Hard Rock New Jersey-based trio Shred Flintstone have been laying some excellent foundations in original music with some EPs and their first full-length album, They’re Not There, and now their second LP is going to be arriving on September 3rd. The sounds behind the album are varied and dig deep into Rock history showing off an impressive range of music knowledge and the confidence to take it new directions. Their album, Unlimited Power, has a rather relevant underlying theme. Though it’s not overtly spelled out in every song on the album, a similar atmosphere is always present of challenging the idea of powerlessness and taking a hard look at the problems of the world in a realistic rather than fatalistic way.
The title track single and accompanying video for “Unlimited Power” were released on August 11th and give a pretty solid preview both of the sounds you’ll find on the album and of the outrageous visual sense their videos often convey at the hands of their frequent collaborator Spaghetti Jesus. You’ll also be able to catch them on an East Coast tour which kicks off with their September 3rd release. I caught up with vocalist and guitarist Dan Barrecchia to talk about the roots of Unlimited Power and the development of Shred Flintstone so far.
Hannah Means-Shannon: You all have worked with Spaghetti Jesus before on several videos, right?
Dan Barrecchia: I think we’ve done three videos with him, which means most of our music videos, and we are good friends with him.
HMS: It seems like you have a good connection in terms of aesthetic and vibe with his sensibilities.
DB: Yes, we click very well. We bring things out of each other that otherwise would not come out. A lot of the stuff we do is in the moment, and it’s kind of chaotic when we film a music video, but we click.
HMS: For “Unlimited Power”, we have a lot more live action rather than live play, more like a scripted music video. Is that the first time you’ve taken that approach?
DB: We’ve done some like that in the past, but that was the first one we’ve done with him. We wanted some clear shots and a bit of a story to tell rather than psyched-out graphics. We came up with a shell of the script. We had a brief outline of what it would be, but a lot of it we just improvised. There’s a dinosaur costume in the video and we just found that the day before the video and thought it looked cool. It took us a couple of weeks to build the robot costume by hand and the staffs, so we knew those were going to be in.
HMS: How did you decide on what the band would wear?
DB: We were trying to find bathrobes and, apparently, bathrobes are really hard to come by. [Laughs] You’d think they’d be available everywhere. They’re really not. I went to ten different stores looking for bathrobes the day before, and those were the least expensive bathrobes I could find. I spent ninety bucks on bathrobes.
HMS: Then by accident, you actually ended up with a great result, because the robes look kind of like Star Wars or like samurai warriors.
DB: We were going for some kind of Star Wars/Jedi vibe, or something more monk-esque.
HMS: What about the PlayStation and game disc?
DB: That was just stuff I had in my trunk, which is a mess. We turned up at this park to film and I had a PlayStation and blank cd in my trunk.
HMS: Again, weirdly perfect. A lot of these items are things people are going to relate to. They’re almost modern-archetypal already. It’s silver, boxlike, and has a shiny treasure that goes inside.
DB: Exactly. Especially for my generation, PlayStations are very archetypal, especially ones and twos.
HMS: The album and song title suggest a major idea at work in some way. I saw a reference to the idea of a social power that wants people to give up or surrender their own power by becoming convinced that they don’t have any. Can you tell me more about that?
DB: I think we’ve reached a point in American culture where things have become so hyper-capitalized to the point where the powers that be aren’t even trying to pretend that isn’t true anymore. It’s become a kind of cult of saying, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do. This shit’s going to hit the fan. Let’s just drink the Kool-aid.” It’s hard for me to fully put in words what I’m trying to say, but our culture is very cult-like in a way. I was thinking a lot about the Jonestown massacre, with us drinking the [blue] Gatorade [in the video]. But instead of having a cult-leader, it’s our culture in general.
HMS: I hadn’t really thought about the role of the blue Gatorade in the video. I had assumed it was positive or neutral, but it does sort of distract the characters from the conflict that descends on them unprepared.
DB: It could be all of those things. I feel like we tried to leave it open-ended. I’m no cinematography expert, but I love films that leave things a little open-ended, like in Pulp Fiction when the suitcase is opened and we don’t really know what’s in it. It could be really good or something really evil.
HMS: Are sci-fi, fantasy, and video games, a big part of what the band’s influence, or are they just part of the normal language of culture these days so they crop up in your music and videos?
DB: The sci-fi/fantasy are Josh’s influence [aka Spaghetti Jesus], as you’ll see in the music video. He loves all the old, classic Godzilla films. For me, personally, and the band, we love old, vintage, terrible 80s horror movies. Ed [Weisgerber], our bass player, has an entire collection of the worst movies on VHS that are also somehow the best. They are entertaining because they are bad. I feel like we encompass that as a band. I think we’re great, but we’re goofy and weird. I wouldn’t say that we’re very “cool”. I’ve never looked at myself as a cool person.
