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Music

We Asked This Band What Their Deal Is

"Obviously just taking an instant look at us, it’s shocking enough."

Let us all take a minute to give the above photo of the band Salems Lott a good, hard gander. Gaze into their eyelinered eyes, get lost in their hair as it reaches desperately towards the heavens, and ask yourself: What the fuck is their deal?

Why would a band choose to look like this? I don’t mean in the sense that I am SO SHOCKED that the mere sight of their craaaaazy get-ups caused me to drop my monocle and shield a small child’s eyes and ears. I mean the opposite—tons of bands have done this glam-trash metal schtick from the Motley Crüe types of the 80s to modern abominations like Black Veil Brides. Any “shock” value this look may have once yielded has been drained of all its effect and left something laughable in its place. So why do bands keep doing it?

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Generally, I don’t care enough to want a legitimate answer to this question. Like most people, 99.9999999 percent of the time I will see a photo of a band like this and skip right past them (and will continue to do so, so please for the love of god do not contact me about your goofy costume band), but for some reason, this photo of Salems Lott found its way into my inbox and I stared at it like Cameron in front of the painting in Ferris Bueller. Then I fell down the hairsprayed internet rabbit hole and learned some things.

A bit of info about Salems Lott:

–They look like the above.
–They have been banned from the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip twice. (Although when I contacted the venue, a representative said: “I do know that the band did throw a stink bomb into the crowd during their set, which I'm sure at least one of our staff let them know wasn't the greatest idea ever, but no one ever banned them from the club.”)
–Their website contains the following description: “Salems Lott is the ultimate antithesis to the ever so tame ‘Modern’ Rock scene.”
–They have a member named Tony F. Corpse although I do not know what the F stands for.
–They have a new video for their song “S.S. (Sonic Shock)” which they said we could show you (below).

So for no other reason than I wanted to know what the fuck this band’s deal was, I talked with singer/guitarist Jett Black on the phone about what exactly their deal is. You may watch their video below if you dare.

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Noisey: So, like, what’s your deal?
Jett Black: Well basically Salems Lott is a project in the sense that it’s trying to embody the band that we never saw on stage. We’re trying to mix aggression, speed, power, and we’re trying to mix it in a way that people haven’t seen it before. You’ll notice that there’s a strong visual aspect as well.

I did notice that.
Yeah, and we thought that the visuals have never really been mixed with heavier, aggressive music with shock antics, strong performance, and good musicians all around.

What would you say is shocking about Salems Lott?
Obviously just taking an instant look at us, it’s shocking enough. We’re trying to embody what we see as power and aggression. So having hair to the sky is like looking like a lion. So to us, it’s to portray some kind of intensity that portrays the expression from the music. And on stage, we’ve done a few things, we got banned from the Viper Room, there was some pyro, cow tongues, there’s a few things I can’t really talk about because some people are pretty pissed off at us about it. But there’s some things we brought out on stage, usually animal parts. It’s all just kind of to get people’s reaction and to prod, to push the boundaries. We’ve noticed that we’re in a state of mind socially and in the musical world where everything’s very tame. Everything’s very apologetic. We’re doing everything to push out of that kind of attitude. It’s not just antics being done on purpose because we’re trying to entertain.

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What does it take to shock people in 2015?
Honestly I don’t think it takes much because I think we live in a generation that’s very apologetic. I mean, you say one wrong thing and everyone’s up in arms about it. At the same time, people have, in a sense, seen it all. So they’re really numb to it, but they get offended real easily so it’s a double-edged sword.

Do people get into Salems Lott ironically?
No, most people who get into it, there’s no irony. People are glad to see a band doing these visuals with no tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, you have that nowaways where people are more comfortable with a band that has visual aspects if it’s done ironically or sarcastic. But I think that people who get it and are into this band don’t see the sarcasm and are appreciative for it, because there isn’t any. We’re not trying to be a joke, we’re not trying to be a parody. We take ourselves seriously, but we can take jokes ourselves. We’re not stuck up. But at the same time, we want to portray that it doesn’t have to be a joke because you’re adding visuals. I think when people want to associate it with a joke, it stems from them being slightly uncomfortable, maybe unconfident. I think throughout the years, the media’s done a good job of attacking visual bands. It’s hard for us to accept it, in a way.

