Inside The Heart Of Cursed
Wednesday May 07, 2008 @ 11:00 AM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By Evan Dickson

ChartAttack got Cursed friend and confidant Evan Dickson to get vocalist Chris Colohan to reveal a bunch of the band's deepest secrets.

ChartAttack: Let's start with the tour. You're able to tour again because of your guitar player's hands?
Chris Colohan: Yeah, Christian [McMaster]'s hands. He had carpal tunnel really bad and we hadn't stopped touring or playing long enough for him to deal with it. It got bad enough that he had to have double surgery. He couldn't work. He couldn't do anything for like a year since we recorded. He's been in rehabilitation for it.

Cursed

So the album was done before he had the surgery?
Yeah. It pretty much gave him the chance to do it, because there was a pause.

Did it affect his ability to play before the surgery?
No, he was just in pain all the time. He worked a couple manual labour jobs, too. So between always working with his hands and always playing guitar, he wouldn't have been able to use his hands if he didn't have the surgery. We're all taking one for the team in different ways.

How are you taking one for the team?
My hearing. Sleep loss.

What about your voice?
Probably pretty screwed. I don't want to know. I don't want to go to a doctor and find out. I'm afraid to see what my throat looks like on the inside.

When was the last time you played live?
The shows last year: There was the one at Sneaky Dee's. We played Wavelength. We played a basement house show in Niagara Falls, and the gig at The Funhaus. We have played a lot of cool places, but not around here. We played on a boat in Sweden. We played in a corn field and a trailer park in New Jersey.

How do you get booked for a trailer park or a corn field?
It was a show we got with this band Inepsy. We didn't really know it was in a trailer park. We just followed our directions to where the show was supposed to be, and it was inside a trailer.

How could there even be room?
Oh, there wasn't. An angry, angry old man came and yelled at us. So it got busted up by cops. It's a lot to expect to have a show in a trailer.

Touring Canada is tough. So many bands end up hating each other on tour.
We hate each other on tour.

How do you deal with that?
We just hate each other. Everyone deals with it their own way.

How do you deal with it?
I get this sudden crazy intense attention span for books, just so I don't go insane. You're on stage for an hour-and-a-half of the day and then you spend the rest of it locked into your frustrations — which make you play better. The way we play as a band is kind of funny, because it requires us to be pissed off for real. It's really abusive to yourself.

What about the other guys in the band, how do they deal with touring?
They smoke a lot of weed. Yeah. I'll leave it at that.

So are you the only straight-edge dude in the band?
A.k.a. designated driver. As much as we hate each others' guts, if any one of us wasn't there, it wouldn't work at all.

Let's talk about some religious-related content in your lyrics. Like "Magic Fingers," it sounds to me that it's about religion and its role in ideology.
Yeah, it's about religion telling people that things like suicide are wrong, or trying to draw out people's lives as long as they can, but not because they care about people. Like religion and economics.

Like the Protestant work ethic.
Keep people poor and screwed for as long as you can keep them alive.

So it's about the idea of religion as the opiate of the masses, like the relationship between religion and capitalism.
That's exactly what that song is about.

Also, "Dead Air At The Pulpit," that seems to be about televangelism.
That was about Jerry Falwell. I wrote that when Jerry Falwell died.

It seems like Christianity and televangelism are easy targets.
I grew up around a lot of religion, so it's always in my head. It gives me a bone to pick forever. I look around and I see that around me, kids getting that pumped into their head...

Where did you grow up?
In Hamilton. It just takes you a whole lifetime to get these things out of your head that get stuck in your head when you're young.

Isn't that true of anyone?
For sure. That happens to be the thing that I was around.

Let's talk about a couple of your other songs. What about "Antihero Resuscitator?" Is that about rock star comebacks?
Totally! You're good, man. It's about how 100 is the new 85.

When I think about the idea of going to see The Rolling Stones right now, it's like they're really just selling memories of their younger selves.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. The Rolling Stones have been around so long they're kind of a novelty. Do you want to hear me bitch about condominiums?

Yeah! I was going to ask about that. What's wrong with condos?
Hate 'em.

OK, why do you hate them?
I just hate condo culture and definitely what it's doing in this city. There's definitely a false inflation of the worth of things and there isn't much room left for culture. Like, the city doesn't have room for itself, kind of like New York. I mean, people are being sold on coming into the city based on things that can no longer be there by virtue of the things trying to build overtop of them.

But also, condos are Toronto's response to urban sprawl. It's the city's strategy to make sure we're not all living in suburbs, which I imagine you also hate.
I don't know, man. I think it's development-driven bullshit. I don't think it represents an actual — how do I say this — like a crisis of places to live. People are selling houses they've lived in for 30 years in the 'burbs to be in the middle of the city in a tiny, tiny boxed-up thing. I just think it isolates you from the city itself.

You're 32, right?
Thirty-three.

And you're still in a DIY hardcore punk band. Not to say that that's impossible, but that sort of thing is typically the purview of people in their early twenties. Do you feel...
Painfully aware?

How does that make you feel?
I don't care about the implications on life in terms of where I'm supposed to be, because I decided as long as you can sustain your life, it doesn't really matter. So I don't ever let it get to me. I work a bunch of jobs and it's my trade-off for doing what I do.

You wrote that song "Hegel's Bastards." I haven't read any Hegel.
Hegel came up with the idea of controlled conflict: setting up two sides and controlling both of them so you know that the outcome can only be a certain thing. It relates to the War On Terror or the War On Drugs. You allow it as a conflict and it makes people act a certain way. Really, you can pinpoint that the level of alarm goes to red and the price of oil goes up. You can find the way people think and work as consumers. That's kind of American, but it really spills over to our lives a lot. That's "Hegel's Bastards."

What's the story with that dead bat in the recording video on your website?
Ah, Theresa. She was from my house. We have bats in our house.

So what did you do, you just kept her in the fridge?
We kept her there. She helped us when we needed advice about what to do. She helped us do some mixing. Sort of like our spiritual guide. We were trying to find a way to laminate her. If anybody out there knows how to laminate a dead bat in a way that holds up for years...

What about taxidermy?
Probably expensive.