Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Two Sweet Home High School alumni will perform a free show with their bands at Sankey Park at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 23, for the final stop in a West Coast tour.
Performing are Andy Slaght, who uses the stage name Drew Wylie, with Church for Sinners, and Brent Wilkinson with the Gruesome Boys.
Both bands follow a horror-rock genre, based thematically in classic gothic horror and drawing musically from a wide variety of styles.
The bands are on a nine-date tour that started Thursday night in Seattle. They are playing concerts in Oregon, including Medford and Portland; Washington; California; and Nevada.
Slaght, a 2004 graduate, moved to Everett, Wash., two years ago. He started playing music with his brother, Ben Slaght.
“We ended up writing a couple of songs we ended up using for this band,” Slaght said. Ben was playing in a psychobilly group called Graveyard Shift, which toured with bands like the Necromantix and Tiger Army. Ben left the band to play with his brother.
The brothers, Andy on vocals and guitar and Ben on bass, were joined by drummer Jay Johnson, and they started writing songs. They brought in Tyler Murphy of the River City Rebels to play lead guitar and recorded demos for their myspace.com page.
“Within a week or two, we had two label bids before we even played a show,” Slaght said. They signed on with Robot Monster of Snohomish, Wash., and brought in another guitar player, Calem Bergemier, allowing Slaght to focus on his vocals.
“I’m a singer,” Slaght said. “I learned guitar so I could sing what I write.”
The group recorded a seven-song EP and played a gig in Seattle prior to the release.
They released their EP at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood, Calif., a show they played with several other bands, including Calabrese of Arizona and Order of the Fly.
“It was really cool,” Slaght said. “I worked on getting that one (the Hollywood show) for two months.”
The band returned to the Seattle area and continued writing music and playing local shows, including a show with the European band the Meteors, the first psychobilly band, mixing horror punk and old-style rockabilly. The group also did a small Northwest tour, including stops in Portland, Astoria and a radio show.
Since then, Murphy left the band, and Ryan Hausner took over his guitar duties.
The band is planning to record its first full-length album for release later this year or early next year.
Slaght is enjoying the chance to get out and tour, he said. “It’s great. It’s cool to get out, and just playing shows is amazing. There’s nothing like it.”
He has enjoyed meeting the people who influenced him and his band mates, groups like Gorgeous Frankenstein, which includes two members of the Misfits.
“We get to meet a lot of people, get out and see new places,” he said.
His band’s music is mainly melodic punk and rock, with lyrical content based in classic horror themes like vampires, ghosts, zombies, B-movies and Anne Rice. The music can range through 60s-style “doo-wop” through Spanish themes. He enjoys drawing from a large variety of influences.
“We try to keep it up and have fun, kind of different from the genre,” he said. “We’re not trying to be evil all the time. It’s not darkness and gloom. We want people to have fun at our shows.”
Slaght works at a business center doing packaging and shipping. The owner of the business also owns Robot Monster. Slaght said he has been helping his boss locate other horror-rock bands for the independent label.
He found the Gruesome Boys on-line and pointed them out to his label. Then he discovered that the band’s guitar player was also a graduate of SHHS.
“I didn’t find that out until the first show we played with them, in Arlington,” Slaght said. He started talking to the members of that band after the show and learned Wilkinson was a 2000 graduate.
Wilkinson grew up in the Mid-Valley area. He started attending SHHS his sophomore year.
“When I found out Andy was from Sweet Home too, it just blew my mind,” Wilkinson said. They didn’t know each other in Sweet Home, but after playing many shows together, they’ve “turned out to be really good friends of ours.”
After graduating, Wilkinson moved to the Vancouver, Wash., area and then to Longview, Wash. He is in his second year learning digital audio and recording at Lower Columbia Community College. He delivers pizza for Domino’s.
After about three years in Longview, the Gruesome Boys were a three-piece act that had been together since high school. The bass player broke his hand, and Wilkinson filled in on some studio work.
He ended up playing guitar and singing backup vocals with the band full time.
This is the first time he has gone on tour, he said. “I’m actually really, really excited about it. I’m excited to come back to Sweet Home. It’s going to be really weird.”
His band is in the horror rock genre also, and like Slaght’s band, it draws from numerous musical styles while leaning toward punk.
“We’re spreading ourselves thin around the stereotype table,” he said. On their upcoming album, the group used everything from a toy piano to an accordion. “Whatever sounds good, we play.”
More information about the bands may be found on the Internet at http://www.myspace.com/thechurchforsinners and http://www.myspace.com/gruesomeboys.