As if recording wasn’t tough enough, imagine having to play drums with a bad cold and having your mouth covered with duct tape. Alas, that’s where Mad At Gravity’s Jake Fowler found himself while recording the band’s debut release, Resonance. Turns out he has a tendency to grunt and groan while playing. Perhaps it was Fowler’s early fascination with all things hard rock, from Led Zeppelin to Motley Crue to Deftones, that led to his overly audible playing style. Then again, maybe it’s just because Fowler is passionate about drumming.

“I’ve been playing drums for about twenty years,” Jake says, “in just about every type of band there is–rock, goth, nu-metal – all sorts of stuff.” Bands such as Korn, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Soundgarden dot his modern-day influences. But Fowler says that when he started to put this band together, he was looking for something different. “That stuff is really aggressive,” Jake says, “but I kind of got that out of my system. I didn’t want to have another nu-metal band this time around. I wanted to have a more timeless kind of rock band.”

Mad At Gravity blends the best of driving rock and hooky pop with touches of odd time signatures. “Walk Away,” the band’s first single, is in three, “Burn” is in seven, and the tune “Historypeats” shifts between three different time signatures. Listeners might hear some Josh Freese influences on the album. “Probably a lot of that was because I was stealing Josh’s work,” Fowler admits with a laugh. “I stole the beginning thing that he does in A Perfect Circle’s “Judith” for “Walk Away” because it’s in three. I wasn’t purposely trying to do it, I listened back and was like, Oh, no.” Advertisement

“Burn” offers Fowler the opportunity to expand on that approach. “It was a challenge to take a song in seven and make it groove,” he reports. “But it was a lot of fun. People really respond to that one live, because I think it’s a lot different from your average song.”