San Diego Reader February 25, 2016 53


Surreal Vokabulary. “We were just outside of Ferndale, Washington, when the wheel from our Thomas the Train trailer completely flew off and shot a hundred feet in the air,” says Vokab Kompany vocalist Matt “Burkey” Burke. The band is on a 15-city tour.


TV networks. “We owe a lot to Mike


Halloran of 91X,” Burke tells the Reader while en route to a show in Bend, Oregon, from Tacoma. “He saw us at Oysterfest


and then picked us as one of their ‘local break’ bands a few


the inside track


management team handles the Green, Hieroglyphics, Collie Budz, and several other artists. Opening shows for Cage the Elephant, Wiz Khalifa, and Pepper and slots on Electric Forest and Coachella’s Do Lab Stage followed for Vokab. Last year they fronted the


Run DMC Remix tribute tour with Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe that played 16 dates, including the New Orleans Jazz Fest and the Brooklyn Bowl. Burke joined Vokab


“[The trailer] landed on the axle. We’re lucky we didn’t flip...it had a smiley face just like the cartoon.” A lot about Vokab Kom-


pany seems surreal.


years back.” Burke says the airwave exposure 91X gave “Take You to Space” in 2011 was invaluable. “From there we drew the attention of the manager of [reggae band]


founder Robbie Gallo in 2007 and the two call all the shots. “You have to have a leader... but what we are is a collective of all the people we’ve met and experiences we’ve had together in the past ten years. We’re like a jam band added to hip-hop.” Burke says their new


15-song album, The Good Kompany Album, produced and arranged by him, Gallo, and keyboardist Geoff Nigl, is a mix of instruments, hip-hop, and synth tracks. “It’s what all music is becoming...genreless.” The record-release show


is Friday, February 26, at the Music Box.


— Ken Leighton


Vokab Kompany’s Matt “Burkey” Burke (left): “We’re like a jam band added to hip-hop.”


For starters, the hip-hop/


EDM/jam band managed to tap into the corporate honey pot by providing soundtracks for TV ads for Southern Comfort, Kia, South Lake Tahoe, and the MTV and Starz


the Irations.” Vokab eventually moved on


to the Ineffable Music Group, a Bay Area–based manage- ment company with offices in Denver and Charlottesville, Virginia. Ineffable’s 20-person


Beauty amidst ruin. Before Protomartyr was a band, Joe Casey would build up a little whiskey courage and sing a couple songs with one his favorite local Detroit acts, Butt Babies. The younger musicians had befriended Casey and had decided that


they would help him out with a couple of songs since he was a nice guy. “They would play a show,


and halfway through the Butt Babies set I would wander up on stage, sing two songs, and then just leave. People were, like, ‘What the hell just happened? Who the hell was that guy?’ That was almost going to be like the end of Protomartyr...I was just gonna ruin Butt Babies shows,” Casey said. The band began to click


with Casey, though, and even- tually enlisted him as full-time vocalist. Three albums in (the last two via Sub Pop subsidiary Hardly Art) and Protomartyr is a wrecking ball of post punk circa 2016. Their raw sound, experimental song structures, and primal playing recall some of the best acts from labels such as SST and Touch and Go. Like many of the greats, the band kind of stumbled upon their sound. “It started with us kind of


drunkenly screwing around,” Casey recalled. “It was very loose and raw. Maybe one chord played over and over again so I could make up stuff on top of it. As far as the changing of the sound for us, it really comes down to them getting better at their instru- ments and wanting to try new things.” Casey continued, “Each


song we do is kind of different. The Agent Intellect was written where Greg [Ahee] would


come in with a guitar riff or an idea, and they would jam on the song for a while and I would mumble over them. We record the practices, and


remember the names. We went one time and it was one bar, and when we came back it had kind of changed. It looked like they must have had a ‘bar


Detroit post-punk four-piece Protomartyr bring this year’s critical hit Agent Intellect to town to play Soda Bar on Wednesday night.


then we all go back and listen to them so we can remember the song. The song then gets whittled down more and more until it resembles an actual song. That’s how it works.” The music seems to be a


metaphor for the band’s home- town of Detroit. It is beauty amidst ruin and despair. Casey speaks of the “winter waste- land” he is staring out at dur- ing the phone conversation, and also how the band will likely have to travel through more snow before they make it to San Diego as part of their West Coast run. They are hitting Soda Bar this time around, but their last show in town left them feeling as if they were in some Jon Taffer– influenced bizarro world. “We played the same


place twice, but it had differ- ent names, and now I can’t


rescue’ or something. It was a completely different bar, but the same,” Casey said. Can you guess which two


bars in the same establishment he is talking about? Protomartyr plays the Soda


Bar on Wednesday, March 2. — Dryw Keltz


Island vibe. “Paradise ULTD. is essentially about escapism,” Corey James Hurley remarks of his burgeoning label and blog. Hurley, listed on showbills as Colour Vision, knows a thing or two about getting away. The North County native grew up on parties in L.A. and Tijuana, where he developed a taste for dance music. “We would only really go


to Porky’s in TJ, where they played indie dance remixes (continued on page 54)


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