Interviews : Lochlan Watt chats to Enabler’s Jeffrey Lohrber

Enabler hail from the middle of nowhere, USA. Having done time in Harlots, Trap Them, Dead To Fall, Shai Hulud and more, guitarist, vocalist and mastermind Jeffrey Lohrber decided it was time to do his own thing a couple of years back. Eight releases later, and the raging hardcore crust/thrash metal/grindcore crossover unit that is Enabler has released two full lengths, countless splits, and this year’s incredible Shift of Redemption 7”. Jeff got on the phone to the man responsible for their current Australian tour, Lochlan Watt, and had a bit of a chat before getting on the plane…

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Hey Jeff, it’s Lochlan man, how you going?

What’s up man? How are you?

Not much man, busy but good. Did Tom get on to you all good before?

Yeah I just got off the phone with him ten minutes ago or something like that. All taken care of. How are you?

Pretty good. We just got to announce that we’re releasing the new Rosetta album down here, so I’m pretty stoked on that.

Oh fuck yeah man. Are you guys just doing the Australian pressing?

Yeah. There’s a Euro label, and the band is doing it themselves in the state, and it’ll all be a free download with different variations on the pressing.

Oh right on. Are they doing one of those Indiegogo campaigns?

Nah, the album is already booked in to record. They’re just going to put the album on Bandcamp as a donation download. Just straight up no label for the US, no CD release, just doing it themselves.

That’s cool. We’ve been playing around with that idea ourselves for the next record. We’re just trying to figure out someone to put it out right now, but I have no fucking idea. We have like 19 new songs though… I don’t know whatever.

You mentioned in some emails earlier that you had a new record deal in the works… did that not come through?

Well we had an offer from like Vagrant actually, and it was complete shit, so I said no. Southern Lord turned us down. ThinkFast! is down to do vinyl if we can get someone to do CD, but like, I kind of want to get a budget together. I’d like to have something to record with. I want to make it sound better than the last full-length, and we need some money to do that, and we just don’t have it. So it’s like… just kind of thinking about what we could do. I’ve been thinking about doing one of those Indiegogo things. It worked really well for Misery Signals. They got like over 100 g, and the record is really good from what I’ve heard. We heard a lot of demos from it. They were writing the record while Greg was in the band still, so he’d be in Milwaukee doing stuff with them and doing stuff with us simultaneously, so like we’d be in their practice room hearing them write new songs and shit. It was awesome.

I heard they put a minute and a half sample up yesterday, it definitely sounded like Misery Signals. It sounded sweet. They were one of the first metalcore bands that I ever really got into.

Yeah. It definitely sounds like Misery Signals – you can fully tell it’s those guy. It sounds like Greg Thomas production, I’ll say that. Working with him on All Hail The Void and also like, my first taste of what he did was when I played drums for Shai Hulud for a tour, and after the record he did came out. He’s done a lot of definite things that are kind of signature to him, and you can just hear it all over. Some things I’m a fan of and it’s a little too much some times. Greg’s a good friend though, so.

Enabler live at Black Wire Records in Sydney.

I read that you weren’t really stoked on how the kick drum sounded on All Hail The Void.

It just got really… I expected it to be cleaner than our other records, which is what I wanted, but he just went a little overboard on everything. Everything was just… it took three months to mix and edit that thing, but we should have been able to do it in ten days. He edited every little fucking guitar part, so all the inbetween strokes, that should actually be upstrokes, are all downstrokes, because you get more solid hits with the downstroke. I’m like ‘why the fuck are you doing that?’ I like the way it sounds with the upstroke, because then each individual downstroke, it comes in harder each time. A lot of little shit like that… he’s like wanted Jon Bonham snare drum samples for the snare drum on it. I’m like ‘that’s sweet, John Bonham’s cool, you know Led Zepplin, but I’d like to have Andy Hurley’s drums’. He has access to a lot of gear that we don’t have access to, and it sounds really fucking good, so I’m like ‘why are you sound replacing the drums dude? The drums already sound fucking fantastic. It was some of the best recorded drums I’d ever heard. So I was kind of like… you know, whatever, the songs are there, and it comes across.

If it’s any consolation, I personally thought the production sounded pretty solid, but I am definitely a sucker for the big, overproduced metalcore sound.

