Look, I’ve heard it all.or so I have thought on occasion.
I was there when Jimi lit his guitar on fire; when Alice cut the heads off chickens, and when Johnny Rotten scared parents with his mere presence. I watched Keith Moon kill goldfish in plexiglass water-filled drums and weathered Bowie as Ziggy Stardust..It was rock with an emotional head play of shock and surprise.
The punk-ish band No Blitz claims that it is also their style - “blast in your face rock”. They aptly name their debut EP “Never Satisfied.”. (Isn’t there an ancient Chinese proverb that goes something like “[w]ho is not satisfied with himself will grow, who is not sure of his own correctness will learn many things”) If No Blitz were just another punk band I wouldn’t bring them to your attention. There are plenty of them.
No Blitz is from North Virginia and frequently plays the Washington D.C. hotspots. The EP Never Satisfied should garner them wider appeal than just around the National Mall.
They are an oddly talented group of men to come together as bandmates. Three play drums and they all play guitar. Ryan Wogh is the lead vocalist and generally plays guitar with James Cichra, while Don Horner plays the bass and Shane Steenberge the drums. Wogh explains about the band,
“Basically, we’re a no BS, ego free couple of guys who love playing organic and raw music that moves us.”
About the EP, Wogh says,
“The concept of Never Satisfied is more than clever wordplay. It’s the reality that when we’re writing music, there’s no reason to go back to a sound that we’ve already done. We’re always looking to do something new and open to new elements. The tunes we are working on now are different from the ones on Never Satisfied, but there’s a consistent thread that defines us as No Blitz. We’re also doing a lot more collaborating from scratch.”
That makes sense. Most of what is on Never Satisfied was written by Wogh. The seven track EP contains such gems as “My Life,” a song inspired by a friend of Wogh’s about “‘carpe diem’ in a world where too many people waste their days accomplishing nothing”; “Exception To The Rule,” which is “about getting drunk and doing something daring and stupid that you will regret later.”; and “Zero Machines,” a science fiction story about a female “cyborg, floating alone in space, trapped with her thoughts forever in an infinite loneliness with no one to share them with.”
This is a great debut, but I’ll wait to see them perform live before I say they practice “blast in your face rock” So, No Blitz, hit the West Coast soon so I can truly decide whether you live up to your own hype. In the meantime, I’ll have to be content listening to Never Satisfied over and over again.
- Old School
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