LINKS:
noisetherapy.net

    It’s a pretty good thing that he did, too.  Combining sheer sonic force, polyrhythmic drum structures, bombastic bass riffs, eerily industrial keyboards and unwavering vocal dexterity, Noise Therapy has come across the border to deliver a slab of metallic brutality.  Tension, their first release through Redline Entertainment and their first release in the US, bristles with the internal demons of passion, anger, and insanity—equally and thoroughly.
     They are one in a seemingly endless stream of bands—think Nickelback, Default, Theory of a Deadman—coming from the fertile musical environment of Vancouver.  But they are by no means to be lumped in with the commerciality of those formerly mentioned.  They’ve got a caustic sensibility that brims beneath the surface, even on their most melodic compositions.
     “We’ve been around a lot longer than all of those bands,” laughs Rob when I mention the triumvirate.  “Nickelback used to open up for us.  And we’re friends with Dave from Default. You know the guy doesn’t look like he belongs in the band?  The guy with tattoos and long hair? He’s a buddy of ours, so, it’s funny.  It’s good that those guys are having success, though.  They are definitely putting Vancouver on the map.”
     “We’re not even really big in Canada, he continues.  “I mean, we had our moments in Canada, but we were just on different labels and kind of, um, we’ve just had bad luck over our career and not a lot of exposure from or in the right areas.  I mean, we’ve done like, three videos and stuff that got played on Much Music, but not a whole bunch of support in Canada.   We definitely have our pockets of power, where we have lots of good fans and stuff, but it’s not overall. We’re not like Our Lady Peace or anything up there.”
     All modesty aside,  Thiessen and friends could very well put Vancouver on the map for something other than sing-a-long pop metal.  Having released three albums in five years in their native country, they followed those releases with the standard hungry-musician-on-the-road-in-a-van tours.  Somewhere along the way, they were “miraculously” handpicked by Motley Crue to open their reunion tour in 1999.  They were on their way, or so it seemed, until guitarist Kai took a one-year road trek with Tommy Lee’s Methods of Mayhem.
     “I guess he got to go and see the world and do some big shows and stuff,” says Rob, “and I think, just kind of, it changed him a little bit--for good--I mean, for the better.  But, you know, he wanted to come back and finish this, so…it actually turned out—it looks like it was a good idea, because Tommy doesn’t have a deal anymore.”
     Losing your guitarist to a large well known touring machine like that might have set most bands back and taken the steam out of them, but when Kai came back to the fold in 2001, he had a new energy.  The group was imbibed with a new spark, a new energy, and a new streak of creativity.  They set up shop in vocalist Dave Ottoson’s rehearsal studio for an entire summer and came out with three dozen compositions that they had to sort through to find the ten that would assault the airwaves on their album.
     “We kind of go from having really heavy to having melodic, like, catchy choruses kind of thing,” explains Theissen as he breaks down their musical process.  “I mean, that’s just always the way that we’ve kind of always written.   We don’t sit down and go, ‘Oh, let’s write a skull-crushingly heavy song’, and we don’t sit down and go, ‘Let’s write a commercial song’. It’s just whatever comes out. And it usually comes out a bit of both.”
     “It mostly starts with bass and drums and then we build on top of a bass and drum riff,” he continues. “Then Dave and I share the lyrics.  He’ll get ideas for a song and he’ll go, ‘I’m gonna do this one’. Or I’ll have an idea for a song and I go, ‘I’m gonna do this one’, so we’ve kind of got two different people’s perspective on it, which is kind of cool.  It adds to it. Dave writes more about relationship stuff and stuff like that.  And I write more about, like, just, fucked up—how fucked up life is sometimes—good and bad, so that’s kind of what’s going on in my brain all the time.”

    The combination of the two lyrical styles, and the melodic versus aggressive dynamic take the listener on a rollercoaster ride of emotions within the span of the ten cuts on the disc.  It’s like an aural catharsis, an anguish and ecstacy laid bare for the world.  Having said that, it seems that Noise Therapy is not only the perfect name, but the only possible name for the group.
