Shred Flintstone (Oct. 2021)

 

(L-R: Ed Weisgerber, Dan Barrachia, Joe Giambra)

Shred Flintstone are the energetic three-piece made up of frontman Dan Barrachia, bassist and fellow vocalist Ed Weisgerber and drummer Joe Giambra. The outfit has toured extensively in the U.S. and Canada showing off an explosive and dynamic sound to basement shows as well as established venues. Their sophomore release titled Unlimited Power arrived to eager ears on September 3rd, 2021. After a powerful set at the Byrdhouse in Albany, I managed to arrange a sit down with the hottest New Jersey band since Visiting Day. Shred Flintstone discusses their album, their crazy tours and some of their wacky music videos below. 

RRX: So, to start let’s just talk about the new album, Unlimited Power. Am I correct that this is your second full-length to date?

JG: Yes, second full album.

RRX: How did you go about working on it? Was it all you guys doing an independent recording or did you have other people working on recording, mixing or anything else? 

EW: No label, we wrote everything, arranged it all and got all the sounds we wanted, but we did go to a studio; Kaleidoscope Sounds in Union City, New Jersey. We worked with a good friend of ours Jeremy on the record. 

RRX: There’s obviously benefits to maintaining an independent nature in regards to putting an album together; I know a lot of your song titles are very humorous for example “All My Friends are Bread,” where does that humor come from? Is it mostly you (Dan) and are you a primary songwriter?

DB: No, we’re all the songwriters. I just write most of the lyrics, for the ones I sing. If Ed sings a song, he’ll write the lyrics. We all write the songs equally. Ed will bring a lot of skeletons of the songs; basslines and choruses. Or I’ll bring a riff and we just jam it out. Song titles come last and if I wrote it I’ll tell them and they either like it or they don’t. I usually go through about three or four song title ideas before they agree on one. 

RRX: What are some titles that were left on the cutting room floor?

DB: “Lego Island”

JG: Yeah “Lego Island!”

EW: There was one song that was supposed to be about cinnamon buns and that was one time Joe and I stepped and said no (laughs). 

DB: Yeah, we have a song called “Trashed” that’s on the Shred’s Dead EP and originally the song was just about cinnamon rolls and I was singing the lyrics and Joe and Ed were like “You have to change the lyrics on this one.” I was like “Really?” So It’s no longer about cinnamon buns, but it was originally. 

RRX: I wanted to bring up that song actually, because I really like the music video for it. I wanted to talk about the direction for some of the videos.

JG: Shout out to Spaghetti Jesus for being an awesome director. 

RRX: I wanted to mention that as well, because I saw the name in the credits and wanted you guys to talk about who that is; Is it just a guy that you know?

JG: Yeah he’s done a lot of collaboration.

DB: He’s an enigma. 

JG: His (Spaghetti Jesus’s) name is Josh Bruce. His dad is also of Comic Book Men fame. He’s on that show with Kevin Smith. His dad runs the store. But he (Josh) is very into Kaiju and Godzilla type stuff. He’s very into underground street art and Japanese art; that’s where you see a lot Gozilla-type stuff in our videos. We embrace Josh’s style because destruction of the city style stuff like in the video for “Trashed” is the shit. Ed made the shirt for that video, the three-headed shirt.

EW: No, actually my friend tailored us a custom shirt for that. I made the extend-o neck for the guitar though. 

RRX: When you film these videos, who is assigned the role of being in the monster suit or the Robot suit from the new video for “Unlimited Power?”

JG: I was the robot.

DB: We make Joey do the dirty work (laughs).

JG: It was dirty alright, because we were shooting for two hours and the fuckin’ eye holes were too low and I’m walking around blind the whole time.

RRX: I usually talk about the scene when I do these interviews as well, but this is the first band I’ve spoken to from Jersey. What are some of the iconic Jersey venues or bands that you’ve gotten to know over the years?

