LáGoon – Instinctive, fast and not so serious…
“The first band, where I do not take everything so serious, is the first band that starts to get a vague bit of notoriety…”
We sat down last week, wrote out some questions we felt right about, fired up ZOOM, and waited for the good man to join the meeting. Anthony Gaglia, the man with the Italian roots. One of the original two LáGoon members, one of the The Crooked Whispers crazies and a solo artist who released his debut album last fall called Voodoo Heartbeat. A multi-instrumentalist, a multi-band kind of guy and a prolific artist, who might just become even more prolific in the near future. “It’s actually the main subject of Skullactic Visions. I have realized I’ve probably been in a bit too big a haze the past decade or so. Me and the missus went to Hawaii and I took my laptop with me to work on the record. And that’s when I also started this kick, you know. Cut back on substances. Not completely. Just not as habitually as before. I found out that the world is different when you are more clearheaded. And I reckon I might have done more…”
Here’s a man with a mission. His mission is music. Music has always been around him, as far back as he can remember there’s music. Even while being driven to pre-school, his parents had the tapes spinning loudly in the car. It is where his love for music was born… As well as his love for vans. Which shines through in his self-designed band logo. “My dad had a big work van and he used to pick me up from school, and we would cruise around a bit, with an Alice Cooper cassette at full volume, you know.” He smiles broadly as he remembers those late afternoon drives across the city. And that smile does not fade when we discuss the covid-situation. “Don’t get me wrong, I miss playing live, I miss it so much. But on other levels it has not been a bad situation for me. We have been putting out a lot of music the past year. And for my personal psyche it has not been a bad deal either. You know, dipping out of the day-to-day hustle and bustle of the world for a bit. It know it has been much worse for almost everybody else around the globe. Took a new job, been able to work a lot from home and had my music to concentrate on. I feel like I managed to take advantage of it.”
Re-evaluating his situation, his music and his direction. It shows us that this covid-situation indeed has not been all bad for everyone. And even though he was lost in a bit of a haze for a pretty long time, he always took his music seriously. And he still does, but with a fun attitude. Indeed, his perspective has changed since a few years. He’s been in bands before and has taken, not just the music, but those bands so seriously. “I still take LáGoon serious in terms of that I want to play and want to devote a lot of time to it. As I do with all my music. But on other fronts I don’t give that much of a fuck. Not everything has to be perfect you know. And it’s weird to have to conclude that the first band I’m in, where I do not take everything so serious anymore, is starting to at least get a vague bit of notoriety…”
And that’s definitely the case, not just with LáGoon, of which the albums are getting ever better and the reviews of those even more raving. But also with The Crooked Whispers, a band that was even nominated for Best New Band on this year’s first edition of The Doomies. But it all started earlier and it all started with a, errr, difficult edge. “Yeah, I’ve been in couple of bands before. The Bent Bones for instance, we were still in college, but we managed to put out a decent amount of music. The problem was, for me at least, that it was a five-piece. That’s a lot of people and a lot of opinions. A huge learning experience. It was one of the reasons LáGoon was started as a duo and stayed a duo for as long as it did. I just wanted a band that was the easiest possible version of a band. A good buddy and me. Brady (Maurer, drummer) got the bad end of that deal, he's stuck with me! Haha.” And so, they found a van, with two seats and started rolling into every other town for a gig…
“You know, the coolest parts on a rock ‘n roll record are often the little nuances, little mess-ups or imperfections.”
