SPINESHANK Completes Work On Band's 'Most Personal' Album To Date

Rei Nishimoto of AOL's Noisecreep recently conducted an interview with the reactivated original lineup of SPINESHANK — featuring Jonny Santos (vocals),Tommy Decker (drums),Mike Sarkisyan (guitar) and Rob Garcia (bass) — about the band's forthcoming album, "Anger Denial Acceptance", due later in the year via an as-yet-undetermined record label. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Noisecreep: Tell us about the new album.

Mike Sarkisyan: It's called "Anger Denial Acceptance". It's produced by me and Tommy. It was mixed by Mike Plotnikoff. It's sitting there waiting to get released now. I'll tell you this. If anybody is expecting us to sound exactly the way we did when we put out our last record, they're probably going to be disappointed. It's definitely... dare I say the word "growth?" Or "mature?" You can expect us to sound the way we did seven years ago. It definitely does sound like SPINESHANK. It doesn't sound like any other band. The only way I could put it to you is it, is not dated-sounding. It's sort of a loose concept record. It somewhat tells a story. There's an underlining theme to the whole thing. The title ties into it. It's about loss, and the different stages of dealing with loss. It's a pretty elaborate record, I'll tell you that much. I think a lot of people will be rather surprised to hear something this elaborate coming from us. It's the next step.

Noisecreep: Any song titles you would like to share?

Mike Sarkisyan: The first song is called "After the End". Second song is called "Nothing Left For Me". Third one is "Anger Denial Acceptance", which is the title track. Fourth one is called "I Want You To Know". Track five is "Murder Suicide". Track six is "The Endless Disconnect". Track seven is "I Am Damage". Then there's an interlude. After that is "Everything Everyone Everywhere Ends". Then there's "The Reckoning". And then what we did, and this is kind of cool, is the song "Anger Denial Acceptance" is really weird. It's in three parts. So we took each part and wrote a whole other song around it. Those are the last three on the record. They flow one into another but it's three different songs. It's doesn't stop. The first one is called "God Complex". The second one is called "Lord of Method Opportunity". The last one is called "Exit Wound".

Noisecreep: Jonny is back in SPINESHANK. Do you feel the time apart improved the relationships within the band?

Mike Sarkisyan: The way I look at it is, SPINESHANK is us four dudes. It's me, Tommy, Rob and Jonny. In order for it to be called SPINESHANK, I believe we owe it to our fans to have the original four dudes. Very rarely does it happen where a band can have a different singer and still call it that. People are going to crucify me for this, but when MÖTLEY CRÜE got [John] Corabi, as much as I love that record, it's an amazing record but it's not a MÖTLEY CRÜE record. It shouldn't be called MÖTLEY CRÜE. There's definitely some kind of chemistry that happens within the four of us that you can't replicate without any of those ingredients.

Noisecreep: Are you currently shopping "Anger Denial Acceptance" to labels or distributors?

Mike Sarkisyan: We're pretty damn close to it. Very close to it. The problem is that we spent a long time making this record. It's the most personal we've ever been and it's like my baby. I'm sure everybody else will say the same thing. It's really hard to let it go, and we want to make sure whoever puts this record out is going to care about it as much as we do. We don't want to just shit it out and "now it's out." We want the proper support and we want the people working the record understand it and care about it as much as we do.

Read the entire interview from Noisecreep.