Rolo Tomassi

It’s always tempting to indulge in some kind of Wordsworthian person versus landscape wankgasm when you encounter a band. Wagon Christ, for instance, come from Cornwall which is why they sound like having piping-hot Cornish pasties rubbed into your ears.
But Rolo Tomassi, whether they are or not, sound like a product of their environment. Brother and sister duo James and Eva come from Stocksbridge a rural steel works town that is surrounded by arable land. So at the core of the band is an environmental sense for heavy clanking industrial rhythms, grinding and sickly guitars and moments of pastoral beauty that effloresce violently into bloodshed, red in tooth and claw.

James says: “There is quite a lot of contrast between industrial buildings and sheep and cows openly grazing and stuff. It’s not the nicest place in the world but it is pleasant enough. I’m not ashamed to call it home.” But also this is a comparison of the outskirts of Sheffield in 2008 compared to the outskirts of Sheffield as seen through the eyes of Barry Hynes in the early '80s via his momentous film  Threads about nuclear destruction in West Yorkshire. So the green bucolic lushness of now compared to the charred trees, the permanent night time and the howling winds of eternal winter of back then. Whatever you may think of it now, the future, thankfully, ain’t what it used to be.

So anyone hoping for a replay of 2006's self-titled EP (Holy Roar Records) will be in for a surprise. That was a statement of intent; this is the real product. That was black and white TV; this is HD colour Blue Ray. That was Tokyo; this is Godzilla. The first thing you notice is how the songs have expanded; in the case of the album’s implacable and magnetic end piece - Fantasia - we are talking a distinctly brutal fifteen minutes. Starting with a hauntological piano refrain heard from down a long hallway before exploding into Godspeed You! Black Emperor guitars complete with Eva’s ever more impressive Neurosis-like vocal stylings, before morphing seamlessly through several other genres and ending cataclysmically.

The band may be relatively young, but the fact that they have been together “in one form or another” since he was 13, means that they play with more spirit, chops and controlled aggression than some bands twice their age. James says he hopes that the album will mark a transition from them being seen as a bunch of kids to serious contenders. This, of course, has not always been the case, some short sighted promoters up and down the country have even tried to stop the band from entering venues because of their age. James laughs when he recalls one incident: “We turned up to a venue once in Birmingham and the management found out at that time that only me and Edward were over 18 and everyone else was underage. So me and the drummer set up in the venue and we found a long lead and the bassist set up outside and we played a gig of about six or seven songs with him playing outside and us playing inside. It was quite shambolic.”

Shambolic isn’t a word you could use about Rolo now. This album skates delicately over jazz, prog, hardcore, doom, folk, grindcore, electronica and more without ever sounding dilettantish or like a mad woman’s breakfast. James enthuses about new song ‘Nine’ and how indicative it is of the new sound they are embracing: “It was the last song we wrote for the album but it came out best. It is notably different from the others but in a really really good way. It’s really upbeat and one of the most straightforward songs we've ever written.”

He adds: “At the risk of sounding cheesy – the songs on this album are a lot more mature. They are a lot more riff based and a lot poppier but not in a commercially crass kind of way – there are just more hooks in there. Everything’s a lot more memorable but we haven’t compromised any of the intensity of the sound. There are massive noisy breaks in and we’re still very noisy and experimental.”

But one man’s maturity is obviously another man’s punk rock riot as he sums up what is exciting about Rolo Tomassi by describing one of their more memorable recent gigs: “We did a house show in Brighton after the Great Escape festival. We played in someone’s front room and about 200 people turned up to the house and about 60 of them managed to squeeze into the room. It’s normally hot when we play but this was boiling so we were playing in our underwear just jumping about. You could feel the entire room moving with the music. I cut my face a little bit but given how much glass there was in the room it could have been much worse although a window was broken and a radiator was pulled off the wall. It was a lot of fun.”