Sound and Fury

"It's all about having fun, running wild and getting crazy!" says Luke Metcalf, lead singer and composer of the sneering, snarling brute force known as Sound and FURY.

Sound and Fury's self titled debut album will rattle your ribcage with such scrap bone rockers as "School's Out," "Eighteen," "Bad Touch," "Runaway Love," and "Teenage Rampage," while the group - Metcalf, guitarist Griffin and Daz, ex-Age Of Electric bass player Jon Kerns and skin beater Chris Avalos - tap the adrenaline and desperation of raw survival, gear it into overdrive and ricochet that primal energy off the eardrums and craniums of its rabid fan base.

For a few years Metcalf moved around a lot, getting kicked out of 3 different high schools for various incidents, then being thrown out of his house. "I had no money, no job and no place to live but I got lucky and got a job on a farm the same day I got kicked out." He worked there all summer, then went to California by bus to meet up with a friend. "When I got there my buddy and his father were being evicted. They were broke too so we ended up living for weeks in their car, then we squatted in some abandoned house in East Oakland for a month, then lived in a motel room with eleven street punk kids, like, squeegee kids, it was pretty wild." The next year was spent scrounging for good times in the land of the next: the next high, the next drink, the next lay, the next meal -- often in that order. "Whoever had a bottle of booze or a bag of weed or party supplies, we'd get together and get wasted. We'd scrounge food and occasionally somebody would get a job and they would have some extra cash. And that's reflected in my music. The songs are all either about my wild times in high school or about my extreme lifestyle afterwards, living day-to-day in the moment, where your whole focus is trying to survive for that day - trying to get food, find a place to crash and have some kind of good times - get food, get drugs, get booze... I'm trying to recapture that feeling with Sound and Fury. It was great, I had lots of fun and met a lot of cool people.

Luke also lived in the desert in Arizona for some time, then New York, then back to Arizona then California again. Finally he decided to return to Toronto to get his music career going. He immediately set up a recording space in a cramped basement and got to work.

"I was in a situation where, for awhile, I could devote myself almost entirely to music." He had his old drum set, a bass guitar, rhythm guitar, an amp and an old Fostex reel-to-reel 8-track a buddy had lent him. "It's no exaggeration that I spent a solid year in that basement at least ten hours a day every day writing the songs and recording the tracks, playing all the instruments." At the end of the year Metcalf had finished the rough versions of forty-five songs.

"I played all the instruments on the early demo's except I don't play lead guitar solo's, but when I recorded the songs I had left space for guitar solo's, sort of "insert solo here" so I began calling around looking for someone to come in and record some solo's over the songs I had written. I ended up contacting Griffin who had been a buddy of mine in high school. He spent a couple weeks recording the solo's and they worked well over my rhythm guitar riffs so I asked him if he wanted to start a band." Over the coming year they went through various stages of recording and performing with various musicians until settling on the lineup in place today. Says Metcalf: "It's great, the guys are awesome! I'm really psyched about how the music and lyrics that I spent so much time writing and composing have turned out and I can't wait to take the band on the road and kick some ass."

So maybe the pen is mightier than the sword, but Luke Metcalf promises that Sound and FURY will stab conformity through the heart and celebrate the spoils with the devoted fans that hitch a ride to their powerful, adrenaline-pumping sound. "We don't take ourselves that seriously. This is about going out and getting crazy, for kids who want to go out and have a good time. I wanna party with the kids who live for rock n roll – no bullshit, down 'n dirty, ferocious rock 'n roll. People who really sincerely live for that music and don't give a shit about anything else."