I am not. I’ve heard so much of that in my life that… ugh. Dude. I’ve been playing in bands like that for ten fucking years man, and what I was really looking to with Enabler was like finally I could be in a fucking band, a band with a punk mentality about shit. That’s how it kind of felt when I joined Trap Them too – finally something punk. Even though they are a metal band for sure, they definitely have a punk vibe, and I was totally looking forward to that.

So what made you decide that you were sick of being a fill in drummer, and wanted to pick up guitar and do your own thing?

I guess this whole band was a baby of mine. It was a project I had on the backburner. I hadn’t really decided anything with it yet, but over time it was kind of apparent that I needed to do something with these songs. The biggest thing that made that apparent… Harlots, my old band, went on hiatus for a while, and I’d filled in for a bunch of different bands. Harlots went on hiatus in 2008, so I went on tour with Shai Hulud, Today Is The Day for a month – that didn’t go very well – I toured with a band called Dance Club Massacre for a while, and then joined Trap Them. When I got the Trap Them gig I was really fucking stoked. I really love what that band was doing, and I had previous connections with their previous band Backstabbers Inc. It seemed like a really good idea, bu a couple of months down the road things weren’t going so well. It was pretty apparent that I just didn’t fit in with the dudes. They were a lot older than I was, and they had their own vision of things, and I just wasn’t a part of it. At the end of the day, they definitely fucked me over and made me feel completely unappreciated. All the help, the months of touring, it didn’t matter one fucking bit. When I got home from that tour, and Harlots was playing our final shows a couple of weeks later, and it was just like, after all that I just had this really bad ending with this band that I was really into, and it was kind of what I’d been looking forward to playing on drums for a really long time, and the band that was my baby that I wrote a lot of the music for was breaking up, was done. We’re not the kind of band where we can just do a reunion show – it’s done. So I needed to reevaluate where I was at, and it was kind of just like now is the time to start a new band. I’d never sang in a band before, so it was really kind of nerve-shattering doing that the first couple of times. I didn’t know how to talk to the audience because I’d never done that before – I was always behind a kit. There was definitely a lot of frustration from the couple of years there that was kind of rocky. All this frustration got poured into the songs, and it’s been hard to keep up with that, because I’m not really as frustrated as I was, and I think it’s kind of showing in the newer songs. There’s a lot more melody, and it has become a lot more fun in some aspects. When our first record dropped it was like I’d finally said what was holed up inside of me and everything just kind of poured out from there. It was definitely a rough couple of years that lead into this band for myself. Being able to do something different musically was definitely very rewarding, and I’m having a lot more fun playing live than I ever have. So that’s a good thing right?

For sure. I guess it also seems like you might be having a bit more fun in the studio as well. Eight releases in the space of two years is quite a bit. Do you plan to try and keep that pace up with all the EPs and splits and everything?

Yes. As long as someone wants to put out releases for us, we’re going to make releases happen. There is an abundance of songs, and there’s too many to fit on a proper full-length for us. Our band could make a 60 minute full-length or a double album or some shit, but I don’t really like going that route with this kind of music. It’s the kind of music that’s too harsh to listen to for more than… I don’t think any of our albums should be longer than 30, 35 minutes. I love how the last Nails record is like 18 minutes long, because I don’t really want to listen to that for more than 18 minutes, but it’s really effective. It’s just the right length of how long I want to tolerate that for. It’s so effective. It feels complete. It feels like a full length because it is full. But a dude at a record label would go ‘am I going to put out an 18 minute record? No’. Most record labels wouldn’t go for that. What the fuck was I talking about? I’m getting off topic…

Just getting to record a lot.

Oh fuck yeah dude. Recording has been awesome. I mean I have control over it too. There’s all these bands I played in, and my name wasn’t on any of the records. So now it’s like I’m going to put out a ton of releases and make up for that.

Earlier this year you released the Shift of Redemption EP, you guys have toured Europe, done a bit of touring in the USA. Give us a rundown on 2013 so far for the band.

