Milemarker is one of the most important bands in the punk scene right now. They're one of the few bands currently around that have real lyrical substance and plays music that is just as affecting as what they have to say. This makes Milemarker stand apart at a time where the underground rock community is polarized by either bands with a direct political agenda or bands who are just trying to write music. Their combination of the typical rock band setup with their penchant for droning moody electronics and keyboards has translated well now to four full length albums, a slew of singles, and an EP slated to come out this August called "Satanic Versus." On top of their focus on Milemarker the band members all keep themselves extraordinarily busy with other musical projects, several zines, and puppeteering.

This past June at Columbus, Ohio's free Springfest Milemarker joined myself and other Bettawreckonize staff members at a nearby campus bar to clarify some myths about the band, the current direction of their sound, and their new EP.

Interview conducted in person by Dan Rizer. Photographs by Jason Laveris and Anne Anderl.

Names: Al Burian (vocals, keyboard, bass), Roby Newton (vocals keyboard), Noah (drums), Dave Laney (guitar, vocals)
Band: Milemarker

Bettawreckonize: So, what is it about Milemarker that makes it worthwhile for you guys to do?

Noah: Ten part answer starting now!
Al: It's more like what is it about everything else that makes it not worthwhile to do. Milemarker just seems like the natural thing to do. I wouldn't think of it as like I found some great calling... it just seems like the obvious thing to do.
Roby: And I wouldn't want to work at some crappy job all the time.

BW: Everyone in the band has other projects outside of Milemarker, how do you balance everything else out with playing music together?

A: Well, it's really quite complicated, way more complicated than it probably needs to be. It involves everyone having calendars...
R: ...multiple calendars...
A: ... yes, and keeping them marked, usually with multiple colors of markers. But it still gets very complicated with all this stuff and it makes this seem very "full time," which is cool but it can also be very stressful.
Dave: I know what I'm doing next March right now, if I'm still alive. It's insane, my calendar's pretty thick.
A: It's weird to kind of base your life on your art projects and your hobbies and end up having it be more regimented than someone with a normal job.

BW: So how do your personal lives weigh out in the grand scheme of things?

R: Define personal life.
A: I think Noah has more of a personal life.
R: Noah has one, he's the only one actually.
D: Yeah, you have friends.
N: Yes, I have this wonderful girlfriend that I'm super committed to and I make time in my life for her on a regular basis. I do have friends that I still need to get in contact with in certain ways, but I work it out, I even have a job.

Jason Laveris: So the rest of you don't have jobs?

D: I am an employee and I don't care what anyone says.
A: Dave works at the Fireside Bowl, if you can call that a job. I work at this bookstore called Quimby's if you can call that a job.
R: I just quit my really high profile record store job.
A: Roby's going full time with the puppet shows.

BW: Your live shows are very theatrical, but not in a "Let's get dressed up and play" sort of way. Do you ever conceptualize what's going to happen from one show to the next?

D: We talk about it. We sort of kick around ideas all the time and say "Wouldn't it be neat if we did this...?"
R: In the past maybe more. I mean we still do now but we have more concrete ideas about what we want to say or do as far as a gimmick or an idea. But it depends. I mean if we're really focused on the music then we're probably not going to be thinking of some new idea for something new to do on stage. It really varies.
A: It's harder too when your on tour. You can't change what you do every night.
D: It's never like "Hey Al throw your bass up and I'll pose my guitar like this." It's not that type of coordinating.
A: It's almost like the opposite in fact. When we play these songs enough, you almost find yourself like "throwing the bass up" at a certain point in a song every time. That's when we start to say we need to do something so it stops being predictable. I'm into theatrical, but I'm not into having it rehearsed. We don't want to take away the spontaneity or the ability to be able to just knock everything over or just do what you want. I think a lot of what we come up with is an attempt to throw things off balance and make even ourselves unsure of how everything is going to work out.

BW: Your earlier records were kind of polar opposites of what your live shows were at that time. When did Milemarker start to make a transition to having your live shows sound more like your recorded work?

