Rhythm ’n’ bruises

>>U.K. soul-punks the Heavy serve it up
dirty, dark and unadulterated

AXES TO GRIND: The Heavy

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The essence of soul music, what makes the genre’s classic tracks so resonant, is that eternal battle between gospel and the blues, the angels and the devils, Saturday night and Sunday morning. Funny then that Kelvin Swaby, frontman of the new U.K. soul-punk sensation the Heavy, should be so together on the horn on a Sunday morning, Pacific time, because as he says himself, “It would appear that we are on the darker side. I’m definitely in the devil’s shoes at the moment.”

The vice/virtue dichotomy is certainly one Swaby relates to. “That reminds me of ‘Harlem,’ by Bill Withers, you know that song? He’s talking about how all the bad folks are just getting in and the good folks are just getting up. But we love to serenade the angels with our dirt and our filth. I find there are so many amazing voices now in contemporary music, but they don’t use them. I love the whole garage punk thing, but you don’t see or hear the fury within some of these amazing artists. I hear amazing gospel vocals, but as much as they’re seriously phrasing, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re feeling it. What we have done is bring the scream back.”

And how. Though they’re a full five-piece now, the Heavy began as a two-man project between Swaby and co-conspirator Daniel Taylor, a neighbour in the town of Noid—“a little wooded area just north of Bath in England where we hang out, basically. We still produce a lot of the filth there.”

The pair got at the nastier corners of soul music by way of hip hop technique and a taste for cinematic cool. The latter comes through in the Tarantino reference of their debut’s title, Great Vengeance and Furious Fire. Those five words reflect the final fuck-you hidden in a lyric sheet that on the surface leans to romance gone wrong, a reminder that love’s opposite is indifference, not hate.

“Everybody thinks the album is about a generic relationship between a man and a woman,” says Swaby. “It’s not. It comes from relationships myself and Dan have had with people through the making of the album. A lot of people tried to take our sound away from where we wanted to go. People with influence were like, ‘I can help you, I can help you—but you need to change this and that.’ We were not going to compromise our sound, so the album you have is the album we wanted to make.”

Now they’re itching to make another. “We stripped Great Vengeance down to 10 tracks from about 16 or 17, because we wanted to make a short album that as soon as you’re finished, you want to play it again. So we had excess tracks going in towards album number two, but the best thing about it is, we thought we’d done them, but then you get the mind of Spencer Page, who plays bass, and the drums of Chris Ellul, and Hannah [Collins, keys and back-up vox] has been with us for a long time anyway. To feel the heat within the family at the moment is just incredible. So that incubation period is shorter, but we’re still cooking it up.”

With the Sunday Sinners at
la Sala Rossa on Sunday,
May 11, 9 p.m., $12