By Keith Walsh
Mr. Phylzzz new album Cancel Culture Club is brilliant. As the band is on the road performing as a two piece, I spoke with guitarist and vocalist Clinton Jacob, who says his performances are all about the timing….comic timing.

“So, for like years and years and years, I worked in comedy clubs and I feel like that whole aspect has taught me so much just about like performance and just working with people in general,” Jacob told me in a phone interview.  “A comedian’s whole job is to like basically like push and pull and audience the entire time. It’s still like when the audience is talking too much that you get quieter, that makes them focus because they got to like listen cause I’m quieter. If the audience is too quiet, you get louder to draw attention. It’s just like a back and forth dance, and just working in clubs. I watched a lot of that every night and I learned a lot from that.”

Cancel Culture Club, which features drummer Danny Sein, is packed with energetic rock and roll that defies genre. Noise rock is too confining for a mix that includes lots of melody and structure. So despite having chaotic elements, there’s lots of effort behind the sound of Mr. Phylzzz, as Jacob explains. “I like the chaos but I like to hide melody and structure behind chaos. So when me and Danny are writing, it still has to have a melody and it still has to have a hook…I do like the chaotic-ness and the abrupt noise and stuff like that. But for me it’s always got to boil down to good songs, good melody.” Cancel Culture Club also features guest appearances by Kevin Rutmanis (bass, slide bass) and King Buzzo of The Melvins (guitars), as well as Haze XXL (guitars). (Haze XXL is Tom Hazelmyer of Amphetamine Reptile Records, who pressed the album and did the cover art).

The guitar sounds on Cancel Culture Club are amazing, done with studio trickery and an overblown Esteban amp and a Shure SM58 shoved into the 4 inch speaker. Jacob explains: “Now a lot of that record I spent making during the pandemic where I was just like in a little room in Chicago that was also me and my partner’s bedroom at the time and I just like kind of turned it all into like a makeshift recording space and just recorded everything in there.”

This D.I.Y. approach resulted in an outstanding album that Jacob says comes close to his musical ideal. “Well, anytime I’ve done any studio work, the people that I work with don’t really want to do the stuff that I want to do,” says Jacob. “I like things to be chaotic and blown out and messy and yeah and a nice like cohesive form. And you know, when you go to a studio, they kind of want to polish  you up. And usually anytime they see a two piece they assume you want to sound like The White Stripes, The Black Keys. Something like that. Yeah, which is fine but not what particularly I want to sound like. I kind of want to sound like chainsaws.” More on those amazing guitar sounds later in the article.

‘The Curse’
All of Cancel Culture Club was recorded on Garageband and an older iMac with a Focusrite audio interface, but it sounds like the product of any well-equipped studio using Pro Tools. “The curse of a lot of bands is they feel like I just need this gear and I can do this or I just need to make it like you really f$^%king don’t —  like do it yourself. Yeah, you don’t. I’ve played with too many musicians that are like, they’re so obsessed with, ‘oh if I just had this U-87, my vocal chain, would be crazy if I just had this…., right? It’s like, no. I mean I did everything with like the cheapest gear you can find. I mean like scrap gear. Like some a lot of it’s like yard sale mics and like sh$%ty stuff. I was still able to make a record because I just wanted to I wanted to make something.”

In addition to being an excellent recording, the melodies and performances on Cancel Culture Club come through. And that’s down to a lot of preparatory work. I asked Jacob how he comes up with his epic riffs and songs. He tells me: “I feel like a lot especially with like riffs and stuff, I kind of try to always have a guitar in my hand, at least one point in the day. Yeah, at least for several hours. So riff-wise is it just — I feel like it sounds really stupid to say they come out of nowhere, but they really kind of just do. There’s no real thought process behind much of that. Like, especially when Danny I get in a room it’s like just kind of f$%king around until we find something that just like, the way we write, especially for now, is if it makes us like excited, then we’re going focus on it.”

Despite the catchiness of the songs on the album, they don’t come from calculation, but from jamming out and woodshedding. “I don’t want to write, just to write,” says Jacob. “I feel like that’s the curse of a lot of bands. They feel like they just need to write. And I feel like that’s when you get filler songs. Versus like if you’re just having fun and something cool comes out of it, that’s probably going to be how other people are going to like perceive it as like ‘oh, that’s f$%king cool because they’re having fun with it, you know what I mean? And I feel like that just really is just getting in a room and doing it and f@%king around and having fun and joking around, and I feel like, that’s when the best stuff comes.”

This approach seems to work wonderfully. “I’m always going to love the newest thing that I’m doing but I feel like this record because like every inch of this record is Phylzzzz like it is completely 100% touched by us on every aspect. Like there’s no other hands really involved other than Tom’s pressing and Tom’s art. And you know like the Amphetamine Reptile family taking care of the other parts which, you know, I love Tom forever for all the stuff he’s done for me. But the music itself is the I feel like it’s really 100% now exactly Phylzzz because I’ve mixed it, you know, I’ve recorded it. I got it exactly what I want you to hear and it’s not filtered through anyone else. It’s exactly how I want to present it.”

Being in a two-piece, Jacob gets the inevitable comparisons to other bands, including The White Stripes, who he calls one of his favorite bands, even though they sound nothing alike. To be fair, Jacob doesn’t even sound like himself from album to album. “I want to write whatever I write. So if the next album is a country album, it’s going to be a country album. I just want it to be, like, whatever I write and I never want to be pigeonholed into like any sort of genre. I know it gets ‘noise rock’ and it gets, you know, alt rock, stuff like that, which is fine. People can label it whatever they want. But personally to me, I just always want to it be ‘whatever we write is what we write.’ So I just kind of keep it ambiguous. It’s like the music is very androgynous. That’s the best way of putting it.”

Gear Talk
Mr. Phylzzz’ live performances are different beast than the studio versions, but you can bet that it’s captivating and loud. Jacob describes his live setup: “Starting from my guitar. It’s a Snark tuner, and EarthQuaker Dispatch, which is a Reverb delay. And then that goes into a DigiTech Ricochet and then that goes to an A/B Y and then the A is the guitar channel and that goes into a Death By Audio Fuzz into the Marshal and then the B channel just goes into a Little Big Muff That goes into the bass (amp)… I keep the bass amp closer to Danny’s drums, just if we’re in a place where there’s not a good PA, you can still look feel the low end, but I keep the bass to the left of me and the guitar to the right, but they’re kind of like a small, the kind of like, fan out a little.”

Jacob’s favorite guitar is “an Epiphone Les Paul Custom. And (on the album) I was also using like, a 70s, like Japanese real sh@tty off-brand, like a Les Paul lookalike.” Jacob continues: ‘I feel like Epiphone to me are like some of my favorite guitars of all time…especially the new Epiphones, I feel like you can’t you just can’t beat them, they’re just built really well, they’re great for touring. They sound good they hold up, they hold tune.”

Jacob and Sein are bringing their songs in a tour around the U.S., as a two-piece. Find out more at:

MrPhylzzz.com
Amphetamine Reptile Records
Mr. Phylzzz On Bandcamp

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