Blüdwülf
is a metal band full of punks… or a punk band full of metal heads. Frontman
Reverend Sinn doesn’t really sing. He bellows. He rants. He spews. He’s a punk.
But the precision freight-train thrash of the longhairs behind him shrugs off
stock punk shackles.
“As
long as there’s a teenage boy and a teenage girl out there that want to wear
black and feel that they don’t fit in,” Sinn says, “I wanna be playing music
for them.”
Metal,
punk, munkal, punkal, whatever: It’s all the same to Sinn.
“Loud,
fast, and in your face,” he says. “That should be the root of it all anyway.”
Guitarists
Josh and Dave shred heavy and loud, and mohawked bassist America keeps it cool while
she slings a bass as big as she is. Donnie, the two-story-tall drummer,
thunders and looms beneath a wild mane of hair that can’t seem to make up its
mind whether to grow up, out, or down.
Sinn
is engaging. He paces the stage nodding his head like a jackhammer, indicating
his approval of the proceedings.
And
kids at these shows — young kids and lots of ’em, too — eat it up, singing
and headbanging right along.
“It’s
all typical cliché heavy metal lyrics,” he says. “But at the same time all the lyrics
have hidden political connotations.”
“Powers
of darkness reign pure in the night / Crimson tides flow / Fight powers that be
/ Soil gives strength / So the righteous may see,” he sings in “Feast of the
Damned.”
But
Sinn takes the dark metal drama even further with a recurring character
narrative.
“I’m
like, a horror geek,” he says, “and a comic book geek. I came up with this
whole legend. Blüdwülf is this vampire king who existed through the ages.”
One look at Sinn’s
moon tan, the multitude of crosses around his neck, and his black clothes, and
you gotta wonder if he’s Blüdwülf.
Blüdwülf
has prowled for three years now in Rochester, slowly widening the circle to
include cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
It
was Sinn, a scene staple, who got things started. His band of eight years, The
End, was over.
“Everyone
wanted to go in different directions,” Sinn says. “And everyone thought I was a
control freak.”
He
doesn’t dispute the allegation.
“Yeah,”
he says. “But a real subtle one. A very subtle control freak. It takes a couple
of years before they realize they’re being controlled.”
Sinn’s
control issues come from his very specific definition for how music should
sound — “raw and fast and trashy” — and how it should look.
“You
have to have the look,” he says, “a certain rock-star, punk-rock look. Just a
look. Something that when you walk
into the room everyone knows you’re the shit.”
So
Sinn needed fresh blood with a look and sound to work with — or at least to
mold.
He
discovered a young band in Bloomfield called The Manics.
Fresh
blood.
“I
was like ‘these kids got something kind of cool going,'” he says. “They were
country bumpkin kids who could play Iron Maiden perfect.”
So
Sinn moved in and the subtle control began.
“I
was like, ‘Wear these clothes, listen to these records,'” he says.
The
push-pull dynamic between the 30-year-old Sinn and the band (all in their early
20s) helped forge the Blüdwülf sound.
Other
than the odd cover here and there, like Motörhead’s “No Class,” the band
immediately set out to do its own stuff.
“We
fight over covers,” says Sinn. “I want to do old punk covers and make ’em more
metal. They wanna do classic metal songs and make ’em a little more punk.”
Sinn’s
got the recipe to metal the punk: “two guitars, throw a lead in, and speed it
up a little.”
Punking
out the metal’s just as easy: “the reverse.”
But
it all comes back to loud and fast — and the kids who love it. Blüdwülf shows
are crammed with the young disenfranchised. Sinn is their Jim Jones Christ with
the cool aid.
“‘OK,
follow me,'” he says. “‘You can learn from this example. Don’t think that you
can’t come up here and do this. But it’s a glorious thing when you do.”‘
Blüdwülf’s
first album, Cryptic Revelations,will be out in November on a subsidiary
of Side One Dummy Records. It should bring the band greater attention in other
parts of the world where punk and metal go together like chocolate and peanut
butter. Blüdwülf wants to tour. Blüdwülf wants to head east.
“From
day one we were like, ‘Let’s start a band that’ll bring us to Japan.'”
Blüdwülf opens for Murphy’s Law on Tuesday, October 11, at
the Bug Jar, 219 Monroe Avenue, 454-2966, at 9 p.m. Call for tickets. 18+
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
