Balms
Bay Area’s beloved Balms live; photographed by Colin.
You might remember our introduction to San Francisco’s Balms a few years back with our coverage of their EP and today we are proud to present a first listen to their new single “Nothing In” featured off their upcoming debut album to be released TBD later in 2017. Recorded with Jack Shirley at the Atomic Garden that has helped many of the Bay’s biggest heavies where the group has sharpened their chord clusters from dream machines to blazing cold concrete walls with a cinder block sort of sound. Jared from the band talked to us about how the new album departed from their previous dream pop aesthetic to embrace a heavy indie approach that indicates shifts in all directions. Dabbling into the Carl Jung schools of thought, Jared described their attention pivot to what he referred to as, “lyrically focusing on the “Shadow Aspect” of the soul. Heavy & visceral, dug deep free associative style writing.” Balms trio of Jared, John & Michael progress toward highlighting the subtext of matters where the inner-workings of the theater that extends behind & beyond the stage wings sees the group maturing toward mystic explorations of their own arts.
“Nothing In” is the no money down, no love lost, nothing to lose sort of free-fall into the cascading abandon of oblivion. Balms trade the frankincense & myrrh for a cryptic cavalcade of grueling & grating guitars that cast all melodic proportions up into the stratosphere like an electric storm. Balms move from their role as dream weavers to composing psychological soundtracks that bridge dissonant portrait composites of self-expression with an entertaining of ethereal experimentation that reaches toward something both mysterious & unknown. “Nothing In” is an attempt to shed the material conceits for something that feels both transcendental yet grounded where the space between earth & the cosmos is compounded & understood from the narrative of the shadow self. Read our recent interview with the Balms that details both the single & the making of their forthcoming album.
Describe how you felt Balms has grown together as a group from your EP to the upcoming debut LP.
Jared: I think we learned a lot about each other through the full process of putting out the EP—writing, recording and mixing ourselves, self-releasing onto vinyl, touring, seeing the whole process in this band together. For this LP, the writing started out as kind of an anti-EP writing process—I wanted to slow everything down, let parts of songs trail on for awhile, just generally give songs more time to breathe. As a result, we spent a lot of time jamming—and I’m really thankful to Mike and John for letting us kind of endlessly go down that rabbit hole for awhile. And that’s where I think we grew the most—it required a lot of trust for us to just spend a big chunk of time without a real direction or idea of what we were making.
The good news is, after a lot of work and at times disagreements/confusion as to whether this material was even good or going anywhere, we ended up with an album. And something I am really very proud of—maybe the most proud of.
Michael: We are a band built on compromise.
What has changed for you in your approach to harnessing the sounds you are looking for when recording?
Jared: Going into the decision to record this album, I recognized that we wouldn’t be able to pull off the scope/power that I wanted to capture by recording it ourselves. Or if we wanted to try, it would probably take forever and even then maybe not get accomplished. So we committed to trying to work with a pro to record the album—and who else other than the powerful Jack Shirley at the Atomic Garden Studio—known for his work recording Sunbather by Deafheaven, King Woman, Loma Prieta, Comadre, and an endless myriad of Bay Area punk/hardcore/indie. I felt strongly early on that he would be the best person to work with on this material because his setup caters to recording live and making it huge/visceral, so we went in and spent two days recording “Nothing In” and another song in June to kind of test it out and see if everything worked in his space. It did—it went great, so we decided to make the album with him. The main sound I was interested in harnessing for this record was the organic chemistry/heaviness of us playing together in a room.
What currently is exciting about SF & surrounding Bay at large right now?
Jared: I think Oakland continues to be the incubator of really great music and art and over all shows/hanging out right now. Its great to see a new era of musicians and artists making work that is dealing with this insane time that we are living in, especially the amount of outreach that’s happening in light of current events. So many bands/artists are popping up doing donation shows for all kinds of great non-profits, supporting the Dakota pipeline protesters, etc. The Bay Area continues to be filled with rad people that stay involved and informed and do something cool about it, no matter how small.
Balms recording at The Atomic Garden with Jack Shirley; photographed by Georges Pierre Monceaux.
Give us stories about the making of your new album.
Jared: One time we had a show at 924 Gilman with some rad local bands including Plush and Wander, and we had just started writing the new songs to this album and I remember John and I really wanted to play one of the dronier/heavier songs we had just started working on but we had basically only written one part to the song, and it had no structure, but we still decided to play it against Mike’s better judgement. Needless-to-say it was really bad and I remember knowing it was bad but deciding that it had to happen so just kind of enjoying it. The song is called “Sword”, and after many iterations and a lot of work, it’s become one of the most seminal songs on the album, and one of the best songs we’ve written as a band.
Michael: Recording the album was actually the easy part, the year we spent songwriting was by far the most difficult part of the process. During the course of making the album, the band experienced approximately 121 disputes, 57 arguments, four potential break ups, and at the end Jared ended up in Tennessee somehow.
What sorts of experiences & inspirations informed “Nothing In”?
Jared: “Nothing In” was one of those songs that musically just kind of came out of us. We were jamming on something really slow and quiet one day and I wanted to play something heavy and short and simple to cleanse the palette. So I turned on all the distortion and started playing the chords and we just started playing. We stopped after awhile and just agreed that it was good, and it should be a song. Then we moved on, and at practice we’d jam it again and the lyrics kind of came slowly. I never finish lyrics until we are actually about to record the album, that way I have time to kind of let everything lyrically and thematically loop together—to make sense of everything. I discovered about half-way through writing the album that the material was kind of talking about my confrontation of the shadow-side of myself, what Jung called the “Shadow Aspect” of the soul. So “Nothing In” ended up being the introduction to this process—to the album’s narrative—but also kind of the end at the same time. It’s a release/reset song—the realest palette cleanser. Through acceptance of death (re: ego death)/the shadow/submission to who you are, being able to really see yourself for the first time—again and again—and start to work on stuff. So that’s what the album talks a lot about—and kind of changes perspectives of the self—shadow self talking to conscious self, past self talking to future self, etc.
Michael: We wrote “Nothing In” in five minutes at practice one day by accident.
Describe the current Balms creative process.
Jared: I touched on this earlier, but really the creative process starts with us jamming a lot and distilling the sound, then is informed by a direction that one of us or all of us feel it should go, then we jam more, rinse repeat. The final frosting is the concept side/lyrical theme side, which tends to be my domain.
Michael: We argue a lot then Jared gets his way.
What are you all listening to a lot of right now?
Jared: Chelsea Wolfe, Leonard Cohen, Modest Mouse “The Lonesome Crowded West”
Michael: Nickelback, Coldplay
Where do you all find yourself hanging out locally in SF, Oakland, etc these days?
Jared: I haven’t been hanging out in the bay area much these days because I’ve been on sabbatical in Tennessee! Before that, I was hanging out at the same spots—neighborhood bars in the Mission District, shows in SF and Oakland, etc. Mike hangs out at the Secret Alley a lot, which is a many-years-running underground rad workspace/radio/venue in the Mission. John lives by Lake Merritt in Oakland now and goes to a lot of shows.
Michael: Home.
2017 hopes/holiday survival plans?
Jared: Honestly I am pretty freaked out for January 2017 (re: politics), but I’ll be back in the bay spending time with family and friends to bring in the new year. Also, I’m pretty sure we will be doing final mixes on the album.
Michael: Finally releasing our record maybe? Star Wars.
Credits:
Jared is the romantic, Michael is the joker, and John is “the mean one” brooding silently in the corner throughout this interview.
Listen to more from Balms via Bandcamp.
