It’s a hard dollar playing Heavy Metal in an Americana town like Knoxville, TN. But Jake Lonas, Kurt Bell, and Nick Leichtweis—aka Realm—plan on grabbing local listeners by the collars of their vintage Uncle Tupelo Ts and shaking ‘til the headbanging reflex has been throttled into muscle memory.
“Americana, folk, those things are really big in Knoxville,” says Lonas, Realm guitar player and vocalist, downing shots at Preservation Pub, the bar where he met bandmates Bell and Leichtweis.
“But there’s not really a scene for what we do around here. So we really want to challenge Knoxville to head-bang a little bit. We want to be a metal band that non-metal fans can enjoy—beer-drinking, weed-smoking metal. We play loud, and we play heavy, but not in a way that we chase everyone out of the bar.”
“It’s fun metal,” adds drummer Leichtweis. “At our core, we’re just a bunch of Black Sabbath-lovers. The very first hand-me-down cassette I ever owned, from my older brother, was Black Sabbath. And who doesn’t like Sabbath?”
So far, the buy-in looks promising. At Realm’s first two shows—a benefit at Sassy Ann’s, and another at the aforementioned Preservation Pub—the trio had local barflies accustomed to dancing lazy stoner jigs to jam-rock and Americana acts banging their heads and flailing about like seasoned mosh-pit veterans.
For the uninitiated, know that Realm play a brand of so-called doom/stoner metal that pays highest homage to the Almighty Riff. Their stock-in-trade is lumbering riffs and rumbling, room-shaking detuned power chords—big, bass-heavy vamps that rattle the very gizzard, as if the ceiling itself were about crack asunder, crashing and crushing all the rapt metallions lost in awe of Realm’s mighty dirge.
Lonas and Leichtweis are old-school heavy rockers, veterans of a dozen or more previous punk, metal and hardcore bands; Bell is a gifted, girl-pants-wearing weirdo, a multi-instrumentalist who learned to play guitar through bedroom shredding.
Having all worked at Preservation Pub, they founded Realm after Lonas’ last band, the Jojax, fell apart in 2014. “I’d jammed with these guys at parties,” Lonas says. “And I’d been wanting to get a metal band together for a long time. So when Jojax dispersed, I called these guys.”
With Bell pulling double duty on bass and keys, the trio set about making music with all of the best elements—some Sabbathian stomp, thrash energy, atmospheric washes of post-metal and psych—but none of the unlistenability of metal circa 2015.
“We call it beer-battered and deep-fried southern sci-fi,” says Leichtweis.
The sci-fi part is another point of convergence for the members of Realm. All three of them grew up in thrall of a very particular post-1980 science fiction milieu, and their shared passions are reflected in the songs on Realm’s first demo—all of which are based on the Frank Herbert novel Dune, “Sleeper” and “Fatman” and “Witches are for burning,” and the piece de resistance “Desert King.”
“I don’t know that we’ll always write about Dune, but for now we’re having fun with it,” says Lonas. “It’s such a dark story, and so universal. There’s a lot to write about. But maybe we’ll write about Bladerunner next.
Lonas admits it’s not easy playing metal in a mid-sized southern city, a conservative little burg in the trough of roots and country musics. “We get people who roll their eyes when we say we’re in a metal band,” he says. “But we try to be more accessible. There’s some bluesiness, some psychedelic elements. And my vocals aren’t aggressive in the way that a lot of metal vocalists are today.”
Still, says Leichtweis, the most gratifying part of Realm’s experience thus far has been, “when we played our shows, and we had people up front, just rocking the #$% out. And people you’d never expect to be up there head-banging. That just makes my night.”
Realm will play Scruffy City Hall March 4 with Nashville stoner-rock outfit All Them Witches as part of the 2015 Knoxville Horror Film Festival.
