Stealing, destroying, and making noise: Savannah’s Klept prep their debut album
If you have been to many shows at El Rocko Lounge, The Sentient Bean, or Lodge of Sorrows in the past year, there is a pretty strong chance you’ve caught Klept.
Klept are the young quartet of Luke Rola (drums/electronic noises/shaking stuff), Ceron Thornton (guitar/vocals/synth), Sterling Brown (bass/bass synthesizer/guitar), and Carter Bridges (guitar). Other than Rola (who is originally from Michigan) the members of Klept are all local boys who reformed the band after they dropped their previous drummer, added Rola to the line-up, abandoned all of their previous music and started from scratch.
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Unabashed music thieves, Klept are influenced by dynamic, eclectic, genre averse bands like Mr. Bungle or Black Midi. No insane sound or riff sounds out of place in their brand of aural chaos.
So far, Klept’s only recorded output is a single on streaming services called “Cottonmouth Cloudy,” a shoe gaze song that takes a hard right into punk halfway into the track.
“That one has a lot more shoe gaze influence than any of the other ones,” said Bridges of their songs. “A lot of bands that like to switch around really rapidly like Black Midi, or even to some extent, System of a Down, they do that same thing of switching in and out of styles. That kind of shift gets me really excited.”
“That is the most consistent theme, everything switching out and breaking and rebuilding,” added Thornton.
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A Klept song can dramatically shift from melodic indie pop to noise rock to transcendent space rock to amphetamine-fueled 70s heavy rock all in the span of five minutes. And Thornton’s shredded vocals conjure 90s alternative bands like Nirvana and the Pixies, adding further genre-mashing layers to the music.
Klept’s omnivorous taste in music derives from a pandemic locked inside with nothing but a combined record collection. “We all have our own music we like,” said Rola. “Hundreds of records and CDs scatter the house. Three record players, fifteen speakers.”
Because of their eclectic sound, Klept have appeared both on AURA Fest bills supporting metals bands, and Dog Days Presents bills paired up with indie bands, which is both a blessing and a curse. “I don’t think we’re trying to fit into any kind of slot really,” said Brown. “We’re trying to do our own thing ideally.
“I don’t feel like there is any other group of artists in this town that we fit into more than any other group,” added Bridges. “There’s elements of our music that can be indie pop, and then there is also some heavy more metal kind of stuff. It’s kind of hard. We’ve had promoters tell us it’s difficult to bill us with other artists because it’s such a drastic difference. Usually we’re on bill with more indie alternative rock bands. And then we end up scaring people when that happens. Then when we play a metal show they think we’re pussies. We need an in-between show. I guess that’s the slot we want.”
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Booking shows may be easier once Klept release their debut album, “Verbicide,” which they are preparing to release in coming months. The record’s title means “to completely destroy the meaning of a word.”
“So we’re stealing things, and destroying what words mean,” joked Rola. “That’s our goal.”
“We’ve been recoding and mixing it for the past six months. Tinkering with it, figuring out what we want to throw on there, what we want to take out of it. But we’re finally done with it. We’re just in the process of art work and mastering it, but it will be out very soon.”
Most of the tracks were recorded at The Space Studio in Charleston, S.C. Since then the band have been spending time overdubbing, adding synths and vinyl samples, and throwing everything they have into the mix.
Klept wrote and developed all of the songs over the past year with all of the members having their own input.
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“Everyone does grab the steering wheel every once in a while,” said Bridges. “That’s a good way to put it. Usually its not one person controlling everything, but there are certain songs where one person will write them and they’re already fully formed, then the rest of us just work around that. Then there’s some where there is one riff of something and we just go from there. When I write things I like to have them fully formed out and then bring them to them, but I don’t think that’t the case for anyone else.”
It will be interesting to look back at these pandemic times 20 years from now and assess how much music was influenced by lockdown. “Verbicide’s” kitchen-sinkbedlam was certainly informed by being stuck at home.
“I think all these songs sound like a bunch of teenagers who have been locked in a house with no access to anything that teenagers would usually do, besides weed,” said Bridges. “No social anything. These are the only people I saw and it got weird. That was a really weird and trying for everybody, and I feel being entirely removed from any social structure or meeting anyone new, it was just a weird time. I think we made some [expletive] up music out of it.”
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Thornton, who went to Savannah Arts high school with Bridges, added, “We weren’t what you’d call popular or sociable at all. I pretty much kept my head down, put my earbuds in, especially at the end of high school. We barely graduated. But there was that frustration, alienation, of being the odd man out, and I guess there’s some camaraderie for us with that. Liking the same [expletive] up sounding noise.”
Check out Klept’s next gig is at El Rocko Lounge on Aug. 19 with Phantomwise and The Tragedee.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah GA music: Klept prepares debut album ahead of El Rocko show
