Photo credit: End Of Pretend
Dodgeball Club
Before their band Dodgeball Club settled on a more pop-punk direction, guitarists Chad Kreinus and Aaron Bernard had fantasized about being in an ’80s hair-metal band together. “Me and Chad grew up wanting to be guitar heroes,” Bernard recalls. “We looked up to ’80s guitarists like Eddie Van Halen. We just really dig the sound of that era, the style of it and the in-your-face rock ’n’ roll of it all. There’s just something about all that riffage.”
Though the band they ended up forming with drummer Ryan Biwer and bassist Nick Ferrante owes more to the buoyant punk and alt-rock of bands like Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World than the flamboyant pop-metal of Warrant or Mötley Crüe, Kreinus and Bernard haven’t completely let go of their hard-rock fantasies. “You can tell there’s some influence from the ’80s still,” Bernard says of Dodgeball Club’s debut EP, That’s What The Kids Say. “Not a crazy amount, but it’s in there.”
The influence is never more apparent than on the EP’s title track: a Weezer-ified homage to ’80s hard-rock that the band wrote on a lark. With its unruly “Beverly Hills” riff and its high-fiving, Bros-Icing-Bros spirit, it’s by far the most carefree track on the EP, which the band recorded at Cherry Pit Studios in Menomonee Falls.
“That song was written in less than an hour—30-45 minutes, honestly,” Bernard says. “At every practice we go through our set, then at the end we have time to mess around, and Chad came up with that riff. And we were just playing around with it, coming up with joke lyrics and having fun. And after playing it through, I was like, ‘I actually like how that sounds.’ It became one of our favorites.”
The rest of the EP is never quite so over the top. “Carry Me Over” and “Only The Young” project chest-beating urgency, while “Way Out West” flirts with Americana (albeit at a blitzing high-tempo), and the single “She Loves You” showcases the band’s melodramatic side. But nearly every song aims for the gut, and a couple could pass as a first or second take.
“I feel like sometimes when you overthink a song or you add too much to it, you lose some of the nuance,” Bernard says. “Honestly, we just want to have fun as a band. That’s what we’re all about. Like, obvious we do want to be a serious band. But at the same time, we’re making music. It’s supposed to be fun. We’re not going to take ourselves too seriously doing it.”
So far the band has mostly been playing shows around Bay View, Riverwest and the East Side, but Bernard says they hope to begin playing regional shows in Madison and Chicago soon. And, while they only have a five-song EP to their name so far, it’s not for lack of material.
“We have so many more songs up our sleeves,” Bernard says. “We want the world to hear them; we just need to scrape together the cash to get them recorded.”
Dodgeball Club headline a show at Frank’s Power Plant (2800 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.) with The First Rule, Clem and False Flag Renaissance on Saturday, April 21, at 9 p.m. They’ll also play a show at the Riverwest Public House on Friday, April 27, as part of a bill with The Red Flags, Blindspot and Man Random at 8 p.m.
