Alright, first things first. Who are you, and what is the story behind The Catalyst? My name is Eric Smith, and I play the guitar and sing, or what have you. We started out in December of 2002, with Kevin Broderick playing the drums, and Nate Prusinski on the bass guitar. I had decided to move from Richmond to Northern Virginia for no good reason whatsoever. I drank way too much at my going-away party, and still insisted on leaving that night—Kevin gave me a ride up there and just never found a ride back, but he was living under the stairs in someone’s basement at the time, so I think he was OK with it. Kevin had tried out for Nate’s old pop-punk band back in the late 90’s, and I guess they kept in touch. Having noticed that we didn’t have any other friends, and we each played the respective instruments of the classic power trio, we began kicking out the jams in earnest. What began as us hammering out some terrible sappy pop songs on acoustic guitars in my bedroom turned into terrible sappy electric pop songs in our friends’ basement, which frustrated the fuck out of us. But it planted seeds for the noisy mess of a band we are today. At the time we lived in this comically tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, about 15 miles from Washington, DC. At times there were six or seven of us living in this little apartment, but it was kind of all we had. Fairfax was a brutal place to live, for a bunch of 21-year-olds. In the meantime, we bought a van, recorded a demo, and in the summer of 2003, we went out on a disas-tour of epic proportions, after playing only two shows. A total cliché, I know, but we just had to get the fuck out of there. We came back a completely different band. We scrapped most of our songs, wrote a bunch of new ones, recorded two more demos, and in the winter of ‘04, finally started playing out in DC. In the spring of 2004, we culled the best tracks from our three recording sessions and released the “A Hospital Visit”
EP on the now-defunct McCarthyism Records. That summer, we set out on a slightly-lessdisastrous tour, playing 22 shows in six weeks, and somehow managing to get all the way to the west coast and back. The last few shows of that tour were with a band from Delaware called Take Down Your Art, whose drummer was a skinny, dreadlocked kid named Jamie Faulstich, and we all became fast friends. By June of 2005, we’d had just about enough of Fairfax, and the seven of us that were living in our one-bedroom descended on this massive, eight-bedroom punk dream house back in Richmond, and invited Jamie to move in with us, and become our second guitarist. We started jamming in our new basement three or four nights a week, and though we didn’t really plan on it, we set up a second drum kit one night and it clicked right away. Since then, he’s divided his time more or less equally between the two instruments. Nate quit the band in the middle of a tour we did in October of 2005, he had some sort of weird quarter-life crisis. I’ll spare you the details, but rest assured, it was fucking WEIRD. Michael Backus worked with me at Taco Bell when we were 15, and became our bassist in December of 2005, after we saw his band one night, and drunkenly cornered him and demanded he buy a bigger amp. Over the next 18 months we would record the split LP with Mass Movement of the Moth, the Freak Out the Squares cassette, and the Marianas Trench EP, tour the USA once and the East Coast like a hundred times. Jamie left the band for eight months in 2007-08 to live in Buenos Aires. We recorded the split 7” with Brainworms, toured with a different drummer, and toured Europe as a trio. As of three days ago, Jamie’s back playing shows with us.
Marianas Trench, but unlike most punk/ hardcore bands who sound different because of an amateurish earlier effort, you sound like you’ve just stepped out of one suit and into another.
Apart from a few telling aspects, Freak Out The Squares sounds almost like a completely different band than the one who put out
It was pretty generous of you guys to include the tracks from your splits with Mass Movement of the Moth and Brainworms on the CD version of Mariana’s Trench, especially considering that the initial releases aren’t even out of print. What was the main reasoning behind that?
C—Dan Cohoon
We didn’t think we were going to release that Freak Out The Squares session when we recorded it, but I’m glad that we did. The nature of that recording session caught us a little bit off guard. We recorded everything live, in one small room, like we were playing a show to a bunch of microphones. I think we had no idea what we actually sounded like, all of our previous recordings had this real slick, highly compressed production value to them, but that’s not what we sound like at all. All of us have pretty diverse taste in music, barely any of which lands on the same radar screen as what we sound like. If anything, the influences we’ve been encountering since then come from each other, becoming more comfortable with each other’s style, and timing, better understanding what’s going to sound the best when we each bring our own influences to the table. We got into this for the same reason I’m sure that a lot of people did; we’d be lost without it. It’s not like we have much else in our lives that’s worth mentioning, we’re all just wage slaves. When you have something that you believe in, something you’re passionate about, you can wake up in the morning and realize that you’re a day closer to some show, or some recording dates, or some tour, and it makes it worth it to you to get out of bed, go to work, make enough money to duct tape your equipment back together and pile into that van. I saw a movie recently, I can’t remember what it was called, but this one line stuck out to me: “I have to keep creating, or I’ll just die.” That pretty much sums it up.
I still think CDs are cool. You can play them in your car, you can put them on your hard drive, and once you find them under your desk after three years, and they’re unplayable, you can put them in the microwave for a few seconds and they, like, explode. The idea for the collection CD came about right before we left for the European tour, mainly because Mass Movement of the Moth had broken up and the chances of Two Thousand and Six Six Six getting any sort of repress were looking pretty slim. That’s the only one of the three records that had previously been released on CD, so it just made sense to get them all together 20
:: THE NEW SCHEME ::