What artists shock you?
We kind of take from all walks of life. We’re not biased. We like everything from the poppiest stuff to the heaviest stuff, the most brutal stuff. There’s Alice Cooper but also stuff that we’ve kind of mixed and update in our own way and push it forward.

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How did you decide on your look? Did you all happen to dress like that and find each other or is that a conscious look that you all decided on together?
It’s kind of a bit of both. All of us came from different backgrounds. We all had an idea of what we wanted to look like. We wanted to play powerful music that was aggressive, and we wanted to be with musicians who knew how to play their instruments. At the same time, the visual aspect embodied each different character in the band. Not a character in that we’re acting, but more just that person’s personality. So everyone came up with their own look and it came together cohesively.

How long does it take you to get ready?
It does take a bit of time, mostly the hair takes the longest. I’d say it takes anywhere between two to three hours.

Do you put too much emphasis on the look over the music? In that two to three hours, you could’ve been writing music.
In those two to three hours, we’re not sitting at home and practicing how to put on our makeup or make our hair bigger. That’s two to three hours before we go on stage and before that, we’re practicing or warming up for six to eight hours. The visual aspects, the theory I use is it’s like a cherry on top. You don’t complain about a sundae that you get with a cherry on top of it. The sundae still tastes good all the same. If you don’t like the cherry, you kind of take it off, you put it on the side, but no one sits there and complains the whole time. There’s not that much effort put into the cherry. Those two to three hours, yeah we get ready, because we want people to have a whole performance.

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Can you have the music without the look?
Yeah of course we could but in this day and age, we want to prod. We want to grab people’s attention. Would we be able to go without the look? Yeah, because if everybody else had a look, we’d do the complete opposite. We’d go without a look. We just don’t want to do what everyone else is doing.

Do you think the look Salems Lott uses is wholly unique?
Well, obviously, there’s aspects that we take from bands we’re influenced by. It’s not hard to see what. But that’s how everybody starts. I could go on to name a bunch of bands, like Alice Cooper took from Arthur Brown, I can give you a whole list of bands. But we’re not taking from those bands, we’re trying to update it, we’re trying to push it forward. You don’t want to look a certain way and then sound exactly as people expect you.

What if you guys looked like that and played hip-hop?
Yeah, that would be extremely interesting. I wouldn’t do the hip-hop thing because that’s not music we’re influenced from. But if I saw that, I would respect that. Because I respect artists from any walk of any genre. We’re not close-minded. We’re not elitists. I would respect them for taking something and putting a twist on it, not what you’d expect. For me, in the rock world, it’s become a little repetitive.

You’ve gotten banned from the Viper Room twice?
Yeah.

Well, they didn’t do a very good job of banning you if you played a second time.
The first time, I can’t speak too much about the first time, but they basically just took a look at us and said we can’t ever play there. The second time, it was on the metal sites and stuff like that. Monroe was there cutting up a cow tongue and throwing it into the audience. There was some pyro we were letting off, some smoke bombs. It’s sounds excessive and it was pretty excessive.

What are you like outside the band?
All of us have a pissed off, really angry attitude. We’re angry, young, and poor, so we’re doing what we want to do on stage. And that’s how we are in our real life, too. There’s fights, there’s problems, there’s all sorts of stuff, there’s drinking, there’s issues of going to clubs and getting kicked out, that’s in our own time. It has nothing to do with the band. Some people know of us based on how we act normally. We’re not faking it. You see the image and it’s crazy and bombastic and that’s how we are as people. Before filming our last music video, I remember Tony coming in with a bloody nose because he got in a fight at one of the bars outside and a bunch of guys started punching him in the face and hitting him on the ground and he spat blood in their face. That’s just one example. I could keep going but I don’t want to be too cliché.

Dan Ozzi is on Twitter - @danozzi

If you'd also like to fall down the Salems Lott hole, they are on Facebook and YouTube and you can catch them live:

Sep 30 w/ Marty Friedman @ Whisky A Go Go
Oct 26 w/ Loudness @ Whisky A Go Go