Head of Femur, Coffinberry to rock Baker
By Christine Davis, Staff Writer
October 19, 2007 | 6 p.m.
Utilizing almost every instrument imaginable, Head of Femur creates a groovy cacophony of sound. Best categorized as art rock, Head of Femur recently released The Leader and the Falcon EP and will release the full-length album Great Plains later this year or early next. Head of Femur lies somewhere between The Beatles and Arcade Fire. (Musically, that is; anatomically, it’s the ball of the hip.)
In an interview with livewire.com from 2003, Head of Femur gave the etymology of their name: “The head of femur is a bone in your body. When Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the cameramen were instructed to film Elvis' pelvis no lower than the head of femur. Thus, the head of femur is the point where rock and roll becomes sex, and we balance on top of it!”
Coffinberry is a band hailing from the Cleveland area that seems to have a penchant for mixing southern rock and post-punk. Their chill rock ballads that grow to screaming licks are raw and honest. Coffinberry themselves even had difficulty describing their sound when interviewed earlier this week. Whatever it is that they have, it is definitely something new. Nick Cross, the vocalist and guitarist of Coffinberry took time out of his schedule to chat over the phone while on the road.
SE: What is the name Coffinberry about?
Nick: It’s a park that my brother and I grew up near. We used to go there as children a lot and we couldn’t think of a name. We picked something that we thought no one would like. That’s what we did. It’s just like a nursery school and this really big park by where we grew up as kids.
SE: What are your influences and inspirations?
Nick: We like a lot of older stuff, like Beatles records. We like The Grateful, things like that. Some seventies punk stuff, not a lot of modern things though.
SE: How would you describe your sound?
Nick: It’s a lot of fun. The songs are all short for the most part. Some of them are poppy, some of them aren’t.
SE: So anthemic?
Nick: No…Tony said it’s like a kick in the balls. It’s just short, we try to spend a lot of time on the songs. They’re well crafted, I guess you could say. I don’t know, that’s such a hard thing to say.
SE: Do you have any short-term or long-term goals for the band?
Nick: Just to keep recording and try and play around as much as possible, for as long as it can last. We all live together, too, in a house so we spend a lot of time doing home-recording stuff. We just want to keep doing as much as we can for as long as we can, before I kill everybody.
SE: So what’s that like, working with your brother and living with the band?
Nick: It’s actually surprisingly pretty easy. My brother and I get along pretty well, we don’t really fight or anything, we never really have. We’ve been playing and writing songs together since we were tiny kids. We know how to work together well, and the other guys, we’ve all been friends for so long we know how to deal with each other and everything.
SE: What bands have you opened for that you really enjoyed?
Nick: We opened for Arcade Fire, they’re alright. We opened for The Walkmen a few times, and The Futureheads, I like The Walkmen. As for modern bands that we haven’t opened for, I like The Black Lips a lot.
SE: Where do you get the ideas for your songs?
Nick: I don’t know. I don’t really know, Tony and I just start writing together, so whatever comes up kind of comes up. As far as musically, we just try and play it and f*** with the song structure as it can take it before we find something that we can stick with. And then we practice a lot, since we all live together we can practice in the house and record in the house, but as far as where the ideas come from I don’t know.
SE: What are you guys working on now?
Nick: Now we are working on…whatever the new record will be, I guess. We’re doing a lot of home, lo-fi recordings, which will be different from the last one because the last one we did in the studio so it will be different, whenever it’s done. We don’t really know when it’s going to be done but we’re spending a lot of time on it, taking our time.
SE: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Nick: We like to play in Athens a lot. We’ve always had fun playing there, except on Halloween. We played there once on Halloween and it was awful.
Head of Femur and Coffinberry will be playing Oct. 20 at Baker Theater. The show starts at 8 p.m. Fans and cheapskates alike will enjoy these two acts destined for greatness, for free.
---