Manifesto is a very solid release with lots of dynamics and memorable tracks. I could’ve done without the cover of Portishead’s “Wandering Star”, as I think Portishead are just too untouchable to cover or distinctive and great in the first place that any cover isn’t going to be as good as the original. People have covered Nirvana and Bad Brains to various degrees of success, but Portishead should be left alone more than most bands I can think of, with the exception of Mike Patton and Faith No More’s ironic take on “Sour Times”. Still, even the more rock based or Nu Metal influences on parts of Manifesto , like the cock-sure “Black Book” and the writhing cyber-metal of “LIE”, are much more fun than annoying. The whole disc has a satirical and dark yet experimental playfulness both stylistically and thematically that works really well. It is surprising to find a band like this on Century Media (think Eyehategod, Nevermore, Eyes of Fire), but OFTM are confident and have enough guts and touring integrity to fit in admirably.

Slugging it out since 1999, founding members Ron Underwood (vocals) and Jim Kaufman (guitars) have gone through several line ups before hitching their wagon to former Revolting Cocks’ percussive powerhouse Seven Antonopolous and the new girl in town, bassist Anna K. (a very talented woman who has also worked with Revolting Cocks plus Hanzel Und Gretyl and Drain STH. I’m pretty sure I had a special moment looking at Drain STH’s picture on the back on an X-Men comic when I was a teenager years ago). Anna and Seven kicked up the OFTM overall stage presence and intensity and have helped to win them over to new fans every night on their current tour with Richard Patrick’s newly reconstituted Filter. It is one thing to warm up a crowd and another yet to get a hugely positive reception from audiences often hearing the band for the first time. It is even more impressive since OFTM are holding down the stage alongside a classic alternative and powerful live presence like Filter who are so well loved.

I talked to vocalist Ron Underwood via telephone seconds after shouting at an outsourced telemarketer from India who nearly caused me (by seconds!) to miss getting Ron’s call. It reminded me of the bands lyric “I’d live for tomorrow if I could just get through today”. It’s the little nuisances that add in life! When the phone rang again seconds later I waited without saying anything a minute before I heard someone say , “ Hello, is this Morgan?” and I knew the coast was clear.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: Sorry, I thought you were a telemarketer calling back and I was gonna miss the real interview call with you! They are so annoying! So much for the National “Do Not Call” List!

RON UNDERWOOD: [laughing] Hold on a second and let me step outside. They’ve got Pat Benatar jamming here. I’m in a casino right now.

MYE: Oh, so it’s not the real Pat Benatar in person. Too bad.

RU: Actually, our tour manager just got offered to do the Pat Benatar gig for quadruple what he is getting paid with us and he’s like “Fuck that, dude! I wanna see you guys go to the top,” so we’ve got a whole lotta love here, man.

MYE: You should just try and tour with her.

RU: Dude, I would love to.

MYE: She’s got a good voice. So, your new record and 5th LP is Manifesto. You’ve been at the band since 1999 and this time out you are touring with Filter. This could be a breakout and a true manifesto for the band to reach a bigger audience.

RU: Definitely. Just in general, when we go out on this tour 90% of the audience doesn’t know who we are and by the end of the night we won them over. It’s a really good thing because if we’re just in front of the people who are already familiar with us we aren’t branching out at all.

MYE: You have good marketing and stuff in place but it must feel really good to win people over with the live shit, especially when it is with Filter who are well known and have an intimidating live show that you are being paired with. That says something.

RU: Richard Patrick’s work is one of the very few single things that got me very badly wanting to pick up a guitar and start a band. When I heard “Hey Man, Nice Shot” it really just changed my perspective on rock music. Now I am bro-ing down with the guy. Last night we were bullshitting right before I went onstage and he’s been really cool. He’s taken us under his wing a little bit.

MYE: Both you and Richard both have really good melodic screaming, kind of musical, not like death screaming.

RU: For sure. Definitely.

