| "Just being on the same record label as New Bomb Turks blows my mind every time I think about it," admits Luke Nuclear. The vocalist isn’t really sure how his band the Million Dollar Marxists managed to hook up with San Francisco’s hard-rocking Gearhead Records. As the label’s first-ever Canadian signing, they join a roster of such high profile artists as The Turks, The Hives and The Hellacopters, and with a new album out just two months ago, the Ottawa boys – Nuclear, guitarists Steve Samonella and Lee Mobile, bassist Johnny Genome, and drummer Timmy Two Time – are spreading their punk rock ’n’ roll as far as they can.
Nuclear attempts to explain the circumstances leading to the band’s signing. "I met Mike LaVella, one of the owners of Gearhead a couple times through our friend Dirty Donny, who did the artwork for our album. He had done some artwork for them over the years and he and I actually went out to San Francisco a couple years ago and hung out with some Gearhead people. This was before the Million Dollar Marxists even started, but when we did start, Gearhead still had their magazine going. We did a six-song EP and sent that to them to get reviewed in the magazine," he says, clarifying, "We weren’t shopping it around. We did it just to get reviewed and I guess they liked it. We’d been talking to them about doing stuff for a long time and then, all of a sudden, they sent us a contract and said, ‘Sign it, we’ll put your record out right away.’"
The resulting 14-song album combines cuts from three different sessions spanning three years, with five, including the title track, taken directly from the 2002 EP that initially enamoured the Gearhead crew. The overall sound is made cohesive through a killer Californian mastering job. "I notice (the difference in sessions) just because I know which songs are which," says Nuclear, "but I don’t know if anyone else will really notice."
And understandably, The Marxists couldn’t be happier with their present situation. "For the kind of stuff that we play, I couldn’t possibly think of any record label that would fit better than Gearhead," says Nuclear. |
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