Driving Range

Big hair-dos, big sound, even bigger issues. Big deal? You betcha. At the Drive-In are currently garnering rave notices throughout America and Europe both for their current album, Relationship Of Command, and their powerhouse live performances: the kind of stage show that makes Rage Against The Machine look like Kylie and Jason.

The quintet began honing their metallic-punk-hardcore hybrid six years ago in El Paso Texas, where Cedric, Omar, Tony, Jim and Paul grew up. El Paso isn t a city noted for its burgeoning music scene, however.
It kinda went up and down, muses Paul, the band s bassist. There were only a few people who put on shows there and there were a lot of young kids. But when those kids would go off to college, the whole scene died down. We were all in different bands when we were growing up, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before we all got together.
Growing up in the Texan city wasn t exactly a case of holiday homes in Florida and vacations on Malibu Beach, and the band grew up seeing their fair share of life s hardships.
El Paso is a really poor city, right on the border with Mexico, ventures Paul. There s a small stream, it s not even a river, that separates El Paso from Mexico, and it was kinda weird growing up right next to what is in effect a third world country. When we were in high school, we would go down there cos you could get alcohol there when you were, like, 14. Looking back on it now, we would go down there and have fun, not realising what people were going through, because we always got to come home every night.
Perhaps more than most bands, their home-town had a huge bearing on the development of At The Drive-In as a band and particularly on their lyrics.
Maybe it wasn t always apparent even to us, but I think that there are so many messed up things where we are from , Paul trails off. It s not until you tour and you get out of a city that you realise how fucked up the place you come from really is. There s a lot of weird things that go down in El Paso: there s a lot of poverty and it is one of the biggest drug ports in the world, trucks passing through all the time from South America and Mexico. We grew up seeing this every day.
Apart from all its problems, El Paso was also a pretty boring place to live, he confesses, and the only way for us to play, without playing the same bars every week, was to tour. So we just went out in our little van and toured. There would be nobody at the shows sometimes, in the early days, but we made a lot of friends and we still see them at our live shows every time we come back to those towns.
The band s growth was very organic, building up a larger fanbase each year through their incendiary live performances, supplemented by the release of a variety of Eps and LPs on various American indie labels. Relationship Of Command is the culmination of those six years of blood, sweat and not too many tears. Released earlier this year on the Grand Royal label, home to the Beastie Boys, the album is an uncompromising tour de force, equal parts Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails and Metallica. There is nothing manufactured or affected about this lot. One minute into album opener, Arcarsenal and you know you are in the middle of a rage so ferocious it almost bleeds from your speakers.
The band are justifiably proud Relationship Of Command, and of current single Rolodex Propaganda which features none other than the legendary Iggy Pop on vocals. He also contributes a bizarre voiceover intro to the menacing Enfilade .
Relationship Of Command, by their own admission, is the closest At The Drive-In have come on record to the power and passion of their live performance, which NME recently called jaw-dropping in its intensity and spirit .
It s just our little therapy session, Paul laughs. It is in no way planned, so it is never the same two nights in a row.
Irish audiences can judge for themselves when the Texans make their debut visit to these shores on December 9th and 10th, with gigs in Belfast and Dublin. Be warned, though, their, ahem, frenetic performances have often resulted in some of their equipment suddenly going airborne. Vocalist Cedric Bixler recently admitted, We d be on some five band bill in Houston or somewhere, and there would be no-one there and we d somehow break five microphones during our 20-minute set.
It s not just their gear which has suffered for their art. The band themselves have ended up slightly the worse for wear on occasion.
Yeah, Cedric has ended up going to the hospital a few times, Paul laughs. I remember one time he got hit in the face with a microphone by Omar [guitarist]. And Jim broke his guitar on my back once during a show. Everybody s got hurt at some stage.
I wondered how Paul would feel if At The Drive-In suddently hit the major league and were to end up in the upper reaches of the charts, nestling alongside the latest effort from Backstreet Boys.
That s not why we play, Paul says. If that happens, it happens. But that is not in any way our goal. Our goal is just to play music.

At The Drive-In play the Temple Bar Music Centre on December 9th and 10th.