Devil Inside

When local heavy-metal diehards Meanpeace perform at one of the many venues around Houston, lead singer Andre Chenier often throws homemade cassettes of the quartet’s music to audience members — small audio samples, if you will, of the unseemly experience they just witnessed. But the fact is: No four-track demo can capture the nastiness this biracial quartet can pull off in person.

On tape, the Meanpeace sound is hellishly generic. Chenier sings like he’s been gargling hot lava (with a splash of lemon), while the guitars churn out maddeningly repetitive hooks that could only originate from the darkest corners of hell. Their music is not so much subversively jolting as it is jarringly predictable. Live, however, Meanpeace is something else entirely. On stage at a Montrose club called the Oven, Chenier, with his rumpled gimme cap and average-working-Joe getup, looks like a disheveled Hootie (of Blowfish fame) as he commands the mike with all the poise and agility of a porn star. He rolls about the stage, lunges after ashtrays. (“I thought that was a rat,” he says. “I was helping y’all out.”) X-rated verse rolls out of his throat, with lyrics that seem to center on one thing only: sex — morbid sex, to be exact.

“In my mind / I knew I’d fuck you,” he bellows. “You suck dick?” he inquires into the air. “Now you do!”

All the while, guitarists Aaron Brown and Joe Ferro are getting medieval on their axes, slashing at them with a psychotic vigor while fill-in bassist Dwayne and drummer Charles Dean navigate the chaos with a bulky groove. Sure, you could take the easy road and dismiss Meanpeace as little more than pungent, thrash-metal showboating. Do that, though, and you’re missing the point.

“Sometimes you might think it sounds perverted, and it just might be perverted,” Chenier says. “But sometimes, that’s how I really feel. Some people are afraid to say, ‘Well, damn it, I would slap the shit out of that bitch.’ I’d rather sing about it and dance to it than act on it. That’s why I appear so aggressive and crazy on stage, because there is so much shit inside of me to where it comes out like that.”

Meanpeace is what you might call a band of newlyweds. Its membership tied the knot last September, soon after original bassist Mark Salinas and Brown met. Chenier was the final member to join, and he chose the moniker. “I sat around the house — or wherever I was — pretty bored. I just rambled off these names to myself,” he explains, adding that other ideas included Reservoir Bitch, Octave Pussy and Load Eye.

Co-founder Salinas left the group in April of this year because of personal and creative differences. But after a few months with Dwayne on bass, the rest of the band just recently welcomed Salinas back. Not that his playing was missed much. Even when down a member, Meanpeace has the uncanny ability to fill the hole with practically any other noise it can muster.

“It’s a juggernaut,” says Brown of the band’s sound. “It’s different. I mean, it’s heavy, aggressive, you know. We basically didn’t wanna settle on what we were doing, you know. [We] don’t wanna be close-minded, and [we] don’t wanna sound like all those [KTBZ/107.5 FM]-type bands.”

As new as they are to the business, Meanpeace’s members know full well that, to move forward, they have to start small. At the Oven show, the concept involves playing to crowds of about eight, and that includes Brown’s sister and two yuppies who look like they’re there by accident.

“Our general idea is, basically, we need to get our name out and get the music out,” Ferro says. “I think our thing is to bring the aggressiveness back to music. We want to bring back the spontanuity [sic] and have people get into the show.”

Spontanuity?
“Spontanuity, you know what I’m saying?”
Dean chimes in: “It’s spontaneity.”

“Or how you say it. I’m sorry,” Ferro says with a giggle. “I’m just saying we wanna bring back that, you know, just in-your-face. Like just to wake people up when they come to our shows.”

Judging from the content of the band’s songs, Meanpeace takes a sort of sinister pleasure in perpetuating its silly, superfreak stigma. Consider such demented fodder as “Meat Trophy” and “Double CowKill,” the titles alone of which are certain to illicit either laughs or groans.

“But we’re the four nicest guys you’ll ever meet,” says Dean.
The band members erupt into laughter.
As for the “demonic” tag that is sometimes associated with Meanpeace, Chenier claims the band’s music is only evil in that it documents the dark side of the human condition. “When it comes to that subject, I’m a Christian person,” Chenier says. “I believe in God and I practice the faith. I think the sickness in your brain is far worse than choosing Satan to sing about.”

Brown adds, “We are about personal demons or whatever. But it’s not in a demonic way. I mean, it’s handling your demons.”

Currently, Meanpeace is busy rehearsing and looking for a permanent bass player. Family issues have also come into play of late: Chenier is expecting his second child “any day now,” while Dean will be a new father in October. As for the desired effect Meanpeace wants to have on its audience, Chenier doesn’t hesitate to sum it up.

“I wanna touch people the way Elvis and Michael Jackson touched people when they performed,” he says, seemingly dead serious, “have them feel all the emotions and leave thinking about the songs.”

The comment triggers guffaws from the rest of the group. Brown clasps hand to mouth and mocks his band mate: “He wants to touch ’em like Michael Jackson.”

Best to just leave it at that.