Beast Make Bomb

Only when Beast Make Bomb reached the top 10 of Converse's Get Out of the Garage contest did the band begin to take the contest seriously.
After only a year as a band, Beast Make Bomb entered the contest on a whim after the director of their music program at New York University, which all four band members attend, sent out a mass email with a link to the contest.
Even then, it felt like an afterthought.
"I didn't tell anyone I entered our band," lead singer and guitarist Ceci Gomez said.
But from the seemingly endless list of entrants on the contest's website, Beast Make Bomb made it to the top 10, alongside a band named for a Kurt Vonnegut book and a Scandinavian electro-pop duo, among others.
At that point, the band mobilized every friend and fan they could and ended up winning the contest. The prize? A tour beginning at the South by Southwest music festival, music gear and studio time at Converse's Rubber Tracks studio in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Beast Make Bomb will open for The Whigs at the 9:30 Club tonight and again in Chicago, before opening for Tokyo Police Club in Seattle and then finally Cold War Kids at home in New York. The band has already played Los Angeles and South By Southwest.
Gomez described the festival as surreal at first — a heavy mix of excitement and nervousness.
"We were definitely the young band playing," guitarist Glenn VanDyke said. Converse, she said, "paid for all of our flights, hotels and a town car to take us from our shitty apartment to the airport."
Along with drummer Hartley Lewis and bassist Sam Goldfine, Gomez and VanDyke play a sunny side of garage rock rooted in the 1990s indie rock the band cites as influences on its website. Usually, it's the band's low end that drives even the quieter songs such as "Coney Island" to a full sound ready for large clubs like the 9:30 Club.
Gomez and VanDyke know the Internet is crucial to public outreach. Beast Make Bomb maintains four websites in total: a Tumblr, MySpace, Twitter and an official site. As they put it, an online presence is vital today, as bloggers are more important and discovery can happen almost instantly.
But outside the roller coaster of the Converse tour, the band is still operating at a normal level. The members plan to have their first full-length album out sometime this fall. They still have two days of use of the Converse studio, though the writing process has already begun. School, however, can be an obstacle.
"I also have a work-study job Monday through Wednesday," Gomez said. "Then we're gone every weekend Thursday through Saturday."
Even though grades have suffered, she said, it's for a good reason.
"We wanna tour in the summer, then in the fall," VanDyke added.
In the meantime, Beast Make Bomb will re-release their EP, Sourpuss, with an additional fourth song plus a music video for "Party Monster."
Until then, the band's two EPs are both available for free online.
Beast Make Bomb play the 9:30 Club tonight with the Whigs. Tickets are $15. Doors open at 7 p.m.
waldo@umdbk.com - The Diamondback

I know the band had quite an adventure at SXSW this year. Tell us a little about what went down.
Ceci Gomez: Yeah, we got onto two Rolling Stone showcases, which was beyond awesome. It was our first time down there, so we didn’t really know what to expect. We had such a ball! We opened for Queens of the Stone Age, which was insanely awesome. They’re a band that we really look up to. Being backstage at the show was crazy. Jack White was there and a whole bunch of other random people that we weren’t expecting to be there. We got an opportunity to talk to some amazing people, and not know what to say to them. [laughs]
Glenn Van Dyke: We ate a lot candy that we had in our dressing room. We were downing Sour Patch Kids and just hanging out with our jaws open.
Ceci: We felt like babies.
Hartley Lewis: Yeah, we definitely felt young.
Did you get a chance to speak with everyone or did you just stand in a corner all night?
Glenn: [laughs] No, we talked. I couldn’t handle it. I went up to Jack White and said, “Hey, you’re an awesome guitar player.” He was like, “Thanks.” We eventually chased him down the street and gave him our EP. Maybe he’ll listen to it, maybe he won’t. He was a really nice guy.
Ceci: After Queens of the Stone Age went on, we talked to Josh Homme for a hot second. We told him that their set was great and that it was such an honor to open for them. He was like, “Yeah, I noticed you around earlier today being filmed.” I told him, “Yeah, it’s weird, I’m not used to people following me around and filming me.” He said, “You know, honey, you better get used to it.” [laughs]

