The Outfit, rocks. Seriously. These guys out of Chicago are making rock and roll the old fashioned way. Straight forward rock songs with no tricks. Just super hooky guitars, melodic bass lines, acoustic drums and vocals that soar right off of the record. For guys making music by the old way of doing things, they are refreshing in this day and age of drum replacements and assisted vocals on pretty much every word.
I asked drummer Mark Nawara about this approach to making music for the band. I mentioned that the band seems to say: Hey man, this is rock and roll, this is what we do. Nawara tells Sound Vapors, “Yeah that’s kind of like our attitude. We’re getting back to the basics of rock and roll and nothing really complicated. Just in your face, aggressive guitars, drums and vocals. I mean, pretty simple. Trying to write songs that are simple and yet have substance to them.” Sometimes less is more but I don’t want to lead you to thinking these guys are just putting out easy made songs. Less crowded is not the same as being easy.
So while they’ve created an album that is less in terms of studio tricks, they’ve also written and recorded ten songs that give you more and more, the deeper you get into them. The first track is a song called Come Alive. This one grabbed my attention right away and I wondered if this was the choice to be the first single, all along. Mark says, “We were writing all of these songs for the record and Come Alive happened to be the last song. We were like, come on guys we’ve got nine songs and need one more. So we were scrambling because we wanted to get the album out.”
He continues, “We didn’t think at all, that would be the single. We just went in and recorded it. Once it came back, we were like, Holy shit! :laughs: It’s weird, it was the last song that we wrote and we were just trying to finish up the album. There are other songs that are really good and probably thought would be the single but when it came back it just hit me: Wow this is really good. I was playing it in the house and my wife heard it said, what’s that song – that’s really good.” I always say, the first listen or reaction is one of the most valuable things when you are putting a record together. I had the same reaction as Mark’s wife. My initial listen had me thinking – wow this is really good.
I wanted to know more about the band and I wanted to confirm that guitarist, Matt, is Mark’s brother. He tells me, “Yeah, Matt’s my brother. We’ve been playing together for a lot of years in different Chicago project and different things. We work well together. Then we’ve got a gentleman by the name of Mike Gorman who is probably, in my opinion one of the best bass players in the city of Chicago. He’s a great guy to play with. He’s just so locked into the drums. It’s just amazing, I think he drives a lot of the songs. Andy Mitchell is our singer and he plays guitar as well. I think he has a really good voice. I don’t like to compare him to anyone else, it just sounds different than anybody else that I can think of.” The band really does have a great mix of musicians and it shines through on the record. Their album ‘Viking’ comes out on March 27, 2020 via Pavement Records.
You can hear my entire conversation with Mark Nawara by clicking on the link to your favorite place to listen to podcasts or you can click on the YouTube video to watch and listen. Don’t forget to subscribe!
-Tommy Marz
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