     With longtime friend, producer Mike Plotnikoff (KISS, Fear Factory) behind the controls, they took the unusual stance of bringing in a team of luminaries to help them twist and tweak the knobs until they got the sound they wanted.   With people like Yes keyboardist Igor, John Mellencamp guitarist Mike Wanchic, and former Front Line Assembly and Fear Factory manipulator Rhys Fulber, how could they not get the swelling prog keys, pop sensibility, and tone combined with the corrosive demeanor of hybrid industrial?
     It’s just that kind of mix that has put Noise Therapy on the radar of metalheads and extreme sports nuts, alike.   It also doesn’t hurt that their label works with the extreme sports community, helping them to get gigs like skateboarding legend Tony Hawk’s Spring 2002 Birdhouse Skateboard Tour and a performance last June at Matt Hoffman’s CFB (Crazy Freakin’ Biker) Competition in Chicago.
     “We’ve got songs all over a bunch of snowboarding videos and a bunch of motocross videos and stuff like that,” Rob tells me sort of sheepishly.  “That’s how you gain popularity. That’s how Pennywise got so big in that kind of circle—just from putting songs on soundtracks and stuff like that.  But it hasn’t been an overnight thing or anything like that.”
     But do the guys themselves delve into the world of extreme sports?
     “I snowboard all the time, whenever I’m actually at home during the winter,” says Thiessen, “and James, our keyboard player has skateboarded all his life.  And I used to ride motocross and stuff, so…I guess we do.”
     Being at home during the winter is not something that is going to happen for Rob and his bandmates this year.  Right now they’re out on the road.  Prior to that, they were on bills with Otep, Ill Nino, and Flaw, so this makes the third time in eight months that they have criss-crossed the US.  And it’s a very long way from the days when Thiessen had his first paying band gig.
     “Actually, I went on tour in an AC/DC tribute band,” laughs Rob. “They had their own bus and everything, and I played bass for ‘em.  That was my first, like, bar gig.  And I used to make $250 bucks a week and all the beer I can drink.  And I can drink a lot of beer.  I mean, that’s probably more than I make right now, if you actually add it up.  It’s pretty funny.  And that was 10 years ago.  It might have been longer than 10 years ago.  I don’t know—I fuckin’ lose track of time really easily.  But, I moved to LA for a few years.  I just played in a bunch of shit bands around LA and just kind of worked on actually being able to write, because I had never written before.  Then, I moved back to Vancouver and started Noise Therapy.”
     Finding the right players was something that Thiessen was working on when he came back to Vancouver.  But he didn’t have to look very far to find Dave Ottoson, the man who would help him to craft some of the most memorable of the band’s tunes.
     “Dave, our singer, was actually a friend of my girlfriend at the time,” he relates. “And um, Kai—my roommate found him at a liquor store.  He had just moved to Vancouver and they just started talking at a liquor store, and he’s like, ‘I’m lookin’ for a band'.  My roommate was kind of a drunk, so I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna call this guy’.  So, like a month later I hadn’t found a guitar player, and I called him and he’s been in the band ever since, pretty much. The other guys in the band are newer to the band and have only been in the band for a couple of years, but they were both friends of mine from different bands.  Bobby was in DDT, which was Lars’ from Metallica’s label’s first signing, when he had CMC or whatever.”
     Up until the time they added keyboardist James F., Noise Therapy had just been a full-on metal band.  With him joining the fold, the dimensions and depth that is their current stock-in-trade began to be absolutely apparent.  Bringing with him the tones and textures that are more usual in the more industrial bands, he opened the group up to many more possibilities for expansion.  Add to that, the awesome production talents of Igor and Rhys Fulber (along with Plotnikoff, of course), and you have the ear-splittingly hazardous cd called Tension.
     The group plans to continue touring to support the record until they have converted as many fans as possible.  Thiessen is optimistic, although he weighs it heavily with a dose of the reality that is the music business in 2003.
     “You know this business is so weird,” he says.  “One minute everything’s fine, and the next minute, who knows what’s going on.  So…I never sit back and think everything’s fine.  I never think that.  As soon as you think that, something’s gonna—you’re gonna get the rug pulled out from under you, so. It’s happened to us many times.”
     And when those kinds of things happen, what does this Canadian band do?
      “We try to be nice first,” chuckles Thiessen, “and then if that doesn’t work, we break out the hockey sticks and the chainsaws from under the bus.”