Article - West End Motel’s extended stay
The band has been gathering members and momentum over the past year
Originally a duo featuring singer Tom Cheshire (All Night Drug Prowling Wolves, Rent Boys) and guitarist Brent Hinds (Fiend Without a Face, Mastodon), West End Motel has been gathering members and momentum over the past year. The group’s now a six-piece, though the lineup fluctuates: Guitarists Mike Shina and Ben Thrower buttress Hinds, Stiff Penalty plays bass, and for the moment, Mark Carbone is on the drums. They’ve accumulated a large complement of songs and have planned a series of releases over the next year to join the four-song 7-inch recorded in 2005 and released last year.
Cheshire and Hinds first met at a Fiend Without a Face show a few years ago, where Cheshire concluded the group was his favorite band and Hinds his favorite guitarist. “I then decided I was going to make him my best friend,” Cheshire writes from Chile, where he’s spent the last couple of weeks.
Many brews and trees later, they forged a partnership producing music unlike anything they’d created with their other bands: Rustic and ragged, the short country-blues tunes sound soaked in whiskey and scarred by a hard wind.
“We both wanted to show another aspect of our talents. I have ADHD, so I knew the songs had to be simple. I wanted them to be fast but slow and hard but soft,” says Cheshire, who just wrote a new song, “Chilean Man,” while drunk on piscola in the Andes. He says the latest tracks have been even more fun to create, thanks to the larger lineup. “As a group, we are evolving. We only write good songs, plain and simple. The law is the law.”
West End Motel has already recorded seven new songs live, which it plans to release soon via record. Cheshire foresees two more finished records by next summer, with seven songs on each. “We like the number seven,” he explains.
The group has plans for some shows in New York and Europe. With Hinds’ busy schedule, there’s no assurance he’ll be at every one, but Hinds will play whenever he can, Cheshire says. Meanwhile, All Night Drug Prowling Wolves recently finished a full-length due for release next spring on the Colonel Records. This week’s Christmas show at the Earl features special guest Drew DeMann on accordion, as well as Hinds’ old band Fiend Without a Face, rekindling memories of the original duo’s first encounter.