RIVAL WAVES
Marc Schulz | Paul Piñon | Joel De La Garza | Erik Salinas | Dave McLeod
CHAOS ABOUNDS....
“This record is about making a choice – taking a stand. Will we succumb to all the meaningless chaos that surrounds us, or will we wake up every day and fight to keep the wolves at bay?”
So says songwriter and lead vocalist for Rival Waves, Joel De La Garza, when discussing the band’s debut LP, A Meaningless Chaos. A 14-track manifesto on overcoming the madness that has surrounded the world, and the band, since 2016, the album is a microcosm of the times in which it was written and recorded.
Tracked in December 2019, and mixed at The Bubble Recording Studio in Austin, Texas, as the world entered into what would become a nearly two-year hiatus from anything remotely normal, A Meaningless Chaos confronts many topics that society finds itself grappling with: human rights, political corruption, the continued rise of fascism, bigotry, racism and misogyny, the immense universal grief of losing loved ones, and the mental fatigue and anxiety of dealing with all of it every day.
For the band though, the album served as a catalyst for coalescing as a unit around a singular vision for Rival Waves. “I think going through the process of recording and writing songs for this album really changed our perception of what this band can be…of what this band is,” says guitarist Marc Schulz. “Collaboration is really the biggest thing, but working with Frenchie [Smith] and the good vibes produced in the studio really come through on the album. It pushed each of us to find ourselves and be the best we could be in such a positive way, which was an important part of the journey.”
Helmed by Grammy-nominated producer Chris “Frenchie” Smith (…Trail of Dead, Gary Clark Jr, Jet, The Toadies, Jackie Venson), A Meaningless Chaos captures a live, raw immediacy that the times, and the album’s themes, reflect. “Anyone can be melodic or heartfelt,” says Smith. “But to be melodic, heartfelt, AND dangerous…well, there’s a level of edge in that that might just rattle people, so it’s something we kept drawing upon.”
The edge Smith speaks of was provided by the band, who had come off of a series of incendiary performances that had the songs airtight and ready to track. That preparation, along with the collaborative, take-no-prisoners approach brought by everyone involved with the sessions provides the album with a palpable energy. “There’s kind of a cool punk rock quality to it, you know? Not being perfect and lined up to ‘the grid,’” says guitarist Erik Salinas. “I really liked the energy in the pure rawness of what we did.”
The organic quality of this live, collaborative approach yielded “Invisible” – one of the more epic, adventurous and largely-improvised moments on A Meaningless Chaos. “It had a vibe of, ‘Let’s just see where we go,’” says Salinas. “That was one of my favorite songs to record, and it definitely has its place on the record. Those are the kind of moments that I like in the studio, where you just sit in a room with 5 or 6 people and you just play and feed off of each other…and you get a little weird and turn on a bunch of pedals and make some noise.”
Even those newer to the group felt like the band was capturing something special during sessions for A Meaningless Chaos. “Even with parts that we ended up refining, this is still very much a live album,” affirms drummer Paul Piñon, whose two-day, 14-hour marathon drum tracking sessions for the album were stuff of legend. “We all recorded simultaneously, scattered throughout the studio, and that feeling of a live record, where you go in and just play as a band, really captured a lot of the energy that we bring when we play live. I think approaching it that way was really important, as it’s such a big part of our dynamic. It really is a group effort and we made strides to capture that on this album.”
Despite the raw, live nature of the album, both band and producer were aligned on treating the songs with the care they deserved. “I’m really glad we didn’t talk about having all of those elements come together. We just kind of let it happen,” says Smith. “One of the things I never wanted to lose was rawness, but I also didn’t want us to fall shy of the high fidelity that these songs deserve. If I was to look at everything and listen to the album in a broad sense, it is in an amazing place of rawness and high fidelity – which is a difficult thing to achieve.”
“I can’t talk about this record without talking about the state we find ourselves in today,” says De La Garza. “Both macro and micro. The current state of our government, the cruelty of the previous administration, loved ones we’ve lost along the way, the evolution and cohesion of the band, even the pandemic of the last few years…it was all informing this record. Whether we knew it or not. There are so many things that, as we were putting the album together, we looked back and thought, ‘Oh wow…how freakishly prophetic was all this doom and gloom?’ In reality, it’s just us trying to deal with the state of the world, the state of our lives within it and figuring out what we can do to keep from losing who we are in the process.”
The songs on A Meaningless Chaos capture a live, raw immediacy that the times, and the album’s larger theme, reflect. The result is a powerfully purposeful collection of songs touching on the universal themes of love, loss, anger, fear and, ultimately, release.
A Meaningless Chaos and its featured tracks “100M” “Monument” “Meaningless Chaos” and “Isla3” have been featured on several Austin media outlets and radio stations including KUTX, Sun Radio, KLBJ, KOOP, and 101X. Internationally, the album has been featured on radio stations in the UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil and France.
A Meaningless Chaos is out now on Lunar Drive Records.
NICE THINGS PEOPLE SAY:
punk pop rock (Rival Waves)...it’s all damn good.