Love Animals

One of Knoxville's best new bands has a CD Release Party coming up soon, and guess what, you're invited. Love Animals debut EP, "Reckless Holiday," has been available to stream for some time, but now you can get yourself a copy. Your first chance will be at The Pilot Light on Saturday.

Love Animals has the vibe nailed down. Graceful melodies paired with a heavy guitar effects are their thing. And they're not afraid to crank the volume to 11, and rock the house. If you want to preview their songs before the show, you can check out their Bandcamp.
- Knoxville Music Warehouse

One of Knoxville's best new bands has a CD Release Party coming up soon, and guess what, you're invited. Love Animals debut EP, "Reckless Holiday," has been available to stream for some time, but now you can get yourself a copy. Your first chance will be at The Pilot Light on Saturday.

Love Animals has the vibe nailed down. Graceful melodies paired with a heavy guitar effects are their thing. And they're not afraid to crank the volume to 11, and rock the house. If you want to preview their songs before the show, you can check out their Bandcamp.
- Knoxville Music Warehouse

Members of the Love Animals insist that they’re not lovelorn stalkers. But the group’s debut EP, Reckless Holiday, ended up being all about obsessive love.

“It’s indirectly a concept about someone being obsessed with another person,” explains Steve Gaskell, who plays guitar and sings lead vocals in the band. “Pretty much every song is from the point of the stalker.”

The band’s favorite effort from the EP is the title track, which has a sense of doom, rolling into some inevitable cataclysm. With a strong beat and churning guitars, the EP makes for a nice road mix.

Gaskell says he the group doesn’t generally go in for concept albums. A fan of true crime shows like Forensic Files, Gaskell got the idea to craft some theme songs and pitched it to the rest of the group. Drummer Brenton Smith said it was an easy sell.

“We all like horror movies,” he says.

“It’s kind of liberating to write something completely superficial,” Gaskell adds. “I’m interested to see how other people interpret it.”

The Love Animals formed in 2011 out of the ashes of two other local bands, the Shape and Mouth Movements. Joining Gaskell and Smith are Josh Holt (guitar and backing vocals) and David Brown (bass).

All of the members had been inactive musically for a few years before getting together. Their earlier efforts floundered as the members individually found their tastes changing.

“It got to the point where we were like, what are we doing?” Gaskell says. “Our influences have changed over time. That was the main factor in leaving one project and starting something new.”

As the members have aged, they’ve found themselves more drawn to simplicity. “Before, we almost had this idea that we could do whatever we want, and construct a song of five or six parts and never come back to [any of them],” Gaskell says. “In reality, people want a catchy chord.”

What does the name mean? None of the members are quite sure. They get likes on Facebook from animal rights groups. “People ask us all the time if we’re animal-rights people,” Brown says. “No, not really. It’s just our name.”

The songwriting efforts are very much a group effort, the band says. “I don’t think we have any songs where one of us wrote a song and presented it to the band,” Gaskell says. “They’ve been all group efforts.”

“We’ll come up with an idea and work on it together,” Smith says. “Sometimes a random part of a song will turn into a song. We just try to have fun together.”

Adds Gaskell, “I feel like we’ve learned through recording as the Love Animals—what we thought was a complete song changes in the studio.”

As the band members have gotten older, they’ve grown to appreciate their hometown, as well as Pilot Light, the Old City club that has nurtured so many local bands.

“Knoxville is our home,” Brown says. “It’s like a huge family. There are so many bands here. Knoxville is a big part of where our music is from. There’s a tight fit of friends first, bands second.”

The group came to realize how special the place is after trying to book some out-of-town shows recently. Years ago, it was much easier to hook up with bands in a different city to arrange gigs.

“I remember being in these bands between 2002 and 2008, booking two-month-long tours in a few days,” Gaskell says. “This time around, it took me two and a half months to book one week’s worth of shows. ... I couldn’t even get bands to respond to an e-mail, not even a ‘no’. But I see bands here reaching out and helping bands get shows all the time.” - Metro Pulse

Shortly after the inception of shoegaze/space rock quartet Love Animals, the outfit of longtime friends parted ways with its original guitarist and nearly threw in the towel altogether. Ultimately deciding to stick it out due to a significant investment in merchandise, the band responded to the setback by recruiting guitarist Josh Holt roughly a year ago, reconfigured its entire catalog and now prepares to unveil its debut EP.

