CUTTERS

This reflective fraggle rock from a quartet out of NYC pools together something old and something new. Hanging onto tracks from their earlier EP, Trying Not to Die, “X-Cutioner’s Song,” “Excitable Liefeld,” and “Young Gods” epitomize end-of-the-rope, somebody-please-help-me type vocals, much like Black Sparrow Press shot through with gang vox on the chorus and cock rock guitar solos. The new tracks look out from a Red House Painters autobiographical POV, juxtaposing frank, depressing lyrics with unconventional instrumentations like a sprinkling of magical triangle in “Batman 666.” At the end of it all, I wanna hand this guy a tissue and ask if he’s seeing a good therapist. Disparaging, barely hanging on—keep the sharps away from these guys. –Kristen K. (Lost State) - Razorcake

The first couple songs on Brooklyn self-described “danger room punk” band CUTTERS’ We Are The Quarry are sort of confusing, but at the same time familiar. Confusing, right? One the one hand, the anthemic vocals, self-deprecating lyrics, and fuzzy guitars on “We Are the Quarry,” “Good Morning Boys,” and “Savage Nights,” reminded me of indie punk bigwigs like Titus Andronicus and The Men. But on the other hand, I also thought about more post-punk and progressive acts like Priests.

I’m not sure either of these comparisons are completely fair. After all, I can only assume that “danger room” is a reference to the X-Men’s training center, something that is partially confirmed by “X-Cutioner’s Song.” But that song and the following track, “Excitable Liefeld,” are less about superheroes and more about being stuck in a rut. The riffs on both songs are very catchy, and when CUTTERS’ vocalist wails about broken hearts and never-ending bad situations, I believe it. I admit that when I first began to listen to the album I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I am impressed.

The instrumentation is unique and varied, and though the similarities I mentioned in the first paragraph are still there, We Are The Quarry is something all its own. As the record continued into songs like “Young Gods” and “Batman 666,” CUTTERS move into the salvation and self-forgiveness stage, and I thought about other anthemy bands like Flogging Molly and Touché Amoré. However, unlike when I listen to ok or even bad albums, I didn’t wish that I was listening to those bands. Rather, I put We Are The Quarry up in the similar category of bands in my mind that enjoy separately at separate time.

So overall, I enjoyed We Are The Quarry quite a bit. I listened to the album several times, and each time I found a new way to move through the album’s emotional arc and find something new in the songs. Whether that was a guitar riff, a fun bass groove, some important and effective lyrics, I found something new each time. And that’s more than I can say for most smaller records that remind me of other ones. - Rotator Music Reviews

Who It Is: CUTTERS – We Are The Quarry; Lost State Records (2014)

What It Sounds Like: Taking Back Sunday, Nouns, Against Me!, COSMICSPLOSION

Why do punks get so jaded? Is it really just newbies coming in and ruining DIY ethics? Or is it just a matter of growing old? When that old drunk guy is yelling at the pop punk band to get off stage because “punk is dead”, what is he really saying? Well, I think CUTTERS explains it.

Being punk isn’t all about denim jackets and putting X’s over the faces of government officials. Sometimes it’s a lot like being a really regular old person. Sometimes to fund your band you’ve got to work a shitty 9-5 job and your only solace is Saturday night when your band plays a short 15 minute set to a crowd made up of the other bands playing that night. It’s not all glamorous indie rock & roll folks, and sometimes you grow old and tired.

But being older and kinda tired is sometimes really okay. Let’s look at CUTTERS. Their debut LP, We Are The Quarry, is their response to not just age, but to the jaded punk. Tracks like “Good Morning Boys” and “Savage Nights” are active acknowledgments of their age as something they can view with a positive outlook. As grim as life can look, CUTTERS doesn’t see it that way.

So where the fuck do they get all this positivity from? Well, it’s these excessive come-on sing-a-long’s that seem to grab the good vibes. Shouting “I am trying not to die, I’m alive” enough times over is will make anyone believe they’re doing better than they are, at least I think so.

Has an indie punk tune ever really changed the world? Maybe not, but a good indie punk tune can change lives. And that’s what CUTTERS are aiming for. To change their lives, not in the excessive shave-your-head-let’s-move-to-japan way, but rather, to change their lives from the 9-5 monotony to fun Saturday nights spent with beer and friends in the hopes they never end. And CUTTERS, you’ve won me over, I hope those nights don’t end too.

