Yambag! - Razorblades & Aspirin
Ok, what exactly is a Yambag?
So a yambag is slang for your ball sack, scrotum, etc. to put it bluntly. You can also call someone a yambag for being a real dick. I guess you can say that it may or may not be a reference to the Upstab song "Yambag". Who's to say? It was one of the names that was blurted out when deciding what to call ourselves. We were, for our very first show, called "Erfling" but that's neither here nor there....Lately I guess it's taken off in the wrestling community (specifically with AEW fans) with Taz using the term when referring to low blows. He'll often say like "straining the yambag region" and things like that. Him being from Brooklyn, he probably said it all the time. At least that was my impression when i first heard Andrew Dice Clay use it many years ago. It was a real New York-ass term in my mind haha but as I've found out in the 8 years that Yambag has been a band, no one has ever heard of that.
Cleveland has a long and glorious history of excellent hardcore - these days it feels like most people focus on the Integrity/Ringworm sound of things but you all have more in common with the H100s/Inmates side of the house - is there a reason you drifted towards one style vs the other?
I think for the most part it had to do with those fanbases (Integrity specifically) that turned me off from going to those shows and playing/enjoying that style of hardcore. Face tats and crew mentality. That doesn't take away from the greatness that is Integrity, but for me I was more into the speed and chaotic sounds of H100s, Gordon Solie Motherfuckers, etc. It's funny, I was hangin out with an old friend that used to be in Integrity and he told me that on one of their earlier tours they played a show with Raw Power and those dudes couldn’t help but talk shit about their "style". Like it was too metal to be hardcore or something like that...lo and behold all the bands that would emerge because of them. The crowd and responses to Integrity and Inmates were pretty different. Both had elements of danger, but one had an actual sense of comradery in the crowd. Most if not all of my friends in Clevo today I've gone buck to at an Inmates or Ruiners show. I think that in today's age you're more likely to find fans of punk AND hardcore that listen to one style of Cleveland hardcore over the other.
Your LP features a drawing of Captain Caveman - why did you choose this?
It had to do more with the animal theme, or I guess the animal within. I originally wanted Captain Caveman to be on the cover of the demo and couldnt figure out how to photoshop or whatever haha. I figured I could just draw him and so wIth Posthumous Pounce I wanted to put him on there for sure, that name was supposed to reflect how I channeled my inner troglodyte during live sets to spazz and contort my body and face in ways a resurrected caveman would.
Most of the songs on Posthumous Pounce seem to be about animals - why come? I heard that Richard used to wear various animal masks, why did you stop?
I really like animals and as fascinating as we may find them, their fate seems somewhat set in stone. Literal creatures of habit.The reality is that when we started the band I felt like I didn’t have much to say and the animal theme came from just making "placeholder" lyrics for all the songs. That is, writing a bunch of bullshit until you get some real shit down. Only that was my plan all along and I wanted to complement it during live shows with costumes, props, masks and voice manipulation. Sometimes the masks were so big and heavy that i couldn’t even use a microphone. One time I taped a contact mic to my throat and connected it to a wireless receiver that I had running through a pitch shifter. That worked out okay, but even then I was limited in my mobility because I wanted to wild out but couldn’t because the mask would fall off. I had dubbed the singer "Mr. E" (stolen from The Residents) and eventually decided to kill him and all the masks. I gave some away and kept one for myself - the McGruff mask you see in all the videos - and decided that this band is too good to pretend that it needed a gimmick to stand out. I didnt want to play often because at first I wanted there to be a different mask for every show. That got real time consuming and the mask would get wrecked anyway. I was also getting too many people tell me how excited they were for the theatrics of the show while we were sitting on a box of tapes...Mr. E had to go. And now he's dead.
Did you ever see that movie The Lobster? It was about how if people didn’t find a ‘romantic’ partner within 45 days at a resort they were turned into animals and sent off into the forest, but you got to choose which animal. If this was you, what animal would you choose?
Hahaaaa yes of course. I would be a Chimpanzee plain and simple. Doin backflips all day. Eating nuts and berries, the occasional twig-full-o-termites. When I was a kid my older brother started calling me "chango" - which is monkey in Spanish. I guess I've always felt a little bananas. Y'know what I mean?
I’ve had this discussion w/ Cleveland folx before but just why are band from Northeast Ohio so good? What is it about the place, in your opinion, which makes it a place that consistently churns out great bands going back decades?
I really can't say. This question has come up multiple times, but I will say you're probably the first to actually broaden the question to Northeast Ohio. This is important because although a lot of sweet bands are Cleveland bands, they're rooted in the outskirts. The dudes in Cruelster, Perverts Again, etc. are from Fairview Park, Wedge from every sick Cleveland hardcore band is from Painesville, the Erbas from Parma, Bad Noids dudes from Shaker Heights, a lot of old heads from Lorain (just like Sam McPheeters!), even the Electric Eels crew was from Lakewood. If anything, I would have to attribute the greatness to the "nothing to lose" kind of approach to making music. There's no real expectation of what the "Cleveland" sound is. The same crew of people playing in an awesome hardcore band will also write a slowed-down mind-numbing noise rock album and then just move on to the next thing after that. The only thing in the water is algae blooms and we don’t gotta talk about that...
Tell me about Saucepan records.
Saucepan Records is//was a passion project of mine. A label dedicated to Cleveland, for Cleveland. Some of my own bands from that era were on it (including the Yambag - (Be)wear the Mask demo tape). For the same amount of "nothing to lose" attitude that went into making music, there weren't many people knocking at our doors to release any of our bands. So I wanted to be able to assist if not completely fund releases by some of my friend's bands and my own. This all eventually culminated into a DVD comp called Enjoy Cleveland. A better version of what was supposed to be a really good documentary called Destroy Cleveland which suuuuuuucked! Anywho, Enjoy Cleveland had a bunch of awesome bands that only existed for a brief period of time - Wetbrain, Dipshit, Rubber Mate, Prison Moan, Vanilla Poppers, etc... I lost a lot of money doing this label haha but I was also able to be a part of a lot of cool shit that represented Clevo really well.
Tell me about the recent record on Convulse.
Strength In Nightmares is the new EP on Convulse/11PM Records. Lyrically I take a more personal//political approach to songs. Turns out I still have something to say, after all. Dealing with identity politics, neoliberal warfare on us all, flavor of the week activism and how people will do anything to avoid having meaningful discussions with each other. The animal//animal within theme is seen under a different spotlight with Donald Duck/Disney imagery. The horrors of the world aren't so bad when you can force the algorithm to pat you on the back and tell you everything is going to be fine. Musically it's the fiercest stuff we've recorded yet. We even throw in a Cryptic Slaughter cover that we've been doing for years now. This record felt great recording and I hope people slam hard as fuck to it.
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What does the future hold for Yambag?
Definitely have a bunch of stuff we wanna record. Potentially doing a west coast tour next year, maybe Europe? It would be sweet to play Japan, but who knows? What does the future hold for this country, this world? And is any of this even gonna matter in 2024? I was afraid of going "back to brunch" as they say. Yet here we are. All I can say is I love this band, I love my brothers in it and hopefully anyone reading this has something they love just as deeply too.
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