Spacey from the start, Love Animals’ re-bred songlist ups the ambience while introducing a darker edge. The band tells that it started over essentially from scratch after adding Holt “out of respect for the lineup change,” and thus includes only one pre-Holt track in its current set list.

“Obviously the sound changed as soon as Josh joined the band, so we started writing all new songs,” explains Steve Gaskell (vocals, guitar).” We kept one song that’s on the EP. Everything else went to the song graveyard.

“We didn’t have a CD yet, so it would have been easy to just start over as a new band. It really came down to us having put money into all this merch. Nobody knew who we were anyway, so we just decided to stick with Love Animals.”

The darker direction is most apparent when examining the lyrical theme of the group’s first recorded outing, “Reckless Holiday.” Described as a desert trip gone awry, the EP’s four tracks weave a single tale of obsession leading to live burial.

“You get writer’s block almost when you’re trying to write something personal about yourself,” says David Brown (bass). “But when you can turn songs into a Twilight Zone kind of thing, it becomes easier to be more thematic.”

“It just came from old horror movies, movies like ‘Vacancy,’ ‘Psycho’ and stuff like that,” Gaskell elaborates. “We watch a lot of forensics shows and things where some crazy dude is obsessed with some chick who has no idea who he is, (and) he thinks they’re like soul mates. So we kind of went off that premise and wrote this whole story from start to finish, going from track one to track four.”

Love Animals’ process to lyric-writing isn’t typical. The band points out that lyrics are the final component of newly written songs, and subject matter is inspired by the music, never the other way around. Gaskell adds that the frustrating part is that eagerness to debut new material at live shows often leads to having to ad lib vocals on stage.

“We already had all the songs’ instrumentation tracked and pretty much mixed before we even started on vocals,” describes Gaskell. “For me, it was a lot of listening to the songs over and over. I felt like they were darker songs and needed to have a darker theme.”

“I may be speaking for myself, but with past bands, vocals have always been kind of last minute,” adds Brenton Smith (drums). “I think that’s part of being in a rock band. None of us have been in a singer/songwriter scenario. We do music first and put vocals over it at the last minute.”

Marked by a long hiatus between previous acts and this one, Gaskell and crew’s renewed zeal makes them ambitious to move forward with Love Animals. Diligently promoting and scheduling shows, the act has found a sense of purpose in its music. After a brief tour of Tennessee and Virginia this month, the group will lose Holt for September as he tours Europe with Generation of Vipers. During this stretch, the band intends to devote most of its time to writing for a full-length it hopes to have ready by this time next year.

“I look at this as making up for lost time, taking such a long break,” Gaskell says. “I went out before with our other bands and just toured all the time and then stopped doing it to move forward with the career thing. Now that I’ve been doing that, I realize that I’d rather be poor and travel around with my friends, even if we’re just playing to 10 people every night. So there’s this increased sense of urgency that I have for sure... I don’t think any of us care if we’re poor for the rest of our lives; this is what we really want to do. You look at bands like Royal Bangs that kept going and didn’t give up, those are the things you have to do. You have to make sacrifices to do what you love. I want to be able to have the flexibility to leave home like we used to and tour but do it a little smarter this time around.”

Saturday night Love Animals launch the release of their new EP with a show at The Pilot Light. Lipliplip Hands and Rally round out the bill. The show is slated for 10 p.m., and admission is $5.
- Knoxville.com - Knoxville News Sentinel

"It’s been more than a year since we’ve written about the Knoxville-based band Love Animals — a group of local music scene veterans from groups like The Shape and Mouth Movements — but member Steve Gaskell reached out this week to let us know that the band’s debut EP, “Reckless Holiday,” is soon to be released. It’s four songs clocking in at more than 22 minutes and is a swirling kaleidoscope of indie rock, judging by the first two tracks that are available for streaming here. The title track features Interpol-style reverb driving a mean pace, while the second (”Arizona Skies”) is plodding, deliberate and beautifully painted with swirls of drum crashes, prolonged chords and plaintive vocals. It’s good stuff." - Steve Wildsmith - The Daily Times

"Love Animals is one of Knoxville's best kept secrets right now. They came as if from nowhere a few weeks ago with a new four song EP, and it is a reverb-laden delight. It's typically a surprise when a new band puts out this much quality right away, but it's less of a surprise when that band is comprised of veteran members that already have experience playing in other bands. Taking members from former Knoxville bands, Mouth Movements and The Shape, Love Animals brings heavy drums, alluring melodies, and a heap of guitar effects that show shades of their former bands but present something entirely new" - KnoxvilleMusicWarehouse