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Interview: Frodus (w/ Shelby Cinca)

frodus-promo-2Frodus play a packed bill at the Talking Head Club tomorrow, Friday May 8 with Aural States’ friends Caverns, Solar Powered Sun Destroyer and Sick Weapons! Doors @ 8PM / $10. Be there.

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MP3: Frodus – Suspicion Breeds Confidence from Split 7″ with Trans-megetti(1996)

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MP3: Frodus – Explosions from Explosions 7″ (1997)

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MP3: Frodus – Lights On For Safety from Frodus/Roadside Monument Split (1997)

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MP3: Frodus – Invisible Times Lines from Muddle Magazine Promo Flexi 7″ (1997)

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MP3: Frodus – The Day Buildings Mysteriously Vanished from Conglomerate International (1998)

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MP3: Frodus – There Will Be No More Scum (Alternate Version) from Songs From the Penalty Box 3 (1999)

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MP3: Frodus – Disco from Split 7″ with Atomic Fireball (1999)

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MP3: Frodus – The Earth Isn’t Humming from And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea (2001)

The name Frodus (Wiki) may instantly ignite a cascade of warm fuzzies in the pleasure centers of your brain, or it may just ring hollowly, unrecognized.  The DC-area post-hardcore stars burned quickly and melted down ca. 1999, leaving in their wake a massively acclaimed album (And We Washed Our Weapons In The Sea) to be released two years post-mortem on Fueled By Ramen, and finally bringing them deserved amounts of critical acclaim and an expanded fanbase…just a bit too late for them.

The wide variety of music loosely brought under the label post-hardcore has, over the past decade, dilated into a bloated and diffuse parody of itself.  A regiment of clone artists took up post-hardcore’s tattered banner as they achieved mainstream success and a significant dilution in style in the mid-2000s, while the icons of the genre moved on to other sounds and styles, barely reaching the success of their forebears.  Frodus is one of the genre’s most brilliant standard-bearers, formed amidst the wave of early 90′s post-hardcore artists and counting as peers greats like Refused, Glassjaw, Quicksand and Snapcase as well as established acts from the Dischord stable like Fugazi and Jawbox.

Thankfully, those who weren’t lucky enough to catch Frodus the first time around should find it a lot easier now that it seems they have reunited, amiably and permanently.  A series of reunion shows promising to pick up right where they left off, showing the usurpers how things got done in the good old days, and a promise of new material that is hopefully only the beginning of a reclamation of the post-hardcore genre from mediocrity.  I got the low-down from lead singer/guitarist Shelby Cinca (also of the Cassettes, Decahedron, Triobelisk, tons of other projects) about all things Frodus and Frodus Escape Plan (reunited).

Aural States: Let’s get a history lesson, crash course style.  Way back when…how did it start?

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