But of course, everything can and will change. “It was actually part of the covid-situation I guess. One of the bonusses for us. When I started writing Father Of Death, we were already working on The Crooked Whispers stuff. And so, talking to Ignacio (De Tommaso, bass player, The Crooked Whispers, Luciferia) and listening back to everything we were doing with Crooked Whispers, I really wanted to have LáGoon sound a bit more like that, a bit more low-end. And at the time, that was all it was gonna be I guess. You know, the White Stripes approach, where you add bass on the records, but play everything live as a duo. But after hearing the finished album, I really thought, shit, I want to be able to play this live! This sounds like the LáGoon it should be. Luckily, we’re really good friends with the band Ash Eater and Kenny (Combs) their bass player. He’s a super talented dude and I knew he would pick up the songs from the Father Of Death record quickly and make bass parts for our previous catalogue. And since we already hung out with those guys so much, it seemed like a perfect fit. And it does, cause even though we moved from being a two piece to a trio, it has not changed the dynamic much. Or at all even… Which was the goal and is the most important thing I learned from earlier bands. You know, when I was younger, whenever there was an idea, you searched around town looking for the best musicians, cause you wanted to be the best. But that does not really work, you are trying to force it. And the best musicians aren’t necessarily the best people to hang around with. So, my one rule going forward, only be in bands you’re friends with. Cause it does make things pretty awkward when you go on tour and you don’t have anything in common apart from the songs you are going to play that night…”
The two friends turned into the three amigos and the recording of the next record went brilliantly. Also, in part thanks to the solo album Voodoo Heartbeat he recorded before it. “It was much harder than I expected it to be. Cause with the acoustic stuff it is all much more nuanced. And it makes a big difference if you’re just recording your part with a foundation already there or all the parts. It was a big learning curve and even though it was frustrating at times, in the end my confidence grew and I am now definitely more daring to add all kinds of different instrumentation. Hence, the synth parts on Skullactic Visions. It also made me appreciate the way we bounce ideas off each other even more. Simple things about where a ‘break’ should go, but also about whatever idea pops into your head. And for the solo album I was perhaps a bit too much in my own world. You know, cause whenever we go work on an idea with the rest of the band, by the time the song is finished, the idea has completely morphed into something else. For the solo record it was just me and the idea and I went with it. It was different, frustrating sometimes, but fun too.”
It also showed him a bit about how to manage his time a bit more. Cause even though his wife is a trooper about his musical obsession, he did realize that the claimed statement: ‘I only need ten minutes to work on this little idea.’ Turns into three hours every time again. And it also lifted the veil a bit on what he might possibly be able to do with his vocals. Cause there is a small hint of his natural voice on Voodoo Heartbeat. “I’m weird about my voice. I’ve told myself my entire life I can’t sing. In previous bands I always just played guitar. And playing some acoustic guitar and doing covers around the house, I started thinking, I can make it through this. And with some effects and reverb on it, it’s much more forgiving and I guess that fits LáGoon and with added effects The Crooked Whispers. But for future solo projects I am leaning to move more into southern rock territory. I’m reluctant to say country, cause that freaks people out. But yeah, using my natural voice, would lend well on the next record. But for LáGoon and The Crooked Whispers it will always be heavily curved by effects. I love effects man…”
“It’s something that separates us. These sporadic, instinctive decisions. Nobody knows what’s coming next.”
We riff some more about how his solo album came to be and how he normally works out the idea into a song. “I’ve become ever more instinctive. You can kill yourself thinking too much about how a certain guitar solo or lyric should go. Maybe I should go higher here? Or put that part there? But my instinctive work ethic has been ever evolving into, this is the idea, this is how we are going to try it, let’s press record. And after that, we listen back and almost always say: sweet, that works!” And then we turn to Skullactic Visions and the first thing that instinctively pops into his mind when he thinks of the period recording that album. “All of us in Kenny’s basement! Where we practice. Sweating our asses off because it is so ridiculously hot down there. And then immediately writing Cold Smoke, the first track on the record. It came from a jam we were playing one day and turned into this thing that set the pace for the entire record. And due to that we did something that never did before on a record, cause the order the tracks are in, is the order in which we wrote and recorded them. We’re lucky we record all our own stuff and have all the gear to do so. And we knew we weren’t going to be able to play live any time soon. So, we just got everything set up and worked on one song at a time. Coming up with parts, practicing it and finishing it before moving on to the next one. Never looking back to the one that was already finished. Until I went in and did the final mix for the entire album. And during that period, I often heard a part where I thought, shit, we could have gone in and re-recorded that. But on the other hand, that goes back to what I said about instinct and stuff. You know, the coolest parts on a rock ‘n roll record are often the little nuances, little mess-ups or imperfections.”
