“Oakland’s a little lawless. It’s got kind of a Wild West vibe.” Annihilation Time guitarist and founding member Graham Clise is describing his band’s home base. Although the five-piece band, which formed in 2001, originally hails from Southern California, its adopted city has proved to be a good fit. “You can pretty much do whatever you want,” Clise says. “The cops aren’t ever going to fuck with you unless you do something really crazy. So you can rent a cool warehouse; its easy to find places to jam. Rent is cheap, and there is a lot of music going on.”
With their reckless live shows and musical nods to West Coast punk and thrash and ’70s hard rock, Annihilation Time, which along with Clise includes guitarist Wes Wilson, vocalist Jimmy Rose, bassist Chris Grande, and drummer Noel Sullivan, gives off an outlaw vibe as well. Co-produced with Greg Wilkinson (Kalas, Saviours) at Earhammer Studios, their third full-length, Annihilation Time III: Tales from the Ancient Age (Tee Pee), is fresh, unpretentious, and like listening to the early records that get people hooked on punk rock for life.
Clise is more excited about the new record than any previous release. “On the first record, we were trying to get our sound a little more. This one is just more straightforward…we refined our sound.” Of course, “refined” is hardly a word that springs to mind when describing Annihilation Time. Unpolished and irreverent, the band pairs unstoppable crunchy riffs with candid, often crass lyrics. On “Germ Freak (I Ain’t No),” Rose snarls, “Hey baby, you wanna dance? / I just shit my pants.”
The barrage of badass guitar duels prominently displayed throughout the record is a new dynamic that Clise attributes to the recent addition of Wilson. “We live right next to each other. We can geek out on riffs and push each other to be more awesome.”
Everyone doesn’t live so conveniently nearby. Rose writes lyrics to boombox recordings from his home in Cleveland, Ohio and heads west just before touring. The arrangement has its ups and downs. “It’s kind of a pain in the ass,” admits Clise, “but it’s cool because it prevents us from playing out too much and over-killing the Bay Area.”
It is conceivable that this distance helps give Annihilation Time their unique sound. Though some bands are bent on melding genres together, in Annihilation Time, hardcore and hard rock have a symbiotic relationship. Clise says, “A lot of Deep Purple songs are just as punk and gnarly as a Black Flag song. We don’t try to fuse the sound; we’re just into a lot of different things. If you’ve ever played punk in your life, anything else you play will always sound a little punk. You can’t really help it.”
At the end of the day, he says, “It doesn’t really matter what it’s labeled. If you like it, you like it. To me it’s all the same. It’s all aggressive—music to throw rocks at your grandma to.
– Jamie Ludwig
Annihilation Time: www.annihilationtime.net
Tee Pee: www.teepeerecords.com