Echo Black

By Jay Oakley

I'm standing here with Echo Black who just got done playing at Baltimore Soundstage, opening up for The Birthday Massacre and CombiChrist. Guys, how was the set?

Rob Gnarly: Amazing.

Felix Skiver: A lot of fun, man.

Danny Blu: I had a blast. It was the most people I've ever played in front of and it felt just as natural as the 3 people I used to play in front of in basements.

Rob: We all come from that "playing for absolutely no one" place. I played one show alone before. No one else could make it so I played one show alone to literally just my dad and the bar staff.

Danny: I definitely played more then one show to only the members of the other bands. There may have been a few missing but once you have 16 bands on a Monday show it adds up and that's a show.

Felix, rough shows?

Felix: I think all shows are good shows. Again, even if we're playing to 1 person or a couple people it's all fun and games. Even now, we're playing to this big ass crowd. It's a lot of fun so it was good.

Billy, get in on this. How did it feel playing?

Billy Long: It always feels good playing. It never doesn't feel good playing. Even if you fuck up it feels good playing.

I'm gonna through this one right at you guys because I'm not going to lie to you, people were really fucking confused. What happened at the end?

Collectively: Jesus Christ, Good question.

Danny: So, what happened was, it's the first day of tour and all the bands are trying to get their shit together. So other bands are taking longer to sound check, some are taking longer to load in and eventually everything gets pushed to the end and we were the first band playing after the local opener so our stuff just got condensed. They told us to cut a song before we got onstage and then when we were onstage they wanted to cut more so we got cut off in the middle of a song. It is what it is. I think the songs that we did play caught people's attention so that's what we care about and clearly people came over and asked about us and wanted to know more.

Rob: As soon as I got offstage I could hear the confused boos. Which was awesome because it meant they wanted to hear more.

Speaking from someone who in general, regardless of covering it or not, goes to a lot of shows, it's really bad form. It's one thing for you guys to say you have one more song and the venue says. "No, you don't." and then you're just like, "Sorry guys, we're done." as apposed to letting you get started and then pulling the plug. I, honestly, felt bad for you Billy because the guys blazed off really fast and you were kind of stuck by yourself on the stage with the lights on you.

Billy: I really just wanted to sit there and be like, "How are you guys doing?" Just point to someone in the audience and be like, "How's your day?"

Rob: I've heard a lot of rumors from bands that say you can't see the audience. That's not true, you see all of them. You can see all their beautiful faces and I fucking love it.

It was cool though. This was my first time seeing you and I had hear a lot of comparisons. The first and main being with the whole leather meets glam thing you guys get a lot of BVB, Black Veil Brides comparisons and I also personally get a little Tokio Hotel out of you guys. [Everyone laughs and look at Felix, second from the left in the above photo]

Felix: It's all about the big hair, man. That's my life blood.

So, Echo Black morphed out of your name, Danny. Is that correct?

Danny: Yeah, we were a band, we just went under my name, kind of like Marilyn Manson. That's what we were doing for a while and then we started writing more as a band. All of the influences were starting to come together and we realized we were going in a different direction. We were getting tighter, we were getting better, we ran for a little bit so we decided lets just make it what it is and call it a band name.

Where did the name come from?

Danny: Echo Black is the sound of midnight. It's what midnight sounds like. So we all come from four different places and four various backgrounds of music and inspirations and those all bounce off each other and echo each other and make the music that we make. That darkness, black, midnight thing is kind of what we do because we are a darker, modern pop rock sound. That's what we do.

So how long is the tour?

Danny: We're out until just before Thanksgiving.

Do you have time after that?

Rob: Right back to the day job.

Danny: For now, but we do have a couple of releases coming up. We don't have any tours planned, we're looking towards spring to do another one. It's expensive when you're a young band and this is only our second tour and our first tour ever with anybody else. We did one last year and it was just kind of thrown together for a bunch of bars. But it's costly with equipment and everything, gas, tolls and all this stuff so we'll recupe it all and we'll do it again.

Felix: We'll be in the studio soon. We're going to go to New York and record a new song. It's a secret, secret but you'll all find out soon.

Rob: It's going to be a real tasty banger, I can assure you of that.

So, the current Echo Black song, "Burn Another Day," that is out now you did with Davey Suicide. He's a local guy who had a couple bands called Havok In Hollywood and Gold Mind Squad before he started recording under the Davey Suicide Banner. How did you hook up with him?

Danny: We wrote the song and then we decided to put guest vocals on. We wanted to get somebody who embodied the same ideals behind what the song was about. So we wanted to get somebody different,  somebody who lived without regretting shit and had to deal with being weird and another young musician. We talked to a couple people and he was the one we settled on. He was super excited about the track and wanted to be in the video and everything which was cool.

So for people getting into Echo Black, what do you have that's released?

Felix: Just that one song right now.

Billy: Officially, under that name that's about it but I think there's still stuff out there under the old name.

Danny: There is. If you look under the moniker, Danny Blu, you can find the first 2 albums that we did. They're not unlike what we're doing, they're just a precursor to what we're doing now. It's the evolution of us, basically.

Rob: The one thing I can say is we do play a lot of the Danny Blu songs live but the current live renditions, because lineups have changed and because we've been building things a little differently, they sound way different and in my opinion, way better then some of the recordings so you can really get to love the song, as so many of our fans have, and then have a completely new experience with it while still being with something familiar.