Heavy rock duo Muffler Crunch has risen.
Risen out of a Hull, Quebec neighborhood made infamous by crack busts and stabbings.
Risen from a house where the amps must be cranked up high to be heard over the warthog snorts of 18 wheelers barreling down their street and the screeching tires and pulsing stereos of bondo smeared Mustangs.
Risen from a street full of loud-mouthed drunks taking their clumsy, evening constitutionals.
When local Ottawa, Ontario rock scouts Neal Johnstone and Scott Terry (Last Drag Records) dug band members Angie “The Barbarian” Neatby (drums/vocals) and Luc Lavigne (Ol’ Sparky, the guitar) out of the dank, subterranean caves of Canadian underground rock, the band had already accumulated a belt's full of musical notches. Both members had done time in the experimental and theatrical goon-rock outfit David and Michaud. The band's only album, “Kermit Roman Numeral” remains a cult favourite among North American indie/experimental rock enthusiasts. While still working with David and Michaud, Neatby and Lavigne worked tirelessly on a variety of two-person, minimalist side projects, some of them walking a "Moldy Peaches" tightrope between the rough and the soft. As David and Michaud crumbled, MUFFLER CRUNCH surfaced.
MUFFLER CRUNCH was the name band members Neatby and Lavigne might have given their musical "moulting stage". Although David and Michaud had been a rich and artistically exciting experience, Neatby and Lavigne had no choice but to press past it as their technical talent increased day by day. The term "experimental" gradually came to mean something completely more sophisticated and refined to them than it had during past projects.
For the band’s first foray into the world of professional recording, Last Drag Records paved the way by providing an appropriately dark and chambered concrete basement recording studio, as well as all the vintage analog and digital equipment that was fast becoming very attractive to many professional musical acts at the time.
It was Last Drag Records' mission, as an indie label, to help shape MUFFLER CRUNCH's reflective, challenging, organic & coarse - yet intellectual music. Johnstone and Terry worked tirelessly alongside Neatby and Lavigne, bending and re-shaping "the bar" and pushing the sacred, unwritten limits of all that was typical of the traditional rock genre.
Muffler Crunch then proudly served up their début full length, Ol’ Sparky’s Revenge, a searing, seven song showcase for the intense vocals and blistering guitar that the duo has become known for. A brash and aggressive record, cast in the fires of brutal honesty and steeped in the heat of the tireless search for a sort of "post-modern" enlightenment - it was met with a phenomenally positive response from a considerably varied fan base, which continues to grow daily.
The duo's newest release, "ARC WELDER" (2008), is their HEAVIEST yet due to their collaboration with heavy rawk engineer extraordinaire, Ken Tierney.
Enter MUFFLER CRUNCH....enter the DEVIL.
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