2013, we did a European tour with Rotten Sound and Martyrdod, in February and March that was our first time overseas. It was amazing for us. I had a great time playing. I was definitely blown away by how receptive the audience were to us, and how familiar they were with us already. We haven’t had as many people singing along at shows as we had in Europe. We definitely don’t do that in the States, so it was refreshing. That tour went really well, and then it was kind of a weird thing, because we had Andy Hurley from Fall Out Boy play drums in the band last year, and he left in July of last year, because he had to get back to his own band and do his thing. So this guy Dave from Mouth of The Architect joined, and he recorded a split with us, but he didn’t really work out in the band too well. So when he left in November we were left in this spot where we had a European tour planned, and we were like what are we going to do for drums? So we asked my friend Chris if he’d be interested in playing with us, but it wasn’t going to work timing wise in order to do a European tour. And also Hurley came back and filled in for some shows, and we were jamming with Chris. So we were jamming with Chris, but he couldn’t do the European tour, because he had planned a trip to the Dominican Republic. So we had our friend Andy Sam fill in on drums for the tour, and he just did a phenomonal job. Someone that I always look forward to playing music with, although he can’t really dedicate time to touring because he has a kid and everything. So we hooked back up with Chris in April, and we did some makeup shows from last year that we had cancelled in last November, and kind of did a States tour out of that, as well as a few shows with Rotten Sound. We demoed out three new songs, that are actually getting used for various split releases in the future at some point, but it’s not really sure what’s happening, but mainly they’re used for demo purposes. We have a lot of new songs for the record, and just trying to figure it out, and who’s putting it out. Just kind of wanted to test the lineup really. We haven’t had a lot of time playing together before we recorded that, so it was good just to be in the studio when we were fresh, and not just killing ourselves working on past releases over and over and over. We’ve been busy doing that, and now yeah, coming to Australia in a week and a half or something like that.

I was interested to hear the story from your perspective, about how you guys arrived at working with myself and Monolith for the Australian tour. Who did you start getting in touch with, how did it arrive at us, and I guess what your first impressions of everything were when I sent you that first email?

Well basically I have just always been interested in travelling with music or touring or whatever. The idea got started when we were looking into Europe. We knew we could do Europe, but it was like what do we do after Europe? We don’t have any management… we just started working with management, but as a smaller band we have to look after ourselves. We were sussing it out online, thinking who books bands in Australia. I ended up coming across somebody, had some talks with him for a while, but he just stopped replying to my emails after a while. So I was thinking about that band Anchors  – we put out a CD on Creator Destructor Records, who has put out the past Anchors record in the states. I really like that Bad Juju record, I think it’s just an awesome punk rock record. So I was like maybe they would tour with us – that’d be an intersting thing. I know like we’re a metal band, but we have just as much roots in punk rock as we do metal, so it was kind of like that’d be sick. But they’re actually going on hiatus, so it wasn’t going to work out at all, but he referred me to you, and I sent you a blind email thinking why not, I’ve got nothing to lose, and you knew the band already, and it seemed like you cared about music, so there’s a start. On the road you’re in the pocket of people. We actually met up with the guys from Thy Art Is Murder in Germany and they said ‘that guy’s a legend, he will drink your whole rider!’ It just kind of made sense you know. It seemed like you were into music and have a similar attitude that we approach our band with, so let’s fucking do this. It was pretty fast compared to some people, where you go back and forth and back and forth trying to talk them into working with you. I didn’t have to do that with you, it was like you want to do this – cool.

Enabler (and others) recording a three track 7″ at The Brain Studios in Sydney, including a cover of Septura’s “Arise” featuring Lochlan Watt on guest vocals.

Some people have been surprised, or even questioned the fact that it’s only a $15 cover charge for an international band in 2013. It really doesn’t happen so often anymore. My logic behind it is that Enabler isn’t exactly a well known band, down here especially, so my idea is we put on a lower cover charge, a few good locals, and try and encourage people to come and check the band out because it’s only $15, people who perhaps wouldn’t have bothered if it was $25 or something. But then maybe next Enabler comes down, you will have a fan base, and you can justify charging maybe $30 for the show and possibly even make some money off the tour. Would you rather having a $15 cover charge, and maybe not making enough money to cover all of the band’s costs in getting out here, and play to a bunch of kids who might not have checked the band out otherwise, or would you rather than we did charge a bit more, and maybe Enabler makes some money, but you play to less kids?

