|
|
 |
Crowned King.
 Crowned King are proof that no matter how much you think your finger is on the pulse, or how obscure your favourite bands are, there's still a lot of amazing music slipping under your radar.
How did they manage to elude us for so long? Despite the fact the band are about to visit us for the first time ever, it's been almost a decade and two great albums since the band first got together in an effort to score points on their school reports for extra curricular activities. Still, it's good news for their rapidly growing Australian fan base - they're still at that nice stage of unknown where they play comparatively small venues yet you know the show's going to be packed out and awesome.
In their own country, however, things are entirely different, as vocalist Shaun Frank explains. "We do great over here in North America, we've been around doing the circuit here for a long time and the record did really well when it came out so the shows have been packed... But [the band's overseas success] feels like vindication. I mean, we've been working at this for eight long years now and it finally feels like we're accomplishing some of the great things a band can do. We've seen a lot of bands go overseas while we decided to stick with our country and work it hard - and don't get me wrong, it's really paid off and we do really great over here. But it's really exciting to travel to new places and meet new people."
Crowned King aren't the only Canadians to adopt this method of thinking though. Browse through the band's thank-yous and you'll find a couple of other great yet still fairly unknown acts - such as fellow Canadian Bif Naked. "Oh, she's great," enthuses Frank. "She's such a cool girl. We've done a lot of shows with her. But again, she's kind of stuck only to Canada, she didn't travel that much. She's not even that well known in America. She's like some sort of Canadian rock queen," he laughs.
The band are thankful to the wonders of technology for the opportunity to finally break free of the Northern Hemisphere to pay us a visit. Crowned King have relied heavily on internet sites such as the now infamous MySpace to get a name from themselves. "I think it's a terrible thing in some respects, but I honestly think MySpace is possibly the greatest, most helpful tool for a band that know what they're doing with it," admits Frank. "If you can work out the system to an online community like that - a nd there is a system - you can get people legitimately interested in checking out your band. We haven't been to Australia yet but our fan base over there is already not too bad, and I'd say it's all from [our work] online. But like anything great, a bunch of bands are going to abuse it. So what we have now on these sites are bands who go on there and just spam the hell out of people to come to shows, or with MySpace they'll just add tens of thousands of people as 'friends'. But if you take the other angle with it and actually talk to people and actually connect with them, you'll get some real fans and you'll go far."
Frank describes the band's sound as a mix between music his father listened to (like the Who and Led Zeppelin) and the punk rock that Frank himself grew up on. An interesting mix, but the band are throwing gauntlets at every one of today's bands they don't think are taking the job seriously enough. "There's so many bands around these days and I just can't work out where any of them get their inspirations from," Frank states, with a hint of exasperation to his voice. "You know, there's that whole wave of bands right now that are all about girls' jeans and black hair. We just finished doing Warped Tour up here and there were so many bands like that. I think it's a very non-rebellious, not rock 'n' roll time in music right now... Everything is just so watered down and wussy. I think that's a good way to put it... So I feel like we have to push that. If people want us to, we'll be the ones to do it."
Ryan Smith
 | Crowned King play an all-ages show at the Enigma Bar on Thurs 21 July with STR, Bagster and Line Of Departure. |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
