Arms & Armour’s Lauren Voss (vocals, guitar, synths) and John Panza (drum machines, acoustic drums, guitar, synths) first met some 18 years ago when Panza joined Chief Bromide, a local band that Voss was already in. Three years after that, the two started Arms & Armour as a side project.
“Lauren and I would have these nights when we wouldn’t have that much stuff to do, so we’d start working on music,” says Panza from Dark Current, the Twist Drill Building studio that he and Voss co-own. Littered with electronic effects pedals, drum kits and various patch chords and wires, it resembles an industrial warehouse. It’s also the place where they recorded their new album, The Hunted, and where a handful of local acts have recorded.
Originally very stripped down, Arms & Armour featured Voss on guitar and Panza on drums. Now, the duo play a bit of everything, and the songs have a remarkable sonic density to them.
“It was more of a punk thing early on,” says Voss while sitting on a sofa next to Panza. “I was into [indie bands such as] Talk Normal and Fangs Out. It was trashy guitar and drums. Over time, it kept evolving.”
After releasing their first album, Four Years, the band adopted drum machines instead of live drums.
“I was able to start recording drums on my own and turning those live drums into samples that became the foundation for the rhythm section,” says Panza. “When that happened, it became a matter of figuring out how to perform the songs live. I now play guitar along with Lauren, which is ridiculous. It’s a challenge. After 15 years together, we are always up for challenging each other and experimenting. We push each other to try something different.”
Synths and other sounds have made their way into the songs to the point that the tunes on The Hunted are incredibly dense.
For the new album, Panza played guitar notes as “place holders” for the new songs. Voss then played lead guitar parts on top of those notes.
“At that point, I was playing rhythm guitar,” says Panza. “We have a willingness to play instruments we weren’t comfortable playing originally.”
“I became more interested in synth-based sounds and using heavily distorted guitars that were more like drones,” adds Voss.
The Hunted starts with “Star,” a song that commences with an eerie vocal sample: “If you have tears, shed them now.” There’s a loud blast before hollow-sounding drums kick in. Howling vocals follow.
“The sample is from the song ‘Over There,’ which is a World War I song,” says Panza. “The other sample is from a live performance of Julius Caesar. Maybe it’s a tip to the fact that I teach literature. I try to sneak at least one literary reference in. We play it live, and that song often opens our set. It’s the trigger for knowing when we need to hit our first note.”
Another highlight “Orion,” a track with stuttering percussion noises and droning guitars, dates back about eight years.
“John had a drumbeat, and I was doing this synth thing with it,” says Voss. “I threw all that out and went back to the original guitar sound and played it over drums, and it made the most sense. It’s basically as we originally wrote it with electronics and John twisting the drums. It never had lyrics. I came up with lyrics at the last minute. It’s just long, drawn-out chords.”
A songwriting project instigated by the Lottery League’s Jae Kristoff inspired the drum ’n’ bass track “Terror by Night,” which references the Black Death pandemic.
“It has hive mind kind of stuff in it,” Voss says of the track. “It’s about an entity that takes over people and sucks them up and they become mouthpieces.”
The samples become a way to create a mood, and Panza folds them in deeply, even if they’re out tune with the song.
“When you listen to the album on headphones, you go, ‘What the hell is going on?’” says Panza. “That’s intentional, and it has to do with the level of experimentation. Lauren is a filmmaker, and, in a way, we’ve been making a movie for 15 years, and the music is the soundtrack.”
“The songs reflect what is going on in my life and around me,” says Voss.
In the past year, the eclectic-minded group has played a Goth festival in Pittsburgh, a free jazz show in Erie, PA, and Akron’s PorchRokr. The group opened for a Norwegian death metal band at West Side Bowl in Youngstown.
“We don’t change anything we do,” Panza. “We just do what we do. We got along great with the death metal band. We got added to the bill because the booker didn’t want three death metal bands. Genre-wise, we have drone and power chords. The electronic people also kind of dig us, and we’ve been playing with two-person bands too. I don’t want to say we’re genre agnostic, but at times, we feel genre agnostic. It’s all Pere Ubu’s fault.”
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