Sinners and Saints

You're not the only one that's gonna see the light: Sinners and Saints

How we rock

There isn't a band out there with a more fitting name than Sinners and Saints. Their music is a soaring, fist pumping rush of pure American rock and roll, as loud and bracing as it is sweetly melodic and tinged with melancholy. It's the sound of world-weary storytellers with arena-ready hooks and shout-along choruses that you'll take with you wherever you go. With nods to everyone from Social Distortion and the Backyard Babies to Guns N' Roses and Bruce Springsteen, it's modern day classic rock in the literal sense of the term. But it all comes from a much darker place, a place of busted skulls and rampant rabble-rousing and the hardest of the hard. Sinners and Saints front men (and brothers in blood, as well as rock) Mark and Rob Lind are both battle-scarred vets of the punk rock trenches with an impeccable pedigree to boast. Mark was a founding member of Boston street punks the Ducky Boys, who's working class anthems and chugging rock and roll were the foundation of Sinners and Saints' sound, and Rob was the main man in berserk, ultra-hardcore legends Blood For Blood, a band known as much for the mayhem their live shows would cause as they were for their bludgeoning war music. After the simultaneous demise of both of their bands, the brothers decided to reach back into their roots, and create the kind of rock and roll they grew up with, before the mad flurry of moshpits and mohawks. Not just an easy musical comparison, Sinners and Saints are a literal Soul Asylum, a place of solace and a refuge for all the ragged tattooed warriors and the hopelessly disillusioned and the sad, silent crazy people left lonely and exhausted from a life rife with pain, poverty, or punk rock. And although the sound has been sweetened, angry flames tempered with age and experience, anyone writing off Sinners and Saints as glossy, mainstream rock are either too young to know any better, or entirely missing the point. The brothers Lind have already been tougher than leather and hard as nails, and it's time for them to move on to calmer waters. Mark and Rob both know that there's something beyond rage and frustration, beyond flying the flag of anarchy and chaos. Beyond all that, if you're lucky, is redemption. Music sets the sick ones free, after all, and Sinners and Saints truly believe that rock and roll has the magical powers to heal even the deepest wounds. 'The Sky is Falling" (Bridge 9), their debut album, is their tribute to that unwavering faith that a well-placed power chord or a stray lyric, in the right place at the right time, can make everything alright. 

Something's wrong with my radio

"Anyway, our bands both went tits up at the same time." I'm sitting in the booth of a noisy neighborhood bar in Somerville, Ma. with Mark and Rob in late July, listening to the Sinners and Saints story. Rob takes center stage, drawing pictures in the air with his cigarette, choosing his words carefully, like a man that's used to explaining where the blood on his shirt came from. "Blood For Blood and the Ducky Boys both toured and broke up right after. We were both touring the country at the same time, we were criss-crossing. They had been at some town two days before, and vice versa. We were touring with the Dropkick Murphys, and they were touring with some bands that didn't really make any headway. I saw the writing on the wall. The bands were having problems, and I just decided, "Fuck it, when I get home I'm starting up a rock and roll band". I wanted to take a crack at all these songs I was writing. In my last two years of Blood for Blood I was not, in my free time or with passion, writing hardcore songs. I was writing rock and roll songs, like you hear on the Sinners and Saints CD. So, I came back with the intent to do something like that. You know, aggressive, and with energy, but not afraid to incorporate all the influences of things that he and I were both listening to." His decision was aided greatly by the direction that the Ducky Boys had been going in just before their demise. While on the road, Mark played a new song for his brother over the phone, and the die was cast. "I was just checking in with him, and he played me one song- "Nothing at All", which ended up on the Sinners and Saints CD. I was in this backwoods shit-hole bathroom with piss on the floor in Canada, listening to this fucking song, just a beautiful, haunting song, and I practically dropped the phone", he remembers. "I realized that there was an entire other world of music that I wanted to be part of and I couldn't make it happen within the framework of Blood For Blood. I knew that I was at least going to have to attempt something else. Hearing that fucking song, my jaw dropped, I was pumping quarters into the phone so I could hear the whole thing. It just made me realize that he's doing it, he's my brother, and it was like something I had fantasized about doing." And so, as soon as they both got home, Sinners and Saints was born. Although they didn't play on the album, the line-up was soon rounded out by Anthony Papalardo on bass, and Jason O'Donell on drums. With a newfound commitment to a singular vision, Mark and Rob began writing the songs that would ultimately find their way on to "The Sky is Falling". With all the freedom to write exactly the kinds of songs they wanted, influence and inspiration came from many different sides of the rock spectrum. "He and I are both stark raving fanatic Bruce Springsteen fans", Rob says. "He's also a ravenous Tom Petty fan. But even outside that more 'adult contemporary' end of rock and roll, I was blown away by Turbonegro, and some of the other bands like that. I really wasn't listening to metal and hardcore when I was doing Blood for Blood, I was listening to Turbonegro, Social Distortion, obviously Guns N' Roses, and the band that was really into at the time was Oasis. They just pulled my heart. As poppy as they were, or at least what my friends would consider pop, there was just something pure rock and roll about them. I think they had articulately definable characteristics of what I consider great rock and roll. They were hypnotic and transcendental; it was beautiful, and it was jaded, cynical, and optimistic all at the same time." You can hear those same elements in Sinners and Saints, too. In fact, the songs on "The Sky is Falling" will remind you of just about any time you've ever turned on the radio and heard a song that you just knew was your new, possibly all-time favorite. This, Rob tells me, is all by design. "We just wanted to play music that we grew up with, music that we wanted to hear. We wanted to write songs that we wished were on the radio, but nobody else is delivering."

