Artist Profile: Carl Shane of Kal Marks

Kal Marks, one of Boston’s finest and hardest-working bands, released their third album this past Friday (2/19), on the Exploding in Sound record label. Kal Marks, composed of Alex Audette, Michael Geacone, and Carl Shane, perform dense, thorny guitar-drum-bass rock with existential lyrics. But don’t mistake them for somber rockers—they have a finely wrought sense of the absurd, in every sense of the word, and their work is marked by a deep, wry wit and a sharply ironic outlook (just check their album titles, from their 2014 “Just A Lonely Fart” EP to their just released “Life Is Alright, Everybody Dies” LP). In advance of the album release, The Crimson had the chance to talk with frontman Carl Shane about the new album, their upcoming tour, and what precisely it means to be in an indie band.

The Harvard Crimson: What excites you most about the new album?

Carl Shane: We’re all really proud of this new record. I think we kind of tried to branch out more. I know that’s such a cliché answer .… But I think there’s a lot more diversity to this record than the last one .… Overall it’s really heavy and pretty brutal. But there are just more sounds involved—more spending time with our own instruments as well as adding some synthetic sounds, some keyboard sounds, some electronics, and some different texturing.

THC: You’ve mentioned perseverance as being a really important theme in your album.

CS: The last record was so pessimistic …. I needed something kind of new, subject-wise, to talk about. It’s similar in that the last record was called “Life is Murder,” and this record is called “Life is Alright, Everybody Dies,” so we’re talking about real, scary, fearful things .… A year or so ago, when I started writing some of the first songs on this record, I was just so depressed and I wouldn’t get out of bed .… It wasn’t even like things were that terrible. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe there was anything good to do. And I think that there’s a point when you hit a real low that you say to yourself that anything would be better than this. Feeling anything—even anger—would be better than feeling empty and down. So some of the record is extremely, extremely angry, but it’s motivated and thoughtful .… There are a lot of things that aggravate me .… Just thinking about the planet itself, just feeling like we’re just destroying our world completely, with fossil fuels and war and bigotry and hatred, and it just weighed really heavily on my mind as well as my own personal crap, and I just figured why not yell about it instead of retreat .… [The album] is about trying to be constructive with the reality that things are really messed up. Because you can’t just—I mean you can, but you can’t just submit .… There’s still a tomorrow, and you are going to have to live that tomorrow, and why not try to be constructive and try not to make it so miserable? … It’s really hard to be completely miserable and depressed when you are making yourself useful. I actually learned that from one of my biggest heroes, Louis C.K. He said that in an interview and it just immediately—it changed everything. I have so much respect for his stand-up material, but I just think he’s an amazing thinker. And he talks about things that everybody goes through .… My mom is a nurse, and she works in an old folks’ home and probably sees so many people die all the time. I think to myself that I would be so depressed, but my mom’s not a depressed person .… It’s because when somebody dies, she just has to go on and keep on treating the next patient. I don’t know if that sounds cold, but it’s the truth. You can’t just stop the world. People are still sick. People still need help. And you’ve got to be useful. And she’s my hero in my mind .… Hearing things like that just make me want to do better things with my life and make music that’s not so self-centered and more trying to relate to others.

THC: Do you feel that in a way, making music itself is a way of persevering?

CS: Absolutely. Some people think that music is so heartbreaking .… I think some people find music to be heartbreaking, and they give up on it because they are expecting something out of it. And you can’t expect anything. I mean, I want the best for us, I really do, and when people come to us and want to talk to us or want to buy a record or whatever or have us play a show, it’s so great:I’m so grateful for all of that. But I can’t expect that at all. The only expectations you should have is for yourself—to make music that you want to make and to push your creativity. You can’t be just sitting around thinking, “When is somebody going to discover me?” I know I probably felt like that in the past when I was younger, but now I’ve just kind of grown old, and I don’t care anymore about fulfilling anybody’s expectations or their requirements. Music—you really do it for yourself first, and then you do it for other people as well. I really do want to entertain people. When I see people have a smile on their face when we are playing or something like that, it feels really good. And it makes me want to play even better. It feels good to give people something that you cherish. I cherish what we do, the three of us, and I want to share it with people. But I’m not ever going to be like, “Yeah, tonight in St. Louis there should be a bunch of people, there has to be.” There doesn’t have to be. It really has to be for you first and foremost. And yeah, it is a good way of persevering and getting through life. I mean, our music is so loud and so emotional but also primal, in a way, that you just get a lot of aggression out and a lot of emotion out at the same time. It’s got a really caveman kind of quality, but there are a lot of cerebral things to it as well that just lend to your animal, dumb aggression as well as your emotional pain, to just release.

THC: How has performing the new material been?

CS: I think that people are going to like the music more live than on record, though I could be wrong. When we perform, even if there’s a really small crowd, at least one person will come away with it saying, “Hey, that was impressive!” It has picked up a little bit in areas where we never expected it before, where we will play a show and will be greatly received—or well-received by our standards—because we’ve been a band for years to little attention. We’re still a very, very small band. We’re not unwelcoming of more people hearing us. We totally are happy to play to new people every single time, but again, we don’t expect that .… I totally understand wanting to be loved or appreciated, but we just do it either way. Pardon my language, but we just don’t give a f--- about getting a sweet record deal or playing some really big venue. If anything, we want to play the music we want to make and share it with people that would enjoy it and want an intimate kind of moment with us. We’re not shying away from ever playing big venues, but that’s not priority one at all. If that happens, we’ll try to figure out if this is something we can do, but we might be forgotten tomorrow .… That’s the way things are. I can’t have any foresight into knowing that this is going to ever mean anything to anybody.I can’t. So just do it for yourself for the time being. We really have a ball playing! … As much as we try to do what we do as an art or some kind of really creative project, I think when we play to people, we somewhat divorce ourselves from it a little bit and realize that this is entertainment, to give people a good time .… Music is exciting; it’s always going to be exciting. Especially when it’s loud and present and everybody’s locked in. It’s fun for us, and if it’s fun for the people watching, it makes it even better for us and makes us want to go even further.

—Staff writer Amy J. Cohn can be reached at amy.cohn@thecrimson.com