Editor’s Note: It was an awesome night at Spicoli’s Grill in Waterloo, Iowa as St. Louis’s own Discrepancies were getting ready to bring down the house with The Zealots. Discrepancies put on an absolute killer show despite there only being a handful of people there(some left after a local hip-hop artist opened) and they incorporated an awesome medley of hip-hop covers including “99 Problems” by Jay-Z into the set. They certainly left an impact as fans were asking them when they were going to be back. Fans can find Discrepancies at the following locations:
www.facebook.com/Discrepancies
Madness To Creation: Before the interview, we’ve been talking about Kottonmouth Kings, we might as well start off the interview that way, what is your favorite Kottonmouth Kings song?
Garrett: We’ll have Steve answer that question since he’s the expert.
Steve: My favorite Kottonmouth Kings song has to be “Bring It On”.
Madness To Creation: What makes you “bring it on”?
*everyone laughs* Steve: All I know is, that there was the video of that song when I was a kid, it had dirt bikes and everything, I thought it was so cool.
Garrett: It’s kind of a blast from the past, that’s what I think of when I think of Kottonmouth Kings.
Madness To Creation: What are some of your favorite rap metal songs growing up?
Addison: Anything by Rage(Against The Machine).
Garrett: “Don’t Stay” by Linkin Park is one of my favorite rap-rock songs.
Antonio: I’m going to say anything by Limp Bizkit. I love everything that they put out.
Madness To Creation: What is your favorite song to play live, and don’t say “Freebird”?
*everyone laughs* Garrett: I would say my favorite song to play live would be “Get Hype”, and my favorite in studio would be “Foresight/Hindsight”, just because there is so many layers for us to get really crazy with it.
Addison: Live, I’m probably going to say “Rock The Show”.
Antonio: “Not Alone” is my favorite song, but I don’t think I had the most fun recording that one, if that makes any sense, but as far as live, I would say “Rock The Show”, but when Dubs is not with us I don’t really like it! *laughs*
Steve: “Raising The Bar”
Discrepancies: Even though you can’t play it!
Steve: I didn’t record it on the album, so I get to play programmed drums. The new guy can play it, he’s been doing most of the shows anyways.
Garrett: He’s been doing a lot of fill in spots on the road, and he did most of Warped Tour.
Madness To Creation: So Steve, what’s your plans after you’re all done with Discrepancies?
Steve: I’m about to drop a mumble rap album.
Addison: What’s your rap name?
Steve: 2 Chins!
Madness To Creation: Garrett talked about Warped Tour a bit ago, what impact did it have on you, whether it was performing it this summer or growing up?
Garrett: Warped Tour for me was really big growing up, I was always into that punk rock scene, I’ve been going there before I could drive with my sisters and my parents used to drop me off there. It’s always been kind of a big thing, always been a highlight of my summer for a long time, being able to play it was unreal, I never thought we were going to be able to play it and once they announced that it was going to be the last year, and we got the call from the label asking if we could play, and I was freaking out, I was at work, and I was on the phone with a customer and I just literally hung up at the middle of a phone call, and I started freaking out. It was awesome!
Addison: It was a really humbling experience, I mean honestly just being able to play and the bands that we got to play with and have that experience, we all talked about it for years of the possibility of being able to do that at some point, it’s something that I’ll never forget.
Steve: There was actually a mumble rapper on the same stage as us, and he was really good.
Antonio: I wouldn’t say he was a mumble rapper.
Garrett: He was kind of r&b, kind of like Post Malone-y. Or Post Bologna.
Antonio: He’s going to hear this and be like eff those guys! It was a lot of fun though, it was an honor to just be there, let alone play.
Garrett: The craziest part was the after-party in Denver.
Madness To Creation: Tell me about Denver, what happened there?
Garrett: The crazy thing about Warped Tour is that there’s so many talented artists and bands on there that are like massive, but when you hang out with them at the show, and backstage they talk to you like you’re on the same level, that really shows the family experience of Warped Tour, the after-party was rad because we met Twiztid and I personally was extremely intimidated by Twiztid, but he was super down to earth, very easy to talk to, the guys from Issues were cool, The Amity Affliction was really nice to us, we met some big names. Kublai Khan was super cool to us, and they were super nice to us. They are so good live too.
Antonio: 3OH!3 and the ones and twos.
Garrett: That was my parents’ favorite band on the entire Warped Tour, they came to see our set in St. Louis and they were like, “we just watched this band and they were so great, but we don’t know who they were”, and I looked at the schedule and was like, “you just saw 3OH!3”, and they were like, “that’s it, they were amazing”, and I’m like, “holy crap, mom”.
Madness To Creation: You all signed a record deal and you had to cover one mumble rap song, or something by a mumble rapper, who would you cover?
Antonio: tekashi6ix9ine!
Garrett: I thought he was angry rap! I mean, Lil’ Jon, is that a genre?
