Sceneazine.com
Buried Voices
by John Smithson
W
e’re a American hard rock band from Columbia, SC with tendencies to veer off the road
at exceeding speeds into the world of metal. We’re four
friends who grew up cultivating our musical skills together in old garages, converted gun shops, and whatever structure we could find that would put up with the
noise and vibration. We were friends before we were
band mates and believe it or not, we still get a long!
Buried Voices is: Mark Gaddy on guitar and general fingertip hypnosis. Lucius A.Watts III in charge of
primitive, chest pounding, trance like death disco (otherwise known as drums). Brian Laird subconsciously
and mind numbingly kicks your hypothalamus with
low end frequencies and awkward knee bends. Brian
Owen takes care of shouting at people, staring, drooling, sweating, chicken dances, mumbling spells, smiles,
frowns, pointing fingers, and pointing out your flaws,
(otherwise known as vocals).
he noise meter ranges from “melodic enough
for your girlfriend to wink at us” to “brutal
enough for a metal heads faded black T to finally disintegrate.” When people ask we generally just call it “hard
rock” or “metal.” We’re DIY’ing the hell out of this so
far and don’t mind busting our ass as long as you shake
T
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yours. We’ve played with all kinds of bands in different
genres including Straight Line Stitch, SuperBob, The
Independents, and Filter. We’ve completed a full length
album titled “Arson for the Heart” which has been released independently, physically, and digitally on various sites such as CD baby, BandCamp, iTunes, and
Amazon in 2014. It was written and recorded between
2011-2014. We like to describe the album as “hard and
heavy, horror and heartache.” It touches on topics like
depression, suicide, death, love, loss, heartache, power,
blood, destruction, generally seeing the world through
dark shades, and women’s injustice through the story of
the Salem witch trials. The album’s title says a lot about
the long journey to completion. It took a lot of time,
sacrifice, blood, sweat, heart, determination, the loss of
a guitar player, and a bass player, not to mention money that we saved up working day jobs, selling T-shirts
and playing live shows. This band and album represents
music that we wanted to make, natural, uncontrived,
uncompromised, and true. We do this because we love
it, even if it doesn’t always love us back. Enjoy.
So how long have you guys been together as a band?
Share with us a brief history.
B.O.: We’ve been together as Buried Voices since
2011. We’ve all been friends since high school playing in
various bands together, cultivating our musical skills so
we know how much we all used to suck at this. Except
Laird, we met him when our separate bands converged
playing shows together
around SC years ago. We
kind of kidnapped him. I
think he’s still on “missing” posters that some
other bands printed up.
This band originally came together to play
a one off acoustic set of
cover songs. After that
we realized that we had
something and decided
to keep it going. We started with the same cover
songs which included
rock, country, and classic
rock but after a while the
withdrawal from writing
original stuff started in.
We realized that we were
fooling ourselves by not
playing what naturally
runs through our veins;
hard rock, metal, and
generally anything loud,
fast, and/or heavy. I think
we actually tried to curb
the heaviness on purpose
just to try something different but you can only do
that for so long.
We wrote our first song, “Bomb Where the Heart
Used to Be” and went from there.
M.G.: The band has been together for about four and
a half years officially at the beginning of 2011. But Me
and Trey have been jamming together since 1995. And
don’t forget ole “Critical Failure” ala 2003. (we have a
song called “Mother SARS” to prove it).
L.A.W. : Since about 2011, I think. I Started jamming with Mark Gaddy about 1995 or so. I Learned the
“Dave Grohl” power rim shot technique doing covers of
every Nirvana song.
Who in the band came up with your name? What, if
any, reason did you guys choose your name?
B.O.: We had trouble coming up with a name. It’s got
to be one of the hardest things to do in a band besides
jamming in a hot room with 3 other smelly dudes in
the middle of an SC summer. When we became serious
and decided that we needed a name, everyone put some
ideas down on a dry erase board. We literally just voted
them off one by one until we had a few to decide upon.
We decided Buried Voices was the least shitty of the few
we had left to choose from. We fought about the choices
for a few weeks. I think we had some stupid names that
we threatened to keep like “Asses for Ivan” and “Balls
Mahoney.” One of the name’s,“Bullet Pill” became a
song title. It took a while for “Buried Voice”s to stick,
but in the end the music solidified the name.
M.G.: Jeremy Smith, our original lineup guitarist
came up with the name. I have no clue what it means.
We flipped a coin. It was between Buried Voices or
Head Medicine .
L.A.W..: We voted on a bunch of names on a “House,
M.D.” like white dry erase board. Not unlike Dr House,