Alarming Return

Once upon a time, there was a scrawny kid who, in acts of outright insolence, would bury his ears beneath whatever contemporary, hollering rock 'n' roll manifestos he might find, all the while searching for something he could finally relate to. Something with heart; something that would suck at the very marrow of the human condition and spit it back out with youthful abandon. But, you know, also be about girls. What he (I) found was Saves the Day, an unrelenting billow of autobiographical testaments to the disillusion of feeling, backdropped by a fiery pop/punk/hardcore aura via the rough and tumble visage of New Jersey. This was and is the band that did it and will always do "it" for him (me). They're also the band that nearly imploded after 2003's In Reverie fell on deaf ears after Dreamworks Records infamously folded. However, with a swift lineup change (bassist Eben D'Amico split less than amicably with the group during rehearsals for the new record, giving way to Glassjaw's Manny Carrero), a blistering new album (Sound the Alarm) out on Vagrant Records and a replenished anatomical glossary, Chris Conley (vocals, guitar) along with drummer Pete Parada, guitarist David Salloway and Carrero-reports that Saves the Day is stronger than ever before.

How liberating was it for you, as a band, to in essence start from scratch; writing and recording your new album without any label support?
It was awesome. It was the best process because we kind of just shut out the entire music industry and the rest of the world and just focused on our music and each other. We did a lot of soul searching individually, and really worked on a lot of issues and came out of it stronger than ever before. It was really empowering to get to hole ourselves up in our own studio and make a whole record not giving a flying fuck what anyone was going to think about it.

Do you feel like the circumstances surrounding Dreamworks and your last album, In Reverie, matured the band at all?
Yeah, it was important because we had a bit of a crash and burn after that because we had expectations. When the label sold itself to Interscope and no one [at Interscope] knew that we had just put out an album, it was like dead on arrival. That was really kind of devastating. It crumbled our confidence and we had to rebuild ourselves from scratch.

Would you say that the new album's more aggressive feel is a result of what you just touched on, or the result of having new members?
Well, Manny came on in the last week to lay down his bass, and he wasn't there during the writing. So I'd say the biggest reason that the album is kind of aggressive is that on In Reverie we just didn't have much to vent about in our lives. On Sound the Alarm, we've all gone through a lot and our lives have been kind of turned upside down. It was a very frustrating experience at times, not to mention getting rid of Eben was painful. All of the things leading up to Eben's departure were very painful. I had a lot of inspiration just in my rage and...kind of...serial killer tendencies towards Eben. I really had a hard time dealing with that guy, and I'm so thankful that he's gone. It's like a new band now.

How has Manny's role in the band affected the sound or camaraderie in the group?
It's neat. For the first time we feel like a band, it's not just a bunch of guys doing their own thing, with dissenting opinions. We're all on the same page and we all love to play. This is the first time that this has ever happened with the band. There's always been negativity bubbling up. It's so refreshing to have somebody who loves to do this as much as we do.

A lot of the lyricism on the new album returns to your anatomical metaphors- a central theme to a lot of your songs. Have you ever been criticized for being too morbid?
Yeah, people tend to think there's something wrong with me, that I should be locked up somewhere or I should be in a loony bin. And so for a while I was really self-conscious about it because I was writing these images to try to vent a certain uncomfortable feeling or some kind of...just building tension inside of myself, and in order to vent it, I would create these images and then it could live in the image, and the image would just be really kind of violent and just intensely dramatic and dark. That was just a reflection of what was going on inside, it wasn't like I literally killed someone. I was wrestling with some feeling and it felt like I wanted to, you know, cut off all my limbs. So I think it's misinterpreted and I think there are people who think that I would really do things like that, but the lyrics are there to stop me short of becoming that serial killer.

By Ryan Prado

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