Instead of at the Ozzie Rabbit, The Mammal Virus will be at The Grotto tonight (Thursday), headlining a stellar-ass 817 bill: prog-rockers Chingalotus, hard-poppers Mean Motor Scooter (whose new single, “Rhythm of Love,” is a sweet mash-up of The Strokes and Presidents of the United States of America), and promising newcomers The Pyramids.
The occasion is still the release of Audio Ambulance. Groove-oriented, loud, and somewhat trippy, the Arlington quartet’s new EP is also poppy. Juicy vocal melodies abound. Recorded in Arlington at EMP studios with producer Ty Whaley, the four tracks make for a solid counterpart to the band’s 2014 debut EP, The Vax. The only difference may be frontman Lance Sanders’ rage –– the 35-year-old Arlington native has come to peace with letting his freakout flag fly.
“I was really on the fence about throwing the F-bombs out there,” he said. “I really didn’t know, but after thinking about it, this is art. This is me. Why am I questioning it? I said screw it. I don’t care what [anyone] thinks. If it’s too emotional or too angry, they can listen to something else.”
Sanders said he’s had a fuck-off punk-rock life since he was a kid.
“Arlington gets a rap of being a suburb that’s nice,” he said. “I didn’t grow up experiencing that. … I had it rough growing up. I went through a lot of shit.”
Sanders said he was raised in a “real shitty house in a real shitty neighborhood” and that he had absentee parents. He moved out when he was 14 years old. A friend’s mom lied for him on his apartment application.
At his apartment, he said, he immediately fell in with a group of older guys, especially the lead singer of the rowdy yet short-lived Suffering Trucker Trash. That, Sanders said, is when he started really getting into music, underground music, Sonic Youth and Pavement especially.
“Some of it was really aggressive and really spoke to me,” he recalled. “I really didn’t give a shit at that point in time.”
After a few years in Taos, N.M., Sanders returned to Arlington and began writing in earnest with his cousin, TMV bassist Jesse Brady.
“We never found the right pieces” for musical projects, Sanders remembered. “Friends never worked out, so we had to search out people who were like-minded and playing for a while, guys with plenty of experience.”
That void, Sanders said, was filled by guitarist Deven Kampenhout and former Sweetooth drummer Ray Villarreal just about two years ago, not long before recording The Vax.
Kampenhout and Villarreal, Sanders said, were “happy to go along with it. ‘Wow, these songs are pretty brutal, pretty misogynistic at times,’ but, thankfully, they wanted to go ahead and do them. ‘Hey, this is stuff you’ve been through. Get it out there.’ It’s pretty therapeutic as well.”
A majority of Audio Ambulance was written nearly a decade ago, when Sanders was really raging.
“Basically, I attribute [the anger] to some of the rough things I went through as a kid and bullshit I’ve gone through in intimate relationships,” he said.
The Mammal Virus has been gigging pretty steadily since The Vax came out. “We’re trying to saturate the scene,” Sanders said, “get our name out there, get to be a better-known band, and then start doing some traveling.”
Though the farthest the guys have been so far is Austin, just a couple of weeks ago for the release of Audio Ambulance, a two-week Southwest tour is planned for August.
There’s no cover to tonight’s show.
