Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 23, 1995                   TAG: 9503230056
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

SWANK HAS NO STYLE AND IS PROUD OF IT

But at the Iroquois, they are celebrating pants. Big ol' pants with low-slung crotches and wide fraying hems. Pants that defy gravity. Pants hanging off of butts, showing off boxer shorts.

Outside there's a bumper sticker on a parked minivan that says "Big Pants is My Co-Pilot!"

And on stage Swank is leading the big-pants parade. They sound like Shaft's back-up band. They're white punks on funk.

They open with the J Geils number "Centerfold," only they play it fast and furious.

Drummer Bryan Stiglich leads the band through constant tempo changes. Guitarist/vocalist Chad Smith turns the song on a dime - now funk, now ska (a quick-beat offshoot of reggae), now hard-core thrash. Tony Weinbender, sax and vocals, and John Stump, pocket trumpet, punch and blat the main riff, which gets a crowd of more than 200 singing along. You've got Tim Gordon and Jason Garnett, Swank's two bass players, giving the music depth without being bottom-heavy.

There's a polite but earnest mosh going on in the pit. Kids pushing and jumping up and down in sweaty unison. A young woman stands next to the stage, nodding her head and blowing big pink bubbles with her gum. Girls love 'em. Guys respect 'em. Swank is in the house.

"The whole point is we're not a style of music," says Chad. "Our style is like no style." True enough. Mention just about any kind of music you can dream of. It's in there.

The rest of the night they play all original songs - 15 or so tunes the whole crowd has memorized already. But there's something missing, something not wrong, but not right. Then it hits you. Almost nobody is drinking and there's not much cigarette smoke, either.

"A lot of people look at us, the way we look with our colored hair and our big pants, and say, 'they must be doing drugs,'" says Tony. "Somebody told me he thinks the reason we've stayed together this long is because we don't do drugs, you know. We don't preach, but ..."

"We try to say, 'Wake up,' you know, like racism, sexism, pro-life, pro-choice, political stuff going on," says Chad. "We're all involved, you know." The Swank point of view is to educate yourself, form your own opinion and stick to it.

"You can't listen if your mouth won't close," goes their song "Ben Rossi." And in the anthematic "Latin American Negro," a tune about hatred and stereotypes, they shout, "When it comes, just push it away. Our lives are just labels, labels we can live without."

They started the band when they were all about 15, going to Lord Botetourt High School. "Chad and I were sitting in gym class and wanted to do something different and get all our friends involved," says Tony.

Now it's three years later, and Swank has a pretty big following in places like Biloxi, Miss.; Gainesville, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; Richmond and Lynchburg. They've produced a 20-song CD and are preparing to drive to California, where they've booked some shows this summer.

They also have a large following here at home. "Like, there's this crowd waiting outside the Iroquois," says Chad. "I can't believe it."

"And they're not just teen-agers," says Tony. "Some older folks like it, too. My mom likes us."

A lot of clubs don't have "all-ages" shows, where kids under the drinking age are allowed in with a special stamp, because they don't sell as much alcohol. "The fact is," says Tony, "the kids are the ones who are the most supportive of you. They never complain. They come to listen."

Swank is definitely worth listening to. They work hard, they've got a CD under their belts, and they're spreading a message of drug-free peace, love and funk. They just want everybody to get along.

These kids today ...

And the pants?

"It used to be the thing," says Tony, "and it's not the thing anymore, but we can't afford new clothes."

Swank will perform at the Iroquois on April 7.

The sound of Suppression undoubtedly will put some people off. The five-member band plays a combination of thrash and noise, a mixture of grinding guitar, chaotic drumming and screaming.

The message is one of anger and frustration, best shown in tunes like "Single File" in which Davey Austin shrieks the song's four lyrics indiscernibly - "Labeled ... numbered, Nameless ... Faceless." His bandmates, Dave Craft on guitar, Hog on drums, Jason Hodges on bass, and Bill Mahone on guitar noise, create a steady grind that hacks through 20-second songs.

Suppression belongs to the underground music scene of traded homemade audio tapes and Xeroxed magazines that spell out doom and destruction with perverse glee. Thoughts are normally well-reasoned, but desperate and almost comically cynical.

There's a poetry to the chaos, a music in the noise that is more urgent than anything you'll hear on the radio. Suppression breeds revolution. This band is a result.

Suppression will grind their axes at the Iroquois on April 16 with fellow undergrounders Wimp, Sour Vein and Germ Flux. Not for the timid.