EW: At Rutgers in New Brunswick there were about three shows a night Friday and Saturday every week. I saw hundreds of bands roll through and made a lot of friends. I met Rob from Professor Caveman who is a good friend of mine. I just helped him shoot a video. They always pack the house. There’s lots of great locals like Dog Date, who played the first leg of this tour with us. 

JG: There’s a lot of people that we came up with that are cool like Skylar Pocket and Tula Vera.

EW: There’s lots of great places to find a show around New Brunswick and Montclair.

DB: The Meat Locker. 

JG: Right, the Meat Locker which was the New Brunswick scene. Dan went to William-Patterson and I went to Montclair State so we were part of the Meat Locker/Montclair scene. 

DB: Yeah it was the only place to really have good shows in Montclair; the Meat Locker was a grungy old punk basement that has flooded before. A guy lives down there, his name is Lenny or something?

EW: He’s got the room right under the stairs and you can kinda look into it when you come down. 

DB: I saw GG Allen’s band the Murder Junkies down in that basement. I saw the guy do some shit that you wouldn’t see at a normal venue. 

JG: Multiple drum sticks up one guy’s ass. 

DB: It was a grimey place but there were a lot of great shows there despite that. 

RRX: So now, tell me a bit about the first record. Your most popular song, at least according to the internet, is “Delta” from the first album. 

DB: Well Ed hadn’t joined the band yet for that record so our old bassist Bridget played on that. She’s in a band called Whiner. We didn’t know what we were doing as much as we do now. We really winged that one. 

JG: there’s something special about the lyrics on that one, you know Bridget still talks about what a beautiful lyricist you (Dan) are? That was definitely a more lyrically based album. 

DB: It was a lot of finding our way. 

JG: Either way, that album and with what we did for Unlimited Power, I’m very happy with how everything turned out. 

DB: It’s nice seeing how far we’ve come with Ed joining the band and us having a vision as opposed to just being like “what the fuck” and throwing some songs together. 

RRX: And by the way, for a three-piece band, you guys have a very big sound live. What goes into that?

DB: Joe’s drumming probably, Joe’s a very powerful drummer.

JG: I have to drum in a way that brings up the bass and undertones. And we practice so that when we play live either Ed hits a chorus pedal or Dan hits a pedal that fills the void whenever there’s a solo or something. 

EW: And I play a lot of chords on the bass, especially when Dan is using a lot of pedals the bass needs to get right under it and glue it all together. 

RRX: So this is a stop on your current tour of the east coast. Have you been on a bigger tour? 

JG: We did a U.S. tour in 2019 that started with the northwest, all through the southeast and southwest; five dates in Texas. We just skipped the whole northern quarter and drove straight to Seattle from New Jersey. 

DB: It was a lot of fun driving across the country, we went 36 hours straight at one point.

EW: We got to Wyoming and started hallucinating.

JG: I grew up in the car a lot because half of my family is from Georgia. 

RRX: Any crazy tour stories?

DB: Well, the story of our song “Red Dawn.” I won’t tell the whole thing but, in 2018 we went to SXSW when our friend Jack was playing bass. We were crashing with this guy who liked to do a lot of cocaine and keep us up at night watching the movie “Red Dawn” with him until like, four in the morning. We were all sick, it was torture. 

JG: He kicked the door in at 6am once-

DB: Yeah he came in and said, “Everybody up, I just made out with a dude, we’re watchin’ ‘Red Dawn’!”

RRX: Any other projects you guys are in that you want to mention? 

EW: I have an electronic project with my old friend Shaun, we have about 10 songs to be released. 

JG: All of our roommates are talented artists including Ed, who did the mural of Judge Dredd that we had behind us. 

EW: I did the album cover and single cover for this release as well and I do painting with my dad. 

JG: I had a solo grindcore project called Latex as well that was more of a passion project that talked a lot about gender dysmorphia and Sailor Moon.

RRX: What’s your biggest collective influence?

JG: Ween.

DB: Yeah, our uniting pinnacle is Ween.