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The Hammerstein Ballroom, 01.29.02 We’ve seen Flaw twice now (it would have been three times but for a wrist injury to bassist Ryan Jurhs prior to a Trade Winds gig... he’s fine now, thanks for asking). Both times we watched the same thing happen: When the set begins there’s some movement in the audience way up front but, by and large, it’s a pretty sedentary crowd. Maybe the audience doesn’t know the music, doesn’t know the band, maybe they’re just waiting for headliner Sevendust. And then it begins. Little by little, song by song, person by person the movement starts to spread; infecting row after row of people until it starts to cover the floor... Because that’s what Flaw is, infectious. Don’t mistake it for the same old thing (or the same new thing). With help from veteran producer David Bottrill (Tool and Peter Gabriel), Flaw’s October 2001 debut "Through The Eyes" displays a maturity, intelligence and texture that belies their age. We sat with singer Chris Volz before the show and shot off a few of the standards... SHOW & TELL: First off, how’s Ryan’s wrist? CHRIS: It’s perfect, back to normal. It’s actually been healthy for quite some time, shortly after we had a fill-in come in, he only had to do like maybe six or seven shows. (Ryan) actually cut his cast off early, it was a minor fracture. S&T: You guys have toured with some pretty serious bands. (If you could pick) is there one band you would want to go and tour with? CHRIS: Oh man, I don’t know. It would be phenomenal for all of us to tour with Tool, that would probably take the cake just because we’ve been big Tool fans for so long. But there’s a lot of bands. I mean, we’d love to tour with Pink Floyd for that matter. I don’ t know that we could probably pick one but if (we could) it’d probably be Tool. S&T: With you guys being big fans of them, did that play a part in picking (David Bottrill) as your producer? CHRIS: Actually yeh it did because we knew that from the material he had done he could cover every spectrum of music that we were gonna do. We knew that he wouldn’t have any problem with the heavy stuff ‘cause he also had just done Nothingface not too long before that and he did older Peter Gabriel’s stuff, he worked with World Beat. I mean every aspect of music that we cover from the heavy to the you know, textured ethereal stuff, we knew he could make it sound the best possible. He was actually our top choice and it’s funny because we didn’t hear from him right away ‘cause he’s really focused when he’s working on a project. He doesn’t talk about anything else. He doesn’t talk to anyone else about working with them in the future or anything. So when we had sent him our package through the label we didn’t hear back from him and we were about... We were a few days away from picking our second choice down the producer list when he finished Lateralus and he called us like the next day after hearing the songs that had been sent so we were just ecstatic. He’s a really down to earth, very easy to work with guy. Didn’t go in and say, "Alright, I know what I’m doing, you don’t," you know he came in, he worked with what we had, didn’t change anything, made us the best we could be and that’s exactly what they get paid for. S&T: I know this just came out a couple months ago, so it’s obviously too early to talk about the next album, but you think you’d work with him again? CHRIS: Yeh definitely, there’s no question. I mean even if some new young, hot shot producer came along, we’re just, we’re so comfortable with him and we know he’s not gonna lose his edge. He’s just a great guy and a great producer. Yeh, we would have no problem working with him on the second album. S&T: This tour runs through the end of February? CHRIS: Yes. S&T: I checked the dates. You guys are playing like, almost every night. CHRIS: Pretty much. S&T: What happens after that? Some time off? CHRIS: Actually, we had about 3 1/2 weeks off right before this tour so we’re not looking at much time off over the next year really. We’re going to Europe in May with Mushroomhead and Hatebreed. Big Universal tour we’re gonna do over there but that’s only going to last like 3 or 4 weeks, uh, and there’s some different things being thrown around for inbetween there. I know we’re doing a bunch of radio dates after this so I think after this we get to go home for like 4 days, then we’ve got to fly out to Denver and do a radio date. We’ll do a bunch of radio dates and we’ll get to home for a couple more days and then we’ll be back out. We’ll be out for awhile. S&T: Thanks, Chris. |
