From Duluth, MN, active mid/late 2000's. It's definitely pretty mid 00's skram sounding. I do know that they are from the same place as Bear Garden, and they sound actually somewhat similar as well. No info other than that. I've been looking for more tracks by them, to no luck really. Here's just some that I ripped off their myspace.
Demo
Update: heard from the vocalist and he answered some questions about the band
BLATO interview:
Does this "discography" on my blog have all that you've released?
No, unfortunately not. We wrote one song after the first two songs of the demo. I can’t remember the name of it but it had a heavier breakdown and was my favorite song we wrote but unfortunately never got recorded. Having an ” open chugged” (our guitarist Odin could probably explain it better) was a little different from how we thought about screamo in 2006. Being that we thought of breakdowns as being for hardcore and metalcore bands, not screamo (skramz started being used around 2007-8).
Did you, or any of the other band members play in any other bands after/before?
I know Steve-o (this was peak Jackass days and Steve could actually skate really well) played in a short-lived hardcore band that was trying to do like a Terror-Hatebreed thing called All I Have.
I did vocals for a couple of different bands: an old school hardcore punk band (that was a drunken wreck) called Bad Cop Bad Cop. Tthen after moving to Minneapolis I briefly did vocals for the band Cowards, which featured members of Bear Garden and Corrosive Melody on guitar, bass, and drums.
I also did vocals for a brief project called Cannons (weirdly similar to Cowards name-wise but totally different groups of people). Which was members of Minneapolis tough-guy hardcore band Earn Your Stripes. We did like Converge-Cursed sounding kinda dark hardcore band.
As
well as some guest vocals for Duluth metalcore band Count Backwards
from Ten; I was more into traditional hardcore then, so I tried
replicating the first vocalist of Comeback Kid style as well as the
vocalist for the band first After the Burial’s first album
I don’t know if any of the guys are doing any active creative projects nowadays. I myself have some non-music things I’ve done, some writing I’ve had published in the magazine Apocalypse Confidential as well as some podcast appearances on Programmed to Chill I’ll include some links from my substack:
https://open.substack.com/pub/trashe5e/p/podcast-appearances?r=j3388&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Do you have any thoughts or words on the scene that you were part of (where were you from)?
We were a total anomaly, a product of the first generation to have access to highspeed internet. Being in Duluth, Minnesota (and the rest of the Iron Range as well as Grand Rapids, MN (where A Corrosive Melody were from)) we had no legacy of diy punk and hardcore. No real older scene bands to help induct us, like they have on either coast or even the bigger Midwest cities like Milwaukee and Chicago. The closest thing we had to counter-culture music was the slo-core band Low (who I loved as a teenager as well as now, but obviously weren’t playing hardcore).
Honestly I learned about diy, screamo, and hardcore through going online and getting dunked-on on messageboards, as well as the year or two older guys who played in Bear Garden. So, being a precocious kid whose parents had a rule that I always be reading a book outside of the book that my Catholic elementary school had me reading (which was like a stipulation of the curriculum), I got really into researching these scenes that made music I loved instantly.
The second I heard Circle Takes the Square’s album As the Roots Undo and Neil Perry’s Lineage Situation I was obsessed. I thought this was the most interesting and emotionally compelling music I had ever heard.
Did you play any shows with interesting/noteworthy bands?
BLATO only played two real shows: some random show in middle of nowhere N. Wisconsin with some As I Lay Dying-type bands and then Bear Garden’s 2006 ep release show at Rice Lake Town Hall (which is a legendary show for Duluth millennials in the know).
Bear Garden was the biggest band lol. We were a brief flicker of a band. Odin’s guitar playing was really phenomenal and he was the lynchpin: locking in with Steve and Garrett (our bassist) and really orchestrating the band.
Except for my vocal parts which he pretty much just left for me to figure out. For that, and to anyone trying to be a screamo or hardcore vocalist, it was all about locking in with Steve’s drumming. Granted I paid attention to what Odin was doing, as I’m a guitarist myself, but the most important part, in my eyes, is for the vocalist to follow the beat (being a big fan of rap helps).
admittedly I overshot with the last song “I touched a shark” with the chant-gang vocal part, but also I was 16 and just really wanted to have a cool gang-vocal, chant part. I’d probably cut that these days (or spend more time getting the timing right).
Also, when were you active from, and where exactly?
Pretty much just the one year 2006. To be honest I had not the best childhood and dealt with a lot of legal problems during that time. I was put on probation shortly after we recorded the demo and spent a lot of time in juvenile treatment centers as a teenager. So it was hard to keep a band going when my parents didn’t support it and I had a probation officer breathing down my back.
I was really passionate about it but my parents didn’t really care or support me. They didn’t really like me lol.
Any final thoughts to put on the post for my blog?
Just that this is crazy that people are into this and found it independent of any of us who were actually involved. I moved away from Duluth two years later in 2008; becoming a bike messenger in Minneapolis and then Chicago, becoming an upper-tier owner of Cut Cats Courier. I really didn’t fit in with the Minneapolis punk scene as I was a working class kid from “Up North”; I fit in much better with the messenger scene of people who were based more around work, seeing as I didn’t come from money and didn’t have a trustfund.
But I always wished I had the freetime and ability to start a hardore band, of whatever stripe. I love it all: Circle Takes the Square and Jeromes Dream on down to Hatebreed and Terror as well as Spazz and From Ashes Rise…all of it, hardcore fucking rules and it is my bread and butter.
And honestly it's a big part of why I’m still alive.
