We wanted to interview The Realmers, a band full of weed advocates, so I went to the guitarist Lloyd’s place of work late one night to see what they’re all about.
The Realmers play at The Hold in Manly this Sunday July 31.
The Realmers are a relatively new band who have only played a handful of live shows as a collective. They’re not sure what genre they fall into yet and are self-described as “funkadelic blues”. It’s a five-man band, two of whom met in LA when one asked the other at random as an ice breaker if he smoked weed. After Lloyd had filled me in with all the different stories of how they met, I had to ask to catch their names again. “Ah, we got Nick, Rahul, Jake and Jock… and Lloyd [Laughs]”
The boys are a slightly different breed – they’re open to many styles and ways of expressing their music, one of which is poetry. With influences from Ginsberg and Kerouac, the outfit uses stories by frontman Nick to incorporate poems and a sort-of journey into their sets.
“Every set and song is under the premise of a poetic storyline… one’s a Southern blues story about a man who loses his brother and ends up finding him again through blues music,” Lloyd tells me.
Their stories aren’t all that tame though. “The most recent one we did at Soundscape was like a one-hour music poetry set. It starts with poetry with an instrumental background and tells a story of the same man, his first love, being African-American in a volatile time and later running away to San Francisco.” This story also included some stuff about Woodstock, acid and time travelling.
Asked about who calls the shots, Lloyd says: “Everyone feeds off each other’s enthusiasm at the end of the day. Whatever the people are the most into and who can convince everyone else that their idea is the sickest, that’s how it’ll happen.”
One of their fattest tunes is their bootleg from Kanye’s Fade. They grabbed a new tune from Kanye West which they believe had been ruined by his “Auto-Tune shit”. The guys ripped the track apart to then reconstruct it with a new MIDI and guitar chords to make a funky and groovy winner. The boys also had a bit of trouble with the law on that one.
“It’s weird. We uploaded to YouTube and SoundCloud first and literally within like three hours it got removed and we got an email from Universal Group… Then we just put it on Vimeo, and it’s been fine.” The boys really didn’t seem to care, but what about Kanye?
“Fuck Kanye, I hope he sees it.”
Check it out below.
