Guitar Magazine - Local Anesthesia Dec 98<br><br>
"A Remark you'd hear an awful lot about music in the '90's was 'Oh no not another band with four white guys with guitars,' so here was a good way to get around that," says guitarist-vocalist Scott Lucas, half of the powerhouse duo Local H, who landed on the modern rock scene with their near-gold-selling 1996 disc, "As Good As Dead" and the fierce tracks "Bound For the Floor (Keep It Copacetic)" and "Fritzs Corner." "I feel good doing this, but at the same time, it wasn't like we got together to do it," Lucas says. Creating a heavy riff-and-drum-drenched track is first and foremost for the Chicago-based Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels (the 28-year olds hail from Zion, a small suburb north of the Windy City). That goal, howeverm sometimes challenges the two-some. "You can't rely on someone to play solo. When we're writing songs, we try to get ourselves away from verse-chorus-verse," Lucas says. "Anything that makes you look at (songwriting) in a different way is good." Playing live also means a new approach for Lucas and Daniels. Their unorthodox lineup is bass-player deficient, but Lucas is a two-for-one musician. His guitars have been configured with bass pickups, which, along with the guitar pickups, are wired to independant jacks and run into separate amps. Pedals isolate either signal while another pedal emphasizes the bass. Those setups and a healthy dose of melodic rock are heard on Local H's latest assault, Pack up the Cats, and the first single, "All the Kids Are Right." This time, the duo went to the past to find their future, recruiting producer Roy Thomas Baker, whose credits include Queen, The Cars, and Journey. "We wanted to make a record tha would last, so in 20 years you could still play it on the radio. A lot of stuff he did made intresting-sounding records, but wasn't bogged down in any of the technology," says Lucas, who used such unconventional effects as wrapping piano wire and guitar strings with tin foil on "Fine and Good" and ripping tape for "500,000 Scovilles." "I'm really happy the way the record sounds, (but) I kind of wanted to make the record sound different. Halfway through it was really weird. No matter what we did, what distortion pedals I used, it sounded like us. It was surprising to me to discover that your music has a lot more to do with you than it does with gear, who you work with, or what approach you take." "The main thing with this record was that I was sick of hearing a lot of bands that sound like Alice in Chains, bands that aren't much fun to listen to," Lucas says. "I don't mind angry music, I just don't like music that's boring and sort of depresses you because it's boring. We may actually be angry or whining, but the songs all kind of sound like party songs."<br><br>
by Philip Zonkel