When Cincinnati rockers Foxy Shazam went on an extended and possibly permanent hiatus late in 2014, trumpeter Alex Nauth considered his next steps. Bandless, jobless and aimless, Nauth battled melancholy and the reality of his situation until his salvation appeared unexpectedly.
“I was pretty depressed for months, and you get to a point where you’ve got to do something,” Nauth says. “I didn’t have money to go into a studio, so I wasn’t thinking about making a record. It really all came down to talking to my father-in-law. One day, we were having a beer — I didn’t have a job and he had a day off — and we were talking about everything and he was like, ‘I have this spare Mac that I’m not using, I can let you borrow it.’ From that point on, it was, ‘Now I can see something, I can just do it myself, I can make it happen.’ That just kind of kicked it into gear.”
Nauth’s higher gear became the seminal launch of The Skulx, his first post-Foxy project. Ironically, Nauth’s friend Mat Franklin, guitarist/vocalist for Columbus, Ohio’s Cadaver Dogs, had contacted him after the announcement of Foxy’s shuttering with the emphatic idea of making music.
“Mat hit me up immediately, and was like, ‘Let’s do something, let’s write,’ and back then, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Nauth says. “To be honest, I probably wasn’t quite sure who I was without Foxy at that point, but because of it, I wrote so much material from that emotional period.”
When this all began early last year, the lineup was Nauth, Franklin and Cadaver Dogs drummer Lex Vegas. Nauth and Franklin had previously played together in Silver Punch and all three had been in Look Afraid. The trio convened in Columbus and worked on the songs that Nauth had written, searching for their own unique sonic identity beyond the long shadows of their other bands.
“We didn’t have a real, full band,” Nauth says. “We had these songs that we put together, the three of us, as best we could. I was piecing it, playing guitar and bass but not singing — I do it for writing, but doing it together, especially in the live scenario, is not my bag. But we made it work. We wanted to come up with something unique, something we wouldn’t have written together in the past. I’m sure they were freaked out because I was going full force.”
What The Skulx created, along with help from an all-star cast — Eric Nally, Daisy Caplan, Sky White and Loren Turner from Foxy Shazam, plus members of Slash and the Conspirators, Bad Rabbit, Larry and His Flask, Honeyspiders and Good English, among others — was a Rock document that quivers with the same kind of virgin-territory excitement as first albums by The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and Squeeze. The Skulx’s eponymous debut folds the standard blueprint of Rock into a giant origami swan, turns it on its head, spray paints it with fluorescent colors, dusts it with powdered sugar and puts a match to it.
“I wanted to do this amazing Punk record, but just weird,” Nauth says. “Back to the roots, but the heart of it is just Punk. That’s the way I feel when I get with those guys. So I told them I was going to record it, and it was the first time I’ve ever done that, so they were like, ‘Uh, alright, we’ll give it a shot.’ I’m sure my confidence pushed them over the edge.”
Given its limited resources, The Skulx’s nine-track debut has the big, expansive sound of a well-funded production. Nauth’s technical skills resulted from years of watching the process behind the scenes with Foxy.“I figured I could make it work with my ear and not the gear,” he says. “It would be embarrassing to tell people what I did the record with. But that was the idea; we had songs we believed in, an idea of what they could sound like and the control over making them that way.”Since the album’s completion, the trio has become a full-blown band with the addition of guitarist Josh Pilot (ex-KillTones) and Dayton bassist Christian Roerig (The Nightbeast, Astro Fang). Between the momentum of the band’s increased firepower and their New Artist of the Year nomination, Nauth is anticipating the quintet version of The Skulx hitting the studio — not to mention several ideas he isn’t ready to divulge just yet — and to take every stage like an occupying army.“We created the songs in the basement and wrote the basic parts, and we had to keep those parts in our heads because they weren’t being played live back at us all the time,” Nauth says. “The sound in our heads had to be the same as we were constructing it because a lot of it wasn’t there. The first show we played with Josh and Christian, I wasn’t even sure. I’ve seen Christian with Nightbeast, but he has a character where he stands there looking like he hates his life. And I knew The KillTones a little when I was in Foxy, and Josh was always quiet and soft-spoken and humble, so I didn’t know what it was going to be like on stage. I remember the first show, and turning around and watching everybody go nuts, and it sounding all right — I was like, ‘We’ve got a band.’ It probably shouldn’t have worked and it actually worked. We’ve got something special, you can just tell.”
For more on THE SKULX, visit theskulx.com.
For more on the 2016 CINCINNATI ENTERTAINMENT AWARDS, visit citybeat.com's CEA page.