A: I don't think we ever really tried to do that. I think that maybe has happened but there wasn't really an effort to do so.
D: It was really all the records that Ben Davis played on that the whole live thing was so different than the recorded, much more so than it is now. Ben sang on a third of those songs and we just technically couldn't perform those songs live early on. Those songs are pretty much gone now for better or worse. We also did a lot of weirder computer stuff that pretty much ruled those songs out for being able to play them live.
A: I've always thought of records as a much different thing than playing live. When we make a record we try to make the best possible record that we can, and when we play live we try to have the best performance that we can. I'm not necessarily worried about replicating the albums when playing live so that people can hear what they want to hear.
D: I hate seeing bands live that sound like their records. I recently saw a band live that I was pretty psyched to see and they just stood there and it sounded just like the record. I mean technically they were flawless, but I could have just turned up my record really loud and it would have left me feeling the same. I can't really listen to that band anymore.

BW: A number of your songs deal with mankind's technological growth. What are your views on technology and its relationship to the band?

A: I think that there is a level to which you are drawn to it and another level at which you're opposed to it. We generally are pretty in to using technology when we can. We've done a lot with trying to record ourselves, using computers to record ourselves, and trying to play live with them. We're open to the idea of incorporating it and we're sort of interested in it and Dave's especially good with computers. Then on the other hand there's sort of a broad social level where you can kind of look at how technology is having a negative impact on First World society and be critical of that. But it's hard to argue against everyone's lives being on computer files, and the fact that the government can track everything you do while your using a computer program to sequence a song that you've recorded.
D: Yeah, there's definitely two distinct levels of it. There's the level that affects you personally and then there's the level that's totally detached from you in the sense of surveillance and tracking, which can get into some pretty thick conspiracy theories. But nonetheless it's scary overall when you see it in action regardless of the conspiracy crap. Plus, it's hard to say we're anti-technology when you come walking up and I'm working on my laptop.
R: I don't think any of us would mind if technology was suddenly lost. If one day all of this just crumbled and all systems failed I think we would be fine with that.
A: It's sort of about using what you have available. The cool thing about technology and utilizing it is that it's sort of like an equalizer. As a band for instance, you no longer have to be dependent on other people to produce things for you. Now with the CD you can just burn a copy of an album for your band and the CD is one of the most technological formats there is. But on the other hand if civilization were to crumble... you know, just grab an acoustic guitar and a horse and do what you can with what's exposed to you.
N: Speaking as the outsider I was when I was first learning Milemarker songs for our first tour together, I was under the impression that the band was enamored by and in awe of technology.

BW: It kind of comes across that way. A lot of your imagery and your lyrics... it's pretty cryptic. Plus just the fact that you use technology and computers so much in your songwriting.

A: Living in the United States or living in the First World in general it has become a very crucial political issue. Everyone's involved in it whether you're making a very self-conscious effort to avoid it or whether you're totally embracing it, you're reacting to it somehow. You look at a country that is ready to put satellites into space to create a shield against long range nuclear weapons but then at the same time people are able to hijack an airplane and ram it into a building. It makes you kind of realize that no matter how advanced you are if you build a 14 foot wall somebody will build a 16 foot ladder. Unfortunately that is what's happening right now.

BW: Milemarker falls into a unique position of being a political band that has many fans that may not view you as such. Where does the band draw the line between writing engaging music and conveying a political message?

R: Well, it's music versus lyrics I suppose. That's kind of an immediate answer. I mean we try to write good music but lyrically we try to be a bit more. We want our songs to be more than just your average love song. At certain points when we play live we try to talk about political issues with our audience and I think that maybe helps to change perceptions a little more.

BW: What usually comes first, the music or the message?

