Home » Music » Albums » Stereo Demonstration Record

Angry Brick: Stereo Demonstration Record: Songs from the upcoming album "Becoming The Machine"

Angry Brick was a sort of "comedy-metal" band consisting of me on drums, Greg Baker on bass, Brett Tribe on vocals, and "MC Govern" on guitar. For two shows, we employed dancers we dubbed "The Brickettes" (an homage to Limp Bizkit's dancers "The Bizkettes") - friends Shirley Grace, Elizabeth Crew, and Rachel Cohen. We recorded this EP, Stereo Demonstration Record: Songs From the Upcoming Album "Becoming The Machine", and played four shows before disbanding amicably.

Angry Brick was an experiment that should not have worked. The idea behind it was to play intentionally simple, downtuned music, and employ a frontman who would simply mumble incoherently and whine, and occasionally say something about his father abusing him as a child - in effect, capitalizing on nu-metal fans, while making fun of them at the same time.

Some of the songs had intentionally socially-conservative lyrics - not to push an agenda, but as meta-humor - would kids do what their parents asked of them if the message was wrapped in modern music?

The absurd name "Angry Brick" was suggested by my best friend in high school as a potential band name. We also used it on Mad Trivia as the name of a fictional punk band who performed a punk version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in 1998. In that incarnation, Angry Brick was me and Brett. I recorded all the instruments (intentionally badly) and Brett sang (intentionally badly) for one song, featured on the track "An Angry Brick Christmas" on the CD I'm Charles Foster Kane: The Mad Trivia Party Archives 1997-1998.

The genesis of the band goes back to the spring of 1999 when Binghamton University (where Brett and I did Mad Trivia) made two polarizing decisions regarding two local live music events. Two on-campus concerts, "Bandemonium" and "Spring Fling," were occurring on the same day. Binghamton University tapped local Clear-Channel owned rock station WKGB-FM to emcee Bandemonium, and WHRW DJs Seth Mates and Jeremy Klaff (who were known as the edgy on-air duo "Seth & Jeremy") to emcee Spring Fling. While Bandemonium's headliner was the extremely popular regional act Perfect Thyroid, Spring Fling's trump card was indie darling Liz Phair. Needless to say, Bandemonium was going to be under-attended.

Brett and I thought that since WHRW was the campus radio station, that there were more than enough personalities to host both events, and since Mad Trivia was in itself a station institution, we were kind of offended that we didn't get asked to host the other event. There was also bad blood between Mad Trivia and Seth & Jeremy due to some muckraking from a third party, stirring up trouble where there was none, and so at the time we felt even more compelled to show the powers that be that there were more than two worthy emcees to come out of the station.

However, BU did not budge and the KGB emcee stayed. Then one night after Mad Trivia, someone let us know that a band had to bow out of Bandemonium because their guitarist had broken his hand in a car accident. The next day, Angry Brick was born.

Our guitarist was without a band to play with at the time, and had been amassing a collection of original metal-ish guitar riffs. The day after learning a band had bowed out of Bandemonium, I called Brett and pitched the idea of Angry Brick: Simply, a band who showed up, dressed in all black, acted mysterious, played simple down-tuned riffs, and had an incomprehensible singer. Brett found Greg Baker to play bass, and we practiced for three days - no joke - and we "wrote" "songs." I don't remember exactly how, but we got on the bill at Bandemonium and played.

My favorite part of the story was, the emcee (from Clear Channel's WKGB-FM) approached me after our set and said "You guys are great! You sound just like Korn! How long have you guys been doing this?" I looked at him and told him the truth: "About three days," and I walked away without another word.

Anyway, since we had access to the production studio at WHRW, we set off to record a full-length CD. I don't know how serious we were about it, but we recorded an EP. Stereo Demonstration Record was cut in just a few weeks in our spare time. It was recorded in the lobby of WHRW, direct to the station's Tascam DA-88 digital multitrack deck. I bounced the tracks to a computer, and mixed and mastered it in Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition).

Brett, Greg and I were content in continuing the project as a joke, but at the time "MC Govern" really wanted to be taken seriously as a musician (there's one in every group, isn't there?), and split from the rest of us. The joke was close to running its course anyway. The split was amacable - we were surprised it lasted as long as it did!

Stereo Demonstration Record lived on for a while on the old MP3.com, with an absolutely ludicrous and fake backstory about how Angry Brick were the "pioneers of the LA hip-core scene," and taught Korn everything they know, but were sidelined after Tribe was injured in a car accident and sent Korn in their stead. People actually bought it for awhile and sent us these ridiculous fan letters. It was a really fun experiment that proved it's really easy to capitalize off mass-marketed trends.