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Max’s Playground: BattleStar Overdrive – The Satan Handed Me a Pamphlet
Max is a character; it took me just three live tracks from his band Imperial Shark to realize he needed to be kept under close musical surveillance.
On Friday morning, his sideburns appeared in my feed wearing a pajette jacket over a zebra shirt and a Napalm Death cap. He must be gone bananas as Björn “Speed” Strid (Soilwork) does when he’s playing with The Night Flight Orchestra.
A link appears; a new EP titled “The Satan Handed Me a Pamphlet” has been released for his recent solo project, BattleStar Overdrive. Without hesitation, my thumb clicks and a slow old-school funk-rap starts playing on my Spotify, followed by post-punk Brit-rock, then a bluesy alt-rock, and finally an electronic noise storm. The EP is only available digitally, including on Spotify.
I’m hooked, immediately searching for the first live date to witness this madness. First concert: tonight, the same day of the EP drop, at Råhuset.
With just enough time to slip the camera into my backpack, I’m already on the street, arriving just in time to catch Max during the sound check. Live footage and an interview? We’ve got a plan.
The Interview
Over the next three hours, other bands come and go, and some drinks later, we’re both well fueled. We fill up another tap and slip into the backstage area, which in this case, is a photographic art exhibition at Råhuset.
We sit on the floor beneath the strangest artistic photograph, ready to improvise.
Here’s the result.
Notes & Oddities
We introduce the new EP, but before diving into Max’s DIY Garage, we offer a small gem from his previous band, Pilgrimz. This group quickly gained success in 2008 with their only album “Boar Riders“, produced and mixed by Tue Madsen. Perhaps relatively unknown? Maybe, but of excellent quality, enough to land them a European tour supporting Gojira. Here’s a taste of their only music video!
The first track, “Greetings Hearthlings,” kicks off with a very old-school street funk that Max was inspired by Beck‘s Odelay experimentation in slow country-blues and rap.
Just enough time to get into the groove, and everything changes with “Love (You’d Be so Wonderful to)”. I take the easy route, likening it to David Bowie’s post-punk, while Max weaves it around the indie-rock Brit-pop of Pulp. Describing Pulp is a mess; describing Max’s music is a mess too. I give up. As he suggests, listen it: if you like it, great, if not, well, that’s okay too.
We take a breather with the album’s strangest track, the title track “The Satan Handed Me a Pamphlet”. After a few minutes of comfortable sound reminiscent of The Ramones, everything gets weird again, with Beck popping up amidst an electronic storm.
The storm continues with “O”, Max throws it all into the mixer, bringing us back to the sampling of his previous album “Buckle Up, Lucifer“.
It’s DIY (Do It Yourself), and the creativity blasts at full volume!
Website
https://www.facebook.com/BattleStarOverdrive
Tracks
1- Greetings Heathlings
2- Love (You’d Be so Wonderful to)
3- The Satan Handed Me a Pamphlet
4- O
