Interview: Vue Weekly #297

CRUSH GROOVE

The members of Malefaction have no illusions; they are never going to be big-time rock stars. Unless the music industry goes completely insane, grindcore will never be huge. "Because we play the kind of music that we do, even if we have phenomenal success, at best we'll only be able to supplement our regular income," says vocalist Travis Tomchuk.

Still, the Winnipeg band (which also includes guitarist Clint Chiarella, drummer Cory Koss and bassist Michael Klassen) is happy grinding out a niche for themselves in Canada and the States. It also helps to be signed with one of Canada's more progressive record labels: G-7 Welcoming Committee (also home to the Weakerthans and Propagandhi).

"We never had the opportunity to deal with a real label," says Tomchuk. The band was signed after G-7 called up Malefaction one Sunday afternoon last February. "It was totally shocking," Tomchuk says. "I had to sit down after the phone call. I never expected anything like that to happen to us, and then a year and a half later, we had an end product."

Malefaction's newest disc is called "Crush the Dream," which may be only 27 minutes long, but that's an improvement on their previous disc, 1998's 16-minute-long "Man Grows Cold." The reviewers didn't seem to mind its brevity though- one critic gushed that the band was "pasting a sick, mental image of society in general and the multiple wrongdoings of man today.... Malefaction [has unleashed] one of the most powerful and totally in-sync independent LPs ever heard."

"Crush the Dream" follows the same formula: 23 songs, averaging about a minute each. Why are their songs so short? "I don't know," replies Tomchuk, "but they seem to take forever to actually be
leted when we jam it out. If it's an idea that moves me, I'll start writing about it immediately. Sometimes i have ideas ready to go and sometimes it will be months when nothing happens. I experienced that a lot for "Crush the Dream." I had some type of writer's block for a while and it's good that Mike also writes lyrics because it takes a lot of pressure off of me."