MYE: How did this deal with Century Media come about? I know your last record The Spore was on Warcon and they’ve downsized a lot. This seems like a really good, interesting fit for you guys.

RU: Well, we’d let the last record cycle run its’ course and that was our only obligation with Warcon. When it came time to do another one we’d wanted to keep our options open and we knew where that one had gotten us and what we could expect. It was always an option to go back and do another one with them. The Century Media guys, we actually met our lawyer and our label publicist at a house party that Jim (Kaufman, guitars) had thrown. We were like, “Who are these guys? They’re awesome!” Now they are like our number one guys we are working with. It was kind of under our noses for awhile but we didn’t jump on Century Media right away because their roster is so much different from what we’re doing. It turned out to be a good thing though because we get a certain different type of scrutiny, know what I mean?

MYE: Right. It’s a little pressure but cool at the same time.

RU: We have the most commercial appeal on the label besides Lacuna Coil, I would say. It’s actually a good thing ‘cuz they have good expectations for us and high hopes.

MYE: You get good push but there’s still integrity to it.

RU: They know how to do the grassroots following because that’s pretty much all they’ve ever done. They’ve never really relied on radio or television that hard. It was all word of mouth and live shows which is pretty much what we’ve done ourselves for ten years already, so it was a great match.

MYE: As far as Ulrich Wild and John Travis for the production, in the past you’ve worked with Charlie Clouser (NIN) on his mix for “Heaven” and other cool people, but how’d you choose these two guys as right for such an important release for you?

RU: Um, a lot of it was luck and timing and having common friends. Obviously being fans of both of their work.

MYE: You’d played shows with Static-X and stuff too.

RU: Yeah. I mean, we’d toured with them for awhile so that’s how we got in touch with them and it was funny because John Travis just did their last record but Ulrich had done all of their records before that. It was kind of a full circle weird incestuous family. Pretty cool, actually. Ulrich’s style of production, especially tracking guitars, he’s very precise and very impactful and to the point. John’s style, he lays down a solid foundation and then he likes to put some crazy, weird shit all over the top that is pretty ballsy, so the two of them kind of encapsulated all of our ideals into music.

MYE: Yeah. The band has this kind of mechanical and also catchy qualities but there is still this kind of raw, chaotic element and a simultaneous controlled style so it makes for interesting contrasts.

RU: Yep. And that’s exactly why those guys helped make what is probably the coolest album we’ve ever made.

MYE: It almost reminds me at times of this great band Sister Machine Gun’s record I loved The Torture Technique on a little more of a rock bend.

RU: Gotcha.

MYE: Even stuff like the more rock songs work as well as the more industrial sides, like “The Habit” and “Black Book” are probably two of my favorites.

RU: Right, right. I kind of even pulled out a lot of bluesy stuff as a writer that I’d never gone to before. Some guitar twang. It seemed to work. When we first started working with Ulrich he said,”You guys are like country industrial. It’s weird, man!” It was kind of from taking some of those southern influences and throwing them into the more rigid, metal backbone Rammstein type stuff. Playing guitars over it you get a little bit of hee-haw in there.

MYE: Well, you also had two members work with Revolting Cocks and stuff. Seven on drums and also Anna K. has come aboard new to this album and she adds a lot to the band. She’s very talented.

RU: Aww, man. Her tone and her approach to playing is ten times meaner than mine. I wrote most of the bass parts initially and we had her recut almost all of them because of her approach. She owns that shit.

MYE: Now that there’s a girl in the band do you act “nicer” on tour [laughing]?

RU: You have to be a little more sensitive to the “guyness”. When you’re surrounded by a bunch of dirty pirate rock n’ roll guys 24/7 your language goes to hell. The way you view women goes to hell [laughing]. So to have a woman in the band and one who is very dignified… She’s Swedish and has a pretty solid outlook on humanity and the world in general, so it brings a little bit of a mom factor in which is kind of difficult sometimes. In the long run it makes us stay a little more refined.

