Treason so far has been the best and most memorable band I have been in, and hopefully stays that way long after we're done. Whether we're playing in front of 100+ Sidebar(n) goons, or pretty much being each other's only audience at Sinix with Nassau Chainsaw (sup' guys, hope some of you get to read this blog), I have yet to have a show with Treason where my blood isn't pumping at about 300bpm and I'm high as can be on adrenaline. When all the gears are turning, this band is nothing but fun, and that's what it's "supposed to be about" anyway, right?
Treason came about after the demise of Taken By Force. The last couple years of TBF were somewhat of a slowly revolving door of band members. I filled in on bass when my long time friend Pat couldn't make it up to a show in Cecil(tucky) County, and was eventually asked to join full time as Pat was busy with school and, at the time, the band Warpriest. I played two shows with them, one where I literally 100% improvised basslines to a new song I did not realize we were playing! After playing the End Of Year Bash at the Sidebar (which also included the last Harsh Truth set and one of the absolute best early Trapped Under Ice sets ever), Tony quit the guitar spot and we grabbed up Shaina to continue on. After only about 3 or so weeks with this lineup, Chris quit the vocal spot while we were all already on the way to practice. We took the final new song that our guitarist Dan had written for TBF and claimed it as our own, and instantly started looking for a singer. We tried out at least a dozen people, including Shon from VPR, Jack from Diamonds In The Rough/Plagueland, Tom Truth, our friends Milhouse, Joe, and Chad (sort of haha), Dee from Vemorrah, but settled on Dave Clark, formerly of Worlds Apart/Burning Season. We attempted to push away from the sound of TBF, and wrote songs pulling from influences like All Out War, Strife, Obituary, God Forbid, etc. After months of half-assed joke names like Man Down and Bear Trap (both of which incidentally are current bands who formed around the same time....wtf), we almost went with Silencer, but settled on Treason as we couldn't find any meaningful bands who had that name. We played 2 shows with Dave, one at Jersey Mike Fest 2008, and one with Mickey's Crew and No Redeeming Social Value. We began to record a practice space demo around October (good luck getting us to burn you a copy, it's a POS from hell), but in the midst of it, Dave got married and moved to St. Louis to take a baller job offer.
After a few months hiatus, we brought Doug.Fresh.One from Stout in on vocals to allow him to express some of his more interesting feelings, and developed our overall sound and human extinction/apocalypse theme from his early lyrics, which combined with Travis' infamous set of chimes, we dubbed "Hate Magic".
After a few well received shows, we took a patchy few weeks in mid-summer 2009 to record a 5 song demo with Joe Mitra of Wired Wrists Studio/Developing Nations. Since then we’ve gotten to play insanely memorable shows with a huge number of our favorite bands, and have been booked to open the latest Next Step Up reunion show in Philadelphia, which could not be more awesome. After that, we’ll see where 2010 and beyond takes us….
someone should start a hc band called downtrap.
ReplyDeleteor trapdown.
dude, i'm pretty sure that if your heart is going at 300bpm, you're about to die.
ReplyDelete