Young rockers in Blount County’s Fenrir hungry to establish all-ages scene
By Steve Wildsmith (stevew@thedailytimes.com)
Nick Kirkland and Mac Beightol of the local hardcore band Fenrir want to make something clear " just because they’re kids doesn’t mean they don’t take this rock ‘n’ roll thing seriously.
Technically, they’re young men " seniors at Alcoa High School, to be exact. And while their band is relatively new to the local scene, they’ve stepped up and taken the initiative in organizing a new series of all-ages rock shows at the Alnwick Community Center, including one on Saturday night that will serve as a fundraiser for Fenrir guitarist Michael Smith’s father.
When it comes to playing shows and pushing their band ahead, Kirkland, Beightol and their bandmates " Smith, vocalist Steve-O Sperling and drummer Christian Kanoa " are hungry like the wolf, you might say.
(Granted, that’s a terrible pun, riffing on the monstrous wolf Fenrir from Norse mythology. Hey, it could have been worse " at one time, the guys considered calling themselves Shotgun Nacho.)
“People don’t take us serious because we’re in high school,” Kirkland said. “We’ll go to a place and ask to play there, and ... well, they don’t laugh at us ...”
“... but they assume we’re just another garage band,” Beightol continued. “And we used to be, but we’ve gotten to a whole other level of musicality. It’s not just about sitting in a basement and jamming out tunes anymore.”
Although formed as a band called Faces Over Olympus back in the summer, the musical synthesis of Fenrir dates back to Kirkland’s and Beightol’s childhood friendship. They first met in kindergarten, and five years ago, when Kirkland got a guitar, Beightol decided to pick up the bass. Last summer, they were recruited along with Kanoa by an older singer who, according to Kirkland, wanted to start a “huge, avant garde, Between-the-Buried-and-Me-style band.”
“He had all these ideas, which was cool for him, but he wanted us to crank out all of this stuff for him,” he said. “We weren’t part of the creative process.”
The guys wanted to move in their own direction, so they took control of the band and decided to find a new singer.
“He figured that just because we were a bunch of kids, we weren’t going to kick him out " but we did,” Beightol added.
Drawing on their mutual influences " Beightol is a student of jazz, Kirkland plays in a more contemporary rock style and Kanoa is a fan of punk drumming " they put together a style that draws on equal parts classic and progressive rock " although the latter isn’t necessarily a style they use frequently in describing their sound.
In fact, when asked to do so, they have a hard time doing so.
“I think the cool part is that we can’t answer that,” Beightol said. “There are moments where it’s really heavy and moments where it’s light and clean. There are some elements of jazz and punk and even some hip-hop.”
Both guys profess a love for Coheed and Cambria; Kirkland draws on Pink Floyd as an influence, and Beightol is a fan of The Who. Finally settling on Steve-O Sperling as the Fenrir vocalist and recently adding second guitarist Smith to the lineup, the guys are ready to focus on making the music even better and, perhaps just as importantly, establishing themselves as contenders in the Blount County music scene, regardless of their young age.
“Michael’s an amazing guitar player,” Beightol said. “He can do the sweet picking and all that and rip off these blistering solos, too. And he comes up with great counter-melodies to what Nick already had down. With Steve-O, we push him sometimes, but his heart’s in the right place, and he’s got talent. We’ll give him ideas and he’ll go with that for a while, then he’ll build on them with his own ideas.”
After a show at Alcoa High School last year fell apart at the last minute, the guys " along with other local heavy bands " found an open date at Alnwick Community Center in Maryville. Since then, the guys in Fenrir have campaigned hard to put together local all-ages shows that they say help the Alnwick organizers keep the doors open and give local teens a safe place to go see live music " something that’s seriously lacking locally, Beightol added.
“We’re doing this because we want there to be an all-ages scene,” he said. “In Knoxville, there’s a little bit of one, but it’s mostly hardcore bands. We’re trying to leave this one open to anybody and anything. If you’re a young band showing any promise, we’d love to have you come out and play.
“There are a lot of local bands that are great, but they don’t have the opportunities to get out and play. We can’t play in bars, but we can draw the high school crowd. That, plus the magic of Facebook, does a lot of the work for us.”
They credit older bands, like the guys in Waves Like Weapons, for giving them a chance, and Beightol said he wants to give even younger bands " like Rise to Retribution, also playing Saturday " an equal opportunity. He suffers from no delusions " this is Blount County, and while it’s not unheard of for a local band to make it big (Whitechapel, anyone?), such success stories are also rarities.
But they’re going to keep doing it anyway.
“We just love what we do,” he said. “Usually we show up to play as the band no one knows, and we leave the crowd favorite. So even if this doesn’t go somewhere, it’ll be a great story to tell, especially if we can get an all-ages scene going here in Blount County.”