MYE: Not that she hasn’t had experience around sleazy rockers before or can’t hold her own.

RU: She’s been doing this as long as any of us. When Al Jourgensen (of Ministry/Revolting Cocks) called her up to ask her about the Revolting Cocks tour ( here Ron puts on his best gruff Uncle Al impression) he said, “Hey, Anna K, how would you feel about being the Revolting Cunt?!”

MYE: [laughing] Oh God.

RU: So she’s no stranger to dirty pirate rockers.

MYE: You and Jim met in art school in 1999 and this many records in there are good things happening to you guys. Through harder periods how did you keep going no matter what? Even when you were getting bigger tours you busted ass, like in 2005 you did 270 shows!

RU: It was more like 250, but man, when things would get hard it was like, what else would we be doing? Who else would we choose to be with doing that? Jim and I are so similar as far as our creative ideas, but as far as our personalities we are night and day, but I think that works. We are complimentary. He has way different production skills than I do as far as production. That also kept us together and I think anytime we thought it was getting too heavy and were near to calling it quits we rode it out.

MYE: I was wondering because I know you had an EP called Goodbye.

RU: That had more to do with leaving home because it was the last one we did in Phoenix. We were based in Phoenix before we moved to L.A. so that was a tongue in cheek approach to calling it that. Then we moved out to L.A. where we met Seven and Anna so it was a really good choice.

MYE: Also, you’ve played with everyone from Marilyn Manson to The Bled, who rock. Stuck Mojo soon. I love it when Warped Tour throws a band like you guys or Skindred on who fucking rule. More variety and cross-pollination is good for breaking down barriers, I think. Mix it up.

RU: Right, right.

MYE: What is it about your music that can allow you to play with such a variety or you can go out to L.A. and just win people over?

RU: Um, for us and for any band that is gonna have a bit of longevity, you’ve got to choose your influences and choose a good variety of it, because that’s how you’re gonna be able to make your own sound and build your own thing rather than rise and fall with the scene and be derivative with a million other bands.

MYE: I couldn’t agree more.

RU: It’s been a longer, harder road for us because we couldn’t rise with the scene in an easy way because we were underdogs who weren’t enough like this band or didn’t have the right haircut exactly. But we stuck to our guns and did what we wanted to do and now it is finally catching on.

MYE: It’s cool to fight past that. I’m sure many musicians have heard that bullshit A&R speech before. I know I have. Imitation is not always the best form of flattery.

RU: For sure.

MYE: …Or even the best way to make a buck. It seems like you can only ride a certain trend out so far and then people get sick of it. Like, who wants every band to have the same high emo vocals? People only care about short run money sales but it kills careers.

RU: Right.

MYE: The band name could almost symbolize the modern state of pop music as much as politics and I wanted to ask you about that.

RU: Well, as far as the imagery of this album, it was tongue in cheek with the name of the band being taken from the Karl Marx quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, so we found all these Soviet old school propaganda posters and let that be the sort of tongue in cheek look for the album. It’s also a bit of social commentary to do with fascism and how it’s alive and well today and a lot of it resides in America. Anywhere that anyone has a whole lot of power over a whole lot of people, that’s the type of stuff you’re gonna see.

MYE: Also even in terms of cultural distraction some of the pop stuff out is so shallow now. You are doing something with more depth but it’s still fun, satirical rock. I wanted to ask you about the song “21st Century Time Bomb”, what that title represented? Also, some of the lyrics, like when you sing “black and white, no room for grey” or “the whole world sings this refrain”. Do you think across the board people are more or less gullible these days to manipulation?

RU: I wouldn’t say more than ever. I would say it’s a different strategy because people think they’re smarter than they used to be.

MYE: [laughing]

RU: The information is there but there is also more misleading information too. There’s more, but a lot of it is false. If you watch CNN I think there’s a lot of wagging the dog going on, you know? I think it’s cool and important that that type of political strategy works still, and is important to get certain types of things done, but I don’t think people should fool themselves completely. It’s going on.

