Photo by Devin Barnes
Some bands appear straightforward, others have mystique and a few are genuinely puzzling. New York’s Car Bomb comprises four (seemingly) straightforward, middle-aged guys with STEM backgrounds, but they specialise in puzzles. Their songs are meticulously crafted outbursts of angular rhythms, shards of melody, and riffs that cut like shrapnel. Named after a song by noise band Negativland, where the singer rambles about car parts before shouting “Car bomb!” in its chorus, Car Bomb’s latest EP, Tiles Whispers Dreams, confirms them as one of the most unusual, necessary and electrifying bands in heavy music.
Car Bomb operates in a space where the dense chromatic onslaught of Meshuggah meets a vector of influences including My Bloody Valentine, Radiohead’s OK Computer, the glitchy electronica of Aphex Twin and Autechre, and the textures of Björk and Portishead. Since their debut album, Centralia, was released by Relapse Records in 2007, they have become heavy musicians’ favourites. Most notably Gojira’s Joe Duplantier, who met the band while he was playing bass with Cavalera Conspiracy in the late 2000s. He co-produced Car Bomb’s 2016 album Meta with guitarist Greg Kubacki and has remained an advocate and collaborator down the years. Car Bomb has frequently recorded at Duplantier’s Silvercord Studios in New York, including tracking drums and doing vocal pre-production for Tiles Whispers Dreams.
Hailing from Long Island, Car Bomb are part inheritors of the explosive, patchwork production approach of Public Enemy and their production crew, The Bomb Squad. Long Island has groove, also evident in its most notable death-metal progeny, Suffocation. Singer Frank Mullen guested on the stuttering, stentorian “Sets” on Meta. The album was a breakthrough for Car Bomb, something Kubacki attributes to the superb mix by Josh Wilbur, but which should also be credited to the songwriting – from the glistening “Gratitude” to the avant-garde cut-and-thrust of “Secrets Within”.
This Long Island groove is present in the compositions of Car Bomb, slipping and sliding between the geometric angles of their compositions. Singer Mike Dafferner, with a masters degree in astrophysics, is a software manager leading a team of engineers. Bassist Jon Modell (a “workhorse,” according to Kubacki) does network administration and information technology. Drummer Elliot Hoffmann (one of the best drummers in the world, period) installs home theaters and home automation systems. Kubacki is a designer, programmer and desktop publisher – “whatever kind of digital thing you need, I can do.” These educated professionals have used their day jobs to finance their band, taking the pressure right off “making it”. Instead, they self-release their records, build their own equipment, and have complete control of their creative output. Being good at math helps with the songs too.
“We're all counting the whole time and yet we're not thinking about the count,” Kubacki tells me in the bar of Hackney’s Oslo venue in London. “It's just flowing around.”
Kubacki has been the band’s principal songwriter from Meta onwards. Sometimes a pattern will come to him, or a rhythmic idea, and he will work at it for an hour or two – trying the riff higher or lower up the neck of his baritone guitar; experimenting with it faster or slower – until he has ten minutes of music. Then he will leave it on a hard drive for a month or two, come back to it, and see what grabs him.
He describes his songwriting as “digging a tunnel from both ends where you have one idea, and you have another idea, and a lot of times it just never crosses.”
It would be easier if the band was playing in the same key, time signature, or even same tempo within a given part. But in Car Bomb’s sonic world there is an elasticity and also a diamond-hard firmness to all of these things. The challenge is to bring the part of a song in five, the part in seven, the part in one division, and the other part in a split division all together to form a coherent piece.
Tiles Whispers Dreams is three tracks long and features some of the band’s most distilled and challenging music. Kubacki promises they have some “simpler” tracks in the locker they are looking to release next year. But he hopes that the “contrast points” within these songs pull listeners in. That rather than assail people with impossible rhythms, the underpinning of the chaos starts to become visible. Kubacki doesn’t see Car Bomb as trading in difficult musical ideas. Rather, he perceives them as “just not traditional ideas” that the band is “switching gears” around.
Slowing down is more of an issue for the band than playing mind-boggling rhythms. Especially when the part makes it sound like being vacuumed into a black hole.
“At the end of [Meta’s] ‘Constant Sleep’, it's slow,” says Kubacki. “And I remember when I first wrote it I thought, it's gonna contrast with everything else, and it took a while for them to get the feel of that heaviness. It's difficult, man. You want to rush, you want to get to the next thing, but you’ve got to sit in it. And it's that which causes some tension.”
Seeing Car Bomb pulverise the upstairs venue at Oslo later that evening, what Kubacki says makes perfect sense. In EP and set opener “Blindsides”, he makes what he calls a “race car” sound with his guitar, as if the band is an engine literally shifting gears. He plays a washed-out chord reminiscent of “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” by favourites Deftones, before he launches into “Antipatterns” from 2019’s Mordial, as if to signpost the song’s influences to the audience. He tells me that nineties Los Angeles alternative band Failure made a huge impression on his guitar-playing when he went to high school, and that the solo of “Antipatterns” is a tribute to their guitarist, Greg Edwards. When he hits a rare 4/4 chug during “Blackened Battery”, a nod to Metallica, the band which broke him into heavy music, it’s like a rock of conventional songwriting emerging from an ocean of discord for the audience to grasp onto.
