AWOLNATION builds a legacy

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      Coming up with a hit follow-up to the multiplatinum smash “Sail” wasn’t a big worry for Aaron Bruno when he began working on AWOLNATION’s new Run. The lifelong musician was more fixated on the fact that, for once in his career, someone was guaranteed to be paying attention to a record that he had worked on.

      “It’s a strange thing—I’ve always made debut records, so this was the first time in my life that I was about to present myself to the world artistically,” Bruno says, on the line from his hometown of Los Angeles. “At some point, it hit me that this record was going to be reviewed and judged. For the first time.”

      If that sounds confusing, it will help to back up a little. At the age of 36, Bruno isn’t exactly a neophyte when it comes to the music industry. Over the years, he’s been part of neogrunge units (Home Town Hero) and jagged-edge pop bands (Under the Influence of Giants) that never gained much traction with audiences.

      Perhaps feeling like he was wasting—or had wasted—his life, Bruno wrote “Sail” back in 2010, a time when he was rebranding himself as a solo artist known as AWOLNATION. First appearing on an EP titled Back From Earth, the claustrophobic and bombastically baroque electro-shocker didn’t exactly fly out of the gate. “Sail” first hit the charts months after being repackaged for AWOLNATION’s debut album, Megalithic Symphony, which was released in 2011. While promoted as a single in January of that year, the track wouldn’t catch on until September. Twelve months later, it raced up the charts again, hitting the Top 20.

      After years of trying to write a hit in bands, Bruno was suddenly responsible for a massive one. Except that he somehow managed to do it under the radar, with critics sleeping on Megalithic Symphony upon its release.

      “The record barely got any reviews because no one knew about it,” Bruno says. “All of a sudden it blew up, and then I think that a lot of people were frustrated that they’d missed it. So there were people who missed the vote for that record who had an opportunity to say what they wanted to say for Run. It’s almost like I’m being reviewed for two records, and when I realized that was going to happen, it became a scary thing. When I sat down to write this one, I felt like I was going to be going on some sort of dating service and was going to have to explain who I was.”

      Tellingly, Bruno—a former hardcore kid who performs with a band live—lists Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come as a life-changing influence. It’s not by accident, then, that Run is epically diverse, something that caused some critics to suggest it’s too all-over-the-place to get a handle on. That’s bullshit, of course. The record swings thrillingly from the grinding industrial mayhem of “Run” to the fit-for-a-Queen theatricality of “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf)” to the pulsating subterranean disco of “Dreamers”. Bruno sounds as comfortable stripping things down to acoustic guitar for “Headrest for My Soul” as he does cranking the drums and throwing a one-man ballroom blitz for the synth-smeared “KOOKS­EVERYWHERE!!!”.

      The big question is whether Run will yield another smash on par with “Sail”. But having been in the game for a while now, Bruno sounds more interested in finally building a legacy than in re-creating something he’s already done.

      “It got lonely in the studio,” he says. “And I couldn’t really talk to anyone who knew exactly how I felt—being confused yet obviously excited and grateful for everything that happened, but also trying to digest it and understand what it meant. There was huge pressure to be great, really. That’s what I’m striving to do: write songs that, hopefully, will be cherished for years to come.”

      AWOLNATION plays the Commodore Ballroom on Thursday (May 28).

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Steve Black

      May 28, 2015 at 7:43pm

      cant wait to see Awolnation! At the Commodore!