The smell of beer, weed and BO permeating the entire process of the album it only felt right to flee Portland and go to Hawaii with the missus. Yes, everybody goes to Hawaii to surf and trek around the islands, but not Anthony Gaglia, he brings his laptop and works on the final mix for the record. “It was actually a pretty quick process, so, it wasn’t like I was on it all of the time. As fast and instinctive as the recoding went, so did the mixing. In part because we have a little bit of a lo-fi sound. We just like to keep that skate-rat-mentality of fuck-it, let’s just do it. We wrote it quickly, we recorded it quickly, let’s also mix it quickly and put it out to the people quickly. I guess that’s where LáGoon also differs from other bands. Usually, most bands, wait till they have the clean package, all the vinyl and merch ready to go and be sold and shipped. We’re not like that. I mean, the vinyl for Maa Kali Trip arrived two weeks before we released the next record. We don’t really follow the normal route. It’s something that separates us. These sporadic, instinctive decisions. Nobody knows what’s coming next from LáGoon.”
Fast and instinctive, might also be viewed as slacker and lazy, but this isn’t necessarily the case. “No, not at all. Cause what we did was we kept playing those songs over and over while we were working on them. We did not sit down in physical form to write them out and ponder over them. We just kept playing them so they could come to life all on their own. And we moved forward when they were finished. It’s something I guess we will continue to do, to not sit with them too long. Cause there is a track or two where we did stumble a bit in that process. And no, I’m not gonna name the tracks, cause then people will go and try and find out what I don’t like about them. And don’t get me wrong, I like the entire album now. We found our sound. It’s exactly as LáGoon should sound.”
“We’re like the Stooges playing covers songs of doom bands…”
He has also found out that the best music is just laying around the house. “I’ve been playing the riff for the title track of Skullactic Visions for ages. At home on an acoustic. It’s just a quaint and simple little warm up thing I do. And then I played it for the first time warming up for a practice. You know, in the tuning and setting I was using for that electric guitar. It turned into this much heavier thing, with a late eighties, Misfits kind of vibe. It’s probably my favorite track on the record and probably my favorite song LáGoon has at the moment. I think it’s because of the simplicity where it comes from and also because the riff has been lingering in my house for the past five years and I have never thought anything else of it. And then all of a sudden it turns into my favorite song.” Skullactic Visions being the drug reference you already might be thinking it is and we already mentioned in the beginning. Anthony is now kicking the habit, enjoying a little less of the haze on a daily basis, and crawling out of his skull a little bit. And letting other influences creep in slowly; which turned LáGoon ever more doom. “With The Crooked Whispers we’re always working on new music as well. So, it definitely influenced the heading of LáGoon. I mean I almost sent Beyond The Trees to Ignacio to work on it for The Crooked Whispers. And yeah, I guess Skullactic Visions is all over the place, it has that doom element, but we’re also able to bring in that Stooges effect. Which is by the way my favorite way of explaining what our band sounds like to people who don’t know us. We’re like the Stooges playing covers songs of doom bands, like Windhand or something.”
The Stooges were always about energy and intensity and that indeed fits the bill when you’re talking about LáGoon. “On our earlier albums there might be a moment or two where the energy isn’t on par with the rest, so you might end up skipping that song. Which is something that happens often with new bands. You know. You’ve got three or four songs that are really bitchin and you really want to get a record out. So, you just pump out those extra four or five songs to fill it up. We don’t do that anymore; we’ve gotten stronger in songwriting and most importantly we’ve fallen more and more into our sound. So, we often got a song that isn’t bad, but doesn’t fit our sound and more importantly does not fit the energy on the record. So, we now toss those tracks out pretty quickly. It started with Father of Death and is something we did really well for Skullactic Visions. We are nitpicking more and on the new album you can feel the energy grow higher as the record plays through. It starts well and it ends well…”
The album ends with Final Ride, but it’s all just starting to take off and there is no mistaking the goal for Anthony and LáGoon. “I hope to achieve a Motorhead sized catalogue of music. I hope we never slow down putting out our music. Sure, it might slow down a bit in comparison to last year, when Covid is gone. Simply because shows and playing live will become a bigger part again. And we love playing live shows, we always consider us to be a live band first. We hope to be one of those bands that can consistently put out a decent album every year. And with over a thousand albums released every day, just to be able to float high enough so you’re able to keep people’s attention on you for an extended amount of time. And most importantly, still be great buddies, and with other subjects to talk about…”
(Written by JK)