As much as the careful assemblage of Car Bomb’s music, the signature of their sound is Kubacki’s toolbox of sound effects. Most prominent of these is the ring modulator, which gives his guitar a synth-like, robotic voice. The sound is a hallmark of Car Bomb’s progressive tendencies, though Tony Iommi double-tracked his solo to “Paranoid” with the same effect as far back as 1970.
“It's been this effect that's been there forever, but usually it's pretty static,” Kubacki says. “But with the Axe-Fx [guitar effects processor], it has the thing where it attracts the pitch with it, so it creates its own unique voice. And if you just dial it just right it’ll make this nasty sound. And that's been probably 20 or 30% of all the music we write now with that, because it just sounds so heavy.”
Kubacki is careful with his tools. He’s conscious of giving Dafferner room to sketch out his own ideas when they are writing. The vocalist’s roars, and fragments of raw melody when he actually sings, give Car Comb a definite edge. Whether Dafferner is singing about geometry on “Nonagan” or more traditional heavy-metal fare on “Dissect Yourself”, Kubacki squeezes crazy sounds into the gaps in the vocals. “Dissect Yourself” is a famous example within the band’s fanbase, where Kubacki wrings out the cavernous root note as slowly as possible before hitting what sounds like rapid-fire lasers on his guitar along with Hoffman’s snare. Suddenly a sound they had used for twelve years became a novelty hook overnight.
Dafferner has his own tricks up his sleeve as well. Live, he conducts the music with hands aloft like he’s controlling a marionette. He burrows through the twists and turns of older songs such as “The Sentinel” like a soldier doing counter-manoeuvres against his own support unit. When he meshes with the band, Car Bomb assumes terrifying, Terminator-like proportions. And Dafferner does it all with a mischievous sense of humour, whether it’s the exaggerated whoops of “Finish It” or the snatches of “Could We Start Again, Please?” from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar he serenades his bandmates with between songs.
“It’s not necessarily what the story is,” Kubacki says of Dafferner’s lyrics. “It's the impression that it gives. It's the color he's trying to paint. So we really try to honor that.”
Car Bomb aren’t particularly interested in the tropes of more traditional metal music. But, despite the unconventional time signatures that frequently change in the songs, their fans certainly mosh. Once the second song of the evening, “From the Dust of this Planet” (surely a nod to Eugene Thacker’s philosophy book of almost the same name) kicks in, there’s no let up. It’s easier to throw yourself around to Car Bomb than nod your head.
Playing dates with fellow New Yorkers Imperial Triumphant (who write retro-futuristic death metal as if the genre originated from jazz rather than thrash) this summer, it feels apt to describe Car Bomb as a modernist band. They use abstraction rather than realism to make sense of a chaotic world. Even the cover artwork of Meta – originally released in fragments so that fans could piece something together themselves – recalls the shapes and lines of the painting Dynamic Suprematism by Kazimir Malevich, created at the birth of modernism during the irruptions of the First World War.
“The artwork from Meta has a similar theme around that too,” says Kubacki. “It's just really based on this one simple idea, but with a little twist to it. And if you just repeat it in a certain way, it starts to create its own unique thing. And, to me, that's the sweet spot in music. Meshuggah does that really well. Where they take one simple idea and it makes this beautiful, minimalist, modern thing.”
Kubacki is exploring the visual aspect of Car Bomb in more depth. He cites the cinematic richness of (Imperial Triumphant favourite) Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The guitar playthroughs he has made for the Tiles Whispers Dreams songs are shot on a Canon EOS 7D camera, recalling the high-frame rate of Pantera’s classic “Five Minutes Alone” video. Kubacki praises his baritone guitar for allowing him to really dig into bending his strings. His playthrough videos transform the tension and exaggerated floppiness of the strings into high drama.
The cover art for Tiles Whispers Dreams and anime-style video for “Blindsides” have seen Kubacki also experimenting with Generative AI. The comments for the latter on YouTube testify to the knee-jerk antipathy towards AI, even when mapped skillfully to the music. The former saw him work through thousands of images until he landed on the multifarious synthetic organism with its optical focus: “That takes a long time, and then you see one, and all of a sudden it hits.” For the video for “Paroxysm”, he worked with AI visual artist Kyle Rose for six weeks, asking Rose to make “weird stuff” that Kubacki could synchronise to the music. For Car Bomb, AI isn’t a means of bypassing craft, but another tool to be used as a way to bolster it.
“It's mixing a lot of different things together to make something new and something that hasn't been made before,” says Kubacki.
This is wholly consistent with Car Bomb’s creative philosophy. Kubacki bemoans not being able to listen to electronic music now and hear new things since it’s become so ubiquitous. There is nothing new under the sun, but Car Bomb will keep laying out schematics for stronger and more delightfully oddball explosions.
“We're always trying to paint a different picture, in a way,” says Kubacki. “At least, I would hate for one of our songs to sound like another song. We're always trying to get different flavors, whether it's subtle or it's major. We're really trying to explore different avenues of sound.”
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Tiles Whispers Dreams, the new EP from Car Bomb is now available - HERE
Car Bomb is currently touring Europe with Imperial Triumphant. Following the band's European run, Car Bomb will trek to Australia for The Joy of Motion Anniversary tour supporting Animals As Leaders in September. Dates and cities can be found below.
