THE CUTTING ROOM: Designer Virus

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Every week, I go out and interview a band (or two) and we usually speak for an hour, 90 minutes or more. I fill my notebook with scribbles and/or load up a voice recorder every time. Yet, with the confines of print media, I have to somehow scramble all of that down to about 1,000 words or less. Much of what doesn't make it into print probably wouldn't interest most readers, but a lot of it is interesting for music geeks like me. So, this is some of what didn't make it into print:

DESIGNER VIRUS

My brain's been sucked dry by various news stories — elections, Calhoun County consolidated dispatch, et. al — making the very sight of a computer keyboard seem a treacherous thing. It pains me to see all those letters looking back at me, and they become cluttered in my head before I even sit down. Then, when I finally do get to a desk and try to work out on something genuinely fun, like music, I'm so spent of creative juices that I can't think of anything to say.

Anyway, that's a reason but not an excuse for the week or so I've gone without posting anything, and I apologize.

So let's get down to Designer Virus, the Kalamazoo five-piece featured in last week's WOW.

Most of what we talked about is included in the story, because the amount of time I'm able to spend with bands has shrunk, so this won't necessarily be a "cutting room" entry, but there is something frontman Benny West said that I want to get into: "I'm an emotional dude."

Probably an understatement, when you listen to the way West screams in the song "Gas Chamber," featured in this video. That song, West said, is about three sides of a heroin addict's personality conflicting with each other. Pretty emotional stuff, for anyone who knows anything about it.

But, there is also this line from West: "It makes me feel fairly sad or fairly angry at shows. But at the end of it, I feel good, because it helps me express myself."

That is something I think too few people remember about hard, screaming  rock 'n' roll, or negative-sounding lyrics, or moodiness in song. I recall the woman in front of me at the Everclear concert in Mt. Clemens, who said her friends couldn't understand her attraction to the band because, "They're too negative."

But Everclear's music, and Designer Virus' music, like much, but not all, rock 'n' roll songs with seemingly depressing lyrics and violent chord progressions, is about exercising that negativity, and helping others  do the same. In times of petulant anger, I've turned my ear to many a vicious song. Having scream at me the same things I was screaming inside helped keep me from bottling those things up — which many therapists have told me is very harmful to the psyche.

And the feeling is even better to stand on a stage in front of a couple hundred people who feel connected to you when you scream your emotions at them, in song.

So don't think Designer Virus' music is made angsty in the hope some listening geek will get depressed. It's made, from my understanding, to help that listening geek know he's not the only one who's angry or sad.