What songs did you guys bring out on stage?
Hartley: We have two EPs, ‘Skinny Legs’ and ‘Sourpuss,’ and we played every song off of both of those. One has five songs and the other has three songs. So we played all those, plus some new songs that we’ve written for whatever’s next.
Glenn: Yeah. We’re releasing one of the new songs at the beginning of summer. The song is called “Party Monster” and we have a video coming up for it that we’re shooting this weekend.
Ceci: We’re going to be re-releasing ‘Sourpuss’ in late May because we don’t really think that we did a ton of press for it when we released in January. We’ll be adding “Party Monster” to the EP and we’re all looking forward to the video for the song. It’s going to be funny and heart-wrenching. [laughs]
What’s “Party Monster” about?
Ceci: “Party Monster” is a song about this character who kind of ruins every single party situation. At some point, every single one of us can be a party monster. Releasing the video for it will be a fun thing to end the tour that we’re on.
Nice. Sounds like a good plan.
Glenn: We got really hooked up, in terms of the Get Out of the Garage Tour. And we’ll be kicking off our own DIY tour with the addition of the new song to our EP.
How did you get involved with the Get Out of the Garage Tour?
Sam Golfine: Converse and Rolling Stone sponsored this competition where we had to get all our friends to vote for us every day. We won two days in a recording studio, $10,000 worth of stuff at Guitar Center, and we’ll be playing with The Whigs, Tokyo Police Club, and others on this upcoming tour.
Which studio do you get to record in?
Ceci: Well, Converse is opening a recording studio in Williamsburg. It’s not even open yet, but part of the prize is that we get two free days of recording at the new studio.
That should be fun.
Ceci: Yeah, we’re really looking forward to it.
You guys recorded your EP at Headgear Recording Studios with Avery [Medjuck], right?
Ceci: Yeah, Avery is a really good friend of ours. It was through Avery that we were able to record there. Basically, he got us free recording time, and so we had to work really quickly and record everything in one day. We just tracked the basics first and added the extra vocal harmonies and guitar parts later.
Wow. Luckily you only had to record three songs — or was that the reason the EP is three songs?
Ceci: [laughs] That was actually one of the main reasons.
Hartley: We had those three songs written already. We’ve played them live, we knew we wanted to record them, and we knew that we could get them out in one day.
Ceci: Also, “Coney Island” is that perfect song for the middle. “1, 2, 3, 4? and “Rough It Out” are really upbeat songs, so “Coney Island” is the breather in between.
Was there a main songwriter who wrote the tracks on ‘Sourpuss’?
Ceci: I write a lot of the songs, but Glenn and I get together — we actually live together — and we’ll end up writing songs together. Glenn is a master at making sweet guitar riffs, and then I tend to put the melody and the lyrics on.
Glenn: After that, it becomes a collaborative effort. We’ll come with the guitar part and some harmonies and then Hartley and Sam will have something that they want to add or change. At the end of the day, it ends up being really collaborative. The ideas tend to come from one or two of us, but then we all hash it out together.

Is the song “Coney Island” inspired by Coney Island?
Ceci: Yeah, it was inspired by Coney Island. I made my first trip there during the summer and I had one of the best days ever. We rode on the Cyclone rollercoaster and I hurt my head. At the time, I was in a relationship, but I knew that nothing good could last forever. [laughs] I don’t really mean it that way.
Ceci: “Rough It Out” and “1, 2, 3, 4? are a lot more based around the environment that we live in.
Hartley: [laughs] I thought you were going to say, “the environment.”
Ceci: No!
Glenn: I actually wrote “1, 2, 3, 4? in high school — the guitar riff. It was me, Ceci, and Sam — Hartley hadn’t joined the band yet. We were sitting in Sam’s dorm room trying to figure out what to do with the song. It ended up being about a party — it was our freshman year of college and everything was about partying.
Ceci: “Rough It Out” is a song about living in New York, with the different anxiety and pressure you get from being here all the time. It can drive you insane.
A question you probably get asked all the time: Where did you get the name Beast Make Bomb from?
Hartley: We’ve been trying to answer that question ourselves for the whole time we’ve been a band.
Sam: We’re not sure yet.
Ceci: Initially, I liked the idea of having a name that’s really visceral. I wanted the name to be Beast initially, but I realized there’s another band with that name. I got really disappointed because I was into the idea of having it be just that one word. Glenn liked the word “bomb.” So we thought, “What a perfect combination!”
Glenn: We don’t condone bombs or bombing.
Ceci: It makes sense: only beasts make bombs! That’s how that came about.
Lastly, any plans for a full-length soon?
Ceci: We’ll be finishing this tour in May. Then, we have some new songs that we haven’t recorded. We’ll be spending the whole summer and fall getting a full-length together that we can hopefully release early next year. - Rock Edition

