by Tom Lounges
In what is fast becoming a very welcome trend, SOIL, has become the
latest hometown group of heavy slammers to ink a major label contract.
Their latest CD – Scars – definitely fulfills the promise made with the
music featured on their earlier indie releases.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone in the music
business to recognize the wealth of talent contained in this troupe – from
the musicality to the songs themselves – the world is about to discover what
in many ways has been Chicago’s best kept secret. This writer has been a big
Soil fan since their very first EP demo hit my CD player in the late ‘90s,
courtesy of The Bison, our resident metal columnist at the time.
The “someone” who finally saw the mass potential in this band was Clive
Davis, a veteran big wig known for his ability to judge talent and direct it
in the kind of fashion that makes “stars” out of his charges. Let’s
see...among the things Davis did while president of Arista, was to
mastermind the “comeback” of Carlos Santana and turn an unknown gospel
singer named Whitney Houston into a platinum-selling diva...
Yeah, the guy’s got a bit of track record and he knows that Soil is the
band that is going to keep his solid track record rolling well into the new
century.
Soil originally began as a side project for the lads, who were then
pulling full time duty in a pair of well known death metal bands from
Chicago’s Northwest suburbs. Arlington Heights guitarist Shaun Glass was
ripping it up in Broken Hope, while guitarist Adam Zadel, bassist Tim King
and drummer Tom Schofield were members of the Wheeling-based band, Oppressor.
“We were all pretty burnt out on the whole death metal underground scene
and we all felt we were in a rut musically,” he said of why they first
assembled the Soil side project. “We wanted to go into other areas
musically. We wanted to stay heavy, but to explore new areas. In a word, I
think we were all a little jaded and feeling we weren’t going anywhere.”
Not wanting to jump on the post-Korn bandwagon either, the quartet spent
many long hours woodshedding and trying to find a sound that was truly their
own. “We are a modern metal band, but we have a lot of old-school roots I
think,” surmises Glass. “There were hundreds of bands doing the Korn/Limp
Bizkit thing when we first started this band and we didn’t want to become
just another one of those.”
What began as more or less a “songwriter’s think tank” scenario, in a
matter of four months elevated into a full time working band that was
artistically satisfying to all involved. The key to that was Hoosier-born
and bred singer, Ryan McCombs.
“Ryan just sort of fell out of the sky,” remembers Glass. “He’s from
a little town called Dunkirk, Indiana (about 30 miles outside of Fort Wayne),
which is perhaps the most unlikely place in the world to find a world class
metal singer.”
McCombs was discovered when Tim King came across a Midwest Music
compilation CD. “We’d been auditioning a bunch of local dudes and nobody
had the vibe we were looking for and the vibe we wanted. When we heard Ryan
on that CD, we were like – ‘Yeah, that’s the singer we need!’ We wrote to
him and learned his band was in the process of breaking up. We mailed him a
rehearsal tape and he wrote some great lyrics, so we all piled in the car and
went to Indiana to meet him. We put his ass in the studio immediately to cut
a demo and he’s been with us ever since. He was the missing piece of the
puzzle.”
With Ryan on board, the others gave notice to their other bands and
focused on Soil full time. McCombs’ first performance with Soil took place
in the cornfields of Indiana on Halloween night in 1997. They then took the
band to the now defunct Lounge Ax to test the waters in the city for the
first time, and as Glass put it – “we been on a trippy ride ever since!”
That ride began with an independently released CD sold at shows that
generated enough sales to attract the national indie label, M.I.A., who
signed the band and put them on the road. Only one album – Throttle Junkies
(1999) – resulted from that union before the label went belly up due to poor
management.
But losing their home at M.I.A. turned out to be the lucky break Soil
needed, for it freed them up to become the very first hard rock band inked to
the newly formed, J-Records, an imprint Davis started after being
unceremoniously squeezed out of the majors due to his advanced age. But
Davis, ever the rebel, is sure to have the last laugh.
When M.I.A. bit the dust, Soil, booked time on their own with renown
local producer Johnny K (Disturbed, No One, Machine Head) to record new demos
of songs that Schofield describes as more modern in approach than what they’d
done previously. “We are always modifying and experimenting with our
sound,” he said. “We had some good songs and some new ideas and new tunings
and things we wanted to get down on tape.”
Some of those demos wound up getting air play in various markets.
The song, “Halo,” started getting a lot of air play in Orlando on WJRR and
response was so strong that soon the song was being spun in enough markets to
create the kind of a buzz that gets labels calling.
The J-Records offer was most appealing to the band, said Schofield,
“because we’d be the first and only heavy band they’d have, so we knew they
would be determined to support the music and get behind the band.”
The version of Scars found in the stores today features the very same
demo versions of “Halo”, “My Own” and “Need To Feel” that the band
self-financed, only now there are a few overdubs and some re-mixing by noted
engineer, Kevin Shirley, of New York’s Hit Factory.
Suddenly finding themselves as label mates to the made-for-TV teen band,
O-Town, was “a little weird” admits Schofield. “Being the first heavy band
with a label best known for having success with a boy band, there was a
little [hesitation] at first. But we had several meetings with several key
people at the label and in the end they gave us the kind of commitment that
we want and need,” he added.
Indeed, “Halo,” is being worked heavily at modern rock radio and the
band started living out of suitcases before the ink on the contract was even
dry.
They have criss-crossed the nation headlining clubs when not out on tour
packages with the likes of Stuck Mojo and Incubus. Now that they have a hit
steadily climbing up playlists, they are working harder than ever and doing
even bigger and better shows.
An example of this being the North American Ozzy Osbourne/Rob Zombie
tour that will bring the boys home to rock our asses at the Allstate Arena on
December 6.
Keep up with the band via: www.soilmusic.com