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Stomacher Interview
By Ryan Pangilinan

Hailing from the Bay Area, Stomacher is a five-piece rock band that takes all the best elements of Britpop, shoegaze and new wave. The group’s long-in-the-making debut album, “Sentimental Education” has recently been made as a free download and they are gearing up to release a new remix recording, followed by a new full-length. Stomacher’s frontman, Jarrod took some time out to talk to Totally Crushed Out about the group’s gut-punching sound.

Totally Crushed Out: How did the band form?

Three of us went to high school together and were very close friends and we obviously had an interest in music and started playing together and cherry picked members until we got to the five of us that are here today.

Are you guys operating independently right now?

Pretty much.

Are there any plans to release any music through a label?

No. Don’t necessarily care to. Any conversations that we’ve had with labels either dissolved or been something that we’re just not interested in doing. It’s definitely been nice to have the admiration of people who work at different labels and know that you’re doing good work because people are taking notice…. But any kind of structure that’s going to bastardize what we do, we tend to avoid. Not to mention that to do whatever we want to, whenever we want to, is thrilling. It’s exciting. We’re releasing a remix record on Christmas, I think, or in a few weeks and we needed no one’s permission for that. It was completely our own doing.

Did you guys remix your own songs, or do you have other names behind it?

We had other people do it. Well, Greg, our guitar player, did one. A friend named Danny, a session player, a musical prodigy from the area, did one and we had Popnoname from Germany, Von Spar from Germany and Tropics, he’s from the UK. It’s really fantastic.

The thing I find interesting about you mentioning that, is that back in the day, it wasn’t that far off for rock bands to do remixes. Like The Cure had remixes for their songs. Bands aren’t really doing that nowadays. Why do you think that more bands aren’t into reinventing the structure of the rock song?

I don’t know. I guess I don’t typically run into it in my musical life. I don’t listen to a ton of rock [bands] and those that I do listen to are pretty open to electronic. Sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ve heard some great remixes from Queens of the Stone Age. UNKLE’s done some crazy, crazy remixes of Queens of the Stone Age and you’d think it’d be tricky to remix a band that’s just so full-on rock, you know.

A band like us, we do a little bit of the work for you, because we have ambient sound and you could do more than just cut up the vocal.

I don’t know if this is something I got from listening to your record, but there were two distinct influences that I sensed. It’s part shoegaze and part Britpop. Would you say that that’s a fair assessment?

Yeah, I think we tend to – not everyone in the band, but me and a few of the other guys – lean towards British rock, from the Beatles on to the Arctic Monkeys and stuff like that. Blur and Pulp…and I definitely tend to lean in that direction. I do like the shoegaze-y stuff just because full-on onslaught of that stuff.

But writing the record, we were influenced by a ton of stuff, like Nick Cave and Radiohead. It’s kind of hard to say because writing it took so many years. From the start to the finish, there were hundreds of things we were into, whether it was books, music or film, so it was kind of different from day to day. And everyone brings in a different perspective of music.

One of the other things I liked about Sentimental Education, and you don’t really hear this in a lot of records, is that there’s a lot of space. The feeling and the aesthetic of the record isn’t from what you’re saying, lyrically, but what’s popping out, sonically. Was that part of the process once you found the benchmark of “this is what we’re going to sound like”?

Well, I guess it wasn’t so much what we were going to sound like, but how we approached the production. We approached the production the same way that we approach our instruments. So even mixing the tracks brought a new idea of what we could sound like. The big thing was clarity. We wanted every minute detail to be clear…. Just to find an ambiance.

I know that you guys aren’t actively touring right now, but do you think that will change once the new record is finished?

I hope. When we were younger, we did a lot of DIY tours and it was rough. We’ve got this nice balance where we’re giggin’ a lot and we’ve got gigs this weekend, but nothing too crazy. I think one of things that I’d like to mention is that we want to go to LA because we haven’t been there in about a year. We’re also considering the possibility of doing the UK next year or the year after. That’s definitely high on the list. Plus, if people want to hear the music, we’ll go to those places. In fact, our booking out of town is based solely on that. If we get a hundred emails from Los Angeles, we’ll probably go to Los Angeles; if we get a lot of emails from the UK, we’ll probably go to the UK. Wherever people want us to be, we’ll definitely be there, because I’m getting old and the winning-people-over is getting fucking difficult.

Stomacher’s full-length, “Sentimental Education,” is available for free through their website. They’re also active on almost every social network outlet including Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube and Vimeo.