Interview with Kar

Italian three-piece Kar have just released a great debut EP of classic hard rock with a bit of stoner and southern rock thrown into the mix.  I recently interviewed vocalist and bassist Matteo Bellesi about the EP, delays from Covid, their new video and more.  

Can you give me a little background on the band?

Kar was born in 2017 from an idea of Matteo Bellesi (voice, Bass) and Tommaso Palma (guitar).  Shortly after, drummer Filippo Baldi joined them, completing the formation; the band's aim is to produce straight, simple rock’n’roll, ready to be danced, sung along, enjoyed at all levels…of course the words “simple” and “rock’n’roll” doesn’t always go together well, in fact the project is a mixture of hard rock, blues, southern rock and stoner, in our EP (Kar) you can listen to a lot of those influences across the tracks.

 

I was looking at some of your older posts and it looks like you were initially called QAR. Why the name change?

It’s a funny story actually: at the time the project was started we were strongly infatuated by the pirate world imaginary, that didn’t affect directly our style or the lyrics, but we decided to call ourselves “QAR”, that stands for “Queen Anne’s Revenge” (Pirate Blackbeard ship’s name). Unfortunately, we quite immediately stumbled into Italian pronunciation issues, in fact the letter Q in our language is always followed by the U and pronounced like coo in the word cool, so people use to say “what’s the name of the band, is it Coo-AR?" So we decided to make it simple and universal, to change it into Kar. Kar is also a name that keeps the straightness and shortness of the old one which we liked, recalling too the word "car" and the imaginary of travel and adventure with it. 

 

How does your songwriting process tend to work?

There is always someone who brings material, sometimes a guitar riff, so that we work it out together in rehearsals, but lately it happened more often that me (Matteo) or Tommaso brought in almost finished songs, in that case we give the band’s touch to it.  I usually write the lyrics, but not always (also Tommaso does) and Filippo is not only a great drummer, he cares a lot about choirs and details that usually turns out to be vital for the final shape of the song, he has a great taste in that matter. 

I love the song “Caesar”.  It has a really cool groove to it that sets it apart from the rest of the EP.  Can you tell me a little about that song?

Well you can say, listening to our EP, that most of the tracks are quite quick, aggressive, noisy ones (in a good way of course), until now it’s the most distinctive feature of our production, but sometimes a more classic rock feature comes out during the composition. That’s the case and we are very happy with that rhythmic, groovy, epic result…talking about the lyrics: it’s a quick overview of mankind, it basically says “do your best but don’t take others too seriously as well as yourself”, cause it’s all kind of a great show that no one is watching at and if you focus too much on pretending to be something, the risk is you’ll forget about who you really are.

 

You have a really fun video for the song “I Like Your Eyes” that has a storyline that is kind of a throwback to some of the metal videos of the 80’s.  Did the band come up with that idea?

Basically the intention was to create a great “80’s rock cliché” video clip, it seems we made it! We worked together with Simone Ducci, an old friend, videomaker and fellow musician from a concept the band had.  He was perfectly in line with that vision from the beginning and we had lots of fun filming the clip with other buddies in a brewery owned by Davide Bartolotti, a dear friend of us and rocker to the bone.

  

I saw some posts in late 2020 talking about the EP’s upcoming release.  Was the release delayed because of the pandemic?

Yes, of course the pandemic affected us just like all the musicians and performers around the world, the main issue was that we couldn't play live...and that, as you surely know, is a great problem for a young project like ours, that needs to arrive personally at people ears, to touch them, make them understand what we are and what we really do, and that's even more vital when it comes to promoting a new work.  Someone says that socials and the internet in general are more than enough to let your music spread across the world, but as every musician knows it is simply not true (unless you are already quite famous of course) so the EP as you've read, was finished in 2020, but we decided to wait for better times to reveal it and promote it.  Pandemic is not over yet, but we had the chance to play live and promote the songs on radio and so on...fingers crossed.

 

The band has been together for about five years now, but you’re just now releasing your debut EP.  Do you have a lot more songs ready to go and should we expect more stuff sooner than later?

 

Yes of course, the ones who came to our gigs already know, we have plenty of material.  Consider this: before the recordings of this EP, we had more than twenty finished songs, and during lockdown we wrote another thirty.  Not every one of them became a Kar song, but we surely are full of material ready to be shared from a stage and not before long in your headphones too

There are some older songs on your Bandcamp page.  Do you think we will be seeing newer versions of any of those?

Why not? We always use to say “if it is not engraved in stone you can work on it”, but some of those songs, we still like them that way.

 

Now that the EP is out what kind of plans do you have for promoting it?

Of course we are going to appear in several radio shows, and Volcano Records is doing a great job spreading word in and outside our country. The road for live performances in Italy has not been totally cleared yet and there are plenty of problems, so we are sailing on sight for that matter, but we will do our best!

 

Is there anything else you would like to share with readers?

We would like to thank everyone who will spend his time listening to our music, please, if you like what you heard, share it with your friends, we are in year 2022 but word of mouth is still the more powerful weapon for music to spread, join our pages on instagram, facebook and our youtube channel where you can watch the -I like your eyes” videoclip you mentioned earlier.  The EP is now streaming on Spotify, but soon we will have available the physical copy of the album in compact disc format.  All the art for the cover, etc. is created by the talented illustrator and graphic designer Mr. Pulp.  Thank you so much and rock on!!!

(Volcano Records / Kar - Facebook)