We Don't Need No Stinkin' Vocals
By Alicia Grega-Pikul
Instrumental trio commits 'Commercial Suicide' with debut disc

Braiding captivating guitar licks, undulating waves of bass, and powerful percussion, The Reigning Toads can confidently boast a unique sound. Yet despite all its got going, the Scranton-based trio tends to be defined by what it's lacking - mainly, a vocalist.

The most ironic aspect of the trio's short life - about two years - is that the longer its played together without a lead singer, the harder it has become to incorporate one.
Drummer Bob Gatto estimated the group has auditioned about 14 singers, though many had more personality than talent. But The Reigning Toads is a band that doesn't look back, the members (add guitarist Dave Campbell and bass player Matt Mang) joked with ec/dc at their garage-cum-practice space near Clarks Summit last weekend. They're looking forward. And that's exactly why they decided to go ahead and release their debut disc, albeit titled Commercial Suicide, without vocals.
While the album sadly won't be available in time for Saturday's HighRise Productions concert at the Scranton Cultural Center - also featuring Alien Red and The Sw!ms - fans should be able to pick it up at shows, Gallery of Sound stores or via the band's new Web site (www.thereigningtoads.com) before the end of the month. To ease disappointment, they'll offer DVD copies of their recent live Showcase Underground performance at The Five Spot in Philadelphia. The Reigning Toads is also this week's featured performer at Test Pattern's figure-drawing social on Thursday and is looking forward to a late-June Radial Noise Records gig with Felix Sarco, Kairos, and Shattered Sky at The Dome, a new indoor-soccer field in Jessup

Fourteen singers and none worked out?
Matt: We've auditioned a lot of people. Some were good. Some were OK. Some were bad. The people that we liked always something else going on.
Dave: They were artists or actors - there was always something bigger in their life.
Matt: Conor (McGuigan) actually tried out once.
Dave: The vocals weren't that great but he would freak out, and that was awesome.

I love the album title.
Matt: We figured we might as well call everybody out on saying that it's not going to work. I mean, we're confident and everything.
Dave: The reviewers will be like, "Well, they got the name of the album right."

What do you like most about it?
Matt: We put out a nice wall of sound with our live show but you're obviously only hearing three instruments. What's nice about the album is there was some extra stuff we could do that we can't do live.
Dave: We were really able to dissect the songs and the parts. Playing live, I can't do a melody and solo over it, obviously, but for a lot of the stuff that I recorded, there are three, four, five guitars throughout the song.
Matt: And two or three songs actually do have voices on them. Whether you want to call them vocals or not. For our song "Black Death," we actually took a computerized voice and put some bible quotes in.
Dave: It's not a religious thing, though. That's one thing we've got to watch. "Oh, they quote the bible."
Bob: We had to find something we could quote without giving money to anybody. Something about death and disease.
Matt: I'll pay God later.
Dave: There's some brutal stuff in the bible, too. So, it's actually kind of what we were looking for.

That's fun. I like words.
Matt: There's a whole track that Bob did - I can't say it's all percussion ...
Bob: It's me making noise with my mouth and cymbals and tympanis and hand drums.
Dave: And a pan flute.
Bob: And me banging this little toy piano against my leg. The keys didn't work so I just slammed it against my leg. Voila!
Dave: It's good, though. You'll hear it.
Matt: Gavin from Felix Sarco helped out with that one too.

Where did you record?
Matt: We did the actual recording at Gavin's studio at his house.
Dave: Leisure Studios. And I tracked most of the guitar at my house. Paul Sinclair mixed it for us. He works for LCCC - he teaches the recording program.
Dave: We actually got it mixed at a speakeasy. They're like, "Go through that door over there." And then there's people hanging out watching DVDs.
Matt: There's this mixing studio and a recording studio in this garage, and then there's people hanging out in this bar in somebody's house. Maybe we shouldn't say that.
Dave: It's like a never-ending building.
Bob: That's what we'll do as soon as I get money. We're going to punch out this wall and make a maze. A maze of rooms. And there will be a bar in there somewhere. I'm not going to tell you where. You'll have to find it. And there will be passwords.
Dave: There should be a special knock.
Bob: We'll hire trolls to watch the doors.
Dave: And when you get in, there's like one dude drinking a Miller Lite. "I had to slay the troll?"
Bob: "Dude, all I got is Lionshead and this bottle of Banker's Club."

How do you title your songs?
Matt: Most of the names come after the songs. "Breakfast Bombs" is the last track on the CD. Dave actually does have some lyrics for it.
Dave: It was just something I wrote in high school, and I ended up taking the chords and we basically totally reformed the whole thing. But most of our song names are the working names for them, and it's funny because the song ends up just fitting for some reason.
Matt: Breakfast Bombs is supposed to be about the end of the world in the morning.
Dave: Like waking up to eat breakfast and watching the news, and they just said that maybe a nuclear missile got launched at America, and you're eating your cheerios like, "Alright. Great."
Bob: "Zesty Nachos" got its name because of that picture. (Points to a cheesy vintage ad of a Farrah-esque blonde eating tortilla chips.)
Matt: It's a bouncy, zesty song.
Bob: And "Motorcade" was because I watched JFK that day.
Matt: "Bag Your Face" starts out with more of an ugly sound to it. The first couple of seconds is just mesh. So it's just like bagging somebody's ugly face.

I understand Matt's not allowed to sing anymore?
Matt: It was at the Halloween show your (the writer's) daughter came up and told me how much I sucked and (that) my makeup was ugly.
Bob: That was great.
Matt: The song itself is a joke. It's called "Nice car. Sorry about your penis." So, I'm not performing it thinking it's really going to wow anybody. I think it's almost appropriate - it's a song about pathetic-ness.
Bob: We should hidden track that shit.
Dave: People don't get it. A lot of people just don't get things. We did a show April Fool's, and just as a joke we started out saying we decided to be a cover band and we started playing "Smoke on the Water." And we played a few bars and then we did a big volume thing with crashes and played one of our own songs. I don't think anybody got it.
Matt: That was a show up in Waverly at the Comm and they were all teenage kids.

Maybe they didn't know it was a cover?
Bob: We were going to do "Sweet Home Alabama." Either one gets the point across.
Matt: We're playing up there again next month. It's a cool place to play. The kids up there eat up original music.
Dave: A lot of our fans are kids that go to school in Abington and Lakeland and Trail, they're great.I can't say enough about them
Matt: They've got a lot of energy.
Bob: During "Black Death" they were killing each other.
Dave: You play the bar scene and people will dance and get into it, but these kids are there first and foremost to see the show.