Earlier this week, quartet Beast Make Bomb released their latest music video on Vimeo. The song, “Rough It Out” is off their new EP that will be out on January 29th. The album will be available physically at Webster Hall and online for FREE download at their bandcamp website.
In other BMB news, the band was recently selected out of thousands of bands to be a top 10 finalist for the Converse Get Out of the Garage contest. The the winner will receive $10,000 worth of new gear from Guitar Center and a six city national tour.
The winner will be chosen by daily online voting through Jan. 20th. The band is currently holding the #3 spot. If you want to vote for Beast Make Bomb, go here! - Eat Sleep Breathe Music

This indie band from Brooklyn definitely knows the way to my heart. This video, directed by Sean McIntyre and shot in their Mckibbin abode is really great. Neither the video nor the song are groundbreaking, but both are done well! The changing colors of their shirts was really cool and they’ve got this great energetic, unadulterated sound. The guitars and rhythm section were on point! Rough It Up is on their upcoming EP Sourpuss. Beast Make Bomb is going to play a release show January 29th at Webster Hall Studio! Be sure to come back for more music from this talented group

CALL TO ARMS:
Beast Make Bomb got selected out of 100 bands to be in the top 10 for the Converse Get Out of the Garage Contest to win 10k worth of new gear and their first national tour. TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO VOTE!!!! go to getoutthegarage.com and show your support! they deserve itThis indie band from Brooklyn definitely knows the way to my heart. This video, directed by Sean McIntyre and shot in their Mckibbin abode is really great. Neither the video nor the song are groundbreaking, but both are done well! The changing colors of their shirts was really cool and they’ve got this great energetic, unadulterated sound. The guitars and rhythm section were on point! Rough It Up is on their upcoming EP Sourpuss. Beast Make Bomb is going to play a release show January 29th at Webster Hall Studio! Be sure to come back for more music from this talented group

CALL TO ARMS:
Beast Make Bomb got selected out of 100 bands to be in the top 10 for the Converse Get Out of the Garage Contest to win 10k worth of new gear and their first national tour. TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO VOTE!!!! go to getoutthegarage.com and show your support! they deserve it - Mostly Junk Food

The young Brooklyn band Beast Make Bomb specializes in high-energy indie rock that brings to mind indie stalwarts like Superchunk and Sleepyhead. BMB has been touring the Northeast throughout 2010, and it plans to release an EP early in 2011. Here, the group's singer-guitarist Ceci Gomez talks about being in a band in New York, playing colleges, and Kickstarting BMB's quest for an all-important touring van.

What's it like to be a band in New York? It took a while to get acclimated. We used to pay $200 a month to practice in Bushwick, and then we moved to an even more expensive venue, Death by Audio, which has about 20 practice rooms that are all pretty small and not very soundproof. We had to move out—the fire marshall said the place was a hazard, because it's all wood—and we realized we couldn't really afford paying for a practice space. We would just break even at the end of every month.

Right now, we get paid roughly $75 to $150 per show, but we never take any of the money ourselves. We keep it, because we have to pay for cabs to take our gear. Some venues have good backlines, but to others, we have to bring the entire drumkit, or all of our amps. It's generally about $25 to get from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Manhattan, but playing a show in our neighborhood is pretty cheap. And now that we don't pay for a practice space—we just play at my house—we're saving $200 a month.

Was space a factor in choosing your apartment? It actually just worked out that way. It wasn't even the ideal apartment, but it worked out really well. None of our neighbors complain, and we try not to practice for more than an hour and a half at a time.

How much of your band's equipment belongs to the band, collectively? How did you acquire it? Well, my amp got broken at a show, so I'm borrowing my boyfriend's. And our drummer Hartley Lewis's drums belong to another bandmate, Glenn Van Dyke—his mom shipped them up from Florida, because the $200 it cost was cheaper than buying a new kit. We need to get new gear.

Where do you think you'll go to get it? Craigslist. And we've entered a contest with Converse to win $10,000 worth of gear, which would be more than ideal.

Have you looked into recording at Converse's studio? If you win the contest, you get to record an album there for free, and that would be really awesome.

Do you think you're going to tour anytime soon? We're planning to do some college shows in the spring in upstate New York and Boston. We want to do our first East Coast tour from May to June—we're going to go from New York to Texas and loop back up, and we're going to start planning which cities we want to go to, and hitting up bands we know. We're going to bundle CD copies of our old EP with our next EP, and we'll send that package out to radio stations, in case we can do an acoustic performance to promote local shows.

Do you have a separate bank account for the band? We don't really have enough money to start a bank account. I went to Chase one day this summer when I was thinking of starting a separate account—we had some money, because we'd played a few college shows, which pay really well.

