Photo by Tim Hunt

Rochester NY’s own Polar Bear Club are definitely not the naked, old dudes swimming at Coney Island in December, so don’t worry about being driven blind with horror if you ever see them. Just be prepared for the melodic-hardcore goodness to melt your face off. Simple as that. Also don’t be surprised if you start hearing more and more people talking about them in the upcoming months, after the release of their new album, entitled Sometimes Things Just Disappear, for Red Leader Records. PBC’s guitarist Chris Browne was cool enough to put up with me for a bit one evening for an interview.

How exactly did the band come together?
We started in spring of 2005. Jimmy [Lead singer] and I were in an old band together called Tamiroff. That band was sorta ending and I wanted to do a band that was sort of in the same style but more energetic. I actually talked to a couple of old friends of ours who started a band with me, Kevin and Bob. We got together and started practicing. Jimmy didn’t join until later that summer when we’d already recorded our demo. Over the last two years, we’ve replaced member by member until we got the lineup we’ve got now and it’s been that way for a little while now.

Pretty cool. Most of you guys are from upstate New York?
Yup. We’re all from there; we’re all kind of scattered now. We’re all originally from Rochester, but our bass player Greg lives in Florida now, and I live in Boston to go to school.

What exactly do you think about upstate NY because, and I think you’ll agree with me on this, in the past few years a lot of really good bands like you guys, Marathon, and Lemuria. Do you really see this as a sort of burgeoning thing?
I’d like to think so. I mean, it’s kind of a tough question because right now, there are a lot of logistical problems that prevents the music scene from being as good as it really could be. In Rochester, there are a ton of venue issues, so shows aren’t even going on there at all. Up until recently, there have been a lot of really good bands coming out of there, and there still are. Every few years you have a wave of new bands starting and bands breaking up and even though there’s not a lot going on now, which is a shame, it always kind of comes back around and whenever bands from that area do form, for some reasons people have the tendency to create really good shit and I feel privileged to have grown up there and been exposed to really good local bands when I got into punk and hardcore.

Yeah, I kinda felt for a second like I’d missed out, growing up in Queens and not upstate NY when I saw you guys for the first time. I was blown away thinking “who the fuck are these guys and why have I never heard them before?” and because of how you weren’t like this “tough-guy” sorta thing.
There’s a different feel to bands from there but there’s also a band called Borrowed Time from here that do the tough-guy thing and they’ve been around for a while and they’re really good at it. I mean, style-wise in Rochester, there’s been a tendency for, for lack of better term, “friendly hardcore.” Like How We Are is a perfect example of that, absolutely-crushin, heavy, honest stuff and it’s great to go to their shows.

It’s sorta part of this newer wave of hardcore where it’s all “bro’s,” it’s just dudes doing hardcore without like that violent posturing that defined hardcore for so long.
Yeah, and it’s weird to see that being the new thing everywhere because when I was first introduced to it in Rochester maybe like 10 years ago, that’s the way it was then and I remember the older kids wanting the younger kids to just get into it and people hanging out with their friends and there was never any violent or competitiveness to it.

Do you see this as sort of being a sort of reaction to “conventional” NY? I mean you guys would have been influenced to a degree by New York, 5-boroughs band, so do you think it’s because of that or despite it, trying to prove that it’s more than just New York City that defines punk music in NY?
I don’t think it’s either. I remember, just from my personal experience and people I know, it was almost like NYC and the bands that came from there was an almost completely different world, like I don’t think people were doing things as a reaction to it or embrace it or go against it, it was just people looking at upstate and not knowing what it was all about and not knowing if it was a cool place to be or a shitty place to be. I think that was a motivating factor there, that no one knows anything about it, so let’s do our own shit and get people regardless. It was being isolated. I felt isolated from the whole NY/Boston/big cities nearby and what was going on. People just had their own local scenes, which is kind of how it is everywhere, but you’d think we’d be more concerned seeing as how we’re near all these big cities.

