State of Xen

Drum stick residue and saw dust pepper a pockmarked blue basement floor, where beer bottles stand in rows like multi-colored bowling pins. The air is damp and stale and the members of Xen, a New Haven based alternative/hard rock quartet make room for their annual Thursday night practice in the home of vocalist Tory Steinbach.

“I guess we can part with these now,” says Tory with a wry grin as he scoops the bottles into a big black garbage bag.

While setting up in the usual spot, Drummer Dave Sherwood discovers a deceased mouse from under his double bass pedal, announcing it jovially as the band’s “first casualty” before disposing of it. Lead guitarist Aaron Cox moves a few derelict chairs and tables in place of the amps while the band’s bassist, newcomer Alex Auger arrives to round out the lineup.

There is a necessary hardness to their practice space, an inherited, collective rock and roll squalor to it all that has contributed to the sound and energy of the band since their formation in early 2006.

An energetic, modern hard rock act with roots in the grunge and alternative music scenes of the early to mid 90’s infused with a touch of metal, Xen has played all over Connecticut, frequenting both Toad’s Place New Haven, and the Webster Theater in Hartford, once opening on the venue’s main stage. They have been featured twice on radio station The Rock 106.9’s Home Grown segment, a weekly block devoted to notable up and coming talent from around Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island.

Back in the basement under a few dim, sodium yellow basement lights, Tory belts out the opening lines of the song Enlightenmentality in preparation for an upcoming tune-up gig at The Cherry Street Station in Wallingford.

Steinbach’s voice cut through the damp, musty air, combining forceful, clean vocals with a touch of guttural yelling. Boasting a range somewhere between rockers Scott Wieland and Chris Cornell, he teams with Cox’s aggressive, heavy guitar style, Sherwood’s thunderous unrelenting drumbeats, and rounds it off with Auger’s bass to provide gravity and melodic intensity reminiscent of such bands as Alice in Chains and Tool. The group however is reluctant to settle on labels or anything else that could pigeonhole their sound or any other band’s

“You just can’t,” Steinbach says. “Describing your sound to people is, to me, like trying to describe an orgasm. ‘It feels really good.’ That just doesn’t quite do it justice, does it?”

Creatively, Xen is also weary of falling into the same trap so many bands through the years have of conceptually recycling and exploiting conflicts such as teen-angst, renewed with each new generation and sung it seems in the exact same voice and context. The bands get older, while their songs stay exactly the same.

“I don’t buy into that at all,” Steinbach says. “That’s one of the clearest signs that you haven’t grown as artists. It’s stagnancy.”

The group strives to encapsulate difficult emotions with their lyrics, which range conceptually from enduring personal loss, rising above the elitism and pettiness of people, to seeing through and liberating oneself from imposed artificial hierarchies inherent in society. As the members of Xen change and grow, so too does their music

“It usually starts with the lyrics; some I have written already and I try and match them up thematically with the intensity of the music Aaron writes.”

This symbiosis has provided the group with the root of their creative process, and had worked notoriously well in the creation of Dog, arguably the band’s strongest, and most popular song. Penned furiously without interruption or revision by Steinbach after a less than positive day at work, the song is a potent, defiant grievance against those that who would cast a judging eye from an elevated seat in an attempt to strip away one’s sense of importance and worth. It was quickly passed on to Cox where it struck a shared nerve.

“The song was Tory’s, but it just became mine right away too,” Says Cox, whose musical composition for the song came just as freely as its lyrics had, from the opening solo to the jarring breakdown in the middle.

Though having written and experimented with many songs, the band’s perfectionism has led them currently to six original tracks they have the most faith in playing, four of which can be found on the band’s own EP. They continue to work to develop their catalogue to piece together a full length album, and look forward soon to taking their energetic and challenging, however accessible music to out of state venues.

Information about the band, upcoming shows, and more on can be found on
Myspace:http://www.myspace.com/xenband