MYE: I always get really suspicious during elections when they announce exit poll results halfway through the day, like to discourage people to not even bother to go out and vote because they think it is decided.

RU: Yeah! It’s silly, man. It’s ultra-intelligent. It’s fascinating to me. Some of it’s evil and some of it’s good, though, too. Sometimes there are white lies in politics to protect the greater ideal.

MYE: It’s complicated and you have to examine the moral weight. I was reading an old interview Jim did during The Spore touring cycle and he’d said the name represented in some aspects your beliefs on institutions and wasn’t meant as anti-religious. He’d had a quote that said he thought “without religion there would be chaos”. I think there’s often a lot of chaos with religion too, and I’m not atheist nor anti-religion completely or a strictly cookie cutter Christian, but I think if there was a science based peaceful and rational society it could exist without it. Thoughts on that?

RU: I think that at some point that could be the case, but the transition is so long and far away. I couldn’t even tell you how long it would take for that to become just a generally open public forum where people are accepting some of these new ideas, which are basically observations. I think that people are always going to use certain knowledge against certain groups to retain their individual power, so it doesn’t matter if it’s religion or knowledge of chemistry or whatever, you know what I mean? It’s all gonna be part of the same plan that people want to maintain their power.

MYE: People can even do that regarding lack of information to excuse their own stasis and say they don’t have access to knowledge. There is so much information out there that you can find it if you look. You can’t get discouraged completely or there is no hope.

RU: Then again I can Wikipedia my name and find out I have four eyes, because anyone can go in and tinker with that. It’s hard to say which authority you are able to trust. Pick one and if you stick with it, good luck, man! [laughing]

MYE: Hope you picked well! [laughing] Hey, how was it shooting the “Burn You Down” video? It has this almost antique and sepia yet futuristic look too!

RU: We wanted to kind of recreate that same old Soviet before today’s time but throw in some more modern day stuff, kind of like that movie Grindhouse. You think it’s the 1970’s with the dialogue and everything looks like “Debbie Does Dallas” but then she’s text messaging on screen and you’re like “What!” We kind of wanted to juxtapose some nostalgic things and throw in some of our own, new sensibilities. I think it’s befitting of the song.

MYE: The band’s culture collage too.

RU: Yeah. It kind of looks like it sounds. We were happy to work with Dave Brodsky. He got it.

MYE: Oh, that’s who you did it with? Ok.

RU: We were sold on his treatment. It came down to two guys and we read his treatment and it said “irst off, we’re gonna blow some shit up.” So we were like, “Yeah! We gotta choose this guy!”

MYE: He seems to really tailor the videos well to each band and what they’re about, like Kylesa and Three and The Smash Up. I’ve talked to or know all those bands.

RU: He includes the bands in the production. We bounced everything back and forth from the beginning. Any tweaks on everything, he was down for because he wanted us to be happy with the end product.

MYE: You wanna have something the artists wanna represent and not have forced on them by the label.

RU: Right, I was very happy working with that guy.

MYE: So what’s next for you? What have you planned ahead for the rest of the year?

RU: I can’t say just what tours we’re gonna be on, but we have a couple in mind after this tour. It’ll be U.S. and Canada most likely, and then it looks like in Europe early next year we should release MANIFESTO and then we’ll be supporting it over there.

MYE: Lastly, you’ve gotten some great props from people like Chester from Linkin Park among others, recommending people check you out. On your end, I was wondering what art or literature or music is inspiring you now?

RU: Man, I’m all over the place [laughing]. I’ve started getting into photography and stop animation a little bit. That’s kind of my outlet lately, just to get some ideas music wise that are a little bit different from what I normally would be inspired by. Definitely heads up though for a band called Phantom Communique. Jim just produced their album. They are out of Baltimore. It’s some of the members from Dog Fashion Disco and the (former) lead singer of Bleed The Dream, Brandon Thomas. Really cool sound. He’s got kind of a Mike Patton tone in this band.