They do? Yes. We got about $500 for one. The activities boards at universities have more money to give out—and they're fun. At Sarah Lawrence College, you could tell that everyone who's into music comes to all the shows. We'll probably play at Wesleyan this spring, Bard, Barnard.

Anyway—at one point, we did have money, but it went very quickly. So there's really no point in opening an account. I literally keep an envelope hidden that says 'Beast Make Bomb,' with cab money.

Are you going to get a van for your tour? We're going to start a Kickstarter fund for a van in February or March, after the EP release. We're looking at getting one of those big white utility vans, although we have to make sure that it can travel through a bunch of states.

How do you feel about the Kickstarter model? It's annoying, but it pushes people to donate at the last minute, because they understand that if you don't make it, they don't get anything, and it's embarrassing. Although I think Kickstarter takes 5 percent—that's a lot. There's another website, indieagogo; unlike Kickstarter, you make the money that people pledge regardless.

Are you going to outfit your van at all? We need to make sure it's air-conditioned. And we would like a mattress…and possibly a disco ball. - Maura Johnston for getcurrency.com

I’ve been sitting on this for a while now as I’ve tried to deal with a fairly large backlog of new music. Thankfully though I’ve now almost caught up so I can start getting some of it out there.

First up is this spunky four-piece from New York that did the rounds a couple of months back and generated a nice amount of buzz. Rightfully so, their five-song EP “Skinny Legs” is a spiky infectious affair that hurls you through each song’s kept-together-but-shaky sound and throws you out on the other side, covered in blood, Keith Sweat, and tears.

You can hear two of the songs from said EP below and if you make your way in an orderly fashion towards their Bandcamp page, the whole damn thing can be yours for $5. - Listen Before You Buy

The past is a tricky thing, for many reasons. It determines so much of the future, and yet, you can't return to it to change anything. As a result, it's often the case that the present is spent recollecting the past and wondering what could have been different, what could have been changed. The present then becomes a sort of limbo, designed for the sole purpose of carrying us along to the future. "Rewind" is a song that waxes nostalgic, expressing that nagging desire to return to yesterday. And so, the song becomes a celebration of the better times and a way to forever hold on to the past.

"Rewind" is a cross between garage rock and the post-harcore/post-punk of bands like Pretty Girls Make Graves and At the Drive-In. It's a song that makes me recall driving through the back roads of the Maryland suburbs while blaring and burying my head in the sounds of various indie bands. For me, it's an embodiment of nostalgia because it reminds me of the joy I felt discovering indie rock. It's transports me back to my high school years when I was hung up on the past, trying to sort out everything with help from bands such as At the Drive-In, From Safety To Where, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and Q and Not U.

"Rewind" is from Beast Make Bomb's new EP, Skinny Legs. - Mixtape Muse

I’m a superficial guy when it comes to bands. I judge based on band names and press photos; I generally judge books by their covers despite the old adage not to. In some sense, it’s necessary considering the amount of music we receive; I generally can get a good idea of what a band is going to be like simply by their name. I’m learning not to slowly, however – especially when bands like Beast Make Bomb send us their tracks.

Initially turned off by their chosen moniker, their straightforward pop/punk is pretty catchy – and changed my initial distaste. It’s confident and direct, filled up with alcohol-fuelled dancing and sleepless nights in the New York City streets.

The band is readying their debut EP entitled Skinny Legs, which will be out on September 5 via their Bandcamp page. They have a few shows lined up around the city as well, the dates for which you can check out on their MySpace page. - Typanogram

I’m really impressed with the sounds that I am hearing from NYC’s Beast Make Bomb. They shared a three song sampler of their debut Skinny Legs EP (due September 5th), and there is quite a lot of talent to be found within the tunes.

Upon first listens their sound reminded me of a more tame Be Your Own Pet. With female vocals and a heavy guitar influenced sound, it was the easiest connection I made. They have some interesting tricks up their sleeves in the department of melody. Check out the excellent “Zombie Song” should be your first taste of the band. It’s a pretty good indication of what goodies Beast Make Bomb have for you.

Their songs have sleek guitar riffs, and vocals that co-align to perfection. The songs are catchy and instantaneous, finding a permanent home in your head. You will comfort the tunes, and hit repeat without a second thought. They just have a way with you.

These guys are certainly one to watch. “Zombie Song” has the potential to be a hit. If you are in NYC on September 5th, head to the Bowery Poetry Club to see their EP release show. I may be there!

The EP will be available on the bands bandcamp come September 5th. In the meantime, visit them on their website, myspace, and twitter. Keep an eye out, these kids are on the way to big things! - We All Want Someone To Shout For