Favorite Track(s): X-Cutioner’s Song, Young Gods, Batman 666

Overall Rating: 7/10 - Funeral Sounds

Nearly 40 years since its inception, punk is becoming--once again--a diverse and refreshing genre. Thanks to a new generation of explorers entertaining new approaches, rather than one, uniform 'Rock N' Roll High School' of thought, power chords and four-counts have taken a back seat to ingenuity and nuance. CUTTERS of Brooklyn, NY is finding out that, much like the weirdo punk kid in high school, they don't perfectly fit in anywhere except among their friends.

The strange part is that, like the cliques we all sought to avoid in adolescence, modern punk can at times reinforce stagnation and bands find themselves hopping on bills they never would have dreamed of.

Not to say that this is inherently bad, though. In fact for CUTTERS, it's giving them the battle cry to stake their own ground on their debut LP, We Are The Quarry, a scant 8-songs released by the band proving most of everything they have to offer at the beginning. BTR was able carve out some time to speak with CUTTERS' vocalist Pierce Lydon and guitarist Brian Deodat about resisting genre conformity and how this latest album sums up everything about living the bandless post-grad life.

Speaking of the reception of We Are The Quarry, Lydon remarked that "I was kind of worried that people wouldn't like it." However with CUTTERS, the self-consciousness of the reception doesn't quite have as much to do with their perceived quality of the music but rather the fact that they don't feel they fit so neatly with what's happening with New York music.

He says that "sometimes we get put on weird bills because nobody really knows where to put us." Which on the surface, sounds like a problem and a reflection of the oversaturation of bands but if you reflect on it, it can really be a net positive for the band.

In one way, it forces the band to create their own "scene" as it were because they can't already fall back on one and so they have the autonomy to play with their friends and start something on their own. In another way, the band isn't consciously trying to avoid becoming derivative in their sound.

"[Bands with easily definable sounds] get booked easier; it's when you have such a clear genre that you're picking up these nuances from genres and using them very, very distinctly. It's easier to get booked, it's easier to get categorized. We sort of just sat down and started playing stuff that we wanted to play," says Deodat.

Which brings us to how CUTTERS formed. It's really just the union of a few old friendships between Pierce and Brian, who have known each other for six years; Brian and John Luther (drummer), who have known each other since Brian was 12; and Brian and Mike Strianese, also from his high school who Deodat says is a "phenomenal bass player for no reason."

Brian used to drum for Pierce's "college experience," a band called Ghost Mall, and so after he graduated he was left without a band and nothing musical to really tend to, save for a "pop songwriting thing." Then when the two of them found themselves in Brooklyn, Brian called up Pierce and "cobbled" CUTTERS together.

Their beginnings were a little haphazard as their vision wasn't completely clear. Lydon calls the first year of creative output "funny," while Deodat laments he originally "wanted to be a post-rock band." Though their latest record has a few too many ties to that ambition, one of the spacier songs from We Are The Quarry called "Excitable Liefield" comes from Deodat's original intent.

As you may or may not know, their name comes from Lydon's favorite film, Breaking Away--a 1970s picture about the locals of Bloomington, Ind. who are disparagingly referred to as the "cutters," in reference to their rejection of the college culture that also inhabits the town. For if you didn't choose college then you were destined to become a marble stonecutter. The film also features bicycle racing and opera, but the main takeaway is that the "cutters" were the underdogs of Bloomington society, and for all intents and purposes, the punks.

"Definitely, especially since we exist a little bit outside a lot of things that are going on as far as the music that we make and trying to carve out a niche in the areas that we try to play in. I've played in bands that sounded like whatever was sort of popular on Pitchfork and blogs and shit before, and that was really easy. It's weird to not do that and it's harder but a lot more fulfilling, I think," says Lydon.

One of the trademarks of CUTTERS is their sing-along style, which is not altogether so unique in punk, but somehow they turn the trope into a unique musical hallmark. The aforementioned Ghost Mall project utilized the gimmick heavily, and it seems the communal ferocity that sing-alongs encourage was what Lydon wanted to bring into his new band most.

