Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega recognizes the power in threes, and he has good reason to believe. A trio since shortly after releasing their 2017 comeback album, Interiors, the influential post-hardcore band released the third album of its second act (and fifth LP overall) in July, the crushing Bring On the Psychics.
“You start to know what you want and understand what works,” Vega says of how he feels he and guitarist and singer Walter Schreifels finally gelled on album three post hiatus. “We wanted to make something that would feel urgent and feel like live music. And definitely that’s where we’re the most calibrated.”
Schreifels went back even further than Quicksand’s seminal 1993 debut, Slip, and 1995’s Manic Compression, to find inspiration for the unrelenting 10-song album – all the way to his late-eighties hardcore bands Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits, which have both been active on the live scene in recent years.
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That spirit of self-empowerment imbues the urgency of songs like Get To It and Regenerate, where he alternates between bludgeoning riffs and shoegazey interludes, a callback to Quicksand’s early music.
“I can put a lot of tension into something that isn’t really complicated to play,” Shreifels says. “I just play on the margins.”
In the outro to Regenerate, that means turning the thundering riff into a drone while Vega plays the progression on a Fender Bass VI, one of the most-deployed tools in his arsenal.
As much as Schreifels plays with rhythms and tempo in his guitar playing, his taste in tones is rooted in relatable guitar hero-worship.
“I’m always going for an Angus Young/Jimmy Page combo, and when I use that sound in a hardcore sort of way, which is how I came up playing, it just has a different context,” he says. “It has that distorted sound, but you can also hear the playing, I think, a little bit more.”
While Vega switches between a Jaguar four-string and the Bass VI he began experimenting with during a decade playing bass with Deftones, Schreifels’ current obsession is a Japanese-made Greco Les Paul copy – acquired with settlement money after an airline lost the Gibson Les Paul Custom he played for years.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna buy another Les Paul,’ but Les Pauls are super heavy. They’re breaking my shoulders.” The Greco, he says, isn’t just lighter, but perhaps has more esoteric qualities, as well. “It’s got a lot of, like, good vibes. Not to sound too hippie, but it has soul. It’s lived. It came all the way from frickin’ Japan!”
