Kill the Drama

Formed in January 2006, Kill the Drama was created by four musicians with the collective desire to redefine American musical boundaries. Heralding from Pittsburgh, PA, the band’s name is more of a story-line than a catchy title, summarizing the tumultuous nature that surrounds the growth of a burgeoning rock band. Bryan Laskey (vocals), Steve Stiller (guitar), Skinny (bass), and Jason Godek (drums) formed Kill the Drama with the idea of building a unique and dynamic sound that is driven and enveloping yet reckless and beautiful, utilizing individual talents while building a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
In February 2006, Kill the Drama stormed onto the local music scene, winning Pittsburgh’s premier musical showcase, The Graffiti Rock Challenge. Over the next 8 months, the band honed their musical identity while utilizing the rock challenge’s recording prize package to create their first full length studio album. The result is Close Friends with Sharp Knives, a culmination of tireless effort and experimentation that encompasses a sense of honesty and human spirit that few records effectively capture. The 11 track album released in February 2007 varies in tone and content from introspective and tranquil to soaring and upbeat. Ever engrossing and consuming at times, each song conveys a consistent blend of energy and melody that forge the band’s identity.
On January 25th, 2008, Kill the Drama recorded their first video for the title track to their current album "Close Friends with Sharp Knives." The band teamed with prominent photographer Robert John (Rolling Stone/Gun's n' Roses/Velvet Revolver/Alice in Chains) to create an action-filled music video displaying the band's relentless presence they bring to a live audience. The video is available through a variety of media outlets including YouTube and MySpace and has been a major key to Kill the Drama's latest increase in popularity world-wide.

Most agree that Kill the Drama is anything but safe, mundane, or ordinary. The band creates unique and memorable songs, unveiling themes of amity, rebellion, human evolution, and sincerity all the while emphasizing emotion, dynamics, and melody. And while pushing the sonic boundaries of what is currently heard on American modern rock radio, the band also relies on their sense of pop-culture sensibility to produce a viable mainstream rock sound, complete with the type of smart and catchy hooks that listeners can’t seem to escape from.

Kill the Drama

There’s a frightened innocence in there somewhere. I can see it looming in the middle ground. Just beyond where the stage lights fade to the neon dark of an iron city bar is the front of the crowd, a solid silhouette of arms and fists, thrown in brief relief by pale strobes dancing with the snare as it comes alive. Above their heads, in the smoke, you can see a shadow of adolescence—a bare, rueful frame that has been taking it on the chin for years, patiently unable to communicate.

When the music kicks you can feel the discovery of the brave new world of expression. The guitar rolls through the chords, fingers crawl along the frets, a vocal soars and you know it’s not bravado. The crowd responds, the silhouette shakes, and the band is introduced. This observant youth has found a voice.

The movement of the crowd swells towards the front door through the darkness, an ebb and flow of motion that follows the music as it speeds and slows, and the bar is moving as a whole, a concerted body bathed in the shifting stage light filters—despondent green, red angst, blue. As the band moves through its playlist, ranging from fervent guitars to reflective vocals, there is a sincerity that emerges, a distinct willingness to communicate, that allows you to trust it.

You realize, as the crowd rises and sways energetically, that this band knows you. There is a familiarity to the lyrics, a sense that they have been through the drama that you have. They share your frustration with a world that does not believe in the benefit of the doubt, that allows for destruction on beautiful days. Those lyrics speak of, and the music echoes, a wry understanding of the crowd’s collective life with a mix of introspection and cynicism. The crowd agrees, that much is clear. The energy of the show has shirked everyone’s frightened innocence.

The band has gotten to this point through friction and a long struggle to find a singer capable of communicating the sincerity that their bass lines call for. Their history tells of bar fights, break-ups and relationships with too much drama, but within a few short months of finding the right combination of people their sound was set, and they were past false pretenses and misaligned romance. They now hold their crowds on the verge of insightful reaction, projecting their mindset against a superficial world of crushing sensationalism. They have found a voice. It is Kill the Drama.