"It's just like an immediate connection with an audience. If there's a line, it means something to every single person in that whatever the sing-along it means something to one person, it means something different to another person. If they're all singing it back to you or everyone's going along at the same time, there's nothing better than that," says Deodat.

Lydon chimes in that it's really easy to use sing-alongs as a "crutch" though, and when people are screaming something back in your face they can seem "very real" thus making it "very easy to lie to yourself about things." Deodat also concedes that the sing-along must have an end, that "having it go on endlessly just gets kind of tiresome."

We Are The Quarry is a collection of their favorite older songs from their first EP Trying Not To Die "as well as a bunch of new songs too." The record was originally supposed to have a concept based around Breaking Away, but they decided against it. Whatever thematic cohesion they finally decided to go with ended up becoming much more substantial and personal than a record about some Midwestern townies, at least in intent. Lydon explains:

"A quarry is a big-ass hole in the ground that you remove things from; you take rock out of it and it's like a mine. It gets refilled with things. I think it's kind of how I felt about music a little bit. I got burned out being in bands because it's the constant cycle of 'being in a band, doing some things, people liking it, band breaking up' before you do anything significant. When I wasn't in a band for two years after Ghost Mall I was just like, 'Alright, I guess I'll never do this again. I guess that's it, that's all I got.' But then CUTTERS came along then Brian came into my life again [laughs] and you get filled up again.

"In the same way that a quarry eventually fills up with water and it serves another purpose," he muses. "Even if it's kind of the same, it's something different." - Breakthru Radio

When I first read the album title We Are the Quarry, for some reason I associated it with the movie Garden State. Based on the themes of Garden State, no matter what the album would actually sound like, I was in the mindset for the indie genre and deep lyrics. After listening to the album for real, I would say that Cutters are pretty close to that indie punk/rainy grunge genre that is slowly seeping up from underground.

Cutters is a fairly new band, located in New York, that holds resemblances to Against Me! and the new wave of post-punk that are flush with passionate vocals and noisy guitar riffs. This is a band that sounds like it would come out of the northwest rather than the east coast, hence the “rainy grunge” feel I was talking about earlier. Cutters released We Are the Quarry in June and I’m actually glad that I’m hearing it in the fall of September because it has a gloomy feel to it that fits the autumn mood.

The album had a couple of elements that stood out to me while I listened, but otherwise it was just eight songs that had the same tones and sound that kind of blended together. It was missing that one kick or metal bash that would have made the album a little bit more exciting to listen to. Cutters is close to finding their hook, but with songs like “Savage Nights” and “Young Gods” holding the same tempo and same emotion throughout, there was that one piece missing from the puzzle.

On the other hand, We Are the Quarry was an album that fits melancholy emotion and put me in a mood of deep thought as I looked out the window on a rainy day, which was cool. The album was consistent and recorded very well, it just felt a little bit empty. - For the Love of Punk

Sometimes I wish I’d started marking down on the wall how many days I’ve spent working from home – it’s like a prison at time, constantly distracted by your own thoughts and doubts. Every once in awhile your responsibilities distract you, and today’s distraction comes to me from CUTTERS’ We Are The Quarry. It’s a fine punk record done in an indie manner that deals with the trials and tribulations of all the ships, friend and relation.

The friend-centric tracks were the stars of the record. Both dealt with the same idea – needed friends. “Good Morning Boys” went on about how long since it’s been since they’ve seen their buds, and I felt the same. Then the prime track, “Young Gods,” summed friendship up nicely – you need it. I lost track of that idea the past couple of months. The rest of We Are The Quarry played well although I thought their most rocking song, “Savage Nights,” was actually going on about “Rocking Cats.” And while I felt connected to the friendship songs, I couldn’t help but nestle up to “I Just Wanted To Walk On The Surface Again” because I too want to be with someone and cannot.

Thanks CUTTERS for being a distraction from my own thoughts, although you made me think of my own life…so we’ll call it a draw and we’ll wrap this up. So if you’re into other bands like Mosey Jones or Museum Mouth, then this band’s got it going on for you. Make sure to let them be your distraction as soon as you can because We Are The Quarry is out now. - Golden Mixtape