I think a lot of the stuff evens itself out. In the states there’s an entire scene where it’s hard to get people to come out to a show if it’s more than $5 – an entire DIY scene. It’s very well connected, very underground thing, and in those punk circles it’s very uncommon to charge over $5. I guess US and Australian dollars are pretty much the same, but I think things are a little cheaper over here. Some of the shows that I do, where we’ll have two or three touring bands, I’ll charge $8-10, and people have a problem with it. ‘Ten bucks for a show?’ Yeah ten bucks for a show! You got all these touring bands, and realistically I’m only going to be able to pay them $150 a piece or something. And that aint shit, but in their eyes it’s like $150, that’s cool, we can pay for gasoline and maybe have a little bit extra on top of that. Sometimes it’s just what you gotta do. You can’t just go out and play sold out shows overnight. I guess for some people they luck out, but we’re a different kind of band. There are very few bands ever that get to do that. So we’d rather just have the shows happen, period. It’s something that we want to do. Obviously we want to make our money back – and that’s the whole goal. As long as we’re not losing a ton of money, then what the fuck? When we start losing money, the reason it sucks is because you’re like ‘well, I have to pay rent or I’ll lose my apartment, I have to pay bills every month’. If I’m paying too much out of my pocket to play, then I don’t have a roof over my head. At least if you’re breaking even, you’re a band, with the comfort of ‘okay, I can pay my bills’. If it turns out that we can make some money, then that’s awesome, but the main goal is to try and not lose any. That said, I think it evens itself out. Even if we charged $30 and had half the crowd, we make the same amount of money. But if it’s only $15, and that’s a cheap price for a show in Australia, and all those people come and you still make the same money, and you have twice the amount of people to sell merchandise to. It’s going to even itself out. That’s what it’s like with a lot of the underground basement shows here. There’s no overhead, there’s no one to pay for having the show, there’s no sound guy, there’s no nothing like that, so every dollar that comes in is going to you, and when all those people are paying $5 to get in, and they are bringing their own beers rather than paying for overpriced beers at the bar, then they have cash on them, and then you’re more likely to sell stuff. I’ve walked out of shows that I’ve played to 20 people with more money in my pocket than shows I’ve played to 600-700 people, where the national touring band will get all the money for the show, and they dick over the support and pay them $50, and everyone’s there to see them and buy their merchandise, and then we walk out with like $100 in merch from the night, even though there’s 600 people there. But then we’ll go and play a show the next night to 20 people, and every one of them buys a record and a shirt. It all evens itself out, and I think the most important thing is to not get stressed about it. If something’s going wrong, something’s going to go right sooner or later. You just have to roll with the punches sometimes, just with life in general. There’s always going to be something that’s fucked, there’s always going to be something to do, something in the way, and you have to just roll with the punches and chill out about it, and it will work itself out over time as long as you’re putting in your best effort.

For sure. I was interested to know, you mentioned bigger bands in the states dicking over supports and not giving them enough of a cut of the door… is it all pretty cut-throat over there, with bands trying to climb over each other?

Yes and no. It’s all on a band to band basis. Some bands are a lot more relaxed about it, some are not. Some people in bands are fucking assholes. Sometimes you have to be in between, and sometimes you have to be an asshole. Well, not an asshole, but kind of hard sometimes if you want to get paid realistically. You can’t tour with every single one of your friend’s bands. It’s just like.. we have a lot of friends with bands, and some bands, yeah they’re an awesome band, but they don’t know anybody, they’ve never been out of the state, they don’t know how to tour, they don’t know how to be a good live band or whatever, but they are still your friends and you still enjoy playing with them, but you can’t just take them out. Sometimes you have to take everything with a grain of salt here. There’s definitely times when it is cutthroat, and bands try and look out for themselves. You have to be looking out for yourself, but you need to also look out for the other people around you, because if you’re not looking out for the people around you.. I’m definitely a person that believes in karma, and if you’re not looking out for the people around you, they’re not going to look out for you when you need help. The best way I can describe it, is this past weekend, I got a phone call at about 9:30 at night from a show promoter, and he was telling me like ‘hey man, this band Windhand that I just booked tonight, their transition blew like ten miles out of the city, and you’re the only person I know with a van that has a trailer hitch on it, can you go pick them up? They’re going to scrap their van and keep the trailer.’ And I was like fuck it man, I really don’t want to go anywhere right now, because I just got off work, but two months ago when my van’s alternator blew, the singer for Everything Went Black came and drove for two hours and picked us up so we could play the show, and just use all his band’s gear, and we found our way back to the van the next day and got it fixed. If that guy wouldn’t have done that, we wouldn’t have played that show, and wouldn’t have had fun on one of the better shows of the tour. It’s like this show is straight up not going to happen if I don’t do anything about it, and I don’t really know these guys, but I know all the other bands playing, and I know how stoked everyone is to do it. So, at the end of the night, I’m trying to talk to these guys like ‘hey, what’s the plan? Where am I dropping the trailer? What do you guys want to do?’ And they were like ‘we were just going to rent something tomorrow, and we have someone picking us up on Tuesday’. And I was like ‘well I don’t have to work until Wednesday, and the trailer’s already on the van, and I do need to get something out of it, but it’s ultimately going to be cheaper for this to happen, and I really don’t mind, I’m down to go on tour for a couple of days’. The next morning I left at like 9am and was like on tour for two days. I got to see some bands for free, drink some beers and hang out, and I got back at like 8am Wednesday and then went to work at 10am. I think I closed my eyes for about 30 minutes in a gas station car park on the way back. The way I look at it is like you gotta help other people out when they need help, because there’s a lot of people involved in this business, where it’s not just about the band, there’s an audience that pays to go to your shows, there’s other bands that you play with, and you need all of them, the promoters, everybody has to do their job. If bands want to be selfish and only want to look after themselves, I think that’s bullshit because it’s like someone’s looking out for you. You have management, you have a booking agent, you have all this stuff, and if you didn’t have all these people pulling the strings behind you, you wouldn’t be shit. You couldn’t do all of this on your own. So what about before you got to that point with people who have power in the music industry? Where would you be if they didn’t help you? I think a lot of bands in the States are not thinking about that whatsoever. You can’t take every single band that asks you to take them out, but you still have the power to do something here and there. I think it helps in general in life, if someone needs help, help them, because there’s going to be a day when you need help too, and it’s going to suck if no one helps you out.

