Consisting of drummer/keyboardist Dino Campanella, vocalist/guitarist Gavin Hayes, guitarist Mark Engles and bassist Drew Roulette, Dredg is the California quartet that continuously embodies and redefines the term avant-garde. Their fourth album, The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion, once again jolts the realms of conventionality with a flair that intelligently blends kaleidoscope views and a pristine ferocity.
The record, which was somewhat inspired by a Salman Rushdie essay, missed its initial release date, but proved well worth the wait, and Gavin explained why. “I think the main reason was to distribute it properly, and all these little things that add up.”
“Cartoon Showroom” really displays the utter lushness of Gavin’s voice while “Information” is a satisfying epic with a narrative that feeds the imagination and “Savior” is the band at their visceral best.
Currently on a co-headlining tour with RX Bandits, Dredg have truly outdone themselves with the additive The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion. Gavin spoke about their new imprint and quite candidly about the unique way he recently got to explore his musical lineage.
The new album has a little more physicality to it, verses the more cerebral and trippy material you’re known for.
Yeah, I agree absolutely. It’s a little more assertive, I think. Certain aspects are cerebral, and back to our older records, but yeah, I think in general—I don’t know where it came from at the time, but yeah, I would have to agree with you there.
How did you spend your downtime between writing this record and your last tour?
A lot of it was writing and working really shitty part-time jobs. We toured on Catch Without Arms in October of ‘05, we toured on that for a good 13 months. It took a little longer than we had planed; we ended up changing labels in the middle of the writing process, which put a few months of a damper on things. This record was really important to us, and we took our time to get it where we wanted it to be from a writing standpoint and a production standpoint.
What were some of those part-time jobs?
They weren’t really shitty, but it was within music. It was like a Rock The Vote type of thing, which is no longer actually, because they lost some funding. It was a nonprofit organization. I worked there for awhile, I had a few friends that worked at the company and they offered me the job. I could always use a few extra dollars since we are musicians and happily broke. I did basically little jobs and most of them were through friends like, ‘Hey, I can get you six months over here, do you want to do this?’ It’s kind of nice to do to be honest, it’s not like a full-time thing—that mixed with writing songs, is just a good balance.
