Return of the Venus Flytraps

Here in the 21st century, we’re told what used to be beaten path for the rock and roll band’s career has been digitized out the window, especially when it comes to making albums.

These days, there’s almost no such thing as getting the local rock radio station to play your records, as nearly all terrestrial commercial radio stations are owned by two big corporations who couldn’t give a rat’s patoot about local artists. Downloading songs, legally or not, has all but killed the very notion of the rock album, as people have returned to buying only the songs they want, thus rendering spending a bunch of money to make an album that much riskier. By the looks of it, phenomenon of the rock album has gone the way of the dodo.

Or has it?

One group that may beg to differ is our friends the Venus Flytraps. Like so many other artists, they have the rock and roll dream. And part of that dream is releasing albums.

The Cleveland-based outfit has recently released their first full-length album, Night of the Venus Flytraps. The collection of tunes solidifies the band’s already-established sound -- a trippy, heavily blues-based music that echoes back to a mid-60’s point almost literally seconds before the birth of psychedelia.

For singer Vondrella Raygun, the band’s first full-fledged album is a giant deal. Most rock and roll bands never even get to that point. Night of the Venus Flytraps catapults the band in another important way, too.

“We mainly wanted to get an album out so we would have a reason to tour,” said Raygun, communicating with Garagerocktopia via email. ”From Cleveland, we made it as far as Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was a gas, and we can’t wait to do it all over again on a larger scale.”

What’s more, the album shows the band has far more to offer than just a few songs, laying out an artistic vision.

“We hope that people listen to it and realize that you don’t have to fit in or even fit in with the misfits,” Raygun explained. “You can express yourself in an organic way and create something that speaks to your truth and what you like. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all wanted to do this for a long time and being able to hold what you did in your hands and be proud of it is a real thrill.”

The rest of the band is: Kelly Venus, guitar; Aubrey O'Blivion on bass; and Evil Dr. Mike on drums.

Musically, what sticks out is just how blues-based the music is. We’ll spare you the two-steps-from-the-blues statement that we make in just about every post, but once again the Venus Flytraps prove us right about that. The band has never made much of a secret about their affinity for the blues, and it comes through loud and clear on the new album. Songs like “Caught in Your Web” and “Serpents and Spiders” bellow the blues loud and clear, though nearly every cut radiates the blues to some degree or other.

The album also has some good, all-out rocking moments, too, such as the song “Floating Garden” and the previously released "Cherry Slush."

“Our blues influences were coming out in unexpected ways when we were writing this album,” Raygun confirmed. “We probably picked it up like a germ during our increasingly frequent nocturnal ventures around America’s dingiest dungeons and dives”.

Raygun went into quite a bit of depth in explaining just how central the blues is to the Venus Flytraps.

“I think the blues, like most kinds of elemental music, can take you places and reveal new things but you have to love it and respect what it’s capable of doing. Like alchemy, blues is an important base material for music especially guitar-based rock and roll and not respecting that could potentially have dire spiritual consequences. We don’t think there is much of anything worth listening to that hasn’t been touched by the blues in some way. Some of our favorites are Big Maybelle, John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. True magicians and true stars.”

Another motif that pops up throughout is an affinity for horror, science fiction and all things creepy. The Romero-esque cover, for example reinforces that ethos with it’s creepy black and white photo. Raygun helped us with the deeper dive into what the album is all about..

“This record has more crawling tempos and some distorted harmonica as well as the usual grinding guitars,” Raygun explained. “The effect we were hoping for was a particular, sleazy kind of American stripper music that you would have heard in 1940’s and 50’s nightclub.”

Not all of the songs on the album are brand new. A few of them had been released previously as singles. Still, if you are the proud owner of said songs, you still might want to pick up the album, which has some remixes.

“We did do an extra remixing session once we had completed the master tapes,” said Raygun. “Some of those noises were actually cut live and later re-added and others were sampled using found sounds or ripped from old commercials and TV. We were trying to make it a little more immersive and show the psychotic headspace we were in and can’t seem to escape from.”

The song “Ghost on the Phone” has been out a while, but it got a re-mix for the album, this time coming up as a bit more subtle and laid back, which appears to have been the point.

“"Ghost on the Phone' was fun to mess with because it already puts us in a trance,” Raygun explained. “So we wanted to push the limits of how we could use bizarre sounds to color the underlying psychedelic qualities. Some of the synth noise we were able to replicate sounded like the giant ants in the proto ‘nuclear monster’ flick “Them!” which was a great personal highlight for me.”

Even in the streaming age, any band that wants to be successful needs to figure out how to get the one thing that’s been the part of the rock and roll equation since the music’s birth: airplay. Raygun reports that the band has had some success in that pursuit.

“We’ve gotten some local play from WCSB,” Raygun reported, “and we’ve also been played on Goldie’s Garage, girl group legend of Goldie and the Gingerbreads and punk producer extraordinaire Genya Ravan’s show on Little Steven’s Underground Garage. It’s popped up in a few strangers radars and mysteriously gotten back to us. Kelly’s sister’s boyfriend was on a basketball message board and someone had posted a link recommending our music there. Things like that are surreal but they seem to happen to us all the time.”

Raygun even parted with directions on how to best enjoy the album.

“We hope everyone gets out of it what we did; a good time. Listen loud with the lights low and your favorite black and white horror movie playing on mute. And if any of you groovy ghouls out there have a floor and a PA, we would love to bring our psychedelic circus of sights and sounds to your town!”

We have some other features already in the works here at Garagerocktopia. Artists have been sending us some very cool stuff. As always, we don’t make any guarantees in stone but we’re happy to say we’ve gotten a lot of very promising music sent to us, and we’re always happy to spread the word about about bands that are playing the way-out kinds of music we profile here. Send us a line and we’ll talk.

Also, we do have a Facebook page for this blog. We don’t put personal stuff on it – no pictures of grandkids or our dinners or politics or anything like that. What we do post are announcements about upcoming features, maybe extra stuff about the bands, and any cool music, movies or TV Shows we stumble across that might have even the most tangential connection with the music featured here. While we don't spend all day thinking about it, we do like "likes" if you're so inclined ...