California-based Psych-Rock band Westerner are releasing their album Kali Yuga Kama Sutra on August 19, 2022, via Coconut Spaceship Records, and will also be hosting a release show at L.A.’s School Night on August 22nd. The album represents the culmination of many months of work that commenced back in early 2020 when they made a plan to start releasing a single or a video every month. The ambitious schedule actually ended up being extremely helpful to them in keeping them creative during a very chaotic time in the world. The upshot was that they ended up with plenty of material, and created an album that addresses some of the big ideas that interest them most, the relationships between opposites in this world and our perceptions of the lighter and darker elements of life.
A related subject that interests the whole band including frontman Cooper Bombadil, bassist and keyboardist Brandon Valerino, and drummer Mike Gattshall, is horror tradition, and they handle that with humorous, as well as more sinister effect, on the album. One of the less obvious stories behind the album is the way in which these songs represent a new era of collaboration in songwriting for the band, but it may well be that the organic development of sounds and ideas is a big part of what makes these songs feel so balanced and engaging. I spoke with Cooper, Brandon, and Mike about those developments and the ideas behind Kali Yuga Kama Sutra.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I was pretty interested to find that you’ve been releasing singles and videos for quite a while leading up to the album release. Is that how you normally work?
Cooper Bombadil: In 2020, we made a plan to release one single or music video every month. The album came about after that, so when we decided to do an album, we decided to place some singles on an album with new materials.
HMS: That’s a very ambitious plan to release on that schedule. That must have kept you pretty busy.
Brandon Valerino: That definitely kept us busy, and for some of the songs we’d already released, we re-recorded and remixed some things, so hearing the album actually is a brand-new experience. We added instruments and sounds, for example. It was really busy because we actually record everything ourselves at the studio that I have at my house. We mix and get songs to a really good spot, then we give it to a professional who we know who can turn it into that crispy, clean sound that we were going for.
I think we honed in on our sound a little more throughout this process, too, which makes the album more cohesive. There are a lot of songs that we have that we are working on, so for the album we chose our top ten that also felt like that they would work together. That helped as well.
HMS: Do you tend to think towards videos as a band, or was that a new goal in 2020? Is it something you get super-involved in?
Mike Gattshall: When we started doing the single per month, part of the plan was to include videos, so we made plans based on being able to do that within one month. When Covid happened, that did change our plans a bit. The very first video that we did was just a quick idea of having a camera in the back of a car and we would be running towards the car. That was the whole concept and that was the whole video. We shot that in a day and edited it really quick.
HMS: You have some very entertaining concepts in some of these videos, like time running backwards, or a party with decadent vampires. Do you tend to come up with all of them?
Cooper: Yes, those are all in-house. We tend to come up with our own ideas, and shoot them with our motley crew. Personally, I love shooting videos and I think of it as the same creative process as writing a song. We have a lot of fun making the videos.
By the way, we were really fortunate that we came up with this release-per-month plan before Covid struck. We already had the plan in motion, and this gave us something already in place to get things done. It was a testament to our crew that we pulled that off and got a bunch of stuff done even while the outside world seemed to be screeching to a halt.
Brandon: One story that relates to this and is really special to the band concerns “Yesferatu”. As Cooper was saying, we were in lockdown until summertime in 2020 when restrictions were lifting a little bit. Because the three of us were isolating together, we decided in July to go up to Lake Arrowhead and rent a cabin for a week. Our plan was to get away from home and get some fresh air, and we brought our instruments, so we were songwriting the whole time. There was a magical moment when we were all very relaxed and no longer as stressed out by the world, and I showed Cooper this bassline. Cooper provided the guitar part and the lyrics. Then Mike showed up and started putting a beat behind it.
Within a couple of hours, we had “Yesferatu” written and ready to go. When we got home, we recorded it, and put it out with a video in September. It was a really defining moment for us because it was the first thing that the three of us had truly collaborated on as the current band. We put equal parts into this song and when we created the video, we were also putting all our talents together.
Cooper: To add to that, I really appreciate how we are able to use the resources we have to shoot the videos, which I’m personally really proud of. For the most part, except for “Hell is Dull”, we’ve just used our iPhones and I feel like they’ve come out really well.
HMS: I wouldn’t have realized that they were mostly shot on iPhones. With “Yesferatu”, that’s a hilarious video and seems well timed since there’s a new show coming out for Interview with the Vampire, which has a similar look. It’s the refined, decadent vampire type that we see in the video, but the fact that it also doesn’t take itself seriously is also fun.
Cooper: I love horror movies and I’m a huge horror fan. I actually have a Sunday Funday where we all get together and hang out, and we watch a horror movie at least half the time. For me, “Yesferatu” was a way to work in that horror movie lore. It’s interesting how you have different types of vampires in pop culture, like the refined vampire, the Twilight vampire, the 30 Days of Night kind of intense vampire.
HMS: The lyrics and the story of the song are also, literally, about a vampire, so this isn’t necessarily a metaphor. You’ve actually told a kind of horror story.
