The Blog
UGO.com
The Short-But-Sweet-Interview: The Accüsed's Tommy Niemeyer
Few rock bands can say they created a whole sub-genre themselves, but that's exactly what the Accüsed accomplished with..."splatter core."
OK, maybe it's not as a renowned style as "thrash metal" or "hair metal," but the band has been at it since the early 1980's, and in 2009, released their sixth full-length overall, The Curse of Martha Splatterhead (via Southern Lord Records).
And with the Accüsed set to tour this summer, what better way for the group's guitarist (Tommy Niemeyer) to celebrate than with carefully navigating through the Short-But-Sweet-Interview?
UGO: How heavy is the latest album, The Curse Of Martha Splatterhead?
TOMMY NIEMEYER: On your standard "weights and measures scale" it's not super heavy, more deadly, lean and sharp, like a handful of those martial arts throwing stars being jammed into your face.
UGO: Would you agree that the Accüsed were one of the first bands to blur the lines between punk and metal?
TOMMY NIEMEYER: It's cool for the Accüsed to be considered "one of the first," but honestly, there were several amazing bands that were way ahead of the Accüsed and other bands from that era that just don't get the credit they should for mixing metal with punk. The Plasmatics (feat. the late, great Wendy O. WIlliams) and China White (Orange County, CA) are two I can think of immediately. Both of those bands' earlier stuff was HUGE in helping create so-called "crossover" of the mid-to-late 1980's.
Everybody Loves Our Town
Tommy had the great opporutinity to be included in this publication. The book is also known as the ‘Seattle sound’, is the sludgy fusion of punk rock and heavy metal that emerged from the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 1980s. But it was the unexpected, seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ in the fall of 1991, that made grunge a household word and launched an American music movement on par with punk and hip-hop. Twenty years later, Mark Yarm captures that era in the words of those at the forefront of the movement (and the music's lesser-known champions). Everybody Loves Our Town will tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of Seattle’s Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the insane media hype surrounding the grunge explosion, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre’s mid-to-late-‘90s decline.