For sure. I was curious to know about the track off All Hail The Void, ‘Speechless’. I guess I had a very personal but also business related relationship of mine that really fell apart pretty badly last year. For some reason that track just kind of came back to me and struck a chord, and almost became my personal theme song for dealing with that situation. I was wondering if you might be able to elaborate as to what you went through to make you write that song? I wanted to know if the situation was similar to what I had been through, or if I’ve just applied it to something completely different.

I think you got it right. Basically, it was about a friend of mine who I was very close with for a long time. It was kind of written in two different parts two. The first verse of that song was written about five years ago maybe? Actually six. Wow. Fuck. But yeah it was written about six years ago for a different project I had thought of with one of my friends that just never happened. It was kind of a failed band I was supposed to do with Kevin from Mouth of The Architect, a bit of a hardcore band that never happened. I sat on the song forever, but I always liked the lyrics a lot. When I applied them to Enabler, the first part seemed a little happy in some ways, and when I wrote the first part of that in some ways I was still pretty close with the person and everything, and now it’s like that person is no longer a part of my life whatsoever. Ultimately you move on and do greater things. Part of the frustration that comes out of the song is the wasted time. It’s like, you hate to come out of a relationship and feel like ‘I just wasted all my fucking time with this person that I thought was my friend, and now there’s nothing here’. There’s fucking nothing here now, and that was the biggest frustration about that, and it kind of turned into the idea that there’s something better to be done with yourself. That frustration should be used for good things, you shouldn’t just dwell on it. That’s kind of my outlet too, this happened, all this shit happens in life, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you have to move on. You can either let it affect you in a negative way, and let it sit inside and dwell on it and become a wreck of a human being, or you can say ‘that’s fucking bullshit, I’m pissed about it, but I am going to do better things’. I have an agenda of my own, and I will never get sick of singing that song live. It’s definitely one of my favourite Enabler songs. It’s definitely about a relationship, and definitely about coming out of it, overcoming the blow that it took to be able to watch that relationship dissolve in front of me and and be completely unable to do anything about it.

ENABLER are halfway through their Australian tour. Check the remaining dates below.

Wednesday 10 July – The Pot Belly Bar, Canberra 18+
w /Reigner, Throat of Dirt, Machina Genova

Thursday 11 July – The Bendigo Hotel, Melbourne 18+
w/ A Million Dead Birds Laughing, Party Vibez, Diploid

Friday 12 July – Black Goat Warehouse, Melbourne AA
w/ In Trenches, Join The Amish, Jurassic Penguin

Saturday 13 July – The Enigma Bar, Adelaide 18+
w/ Life Pilot, Funeral Moon, Impasse

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