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Local metal band makes it big with national record deal
“It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.”As true as that statement was for bands when AC/DC vocalist Bon Scott penned those lyrics, it rings a similar note for up-and-coming artists today.
Just ask the members of local heavy metal act Adversary, who practice in a basement in Dominion Valley. The band inked a record contract during the summer with the independent national label Trustkill Records. The label officially announced the deal earlier this month.
“You could literally smell rat [urine],” said Bryan Ryder as he described one of the gigs his former band, Blackbody Locus, performed in 2005. “Like, honestly, you’d walk down there and go, ‘There’s rodents here.’”
The vermin populating the basement of the now-defunct Charm Space City Art Space in Baltimore actually outdrew the number of fans and friends that showed up. Ryder and fellow guitarist Kenny Harrison had driven from their homes in Manassas to meet up with band-mates Zach Kowalcheck and Noamel Gonzales. They essentially performed in front of the other bands on the bill.
For the guitarists Ryder and Harrison, who had been jamming together since they attended Stonewall Jackson High School during the turn of the century, enough was enough.
“To me, that was the breaking point,” said Ryder.
Within a month or two of that performance, the band was done.
But a heavy metal heart is hard to break and the future members of Adversary knew it.
Ryder asked Harrison to jam again, eventually teaming up with high school friends Justin Green and William Clapp.
Jamming turned out to be a natural fit for the new group; after all, Green, Clapp and Ryder used to bang on the back of lunch trays at Stonewall Jackson to Metallica songs, drawing nasty looks from preppy kids in the lunchroom.
By the time they moved to the $400-per-month Dreamsound rehearsal and recording studio in Manassas around August 2005, the rust from Blackbody Locus had fallen off. They enjoyed making music.
“We finally had a place to play. It was finally time to start writing our own material,” said Green.
But Dreamsound turned into a food market and Adversary was without a home.
“So we were kind of devastated,” said Green, mentioning that engineer Ben McCall found them a place in Vienna to record and school friend Rachel Mullens offered them her house as a practice space.
In early 2006, they sank $2,700 into a four-song demo made over 12-hour days in a little less than a week. When Ryder’s now-20-year-old cousin Daniel Tidwell heard the demo, he immediately wanted to be a part of it.
Adversary needed a bassist and though Tidwell performed as a guitarist with his brother in the Manassas act Guillotine, he was willing to pick up the four-string full-time.
Finally on March 20, 2006, Adversary hit the stage at Jaxx Nite Club in West Springfield. Virtually every metal band in Northern Virginia passes through Jaxx at some point if they think they have a shot at making it to the big time.
They sold enough tickets, put on a strong performance and had the right connections to eventually book opening slots for national and international acts.
“We started playing as [the fans] were walking in,” Green said of their first national show. “By the time the first song was over, the place was packed.”
And the packed house loved it.
Gigs like that helped justify to the members why they wanted to make music as a career. So they got serious, took out a $10,000 loan, pumped out their first full-length record “Singularity” in October 2007 and started shipping it around.
At first, labels showed little to no interest until they hired a manager. But the internationally-circulated heavy metal magazine “Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles” got hold of it, giving Adversary a 9.5 out of 10 rating.
“Harnessing Arch Enemy’s unbridled metal maelstrom, Adversary literally explodes out of the game,” the review stated. “Before the first song, ‘Hedonist,’ had finished, it was obvious this band deserves to be signed.
Trustkill Records president Josh Grabelle agreed.
“I fell in love with it,” he said. “It was just really well-played metal.”
Melodies, solid song structures, name it: this record had it, according to Grabelle.
“Writing a good song is hard and these guys are good at it,” he added.
Grabelle chatted with the band on the phone, watched some videos of their live shows and decided they were 100 percent committed to making the band succeed.
When word got back in Manassas, Clapp, Green and Ryder were hanging out at TGI Friday’s.
That’s when Ryder received an e-mail on Green’s iPhone from the band’s manager with the subject line “Congrats.”
On the inside was the memo-of-intent.
“Screaming, banging the table” Green said of their instant reaction.
The band now plans to have a record-release show in Manassas this fall and hit the road on their first tour after the start of the 2009. Their album, “Singularity,” is due out nationwide Nov. 11 through Trustkill Records.
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