Grindcore punks and cinema lovers from GRAF ORLOCK, who have been using loads of audio snippets and script dialogues from various movies in their recording, have announced a new LP called Crime Traveler, to be released on February 5, 2016 via Vitriol Records. Th record will be based on the band’s self-produced movie, to be unveiled soon!
Here’s the full official press release:
Graf Orlock’s third full-length and tenth release overall, Crime Traveler is the most ambitious project to date from a band that is all about ambition. With Crime Traveler, Graf Orlock has outdone itself on every level. The Los Angeles enigma has beaten itself at its own game and the big winner is you.
The world is familiar with the Graf Orlock method by now: the LA quartet’s music is inspired by its hometown’s biggest export, movies. Its records are riddled with movie samples, its lyrics are actual snippets of dialogue ripped directly from scripts, and its song titles are DVD chapter titles. This is the band that based an entire EP on Michael Mann’s 1995 De Niro-Pacino vehicle, Heat. Other films pillaged for inspiration include The Terminator, Predator andRoboCop.
Graf Orlock mastermind Jason Schmidt (also rumored to be the owner of Vitriol Records, a college history professor, and one of LA Weekly’s “most interesting people in Los Angeles,”) offered a peek behind the curtain when he stated that the band’s efforts add up to one big social commentary. Using the language of Hollywood, the ultimate symbol of Western capitalist excess, the band seeks to expose social and political absurdities. Whether or not you buy that line, the scope of the project and the band’s commitment to it are nothing short of staggering.
Case in point: it has packaged its releases in some of the most insane packaging ever created. 2011’s DoomboxEP arrived in the form of an actual size, card stock “boombox” that housed CD and vinyl versions of the EP and which Revolver Magazine named “Packaging of the Century.” The Destination Time Tomorrow LP featured a pop-up paper “chestburster,” a nod to the film Alien, in its gatefold. An earlier release was packaged in a backpack.
Furthermore, the band has toured the far reaches of the globe with an absolute vengeance, repeatedly hitting Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Eastern Europe, and Puerto Rico, along with more routine destinations.
Another piece of the puzzle: the music completely rips. Graf Orlock makes a stop-on-a-dime version of hardcore, bursting with blastbeats and breakdowns and sweet riffs that are perfectly placed so as to elicit maximum headbanging and smiles. While it has a whole lot of Slayer up its sleeve and knows how to wield it, ultimately Graf Orlock is a punk band, rooted in the DIY aesthetics of the post-Black Flag scene.
Twelve years into Graf Orlock’s career, enter Crime Traveler. Having spent more than a decade pilfering words, ideas, and images from Hollywood, the band has now taken the next step. Crime Traveler is an album based entirely on an as-yet-unreleased film the band wrote, directed, and starred in itself. The lyrics consist of dialogue written by the band; the samples are from the band’s own film. Graf Orlock has flipped the script and turned the mirror back on itself in the most DIY stunt of the decade: Crime Traveler.
According to Schmidt, the Crime Traveler film tells the story of a French-Canadian assassin who discovers a wormhole and travels back in time to kill American politicians so that Canada can attain superpower status in the future. As the samples selected for the album illustrate, our anti-hero zips through time and space on his mission – rubbing elbows with John Hinckley at the Reagan assassination, witnessing the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and more. Until its theatrical release we can only imagine the cinematic greatness. For now, we have the album.
Musically, Crime Traveler sees Graf Orlock rip harder than ever. The band has honed its style to a deadly science. Stream “A Decent Proposal in a Shitty Alley,” from Crime Traveler, via Noisey, here.
Crime Traveler was recorded, mixed and mastered by Kris Hilbert at Legitimate Business Studio in Greensboro, NC.
Deepening the experience and also hereby rendering all other album artwork inferior and obsolete, Crime Traveler is packaged in an actual, full-size, color newspaper, written and designed by the band.
The full tracklist is as follows:
1) Bad Cell Service on Conn Avenue
2) 600,000 Tons of Explosive Ordnance
3) Afternoon Lunch at the Red Bacchus
4) A Decent Proposal in a Shitty Alley
5) Regional Turf War Spills Blood on Vegas Strip
6) Nursing a Hangover
7) Our Infallible Cybernetic Future
8) Summer Getaway, Mount Hermon
9) Difficult Decision in the Yutani Mess Hall
10) Cheaper, Safer, and Better Than the Real ThingTrue to form, Graf Orlock will be touring the world throughout 2016.
GRAF ORLOCK biography:
At the fringe end of both listenable music and taste, Graf Orlock have existed for a period of close to 11 years. Out of this mass of sarcasm and wanderlust has come a string of seminal cinema-grind offerings. Throughout this time, Graf Orlock has managed to manipulate our childhood memories of the golden age of 1980s and 1990s action movies into something that both tugs our violent heart strings and disgusts the shit out of us. The newest release “Doombox” highlights Gorlock’s minor obsession with Los Angeles, and the teeming issues inherent in the early 1990s Los Angeles “Riots”. Finally an avenue to display some of the ideas toyed with in the early records, and partially embrace the anarchistic philosophy therein, while still appearing marginally informed. Graf Orlock have toured the United States, parts of Mexico and Canada, Puerto Rico, Australia, South East Asia, Japan, Europe, UK, and some other places I probably forgot. If nothing else, perhaps this proves that you can be an asshole and still operate outside of the confines of the “music industry”, while eating your stolen cake and sharing it too.
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GRAF ORLOCK discography:
Self Titled- 2004/2005 – Out of Print
Your Brother Was An Asshole – 2004/2005 – Out of Print
Hurry Up and Kill Yourself Split – 2004 – Out of Print
Corpserate Greed – 2005 – Out of Print
Greyskull Split “Backpack”- 2005 – Out of Print (Dood Records)
Destination Time: Yesterday – 2006 – Out of Print (Level- Plane Records)
Destination Time: Tomorrow – 2007 – Out of Print (Level Plane, Vendetta)
Destination Time: Today (VIT001)- 2009 – Out of Print (Vitriol, Adagio 830)
Doombox (VIT013)- 2011
Los Angeles (VIT025) 7″ – 2012
Trailer (VIT041) 7″ – 2015
Crimetraveler LP (VIT042)- 2016 – Coming Feb 5th, 2016