A: Those things usually happen in different rooms in a sort of way. When we're in the practice space we're playing music and writing music and thinking about music. But at the same time one of us could be reading something or thinking about something that's going to end up being the lyrical content. It's not like "Man we need to start writing some songs about feminism, all right let's go to the practice space tomorrow and do that."
D: Everybody in the band could sing a song about getting dumped in a relationship or something without really having to sing a song about getting dumped... without using that as a metaphor for something bigger. I think we can all trust one another though because there is this greater idea that we're just friends playing music together. So there's this commonality of thought that's present in everybody so that we all operate on the same sort of plane. I appreciate the Dead Kennedy's lyrics more than Blink 182's and therefore I don't want to write lyrics like Blink 182's. I just don't.
A: Part of it as well is that we don't set out to be a political band, but we all think about that kind of stuff and they're topics that we might be sitting around casually discussing. We don't have band meetings trying to decide what our agenda is, we just try to be expressive.

BW: Your last album covers for Frigid Forms Sell and Anaesthetic have very superficial looking imagery on them, what were the ideas behind those covers?

A: The Frigid Forms Sell album cover is really trying to replicate advertising, or a clothing catalog by dressing up the band members to look like fashion models to try and make the point that it's all just veneer and illusory. It really became about construction of image in advertising. With Anaesthetic the album art is sort of...
R: ...Cotton candy... cotton candy laced with prozac. (laughter)
D: The Frigid Forms Sell album cover really fit the content of the album, with all of the songs dealing with modification in some way. With Anaesthetic the idea was to make it not represent the album content at all, and to have it kind of put everybody off... Hide the lyrics, to avoid giving people what they want. People will open it up and say "Oh great nothing to read," so that people can go and tell their friends "Yeah, there's nothing there anymore, they totally sold out, the lyrics are gone." That's exactly what I wanted.

BW: You wanted the controversy?

D: Yeah...
A: We made this album called Frigid Forms Sell, and the basic joke of it is that if we put pictures of ourselves on the cover looking sort of attractive and model like it will sell more records. And for the standard amount at which our records usually sell at, it sort of worked. So instead of releasing Anaesthetic and giving the people what they expect it's like okay you want the pink pony, here's the pink pony.
D: Don't call the damn thing a pony. (laughter)
A: It's not a unicorn... it's a Pegasus.

BW: Milemarker has gone through several lineup changes over the years, how is the current line-up affecting the direction of your sound?

N: What a great question.
D: What do you think, Noah?
N: I think we all have a lot of varied musical interests and I know how outrageously excited I get when I buy a new record that I really love or when I find an old one that I haven't heard in a while. We've been practicing a lot lately, so I've been coming in more and more often jumping up and down about whatever Van Halen song I had been listening to. I think it's safe to say that most bands use their influences in a certain respectful way when writing new music. The mix of elements right now in the band makes perfect sense with where we're at with our influences.
A: I think I may be quoting somebody from Iron Maiden here almost verbatim when I say that "I think this definitely the best line-up of the band yet." (laughter)

BW: You have a new 6 song EP called Satanic Versus out in August. What can you tell us about the new record?

D: It's kind of a crossover EP in many ways. It's strange because Noah's been playing drums in Milemarker for about a year now, but Noah couldn't go on this one leg of a tour that we're doing so this other guy, Tim, filled in for Noah. So we wrote a song with Tim and that's on the EP, one that we re-wrote with Noah is on the EP. It's the first record without Sean since he's been in the band. It has a few electronic songs on it.

BW: Like no guitar type electronic songs?

A: Yeah, songs that were made on a computer type electronic songs. My feeling on it is that it's a pretty dark record. It's not the type of recording where we just had some songs lying around and we just assembled them for this. I feel that it's pretty cohesive. I don't know, it's been pretty strange times recently.
N: I didn't think it had much continuity at all until we listened to it all the way through the other day. I think it's a pretty unique group of songs.
D: I'm pretty excited about it. It's almost like the antithesis of Anaesthetic, it's much more raw sounding.
A: It was recorded a lot differently this time. We recorded half of it and Steve Albini recorded the other half.
D: I think we really make an effort to make all of our songs pretty different. The EP almost comes off like a cross between Anaesthetic and Future-Isms. It leaves us with a lot of directions that we can possibly go and still have continuity.