I think that in music a lot of people are trying to put on a “cool person” persona. We embrace not doing that. I can either pretend to be something I’m not and fail at it or we can just embrace who we are. The band Ween is our biggest collective influence because they did exactly this, and in doing so, are awesome.
HMS: In terms of writing the song “Unlimited Power” and thinking of these ideas, how much of that was pre-pandemic, and how much of it was reinforced by the pandemic.
DB: I started writing a lot of this stuff before the pandemic, including the lyrics for the song. But the song ended up feeling like it had so much more relevance over the past year than it did when I wrote the lyrics.
HMS: Yes, it definitely doesn’t have to have the context of the pandemic to be true, but there’s been a lot of media that’s set up to influence people during this time.
DB: I feel like they are trying to redirect our fear and anger towards things that are meaningless. On any cable news channel that you turn on, they aren’t talking about the fact that our planet is burning up and we don’t have much time left, but they are talking about why you should hate this person, or that politician. They know people are scared and angry and they know how to redirect that. That probably bothers me more than anything else. There are very few outlets where people are talking about real issues. We’re not a political band, but our music is still political metaphorically.
HMS: That’s really well put. Do you see any glimmer of hope there? How do you feel you can resist this trend?
DB: I feel like over the past year, part of me has come to terms with the fact that there’s not a lot I can do about it. I’m not going to lie, part of me feels hopeless. But another part of me says, “Dude, you just gotta do what you can and be as good of a person as you can be to the people around you. Keep making music and playing, and putting your heart into what you do.” That’s really all you can do. That’s the point I’ve come to. I’m not against political activism, but for me, personally, my “activism” is through music. In a way, it’s also through not being something I’m not.
HMS: The sound of the songs on the album is really wide-ranging through Rock influences and I appreciate the fact that you allowed that rather than trying to make all the songs sound similar.
DB: Thank you. That just happens to us, naturally. Between me, Joey [Giambra] and Ed, we have a lot of different influences, and we’ve never viewed our band as one that’s specific to a genre or a sound. We just make what sounds cool to us. Tying back to Ween again, that’s the only band which we are all equally influenced by, and they do similar things. We aren’t trying to be them, but I’ve never seen the music that I make as something based on genre.
HMS: Based on this album, you all seem to know about early Rock and Classic Rock as well as later, Heavy music.
DB: For sure. For me, personally, my influences for songwriting and playing are all classic stuff. Hendrix is probably my biggest influence as far as guitar playing and probably one of the only people who I’ll really put on a pedestal. He’s a legend in my mind. Then, in terms of songwriting, The Ramones. I love The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers. Even though people crap all over that stuff, I love it. I’d love to incorporate some New Wave vibes into my music, but I find I’m not laid back enough for that style. I don’t listen to much modern stuff recently, but I go to my roots when it comes to songwriting. I don’t try to follow trends.
HMS: Is the idea of “Unlimited Power” also present in the other songs on the album?
DB: Everything on this album ties into that theme in one way or another. I personally think that. This is the first time that I feel like we’ve made a record that has a theme throughout and is cohesive in that way. It has some lyrics that repeat themselves throughout the record.
HMS: How important has live playing been in the development of the band and music?
DB: I feel like my favorite part about us is our live performance, for sure. I think our live performance is way better than our recorded music, but I’d like them to be equal. Recording music is a whole beast of its own.
HMS: Do you play your songs a lot live before recording them?
DB: Actually, everything on the record is recorded live. There are overdubs. The vocals aren’t live but were replaced, but the drums and guitars were all played together. Three of these songs had been played in front of audiences, but we have never played the title track, “Unlimited Power” yet. We’ve got two shows in August, then we’re doing our album release show and a two-week tour in mid-September.
HMS: Is this the first time you recorded an album with Kaleidoscope Sound?
DB: Yes. We actually met them at the beginning of the pandemic and did two tracks with them which are on our EP. We did them in one day and got the vibe of the studio, and we liked Jeremy [Delaney] a lot, so we came back to do our album.
HMS: I saw that Kaleidoscope is into vintage sound and equipment. Is that something you were attracted to or took advantage of there?
DB: I’m not a huge gearhead, so I don’t know a lot about stuff that I’m using as long as it sounds cool. But on Paranoid, the Black Sabbath record, on the song “Planet Caravan”, Ozzy uses this vintage mic which goes into a fan. And they had that at the studio, and I’ve always wanted to use that on a record. They had the actual mic, not an effect. So we did that on “Escape From New Jersey”.
HMS: Did you actually use a saw to cut a guitar up for your album cover?
DB: Yes, that’s the album cover.
HMS: How did you choose the guitar that would be sacrificed?
DB: We bought a cheap red guitar online. Then we just sawed it. We knew it had to be red for some reason. We went over to Ed’s place and he took a saw to it.
HMS: Were there parts flying off?
DB: No, just sparks, but they weren’t hot, so it was fine.
Photo credit: Ed Weisgerber
