Laughing in the dark

Music
Old Man Gloom give sludge metal a sense of humor 

Old Man Gloom is an experimental sludge metal juggernaut with a reputation for monkeyshines that’s almost as well known as their innovative output. The unpredictable band emerges periodically to challenge genre conventions, offer scathing social commentary and, above all, have fun. Aaron Turner and Santos Montaño formed the part-time group in 1999 after enlisting friends Caleb Scofield and Nate Newton for a unique recording project outside of their full-time acts of Isis, Cave In, and Converge, respectively. For OMG, there’s no editing allowed — in their songwriting or in what they have to say about it. Their sense of humor is at once refreshing in a scene that takes itself seriously and, arguably, infuriating for the industry’s status quo. That’s the way OMG likes it — they trolled the music world last winter when they sent out a fake promotional version of their critically-acclaimed album “The Ape of God.” Their latest tour starts in Portsmouth at 3S Artspace on Wednesday, Sept. 2. The Sound reached Montaño by phone to discuss the band’s unique songwriting process, trolling, and forgetting how to play their own songs.

Given your renewed output and touring schedule, is OMG still a part-time band?
Yeah. I don’t think that Old Man Gloom can function any other way. Even now, when we do touring, the max we’ve done is 12 days. We did 12 days in Europe and even at the end of that it felt exhausting. If OMG were ever to transition into being a real band, it would kinda ruin it. Then those real band dynamics start creeping in — you know, personalities and the songwriting process being a real process that took a real amount of time. If any of those things started happening, it would totally just ruin the way that we work. We do more now than we ever have, but this is the most we will do. It’ll never be more than this.

We do this the same way we always have. When we wrote “Meditations in B,” it was written in probably an hour and a half and then it was practiced for two days and the recording process was done in 12 hours and that was the first album, so the whole thing was done in 12 hours. It stayed like that, even with “No.” We started taking a little more time, but “No” was written in five days and recorded in six days. Then, with “The Ape of God,” we wrote both of those albums in six or seven days total, then just went right into the studio and recorded for seven days. That system we have is just why it works. If we were to take six months to write an album, I think we’d really lose something. Whatever we do that works is because of the way that we do it. At this point, there’s no reason to change it.

To what extent are the textures and songwriting set in stone? How much of that is organic and comes together in the studio?
Not a lot, honestly. The way that it works is we’ll go in and we’ll do our basic tracks, kind of just the way that we hammered them out in the writing. We don’t really alter or change it at all. Then Aaron will take the recording home and over the next six months he’ll just have it and he adds everything at home to the recording. So all the layers are just added by Aaron afterwards. Then we’ll usually get together at some point like six months after and do vocals and a lot of guitar overdubs. By that time, everybody has an idea of what they want to do and it goes pretty quick. Once we get back in the studio, we really hammer it out. The only one who really takes the time and sits with it and layers and layers is Aaron.

Throughout the years and OMG’s existence, he’s really become the main — I mean he started it, so he’s always been one of the main people. He conceptually knows what he wants it to sound like and we have started just really conceding and kind of giving in to his vision. For the rest of us, there’s not a lot of improvising. We just let the mad scientist take it home and do what he wants to do with it. It’s pretty awesome and it works for us. And everything he does now is so different. I don’t know how he does it.

Considering all the projects you folks have, is this the band you want to play in, albeit intermittently, for the rest of your life? Do you want to be old men in OMG?
(Laughs.) We kind of are; we’re all pushing 40. That feels old to me already. Given the way that we do things has lent itself to longevity. Even now, at our busiest, we still do maybe one or two things a year and it’s only for about a week. It’s like, why would we break up, why would we stop doing this? There’s no threat of overdoing it. Especially for Aaron and I, we’ve just been so close for so long that even if the other guys get burnt out on it, I think him and I, it’d be really hard to stop doing it. I hope it keeps going for years. Now, whether or not anybody will be interested if we keep doing it — it’s shocking to me that people are still interested in it now.

It doesn’t feel like nostalgia, which is interesting. A band that’s 16 years on, you’d think we’d be heavily reliant on people wanting to hear certain things from our first couple albums, but it doesn’t feel like that. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like people are still on board with what we’re doing and I think that’s, not to pat ourselves on the back, but I’m impressed that we, 16 years on, are still able to make things that are still relevant. I think a lot of bands really struggle to do that.

What was the goal of the band when you and Aaron formed it?
It wasn’t a goal, it was more like a concept. We wanted to make a weird concept album. It was really super deliberate (laughs). We walked around and we’re like, “OK, we should make a record while you’re here for two weeks in Santa Fe.” “Yeah, let’s make a record.” And we were like, “What do we want to do?” … The more we talked about it, it was kind of like, “I want it to be really dark, I want the songs to be really short and then I want there to be really, really long pieces of noise in between each song. It’s really hard to listen to and then there’s a little bit of respite in a really short and straight-forward song.” The other thing that we wanted to do was, we didn’t return to any part, so there’s no part on that first album that was played more than once. There’s never a verse and a chorus and it goes back to a verse. It’s just part, different part, different part … and that was part of the concept. Kind of hard to do (laughs).

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Old Man Gloom. (photo by Faith Coloccia)

Did you set out to defy metal conventions from the start?
Yeah, but it was totally thought out (at first). After that first album, and after I moved to Boston, then there was a little bit more of a vision. The vision was to do a band that there was really no boundaries on. There was never any saying “no” to any ideas. There’s never been an OMG song or part that we’ve thrown away. Every single thing that we’ve ever written has been on the album because there’s no deliberating, there’s no debating. It’s just whatever somebody plays, we’re like, “OK, that’s the song,” and we just go in and record it. It still functions that way. Nobody ever says no … Whatever it is, whatever the person who’s coming up with the riff says it is, we’re like, “OK, that’s it.”

What is the role of trolling in the band?
It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it’s become such a thing for us and for me. I’ve really excelled at the whole thing (laughs). I’ve always been a real smartass, so maybe I’ve been grooming for this my whole life. The whole concept of trolling is very current and it’s very new, but as far as the band is concerned, we started this from the b