and guitars.
The Wildcat should consider itself fortunate for two reasons: the lead singer and guitarist of the band, Ronnie, sat on a bus before his show and gave us this interview. We weren't in New York with him freezing our asses off.
Wildcat: You guys are from the L.A. area right?
Ronnie: Yeah we're from L.A. We lived in Seattle for a while, you know, as a band. But we lived in Los Angeles before that, and after spending a year in Seattle, we moved back to L.A.
Wildcat: Why'd you come back?
Ronnie: We moved to Seattle because our old keyboardist, Aska, got married and had a baby, and we moved up there to see if this is gonna work. You know, can she have a family and be in the band at the same time? And it didn't, so we moved back down to California.
Wildcat: How is Your Enemies Friends unique when compared to similar music?
Ronnie: I think that's a pretty easy question to answer. It's unique in that it's personal to us. Anything that has a personal meaning or comes out in a context of being personal is automatically unique 'cause everybody's different.
Wildcat: I mean you could be compared to other bands, but you're saying your personal slant makes you completely unique from other bands?
Ronnie: Yeah, just like any band. I mean everything is gonna have similarities. There's like what ... 12 tones? We're kind of limited to the language of music, but inside of that context, we instinctively make noise so it's relative to us. Does that make sense at all?
Wildcat: Yeah, it actually does.
Ronnie: It's kind of a theory that I have about bands in general. A dividing line for me with bands is there's bands that just make noise to suit their ears, and then there's bands that sort of make noise to sound like other bands they like. I'm not saying that either one is better, but we do it to suit our ears, so that makes us unique.
Wildcat: How did you approach writing the songs for the new record?
Ronnie: In the way that we sat down and decide to write a record. Before, those were just the songs we had lying around. We went into the studio and thought, "Let's record them."
Wildcat: So was that tough to do, having that obligation over your head?
Ronnie: No man. That's like as tough as if you were really hungry and you wanted to make pizza. And how hard would it be to go into the kitchen and make a pizza? It wouldn't be very hard at all.
Wildcat: What really pisses you off about contemporary music?
Ronnie: I'm not gonna go on a rant about capitalism, but ·
Wildcat: No, go ahead.
Ronnie: I think that if you turned on the radio, or went to some clubs, you'll see capitalism in action. Stuff that's custom-tailored to sell. It's just shitty. It's so stupid, why would people waste their time? We're not making a product; we're just making noise. If people want to buy it, cool. It gives us an opportunity to keep doing it. If not, back to the garage.