Story of my life

"We know the measure of each other", Rob tells me, when I ask him what it's like to finally be in a band with his brother. "He'll probably tell you that he hates my guts if I get up to take a piss, though." The former Ducky Boy laughs. He's obviously the quieter of the two. Sitting in the shadows throughout the interview, Mark listens intently to Rob's words, adding just what he needs to. It's probably been like this forever. "Well, at least I know he won't quit", Mark jokes. "Other guys might come and go, but he's here to stay." Rob agrees. "We know each other implicitly and fundamentally. We're closer than friends. It doesn't hurt that we're brothers, it definitely helps." Sitting here with the two of them, it's hard to imagine that these low-key, friendly rockers with authentic Boston accents spent so much time in the eye of the punk rock hurricane, both beacons to a legion of angry, working class youth. Rob has an explanation, though. "I've got to be specific about this, because I've been asked about it a lot", he says. You know, 'You guys have a very working class element, it's very honest, it's very gutter, and it's very unflinching', but to be specific, I don't think that I, and consequently my brother and the neighborhood we grew up in, could be qualified as 'working class'. We grew up in the projects, which I think would qualify as one step lower, like lower class, or poverty class. Food stamps, all that. And everybody", his hand sweeps across the table, signifying all the people he and Mark grew up with, "came from broken homes, with violence, domestic and otherwise, and addiction was just a casual thing. Everybody that I grew up with is either dead, in jail, or a stark raving addict that can't function without shooting up, without exception. There was never anything for us to aspire to beyond that." 

We must begin in blood, so we may end in blood.

This lifestyle of poverty and frustration was not forgotten when Rob and Mark eventually formed their respective bands, and for Rob at least, this lifetime of struggle culminated in Blood for Blood's startling legacy of brutality. The Ducky Boys were no stranger to the odd dust-up, either. "We didn't really have that much violence", Mark says of the DB's. "Yeah", Rob agrees, "With his band, there'd be a bar brawl here and there, but the violence was almost...friendly." Blood for Blood, on the other hand, was like "Lord of the Flies" on a nightly basis. Rob has his theories for this blood soaked phenomenon. "Well, that's difficult to elaborate on in a short amount of time", he says, "but I have some specific assessments of why that went on, and I've spent a lot of my free time, assessing, in a sociological capacity, the reasons for some of the violence. With Blood for Blood, it got to the point were it was horrifying and disgusting. Some of the things I've personally witnessed are going to keep me from getting into heaven, just for looking at them. There had been times when I wanted to wash my eyes, from some of the things that I've seen when I was playing, or just around the phenomenon that was Blood For Blood." I suggest that for some, the mayhem might have been more of a draw then the music, that some people might have gone to BFB shows just to fight. "Well, they wouldn't walk away from a fight, that's for sure", Mark jokes. "Some did", Rob admits, "Some paid their money at the door to go in there and get in some shit. I started to view it like this- there's a lot of aggressive music out there, angry music, anti-social and anti-societal music, and I certainly think that Blood for Blood would qualify as all of the above. People that are attracted to aggressive, anti-social music have usually had a certain level of trauma in their upbringing; some have seen more traumas than others. Sometimes people act on that trauma, they respond to society the way society's responded to them. So you have one of these kids who's a true sociopath, a true thug. So if you've got a show with 500 people, 5 of them are going to be truly violent, and if they go along enough, they're going to find the other people like them." Rob sips his beer, a thousand fist-fights flashing through his brain. "My personal experience is 99% of the violent people that I've met- I don't mean the functionally violent, like guys that like to throw punches once in awhile, but people that cannot function in a normal society without doing something truly evil- they, more often than not, grew up with lives that the average American couldn't really understand. I'm talking about things like child abuse, be it sexual or otherwise. Almost to the person, that's the case. So if they come across music like this, of course they're going to relate to it. So you have people that aren't wrapped too tight in the first place, and you add booze, and this aggressive music, and of course something's going to happen." As for his role in all of BFB's madness, Rob doesn't deny it, but he's quick to point out that it's all behind him. "As far as the violence goes, when I was younger, I loved it", he states, in all honesty. "When I saw violence at the shows, I reveled in it. I was so inarticulately angry, for a variety of reasons, and I hated the world so much, that people would be stabbing each other, and I'd know it, because I'm up on stage, and we'd keep playing." He lights another cigarette, and shakes his head. "We wouldn't stop and try to break it up, or even try to settle it down. As I've gotten older, I've started to ask why I hate, and I've had to come to terms with why I am the way I am, and why I view the world the way that I do. I don't want to contribute to that kind of mindless violence anymore." 

