If you don’t call yourself a resident of the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area, you can be forgiven for being completely unaware of rock duo Hobosexual. Inside the confines of that evergreen-adorned landscape around Puget Sound however, the band is something of a cult-favorite; a fixture of the local festival and club scene, and one of the most exciting pure groups to rise out of the region in quite some time. For eight years or so they have remained one of Seattle’s best-kept secrets. Following the release of their towering new album Monolith last week, it’s high-time to let the cat out of the bag.
Formed around 2009, Hobosexual is a duo comprised of frontman and guitar-wizard Ben Harwood behind the microphone and the brutal Jeff Silva bashing away on drums. Because of the expansive nature of Monolith however, they’ve recently had to beef up their live presence with the addition of three extra touring musicians. Harwood and Silva are shaggy, slightly unkempt in appearance, but blissfully uncompromising in presentation.
Their music, which could be mistaken as simple, bombastic rock, with touchstones that include Soundgarden, The Who, and Guns N’ Roses, belies an immense amount of technical thought and musical precision. Not that you’re meant to notice in the first place. More than anything, Hobosexual is a band that places a premium on humor and irreverence. Whether that means performing gigs wearing pink bathrobes, or putting together tracks like “A Motherf#%kin’ Song About Robots,” or “VHS Or Sharon Stone,” their goal is to make you smile while you bang your head.
As is true of most superb rock bands, the roots of Hobo run working class. “We’re sort of a poor people’s band,” Harwood explains. “No matter who you are, we embrace and we love you.” They’ve adopted a certain, trashiness — think gaudy ‘80s T-Top convertible and piles of crumpled beer cans — with aplomb, but in service of a higher idea. “The band has always been about people, and really about poverty versus wealth. There’s a lot of anger out there right now, and as you start to peel back the layers, a lot of it is just about rich and poor. There are so many people of different colors and sexual orientations and we’re all struggling under the same thing, which is: we can’t decent medical care, we can’t afford housing, we can’t afford the most basic, basic things.”
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That idea stems from Harwood’s own, personal experience, one that continues to define the band and the music they create. “I come from a pretty diverse family,” he explains. “I have one gay parent. I have a transsexual uncle. I have a gay aunt. I also grew up in a trailer in a predominantly Latino and African-American neighborhood. All of my friends were people of color.”
Monolith is far and away the band’s most audacious and aspirational release yet. From the spine-tingling wail that signals the introduction of the record’s first, boot-stomping burner “Trans Am Sunday,” to the effervescent “doo-doo-doos” that mark the end of the last track “Sunset Adieu,” it’s an album packed with atomic guitar riffage, discordant audio accents, and some of the heaviest drumming your likely to hear all year. The tones and textures are familiar to any Zeppelin or Sabbath fan, but the energy and ideas underneath are decidedly of this era. If it sounds massive, well, that’s the point.
“There were so many things that were so much bigger than people,” Harwood explains of his band’s affinity for ‘70s and ‘80s monoculture. “Like a Pepsi commercial with Michael Jackson that would make people go, ‘That’s the most legitimate soft drink I’ve seen in my entire life!’ These days, there would be 57 behind-the-scenes videos that inspire 57 different blog posts and in the end the whole message gets diluted to, ‘That specific section of people who like that specific kind of music think that’s cool… if you like Pepsi.’ There’s like this massively deflated sense these days of anything that feels big.”
While I’d hesitate to give it the “concept record” tag, Monolith is a project that goes a long way to confronting a reality that nearly everyone on Earth is forced to reckon with on a constant basis. “The record as a whole is like a firsthand account of a person experiencing their own unraveling in the context of social media,” Harwood explains. While that might seem ostentatious, or even highfalutin, the ultimate conclusion they hope to inspire is a sense that you’re not alone.
“I think what we’re looking for is to lend some sense of sanity,” Harwood said. “I think that through music, especially loud music and visceral music, there’s a lot on the surface. Anytime you’re dabbling in something expressionistic with sex, and violence and all those things, and that’s a huge part of the music that we write, but it’s more about pushing people to that point where they ultimately understand that those things are actually sanity. Insanity is actually standing around pretending everything’s okay or putting on a false front and not screaming your head off. There’s a way to scream your head off and be funny about it and be interesting and intelligent, and there’s a way to be a babbling idiot. We’re going for the former obviously.”
The creation of Monolith was not without its own set of trials and tribulations. The band’s latest project comes a full four years after the release of their sophomore record Hobosexual II, and in that span, the future of the group was thrown into doubt over a pair of different medical emergencies. “Jeff had to have hip surgery and I ended up with like, a throat ailment as a result of an autoimmune reaction with the flu that hung me up for a good year,” Harwood said. When asked if there ever came a point that it seemed like they reached the end of the road, the guitarist admits he had his doubts. “I think we probably crossed those bounds a few different times,” he admitted. “But, I think we were so far invested into the record that as time went on, even when the ailments came up, we were just like, we’re putting this out. It’s gonna happen!”
While it remains to be seen if Monolith is the record that will break Hobosexual in the national space — they have a nebulous publishing deal at the moment, but remain almost wholly independent — if their sold-out gigs around Washington State, including the packed, album release party at Easy Street Records they played just after hopping off the phone with me are any indication, they are more than primed to make the leap.
“Ultimately we want to lend some sense of solace to people who love heavy music, without it having to be more metal than metal or some cliché bad copy of something that already happened,” Harwood said. “We’re going for our own thing.”
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