“Charge into midnight overdrive and ride the ice” with Madison metal bands Wife and Panther
Panther
When Madison bands Wife and Panther tear into their live shows, attendees might feel like they’ve positioned their heads between a couple of active shotgun barrels. Linchpins and veterans of the city’s gloriously incestuous punk and metal communities—Wife features members of Winged Master, Brian Maiden, Shotdown, and Inspector 12; Panther boasts folks from Pyroklast, Jex Thoth, Deep Shit, and more—neither band has yet to release an album (aside from Wife’s 2010 Live At The Wisco cassette), but both are pulling in good crowds on the raw purity of their respective sounds. Panther swings its axe back to the days of early Venom and Motörhead, coated in the terrifying growls of frontwoman Siberian Tigress, while Wife nods to Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. Before Wife plays Mickey’s Tavern on Feb. 17, members of the two bands were good enough to sit down with The A.V. Club and tenderly discuss their raw approaches to metal.
“We’re influenced by rock ’n’ roll, motorcycles, fire, hell, punk, and Judas Priest,” Panther bassist Nitro X says, sunken into a couch with a beer in his paw. “Also, motorcycles. We’re punks and we play metal—it’s a gray line.”
Every member of Panther is decked out in some form of leather attire and a bullet belt, and, from the start of the interview, drummer Abrandon All Hope stays trigger-happy with outbursts of “Next question!” Guitarist Chrome Bones chimes in, “It’s about fucking attitude. Nowadays, hot-ticket metal is some shitty, watered-down Lamb Of God type band—chug-chug-chug. We’re not trying to do that shit.”
Speaking about his band, Wife vocalist-guitarist Brian Steele says, “We just have this chaotic sort of energy, like everything is always on the verge of falling apart completely.”
Steele’s a bit more sedate than his pals in Panther when discussing Wife’s sonic manifesto. “I’ve always called Wife the ultimate townie-rock band. It’s a snarky, diseased reflection of my life here. We’re all seasoned veterans of the Madison music scene; Bart [Benedict] was in Shotdown and a GG Allin tribute band called Rest In Piss, and Eric Johnson was in legendary locals Inspector 12.”
Steele freely discusses the true townie lyrical themes of his band’s songs.
“‘Evil Sorceress’ is loosely based on a true story, but it’s basically about an evil woman that’s so incredibly hot, but not metal at all. I picture a video where she’s in some kind of power suit. High heels; all that shit. So hot, but so unmetal. She totally fucks me over, and I’m totally in love with her,” he says. “‘Anchor’ talks about Mister Blues and the Anchor Inn experience. It was written around 10 years ago when the Anchor was still around.”
Panther is similarly happy to discuss the inspiration behind its songs but gets seemingly annoyed when questioned about the role of image in metal music. Tigress snips, “We’re living what our songs are about, that’s it. Venom, Metallica, Priest, and Discharge all had awesome shows, you know? Motörhead. ... It shouldn’t just be a bunch of dumbasses in T-shirts standing around waiting for the set to be done.”
Bones adds, “Don’t forget about the music. That’s a huge factor. We have a look, we have an attitude, but we also have the fucking music to back it up.”
Tigress jumps in with, “We like to have a good show. We turn it up to the max and make everybody go crazy. We like to charge into midnight overdrive and ride the ice. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. We like to have a good live show, that’s for damn fucking sure. Having a visual appeal is part of that, but we are living what our songs are about.”
Bones takes the discussion as an opportunity to jab at what he sees as over-indulgence in modern metal. “Everyone and their grandma plays guitar nowadays. You can try your hardest. You can try your whole life learning all the fucking scales, the fucking techniques, doing the sweep picking, time signatures, all that. Odds are, people will think you’re a corny tech-metal band or whatever.”
X adds, “But can you play a riff? It’s all about the soul,” and the rest of the band nods in agreement.
Steele says he’s too lazy to have an image, but admits he wishes he looked cooler. “I guess Bruce Dickinson used to get a lot of shit about his jeans because they were out of style, but he would always respond that he wasn’t wearing them to be fucking trendy, you know?”
Clothes be damned, both bands are hard at work on new releases, with Panther’s self-titled debut due on cassette in mid-April. Wife, however, hit a snag when it made a shocking discovery about its engineer.
“We had to fire him,” Steele says. “I told him we needed a certain part to have a Ride The Lightning vibe, and he asked, ‘What’s Ride The Lightning?’ That was the end.”
