House of Rabbits

The band is tight and their musical performance is flawless as they run through a surprisingly accomplished, dozen-song set of what can only be described as mock-operatic cabaret rock. It is an impressively varied and fresh, high-energy score by any standard, full of engaging hooks and propelled by the rhythmic thrash of Andy Kovari’s acoustic guitar, keyboardist Ian Malcolm’s melodic counterpoint and Cron’s commanding vocals and stage presence. - LA Weekly

I would, however, explicitly emphasize that "Songs of Charivari" is great from beginning to end. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it is so, and each song offers many interesting things to listen to. - Sicmaggot

Previously recording as FEASTofFETUS, House Of Rabbits upholds the tradition of blending the bizarre and the strange with a unique accessibility that is uncommon in music this genre-bending or daring.
House Of Rabbits brings plenty of the vaudevillian-weirdo-core you’d expect from these Los Angeles boys.

Opener “By The Neck” is a dancing on the tables romper about death and marriage, while closer “Skimmington’s Last Ride” is a Faith No More-esque creepy baroque thrasher about the mob murder or an adulterer. These boys have their morose game on fucking lock. If you like your dark and creepy to have a grandiose flair, this is a house you’re gonna wanna set up shop in. - Exiled in Eugene

With music by House of Rabbits and book by Jess Gabriell Cron, we are given an odd and exceedingly entertaining highbred of Edward Gorey blended with Bugs Bunny then served as an admonition against the world’s morality police. - theTVolution

The still center of the controlled frenzy is sprawled on the couches in the adjoining lounge. Tattooed and bearded and dressed in black band tee shirts, the show’s musician-composers — singer Jess Gabriell Cron, keyboardist Ian Malcolm, guitarist Andy Kovari and drummer Mike Caffell — calmly kill time as they wait to begin their part of the rehearsal.

The 34-year-old Cron, who is perhaps most responsible for dreaming up the idea of creating a live show around one of the band’s albums, is clearly excited by the energy and momentum of the project. The live benefit concert of Charivari in Voyeurville that the band played the previous weekend at the Mint, and at which Lopez and Luna’s Post Mortem dancers performed some neo-burlesque, drew a capacity crowd and was deemed a success by reaping both cash for the Fringe production and video for its promotion.

“This has been the most amazing process,” he enthuses. “The cast is incredible. The director is incredible. Our producer is incredible. Everything is really coming together. It’s been one of those things, like, ‘Man, why didn’t I do this sooner?’”

It isn’t immediately clear whether by “sooner” Cron means write and perform a fringe rock musical or abandon a comfortable existence as an art director for an international ad agency by leaping into the bohemian abyss as frontman for the nearly impossible-to-categorize rock hybrid “acoustic grindcore death metal” group House of Rabbits.

“That was probably the first and only time in my life that I could consider myself someone who was really rich,” he laughs about the career on which he turned his back. “I actually had money then. But I had to forsake that all because it really wasn’t creatively where I wanted to be.”

A mere four years ago, the Binghamton, N.Y. native found himself in Los Angeles, increasingly dissatisfied by designing ads for clients like Nike even as he was inexplicably drawn to making music. He had been a lifelong visual artist and had barely touched an instrument when a friend lent him an acoustic guitar and a light went off. By 2008, the noises Cron had been scratching out alone on his home recording studio had resulted in 25 tracks that he released as the first record for his band Feast of Fetus — a name that reflected his childhood love for Nine Inch Nails and the dark and heavily distorted electric guitar that characterized Fetus’ early sound.

“The joy of creation in the visual art world was kind of crushed by art school,” he says. “And that’s what I love so much about music, why I really believe that music found me, because it’s the one thing now that I can have in my mind — I’ll have a picture that will start in a certain way — and when I start to put it into music, it will always turn out better than I planned. Better than what was in my mind.”

But after three albums and the addition of Kovari on lead guitar, the band had drifted away from the heavy dissonance of Fetus’ metal sound and the album writing evolved into something more conceptually narrative and theatrical. So they dropped the Feast of Fetus name for House of Rabbits and began searching for ways to perform their musical narratives as a live stage show or maybe as a neo-German Expressionist film. That’s when Cron happened to mention Charivari in Voyeurville to Oken on a fateful February night, and the producer promptly threw in his hat.

The June 8 premiere will mark the first foray into live theater by any of the band members, but Cron is undaunted.

“I just feel that the timing is right when it’s right, and things like this reveal themselves when they do, or when you’re ready,” he says mystically. “And I think right now is when we’re absolutely ready to put on something like this.” - LA Weekly