Don't look back in anger

In Sinners and Saints, it seems, his point of view seems to be just the opposite. Although Sinners and Saints' lyrics are full of hard luck stories, they're laced with a quiet dignity, and the songs on "The Sky is Falling" are more about closing the door on a life of agony than they are about embracing the maelstrom. "My perspective hasn't changed", Rob shrugs. "The best way I can respond is to say that these are the songs that I've been writing in the past couple of years. Whatever world I was in, whatever state I was in, whoever I was dealing with at the time, whatever I was exposing myself to, these songs I wrote in complete honesty. They're the songs that got me out of bed at 5 in the morning when I'm sweating and the walls are closing in on me and I feel like I've got something that I've got to get out. These songs are me, they're very much who I am. There's a subtle difference in these songs, because I'm not holding back, but I'm not trying to preach in Sinners and Saints. In Blood for Blood, I used the songs as a vessel to tell the world to fuck off. The Sinners and Saints songs are just honest songs that I'd been writing in my spare time. I'm not using them as a platform for anything. If I ever feel the need to, I will. If I ever have songs that lean more to the autobiographical, or social commentary, I will, but that's not the driving force of Sinners and Saints." 

Axl is a punk rocker

I mention Guns N' Roses to Rob and Mark. After all, they were just as capable of creating havoc as Blood for Blood. "Oh, on a mega scale", Rob says. "Like the Montreal riot", his brother adds. "Oh, yeah. I remember reading an interview with one of them, Izzy I think, and he said that people would beat the shit of each other during "Don't Cry" and fuckin' "Patience". He couldn't understand that phenomenon, that impact that they had on people", Rob tells me. Guns N' Roses, just like BFB, brought out the rock and roll beast in people. "They had that huge Roman, Bacchanalian, aggressive, transcendental element. When you listen to any of their CDs, and this isn't relegated exclusively to Guns N Roses, but great rock and roll in general allows you to transcend yourself for two minutes. No matter how miserable or faceless you are, while you're listening to that music, you're soaring. You're a little bit more than yourself. Peter Steele, when he was in Carnivore, one of my favorite bands when I was growing up, said that "Music is great therapy." I disagree with him subtly. I believe that music, that great rock and roll, is not therapy, but it offers you the promise of therapy. It offers you some kind of relief, finding some kind of truth within yourself. It may never deliver, but there's always that promise, that yearning for being something better than you are." Which neatly brings us back to Sinners and Saints, a band that also has that rare power to transcend, uplift, and ultimately, to heal. "When I hear of somebody talking about our band- not necessarily likening us to Guns n Roses or bands like that, but seeing us as having that same sense of freedom that Guns brought to people- if I can do that for even three people, than I think it would all be worthwhile", Rob says. "It's this intangible, religious thing that good rock and roll provides, the sense of being high without getting high. It is a drug, a religion, life, death, rebirth. You know, I don't flatter ourselves and think that that's what were doing, but if I could do that...well, I'd give my life to do that." If their masterful debut is any indication, I don't think he'll have to go to such extreme measures, as Sinners and Saints are headed straight for the same pantheon as their heroes. "Well, regardless of what happens, We're just going to keep doing it, trust me." And I do. "I'm not going anywhere, and neither is my brother. We'll keep doing Sinners and Saints until we go down in flames."

For more info... www.sinnersandsaints.net