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Monster Magnet

Monster_Magnet_1The Dark Lord of space rock, Dave Wyndorf, brings Monster Magnet back to Perth for a show at Amplifier Bar on Thursday, April 3, supported by King Of The North and Chainsaw Hookers. SHANE PINNEGAR takes the call from his New Jersey home.

Usually considered a metal or stoner rock band, Monster Magnet’s roots are more heavily in ’60s psychedelic garage rock.

In fact, Dave Wyndorf hates the band being labelled as heavy metal.

“Totally. Exactly,” he says, exasperatedly. “I don’t think the guys at any record company we were ever at totally got that. Just because the band has ‘monster’ in the title and we play loud doesn’t mean it’s metal. I was like, ‘Dude, this is hardly metal. It’s loud rock music, but it’s not metal’.”

Wyndorf agrees that because of this genre-specific marketing, his band has been misunderstood by a certain percentage of their audience.

“A huge amount!” he says. “To the point where I couldn’t even tell who my audience was. There were certain parts of the world where I could understand it better. Australia, for one, I always thought understood it just because I think Australia has a long tradition of guitar bands.

“The States was always tough for me to get the point across. Europe was always good because they could tell the difference. So, it’s funny, the place I was born in and the place where rock‘n’roll was born turned out to be the worst place in the world for me to play! It turned out to be a huge pain in the ass.

“I think there’s not that many people that get it and I think there’s a stereotype that a lot of people want to believe in. They want to believe that hard rock is one thing, that metal is one thing, and this is it. It’s almost like in the world of metal, those guys speak like sports fans – ‘No, my band’s better than yours. They’ll kick your ass and blah, blah, blah’. It’s like they’re speaking about sports.

“I wish the world was a little bit more open-minded because I think loud music would take a real turn.”

If anyone out there has been blurring the boundaries of what you can do with loud rock music, it’s been Monster Magnet, and the analogy between metal fans and blinkered, one-eyed sports fans is magnificent.

“It’s embarrassing, dude,” Wyndorf continues, warming to his subject. “You know, it’s like they’re holding themselves back with their own fucking stupidity. Why would they want to have guy music by guys, playing music to more guys. I always tried to write about as much sex as possible because I was just hoping there’d be some girls at the show.”

Wyndorf rates Last Patrol, the band’s ninth album, highly enough to have played it in entirety every night on their recent European tour, but says Australia will get a more across-the-board setlist.

“Yeah, we did the whole thing. I figured I could get away with it in Europe, because we play there very often, almost one or two tours a year. In Australia it’s going to be a little bit more varied. There will be probably three songs from the new album and then a set of, I guess for lack of a better term, greatest hits.”

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