I always enjoying hearing these because I never get to see any cool shit at shows, but do you guys have any crazy tour stories or bizarre local shows that maybe stick out in your mind?
Kinda every time we play Syracuse or NYC or Rochester something awesome or bizarre happens, usually not during the show. We just have a tendency to do stupid things, hurt ourselves. For some reason, what sticks out in my mind this past summer when we were on tour with a band from Philly called Jena Berlin, some of the nicest dudes ever.

Yeah I think I saw you guys play with them in New York.
At the Knitting Factory.

Yeah, that was a great show, great guys.
They are, and we played this show outside Cleveland, and it’s going to be hard to describe this without sounding lame and one of those “guess you had to be there” things but there was this separate room where all the bands were hanging out. It was this sort of bigger fest and, you know, as each band played the people in the bands were getting progressively more and more drunk, which you know, isn’t out of the ordinary. By the time Jena Berlin and us played, we’d had taken the empty boxes of beer cans that we’d had and made them into “ASSHOLE” hats like from the movie Beerfest. Everyone in the band and the crowd were tossing around these “ASSHOLE” hats and like running up on stage with these stupid beer boxes on their heads. The whole thing was just a fun time. For some reason that’s just the entire image of our summer tour this past summer; people running around with sharpie “ASSHOLE” hats on their heads.

Did any of the hats survive?
I’m told someone from Buffalo still has it. I’m not sure about that now. I’m trying to bring us there for another show which is cool. Every time I talk to the Jena Berlin guys, they bring it up. It sounds like not that big of a deal but we had a really good time with those guys and we didn’t know them that well before going out with them. That show was like a party and we got really comfortable with them and it’s a shame we couldn’t do more shows with them. I highly recommend anyone who’s reading this [to] check them out.

So you guys have an album coming out soon on Red Leader Records, right?
That’s the idea, yeah.

What’s it called?
It’s called Sometimes Things Just Disappear and we’re gonna be selling them at our shows on our tour coming up in December, and it’ll be available in stores and stuff in February.

What’s the story behind the title? It’s an interesting thing to call a record.
We were having a whole lot of trouble with the title while we were at the studio. We put it off and off until we were recording the record and we were like “we really need to do this before we send it out.” At first, we put up a Myspace blog post and we asked people to submit what they thought it should be. That sort of crashed and burned, it produced a lot of funny things and. For a while we wanted to call it We Are Not Firemen for another reason altogether, but then we realized our labelmates Dear Tonight have a record called We Are Not Men, so that would have been sort of a goof. We ended up calling it this because one day we were at the studio and we went to Taco Bell. I don’t know if you heard about the Taco Bell Challenge. I think that’s the only thing anyone’s ever heard of us.

Yeah.
Long story short, we ate a lot of Taco Bell while recording and some of the guys were there one day, and I’m actually the wrong guy to ask because I didn’t go to Taco Bell, I was recording. They’re putting in this massive order for take out to bring back for everybody and Greg, our bass player tries to order a Mexican pizza, and it’s $3 or however much it is but he gets really bummed like “man, I don’t think I have enough to cover this, the Mexican pizza. Is it really $2.99?” The guy taking their order, a totally slick, 17-18-year-old-manager-type wearing a suit at Taco Bell, just looks Greg straight in the eye, busts out his manager card, and goes “You know what? Some things just disappear.” Swipes it through the machine and gives him the Mexican pizza for free. And Jimmy and Greg and them are kind of, “what the fuck just happened?” One of them said “well that’s it, that’s the title of the record.” It sounds cool out of context and it can certainly relate to our songs. Also, it’s connected to Taco Bell, which is beyond perfect.

Yeah, I heard about the Taco Bell challenge and about how at one point you guys just sorta gave up. It’s interesting because Taco Bell had that thing where touring bands could apply for like a $500 Taco Bell gift card.
I’m personally kinda bitter still that we didn’t get it. I thought if there was ever a deserving band it was us. I mean we committed ourselves to eating that shit all the time. I love it, it’s my favorite place to eat, but every day? That causes serious depression [laughing]. It just kinda made us all sad for a few weeks and I thought we should give up. [Taco Bell] gave it to Ted Leo, who didn’t even apply!

