Protest the Hero demands our full attention

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      It’s when talk turns to a certain rubber-faced fartsmith that Rody Walker finally gets excited about reflecting on the career choices made by Protest the Hero. You can’t blame the Whitby, Ontario–based musician for taking a while to get revved up. There’s a major downside to making hyperintricate albums where the songs play out like fantastical short stories. Typically, Protest the Hero’s singer finds that nine out of 10 interviewers want to know what far-off mystical kingdom lyricist and bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi makes his home in. So when the subject of Jim Carrey accidentally comes up, Walker doesn’t miss the chance to run with it.

      Despite the fact that the front man loves the Canadian-born comedian, he finds it hysterical when informed that The Onion once described him as a “rubber-faced fartsmith”. For all Walker’s admiration, though, he can’t understand why, rather than branching out with dark-themed duds like The Number 23, Carrey doesn’t return to the lowbrow comedy he excels at. In other words, if your big strength is spreading your butt cheeks and pretending to talk out of your ass, why fight it?

      “You know what’s kind of funny?” asks Walker, on the line from a Wichita, Kansas, tour stop. “The generation that’s coming up now does not know Jim Carrey the comedian. They’ve seen The Number 23 and some of the other serious stuff that he’s done, and some of the children’s movies. But they missed that entire period of The Cable Guy, Dumb and Dumber, and the Ace Ventura movies, so they never saw Jim Carrey at his best. That kind of pisses me off.”

      Read between the lines, and what Walker seems to be getting at is that somehow Carrey decided he wasn’t satisfied doing what comes naturally to him. As proven on its sophomore album, the critically lauded Fortress, Protest the Hero doesn’t have that problem, which has been both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, the group has amassed a fiercely devoted Canadian following, with its thinking mosher’s blend of technical metal, extreme emo, and brute-force hardcore attracting the kind of adventurists who gravitate toward the Mars Volta. The negative is that Protest the Hero hasn’t made things easy for itself, seeing how its songs seem designed to demand the full attention of listeners.

      “People want things that are very easy to digest,” Walker acknowledges. “We don’t care about giving people what they want. We’re going to do what we want—we write music for ourselves. So I know that every business decision, every tour decision, and basically everything that we do makes things more difficult for us. I suppose we’re very egocentric, given that we’ve chosen this career path.”

      With Fortress, that path found Protest the Hero taking steps to ensure it wasn’t ghettoized as a Canuck version of American concept-album kings Coheed and Cambria. The group’s press-generating 2006 debut, Kezia, spun death row–related stories from the eyes of a priest, a killer, and an executioner. Quite intentionally, Fortress—the cover of which features a stoner-friendly rendering of the mythical Irish forest goddess Flidias—is more difficult to nail down. The album starts out like an extreme edition of Dungeons & Dragons, with Mirabdolbaghi spinning tales where “enemies of the khanate” are hung on hooks like slaughtered pigs, monsters hack unsuspecting children into meat, and rivers of blood flow through the streets of doomed villages.

      By the end of the album, though, things are less clear, with the lyricist seemingly more interested in ruminating on fate and the meaning of life than sword-wielding sorceresses and musclebound warriors.

      “We really tried to avoid having a stringent concept this time because we got so many fucking questions about the concept behind Kezia,” Walker admits. “People started concentrating on the lyrics more than the music. Though this record [Fortress] is conceptual, it’s not as story-based.”

      The changes don’t stop there.

      “We really weren’t happy with the screamo label that was being applied to us,” Walker says. “What we tried to do, in addition to getting heavier, was also be more progressive, so that when people listen to it they’ll have trouble defining it, as opposed to writing it off as a screamo record. Screamo sucks.”

      Fortress won’t get anyone suggesting Protest the Hero is gunning for a spot between Orchid and Saetia on a future Legends of Screamo collection. Over the course of 41 savagely uncompromising minutes, Mirabdolbaghi, guitarists Tim Millar and Luke Hoskin, and drummer Moe Carlson turn in nothing less than an awe-inspiring clinic, doubly amazing when you consider that, at the beginning of the decade, they were teenagers playing NOFX covers in their parents’ basements.

      Noticeably more accomplished than Kezia, Fortress is loaded with machine-gun riffage, solar-flare guitar pyrotechnics, and unrelentingly inventive timekeeping. And despite moments when it’s clear that the band has learned something about lethally barbed hooks from studying the work of Fat Mike, overall its members serve up enough saliva-frothing fury to scare the Blood Brothers.

      Walker has also elevated his game. After Kezia, the singer took lessons to improve his vocal range, and it shows on Fortress, where he delivers everything from caught-in-a-meat-grinder howling to sweeter-than-refined-sugar crooning. “Palms Read” alone finds him equally adept at turbo-soul crooning, metal-aria howling, and grindcore gurgling.

      “I like getting questions where people are like ”˜So who sang this part, that part, and this part?’ ” Walker says. “I’ll be like ”˜Umm, that was me.’ I’m a big fan of Mike Patton and the Boredoms—anyone that’s really known for obscure vocal performances. I think there’s real merit in experimenting.”

      Funnily enough, a certain rubber-faced fartsmith would probably agree with that, even if his fans would rather see him talking out of his anus than ruminating on the meaning of life in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

      Protest the Hero plays the Croatian Cultural Centre on Friday (April 11).

      In + out

      Rody Walker sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

      On Protest the Hero’s fans: “As much as I say we do this for ourselves, we wouldn’t be here without people appreciating what we do. We realize we’re very fortunate.”

      On touring the U.S.: “It’s kind of fun going from Canada, where we are larger, to here, where we are nothing. We’re the first band on a bill of four right now. After touring so much in Canada, we’re literally having to put our noses to the grindstone and do it all over again. It’s a daunting task, but kind of fun. It makes you nostalgic in a way.”

      On evolving as a band: “When we first got together, we wrote songs with titles like ”˜Jurassic Fart’. Everything we did was really dumb. But still, even that makes us realize how much of a struggle the creative process is for us today. Anything worth listening to requires taking time and going through an arduous process. ”

      Comments