Addison: Gucci Gang?
Steve: I just saw him live, he was terrible.
Antonio: I would quit the band!
Madness To Creation: Craziest moment you have ever experienced involving a fan?
Addison: Most memorable fan experience was there was this fan who flew all the way from Ireland just to see us play on the Warped Tour. And on camera he didn’t want to be interviewed, he just wanted to see the band.
Garrett: And as part of their culture, he was very blunt, they were like, “Why did you fly out here”, and he goes, “to see the band”.
Antonio: And his girlfriend was with them and we took a picture with him and we were like, “do you want to be in the picture with us”, and she was like, “no”. All right! At least you’re honest! *laughs* I respect that! She wasn’t trying to be mean, she was just totally honest.
Madness To Creation: What led to the rerelease of “The Awakening”?
Garrett: It wasn’t because of the record deal, they wanted to rerelease the record because they thought the record had a lot more potential than what we accomplished through the self-release, so they wanted to do a little bit more marketing behind it, and we were cool with that because we already wanted to redo “Get Hyped” and we wanted to do the other songs as a remaster anyway, and so it kind of worked out for us because there was a point in time after the release of “The Awakening”, we wanted to do this remix record with kind of an electronic concept, but unfortunately everybody that we worked with on it kind of kept falling through, so as time went on, we just kind of gave up on that idea, and when they approached us with the rerelease the remaster, and we were like, “that works”, so we were pretty excited to do that, I was excited to do “Not Alone” as an acoustic song, and to redo “Get Hype” in order to give it the justice that it deserves.
Madness To Creation: So Antonio, why was “Not Alone” your favorite, and was it a tough song for you to do acoustically?
Antonio: I like the stuff that is slower sometimes, I think lyrically, it’s just one of my favorites as it just kind of hits home a little bit, it felt like it came together really easily.
Garrett: It came together super quick, Addison came over and was like, “I got this idea”, we recorded the song and five minutes later, it was done.
Madness To Creation: Compare “The Art Of War” song to “The Art Of War” Chinese ancient history book, long story short it talks about military tactics and strategies to be successful in war.
Antonio: I compare it to being in a relationship, that’s like being in a war, basically in war, one of the worst things that can happen is getting captured or injured, but even worse than that, your significant other can join the other side, so that song was written as if your significant other joined the other side.
Madness To Creation: I just love how that song is crafted in the arrangements, whether its the guitar riff, the thick bass line or the timing in the drumming, how did it all come together?
Garrett: Well thank you! That bass line actually started out as a guitar riff originally, so the riff kind of came when we wrote a song on the EP called “The Truth”, and we had this kind of cool breakdown idea and when me and Addison wrote it, and at the time I was just playing around with different frets and see how far I can really stretch my fingers and still play a rhythm at the same time, and it kind of sounded cool in that song, but we changed it more and more for the truth on the EP, and we came back and revisited the idea, when we were doing “The Awakening” as a full-length, “The Art Of War” was actually the first song that we had written, the song was already pre-written on the EP and we didn’t fully develop the idea so we just kind of put it off to the side, so honestly, the bass line kind of came from that song, and it came originally as a guitar riff, and we pretty much write everything on guitar to be honest, and we break it down and split it up, we even write vocal lines on guitar, and we’ll be like, “what if this was just a vocal instead”, and we just kind of move it and it’s always kind of worked that way.
Madness To Creation: Did that lead into the inspiration in the trade off of the vocals between you and Antonio?
Addison: I think that is just something that we like to do, playing with it, experimenting with it.
Antonio: I think on the EP, Addison only sings on two of the songs, I definitely wanted to get him more involved vocally on the second one, so I wanted to make sure that we traded off and kind of mix it up.
Madness To Creation: Tell us about the craziest time that you said you had to “Prevail” or a struggle.
Antonio: We were in Moston! Addison was driving and we heard a weird noise, and five minutes later, the tire just completely popped. Addison was trying to keep our van on the road and we were about to come head-to-head with a guardrail, and Addison swerves to get into the grass instead of the guardrail, and here comes a semi, and it was terrifying!
Garrett: We were a few feet from a dropoff and there was another highway underneath us on a bridge and the guardrail was the start of this bridge, so instead of smashing into the guardrail, we went into the side to try to dodge it, this was in Moston, Wisconsin, and after all of that hell, the cops came over, and they picked us up, the cops were cool as hell, they took pictures with us in the backseat acting like we were arrested and they were super cool, but the shop was not cool because they delayed us by three days, we had to stay at this hotel that we had no money for, and all we had to eat were for these Taco Bell gift cards, and we went to Taco Bell, and they closed the lobby 15 minutes early, so we couldn’t eat, we tried to go through the drive-thru and we tried to call them and explain what was happening, and told them that we don’t have a vehicle to come through your drive-thru, but you all closed the lobby early and this is all we have to eat and we asked if we could get something and they were like, “no, we can’t serve you through a window”, and we told them, “technically you’re still supposed to be open, open the lobby then”
Antonio: “But we closed the register down early, I’m sorry”.
