On Saturday afternoon, November 2nd, 2019, Portland, Oregon’s alternative rock garage band, The Zags gave an in-store performance at Portland’s famous Music Millenium music store to promote and support their new release “The Cliff”. Music Millenium is a nationally known music outlet with a vast assortment of all genres and formats of store-stocked music. They also host regular in-store performances of artists of all levels including local, national and legendary artists (such as Peter Frampton, Art Alexias and June Cash Carter). On this evening, the featured artists were Portland’s own, The Zags. The Zags are a three-piece, alternative/garage rock band and have three CD’s and an EP release. The Zags are David Ricardo on lead vocals and guitar, Stanton Hall on bass and Max Curry on drums. They have been in existence for six years and have had several line-up changes over that time.
Bass player Stanton Hall had this to say about the new cd’s concept, “I remember we tossed around an idea of a life journey from childhood to now, but we didn’t get far with it. It was too hard to stick with. There is a song from this concept called “Awesome”, but that’s the only one. The present album is just a collection of songs of various topics. Not big into love songs.” David Ricardo added this, “We’ve got a song about Martian colonists, peer pressure, white male privilege, environmental collapse and depression.”
Max Curry described the band’s original writing and composition process, “David and Stan are the primary songwriters. As to what I have contributed, is with the song’s structure and groove. So what I add is grooves and different drum fills and when they don’t say anything, I know it’s good. David’s really good at articulating what drum part or feel he’s looking for. Just make me look cool dude.”
Stan added, “We self-record and David is our Recording Engineer. All our recording takes place in his basement. We’ve put our and EP and three full-length CD’s So we have a fair amount of music out there.”
Stan described the public’s reaction to their music, “We have a selective appeal. We’re really quite bad at promoting ourselves, but when people hear us they seem to like us.”
He talked about the future for the band, “I think David would agree we’ll just write songs, because that’s what we do and we might as well keep it up as that works well for us. We’ve only done one tour. Dave and I are parents, so it’s difficult to do the Rock & Roll life. If there is a demand for us then we would leave town. But for the moment, we just like to write songs and make recordings and keep it a regional thing.”
To hear The Zags live onstage, they are tight, well rehearsed, polished and driving. Their sound is hard, yet mournful and reaches the listener. Crowd reaction was positive with plenty of applause and rapt attention as they were playing.
You can see more of The Zags at their website: https://thezags.bandcamp.com/
Check out the full photo gallery from the in store performance below!