Cooper: Yes, it’s not a metaphor at all. [Laughs] It’s really about a vampire. He’s the romantic vampire, which is like Lestat, kind of. He’s a vampire, but he doesn’t really suck your blood, he just satisfies your every sexual desire. I imagined, when I wrote the lyrics, a house party in a cul-de-sac with all these people, and a group of people in a corner talking, saying, “Have you ever heard of Yesferatu? No? Let me tell you! Just say his name three times and he’ll whisk you away.” He’s this rumor that circulates. I thought of it from looking at these old pulp magazine images of vampires seducing women, and they were really ribald. The pun came to mind of changing “Nosferatu” to “Yesferatu”.
Mike: I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but what I like about the video when I watch it is that this is a very specific type of Valley LA person, but they are a vampire.
Brandon: We definitely play on the whole idea of a queer vampire, as well, so we try to include everybody!
HMS: There is so much about society’s perceptions and obsessions that justifies queer readings of vampire lore anyway. There is also a kind of “dark LA” mythology over time that’s associated with occultism, so that helps situate all this vampire stuff, even though it contrasts, since your guy is just fun-loving, it seems.
Cooper: In the “dark LA” mythology, there’s that time when Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons lived in the same house together and had seances. That’s really interesting, too. At the time we wrote the song, I felt things were very serious in the world, externally, and I felt a bit like writing something that was not so serious. I’m not one to avoid heavy subjects, but I had a stroke of humor and since it involved horror for me, it felt easier. Lyrically, I don’t tend to write silly songs.
HMS: Actually it forms a nice contrast to “Hell is Dull”, or maybe a kind of continuum. With “Yesferatu”, everyone is still enjoying their debauchery, but by the time we get to “Hell is Dull”, meaning the song and the video, too, we have people who are bored by the same stuff. They are no longer capable of being caught up in the hysteria.
Cooper: That’s what that video and the song are kind of about. At the end of the video, you see that moment of the bacchanal where we’re sort of, well, literally, torn apart by the party-goers. The party-goers are getting more and more into it, and tear our instruments apart.
HMS: I forget, is Dionysus someone in Greek mythology who gets torn apart?
Cooper: He does. His mythology is parallel to other figures who go through a process of being sacrificed in some way or another and then reborn. “Hell is Dull” is that point where you’ve been doing something you enjoy so much, but each time that you come back to it, you have to make it more intense because the second time and the third time aren’t as pleasurable as that first time.
You pile on the intensity, and at a certain point, you realize that you can’t go back to what was simple. It’s never going to be the same as it was. It’s an ironic moment. It’s a similar thing as when you look back at your childhood and miss it, in a certain sense. But you also realize that there is a reason that you moved on.
HMS: With the music for that song, I can hear the sinister elements creeping in, but it’s still pretty hypnotic, maybe as a nod to how alluring these ideas are. It’s also very calm, which kind of goes with the idea of the speaker being numb. What were you thinking about the music on that one?
Mike: For “Hell is Dull”, Brandon and Cooper sent me a little demo since I was gone at the time. To me, it was already, basically, there, as a very simple, very calm, dancy song. I felt the demo was pretty perfect, and I didn’t want to adjust it too much. It was almost like “Yesferatu” in the way that it came together. It just made sense.
HMS: It has a very organic vibe.
Brandon: There is a little bit of a story to this song as well, since we are not a jam-type band, even though we are Psychedelic Rock. There have been a few moments where we jammed in rehearsal, though, and come up with different melodic ideas. I remember that at the time this was being written, we were getting ready to go to Ohio because Mike, and his now-wife Lauren, were going to be getting married. We were actually going to perform at his wedding. Cooper and I were getting together, and there was a cool moment in one of the jams that I liked. It was a kind of bassline that was popping. I asked if we could come up with something over that. He came up with the guitar lick, and it was very hypnotic and trance-like.
That was all pieced together in a hotel room and then in Mike’s backyard as he was preparing for his wedding. Cooper started coming up with the lyrics, and we presented it to Mike with a very basic beat, and he thought it fit perfectly. It was another one of those moments where we were relaxed, not expecting to write a song, but it just happened really organically, really collaboratively.
HMS: How do these ideas fit into the album’s themes? As far as I understand it, the title of the album, and some of the ideas on the album are about opposing forces.
Cooper: I love opposites and the way they resonate off of each other. Personally, I think that a big part of art and creativity is taking opposites and putting them together, to see what “sound” comes out of how they resonate together. The space in between opposites is the place where I think creativity thrives. We live in a dualistic world in some ways, like heaven and hell, sacred and profane, sun and moon, and I think that creativity comes from putting opposites together.
The title of the album is that, in a sense, opposites, with Kali Yuga, the end of the world, and Kama Sutra, the union or sex, essentially. The album is ordered based on that, where the songs are divided into the poppier, more positive songs, and the more subterranean, darker dream-world songs. I spent a bunch of time trying to find a way to mix them together, but we decided to go with the flow, starting with the sunshine, then the sun goes down, and the moon comes up, and you start dwelling in the dark. I personally have no problem with that since I love dreams and nighttime.
