Stavesacre's Debut
Don’t call these guys a supergroup, or else two of the larger members -- guitarist Jeff Bellew and bassist Dirk Lemmenes -- might give you a superwelt up the side of your head. It is true that it’s not every day that ex-members from three popular bands -- The Crucified, Focused, The Blamed -- come together to form a group. The debut album is super, but this isn’t a supergroup.
“We’re just a bunch of guys playing music,” says Dirk. “I don’t know what was so super about any of the bands we were in before.” These musicians are not taking their past laurels and banking on them to bring in cash. Their former groups, predominantly of the hardcore variety, have little to do with the current direction Stavesacre is going in. “I don’t want people to think we’re gonna sound like The Crucified, but I also don’t want people to think that we sound anything like the Cornerstone show we played last year,” laughs vocalist Mark Soloman. “That was awful!” (referring to a short set of the three Stavesacre demo songs performed prior to the Argyle Park/Circle of Dust set)
It’s humble beginnings like this that may keep these guys down to earth. Prior to this first show, and even prior to being an official band, the guys just got together to play. “It was just something fun to do,” admits Jeff. “(A band) just wasn’t the plan at all. I’ve known Dirk for forever and a day. Obviously, we’ve known Mark for a while, and Mark was roommates with Jeremy for a while. It was just a mutual friend thing. We decided to just get together and make some punk rock. And, after playing together once, we just thought it would be more fun to do something a little more challenging. After the first couple times (they dropped the first tune they wrote), I think it really started to click that there was some special chemistry.”
“I agree,” says Dirk. “Jeff used to babysit me when I was kid. We’ve gone to church together, and I’ve known him forever, and he’s the one who kinda got me involved in music. We’ve always talked about doing a band, and it just never seemed to fall together, and then when he moved away to play in the Crucified, it kind of hindered the whole band thing. And then I was in Focused. Mark and Jeremy and I were just friends who decided to play music together. Me and Jeff kind of have similar tastes in music.”
“And we’re bigger than Mark and Jeremy,” says Jeff, “so we just forced our opinions on them (laughter).” According to Mark, the tune “Suffocate Me” was the first tune where things really clicked. “When that was going on, the whole time, we were like, ‘Well Lord, whatever You want.’ We all had peace in our hearts about it. I don’t have constantly anything in the back of my mind, saying, ‘Slow down,’ or whatever. We’re just kind of taking things at whatever pace that God provides, and whatever pace that we can manage. We’re just praying that He would lead us, and show us the difference between the two. People kind of tend to have a little more energy, sometimes, than God intended. I really knew, I think, that things were kind of rollin’ when we finished that one song, and were kind of settled into a place to practice, things just started rollin’ from there.”
It’s cool to see a band form with no agenda and then to create music that wasn’t bound by prior expectations. “We knew what we didn’t want to do,” says Mark, “and we knew some of an idea of what we did want to do. And we just sort of tried to work to balance it out and get it to a place where we felt comfortable with the music that we were playing and writing. There are definitely influences, you know, but I would say that we wanted to try to come up with our own sound. Not to sound like all deep and revolutionary, or anything like that . . . but, when people compare it, they might compare one song to somebody; but, as a whole, we wanted to go for something that people couldn’t listen to the album and go, ‘Oh, these guys sound just like so & so.’ We purposed to stay away from that, but stay within the kind of stuff that we like.
“There’s like a soft side to it, and there’s a hard side. I’m 26. I’ve been playing music since I was 15. I’m not into screaming and yelling every five seconds and running around. I want to see if there are other emotions that are available to the music that we play. We didn’t try to go, ‘Okay, what’s gonna please the Crucified fans? What’s gonna please the Focused fans, or the Blamed fans.’ It was just like, ‘We’re really not too concerned about it. We’ll do what feels right, and God, bless us whatever way You want to.’ If the Crucified fans like it, that’s great, and if not, there is like 1,000 other bands that sound like the kind of stuff that they want to hear, so they can listen to them. And there’s some pretty good bands that are doing it.”
“This is one of the first bands that I’ve been in that has written a lot of the songs by just jamming together,” explains Jeff, “one guy’ll just spill out an idea and start playing. A lot of the early songs were done that way. I just love that.”
“It wasn’t like The Crucified, or Focused, or The Blamed,” adds drummer Jeremy Moffett, “with expectations of a certain sound, like, ‘Okay, we’ve gotta have a fast part here. We gotta make this hard,’ and stuff. One of our songs, ‘Burning Clean’ -- Dirk wrote that song 3 or 4 years ago, or something. All our songs, like our taste in music now, has been stuff that’s really been in our hearts to write and play. We’ve finally been able to start writing and playing.”
“There were definitely no expectations,” adds Jeff. “Like, on the harder stuff on the album, all the way to the soft, there was never like, ‘Do you think this part’s too mellow?’ or something. It was like, ‘Great! If you like it, it’s beautiful.’ It just kinda came out, and I think the album just has a wider range than a lot of the projects that a lot of us have been involved in so far.”
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