Addison: Moston was a little bitty place and we got stranded from there for a good couple ofdays, the police were great people. The good part of the story was that nobody got hurt.
Madness To Creation: What part of this causes you to “Get Hyped”?
Antonio: Honestly, I don’t really get too hyped until the music starts or watching other bands play, that will get you hyped for sure. I usually get kind of nervous until the song kicks in and then I’m like, “oh yeah, let’s go”.
Garrett: I’m not going to lie, I still get kind of nervous before we go on stage, sometimes I feel like I mentally hype myself up, and I’ll listen to the music if I really need to. I enjoy our show, I feel like we play with a lot of energy, so thinking about what I’m going to do when we start playing hypes me up I guess.
Steve: Me and Addison make out! *laughs*
Madness To Creation: The song “Wake Up” is a poignant and raw song, take us into that song. It seems to touch on police brutality.
Antonio: “Wake Up” goes along with the whole theme of “The Awakening”, but it’s like there was a lot of tension going on in the St. Louis area with the Ferguson situation and everything like that, so I just kind of touched on all angles of the situation, the blame is pointed at the police but we’re still having all of these problems within our own communities, but also there does need to be some blame on the police because “this is happening, xyz”, just shedding light on the entire situation to try to get people aware.
Madness To Creation: What was it like after the Michael Brown situation?
Steve: I was in New York when it happened, all I heard was like the Facebook posts, and it happened less than ten minutes from where I live, and I was in New York the day it actually happened, so all I had were Facebook posts and talking to people and asking what was going on, it seemed like World War III was happening.
Garrett: I think the media made it look a lot worse than what it was, I lived downtown when it was happening, there were a lot of protests that were very peaceful, a lot of people walking around with signs and speaking about stuff, talking about things, I worked at the radio station at the time, and we had a news station that I would say was a primarily conservative news station, and they would go to these events, and I would be there with them as a promo team, and they would make it seem like it was horrifying, and it was not, I was talking to people, and I was standing right there talking to another guy about the situation, I mean people were obviously upset, but it’s not like people were screaming and throwing stuff at each other.
Steve: Everything that you saw on the news of people throwing stuff at the police, with pepper spray and teargas shots, that was happening in such a small area.
Garrett: Most of those people were not even from St. Louis.
Steve: There were opportunists coming from out of town because a lot of places were getting looted and stuff, but really that happened on one block, the whole city of Ferguson and St. Louis wasn’t in flames, it was a very small part, a lot of people weren’t even from the area, I think they saw, as usual, the news and the media sought after the opportunity to blow something up, just to get everybody riled up.
Antonio: Just to get everybody riled up and mad at each other, with all of this tension.
Garrett: There were groups of people that were delivering water, there were people donating cases of water and giving back to the community, even to those that were protesting to make sure that everybody was taking care of each other as a community, never saw any of that on the news, saw it with my own eyes, but never saw it on the news.
Steve: My grandpa owned an automobile shop for a long time and a guy that was sent there had a wheel and tire shop on that road and he was setting up a tent and it had fans and giving out water, that was what was really going on, that small part, obviously there was some terrible shit that happened, but that was a very small part.
Madness To Creation: What’s the plans for Discrepancies for the rest of the year?
Garrett: We have some plans that we can’t fully announce yet, but we have some tours coming up that will be super rad with some super cool bands. At the end of the year, we’ll probably finish writing some of the new material, that we’re hoping to have recorded and done by the end of January, as far as release date, I have no idea, but that’s the timeline for us recording.
Madness To Creation: Anything else you would like to add?
Steve: I was bullied out of this band! *laughs*
Garrett: What’s kind of funny is that we announced that Steve was leaving, but everyone was like, “is everything okay”.
Steve: Nobody wants to ask, but everybody was half-assing looking for something that happened, some juicy gossip, I ran into a couple of other people from other bands, and they were like, is it okay if I ask you “why did you leave”, and I’m like, “I don’t want to tour”, they’re like, “oh, so nothing happened”, I wouldn’t be out of town with them, it would be real awkward.
Garrett: I thought I was pretty good about wishing him the very best and that we’re also friends, everybody wants this big, juicy gossip and Steve just wasn’t into touring, it’s tough.
Steve: Addison also has to get to hair and makeup station! *laughs*
And there you have it! So much laughter and so much fun in this interview!
Discrepancies has a couple of gigs coming up so check out the tour dates below!
Sat. Nov. 3rd- Delmar Hall in St. Louis, Missouri (w/My Posse In Effect and DAD)
Fri. Nov. 9th- Brauerhouse in Lombard, Illinois (providing support for Kottonmouth Kings)
For tickets and further information on any of the shows listed above, click here.
