Audioholic Media

For those of you whose music library is filled with music your friends make fun of you for liking, Colour Revolt is your safest bet at acquiring some street cred. The Mississippi natives’ first full-length album, Plunder, Beg, and Curse, is a solid rock album that sometimes catches itself being catchy but never cute.

Last month we invaded the band’s personal space to interview Jesse Coppenbarger and Patrick Addison (lead singer/guitarist and bassist, respectively) inside their van outside of Dante’s in Portland, Oregon.

The weather was hot and the inside of their band was no better. The entire experience was sweaty, and fun, and enlightening– not unlike their live show. [insert rimshot here]

Audioholic Media: I went to colourrevolt.com and the page is blank, but the title says there are some places some of us can’t face yet…. What does that mean?

Patrick Addison: It’s a lyric to a song but our website is not up because we’re in transition.

AM: Your sound, to me, is pretty difficult to categorize. When people place you within the Southern Rock genre, do you feel as if they’re looking more to your home base than your music to classify your sound?

PA: I think sometimes it’s easy to categorize it as Southern Rock but the music isn’t necessarily Southern Rock.

Jesse Coppenbarger: It isn’t like, Lynyrd Skynyrd or anything. Same amount of instruments, though– minus the piano. But geographically it’s correct.

AM: Right. When I listen to your music, I don’t hear any Lynyrd Skynyrd…

JC: There’s definitely influences we take from the South, but I mean, Lynyrd Skynyrd so much? Not really.

AM: With all of the sub-genres and hyphenates that have been created to define a band’s sound, do you feel like it hurts an artist’s marketability if a critic can’t place you within a specific genre?

PA: I don’t like critics because a lot of them don’t really, fully understand. I guess it could be their job to label you as something but they’re wrong a lot. We end up seeing a lot of different comparisons that don’t make sense, and I guess that’s because they don’t fully understand it.

AM: Do you ever have people who come to the show and say, “I was expecting dirty, sweaty Southern Rock–”

JC: That’s what it is, kind of.

PA: It’s definitely gritty, and sweaty, and scary, and confusing…

JC: But fun.

PA: Yeah, but fun and energetic.

JC: We have fun.

PA: I’ve never heard anybody complain about a show.

JC: You always hear complaints about sounds or equipment or something, but usually if people are gonna come up to you and say something–

PA: Yeah. Expectations have always seemed to be higher than what they expected, I guess– not to sound cocky. But of course that’s just what people say. I’m sure we’ve let people down.

JC: But they wouldn’t come up to you and say, “Man, that sucked. Guys, what the fuck?”

PA: I wish they would.

JC: Also, our full-length is live. Basically when we play the songs live, it sounds like the record so if people have the music and they’ve heard it… It’s not like we’re not accomplishing what the record is. It kinda just is what it is right now, and maybe in the future we’ll make records that we can’t play live– but I don’t foresee that.

AM: You have three guitars in Colour Revolt and each guitar seems to have a specific role that generates a deliberate sound on each track. Is it challenging for you to accomplish that when you write songs?

JC: I think everybody definitely has their own style. Jimmy is kinda the noise guy, Sean’s kinda the clean guy, and I’m kinda the middle man. But it’s not like one person writes all the parts, and it definitely gets hard. It’s hard anytime but sometimes it’s fraying having to play harder parts than you [usually] would. But definitely there are times when you’re writing a lot of parts and the other person’s writing a lot of parts and you have to like, cut out stuff.

PA: And for the record, specifically, a lot of that came out of necessity since we didn’t have a piano anymore.

JC: We kinda just wrote the album with what we had. The EP has a lot of like, keyboards, and samplers, and all kinds of stuff. We were basically reduced to the equipment that we had– touring equipment– so the album’s very accurate to what it is live.

AM: I’ve heard a lot of bands try the three guitar thing and it sometimes just sounds like sloppy noise.

PA: We definitely try to make sure it works and it’s not overdone. Everyone has their role, and if it’s not time to play, don’t play.

AM: The thing I think I like most about your band is that you write albums, not singles. If I want to listen to your music, I listen to the entire CD, not just one or two tracks. Is that something you strive for when you write?

PA: I think of it as a song-to-song thing, but I guess we try to keep it consistent.

JC: I think it has consistent themes and stuff like that, but this album in particular is very song-to-song based. The EP is as well, I guess.

AM: You all just graduated from college…

BOTH: Yes.

AM: Is this your first September on the road together?

PA: Pretty much, yeah.

JC: Unless there’s holidays–

PA: Yeah, Labor Day weekend I’m sure we did tours. We did a lot of weekend tours, but this is the first time we can actually go out.

AM: What did everyone major in?

PA: Me and Sean were both Psychology, Len was Art, Jimmy was English…

JC:: I was Social Work.

AM: Does it surprise many people that there are no music majors in the band?

PA: I’ve heard people say that but… it’s different.

AM: It seems as if it might make music more of a mathematical thing than an art for some people.

JC: That’s definitely what I was scared of. There’s a blues program at Ole Miss. but there’s not really– I mean, if you could sit down and be taught by like, sweet blues players, then I would definitely major in that.

PA: Being technically right isn’t always the best thing.

AM: It seems that there’s kind of a pre-conceived image that comes with a certain amount of recognition as a band, particularly after touring with Brand New or playing SXSW and Lollapalooza. Was it ever difficult to find the balance between that and just being nomal college students?

PA: It was a complete balance all-around. I mean, you’re in a band, and you’re having to write papers in the van and read and do work on weekends, you know, leaving on a Friday for New York and having to be back in Mississippi on Monday for school. It’s a complete balance.

AM: Was there ever a point where you’d go back to school on Monday and your classmates would be excited about the fact that you’re Colour Revolt?

JC: No, definitely not. We just saw it as like, a vacation from school. I mean, for a long time it was work but you’re also being able to hang out with your friends in a band and play music for a weekend. In terms of image and stuff like that, it’s such a small town that we know so many people. My professors were really into that kind of stuff like, “Oh, you’re in a band?!” But there are so many bands around Oxford that we know everybody and all the band people know us, and it’s all kind of interwoven between school and living in a small town together. You know basically everybody and everybody kinda knows who you are.

PA: There, we’re just Patrick and Jess. Our hometown paper got our picture wrong for our CD release. They put a picture of Brand New and said it was Colour Revolt. [laughs] So they don’t care too much. [laughs]

AM: What is being said at the end of the song “What Will Come Of Us?”?

JC: That is in reverse and it’s me talking to Clay about Len’s drum track. I was saying, “Len’s droppin’ it. He’s droppin’ that shit.” It sounds awesome. You know… I don’t know.

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Colour Revolt’s Plunder, Beg, and Curse is currently available through Fat Possum Records as well as iTunes.
Visit Colour Revolt on MySpace at myspace.com/colourrevolt.