You guys are lucky you didn’t get E. Coli.
Yeah, I know. It was pretty scary. I’m proud to say that I ate the most. I tell that to every person I talk to and do an interview with, I sound pompous about my ability to eat Taco Bell but it was not enjoyable by the end. I like it just as much as anyone else but I think I had something like twenty-five items in a week or two. It was just a bad scene.

Yeah,that sounds kind of disgusting.
It was. And I didn’t even come close to finishing.

So, getting away from the more disgusting topics, how did the recording process go? I know it wasn’t your first time in the studio.
It went really great. We went to the same studio, Nada Recordings, where we did The Redder The Better (Red Leader). Nate and Emmet had been there from Marathon. It was the first time I think that any of my bands had gone to the studio like that for the second time. We were able to write the record, knowing about the recording process, so the songs were tailored to the studio and to the resources that John [Naclerio] had. Jonathan is an amazing producer, better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. It was really demanding. It’s always really demanding. It was more time than we’d ever had. We had eighteen days to do ten songs and the record came out a lot longer than we thought it would be. It sounds cliché but the days flew by really fast and we were working really, really hard all day, every day. It wasn’t even stressful. It was more like hoping it’ll be really, really good, or worrying that you’ll mess up. You just get cabin fever sitting in this one room every day, for almost three weeks straight, you’ll go nuts. We would just look forward to taking turns getting out of the building more than anything else. We all enjoy each other’s company but after a while it just gets stressful to be around each other constantly, much less be working together.

So anything planned once the record comes out? You mentioned a tour in December.
Yeah, we’re going to be doing a week or two in late December-early January; just staying around the Northeast. Maybe a few weekends in the spring, but like I said, it’s kind of tough. Our schedule has always been the worst part of doing this band. You could say it’s also the best because the band is not our entire lives and what we rely on; we do it for fun. A lot of us don’t have time to do it all the time. Greg like I said lives in Florida; Emmet has a job; Nate has a job and goes to school; Jimmy acts and is probably moving to Chicago this year,; and I’m in Boston in law school. Hopefully next year in the summer, we’re going to be having a nice big tour and hitting up some places we haven’t been to yet. I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re super-excited to be able to do that with the band now.

That’s really cool, hopefully more NY dates, right? I’m infinitely pissed I had to miss the CMJ showcase.
It’s safe to say NYC is our second-third home away from home. We always have fun and the people are so nice and especially this last time. We were worried about the show being not that great because there was so much else going on that night and in my opinion, it was the best NY show we’ve had yet as far as turnout and enthusiasm. I think it’s safe to say we’ll be coming back to NYC on a regular basis all the time.

Awesome. I don’t think you guys should’ve worried though. I heard it wasn’t that great, so the Red Leader showcase was probably the best thing going that night.
That’s good.

Yeah. I know some bands feel uncomfortable at the CMJ’s, I tried to see Cloak/Dagger at last’ year’s Jade Tree showcase, I tried sneaking in but it didn’t work. Later on in the year though I saw them and I talked to Colin [Cloak/Dagger's lead singer] and he told me it was a mix of fans and industry types so the vibe is strange.
It’s weird, because bands like us and Cloak/Dagger, we don’t really fit into that and aren’t used to playing shows for “the industry types.” We’re used to playing shows for our friends, and other bands. Traditionally, it hasn’t been a commercial genre, and it is becoming more so but to think about that you’re playing for a mix of people like you mentioned we didn’t have it in mind at all. We were just thinking it was cool people came out and well, point being, the presence of these industry people didn’t deter the show from being great.

Well that’s great. You guys are getting pretty big though, I mean you were Spin’s artist of the week last month or so on SPIN.com, right?
Yeah that was a couple weeks ago [AUTHOR’S NOTE, THIS INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE OCT 3rd 2007].

And before that Dear Tonight were too.
I thought that was really cool when that happened. I was beyond surprised when they offered it to us. It was a great opportunity.

Thanks a lot for this, any last words, anything to pimp?
No, I’m good, I think I’ve blabbed enough.

You sure, don’t wanna plead for help studying for torts or whatever?
No actually, I’m not taking torts right now, not looking forward to those right now. I’m weird; I’m actually really enjoying law school.

Tags: Interview, News, Red Leader, polar bear club, red leader records //