By Woody
Chase The Ace are about to hit the road in the UK and Europe supporting their debut album ‘Are You Ready’. Woody caught up with Vito, front man of the raucous rockers to find out more about the Israelis and their forthcoming tour.
Hi Vito, I hope you’re well.
Your band Chase The Ace released their debut album ‘Are You Ready?’ a few months ago. How would you describe the band and what can people expect from the album?
How you doin Woody? I’m doing great mate, doing my best to enjoy the best year of my career haha.
Chase The Ace (CTA) is our modern way of sayin “Rock n roll is alive and kickin so let’s party”. It’s got lots of influences from 70s-80s hard rock/ glam metal but I’d like to think we’re giving it quite of an up-to-date twist. It’s all about the fun side of rock – big choruses, party songs with loads of overdrive. Even though we sin with a big ass power ballad here and there; the quick, guitar riff oriented, get on stage and rock it tunes are our thing and we love it!
With our debut album we wanted to keep that live sensation we get on stage and try and just put it on an album for the whole world to enjoy.
Because everything happened really really fast as we signed only a couple of months after we went public with CTA, we wrote the songs in our rehearsal space and recorded everything live a couple months after – without the months, sometimes years, of pre production and countless hours of sitting in the recording studio putting layers on top of layers.
Most of it was straight up live recording, like we’re playing together on stage. This work process, with the help of the brilliant Daniel Strosberg (who recorded, mixed and mastered the album), helped us achieve the goal of keeping the music nice and raw, with loads of bite to it.
What should you expect from the album? Just a fast driven, “put it in your car and floor it” stadium anthems. Hopefully once you’ll hear it you’ll feel like you just gotta catch us on tour haha
‘Are You Ready’ is the band’s first album in English, but you are not an inexperienced band releasing a few albums in your native Hebrew. Were those albums in a similar style to Chase The Ace? Why have you chosen to start writing in English? And practically start from the beginning again with a new band?
Yeah, we’ve been around for 6-7 years back home under a different name, singing Hard Rock/Glam Metal only in Hebrew. The thing is the whole country’s population is around 7 million people, it’s literally impossible to have a career as a rock artist back home.
After going to Download festival for the first time last year, I’ve seen more than 100k rockers that could easily be our best friends and would appreciate our brand of rock n roll – I was shocked, I’ve only seen these things growing up watching video cassettes and DVDs from AC/DC and KISS. Among them was also a beautiful girl who nearly started crying when Slash took the stage – a dream! So we figured we’ll write and record an English EP put it online and see how it goes.
Even though we play kind of the same style between our old band, Koex, and Chase The Ace, it feels like its brand new to us and we wanted a fresh start, so we did everything from scratch.
We’ve had Koex for years and along with all the local recognition we’ve had, we’ve done some mistakes that we didn’t wanna repeat this time. First of them was the name – Koex is a shitty name hahaha
It kinda feels like Koex is where we got our degree in rock and now it’s time to hit the real world and find a way to make it big.
Can you tell us about a few of the songs on the album, what they are about?
I mainly write about night life, having fun and the road to Rock n roll stardom, but with this album things were a little different. You can still finds songs like ‘The Cat Is On The Loose’, ‘Raise Your Glass’ and ‘Made Out Of Ice’ that talk about having fun, hot chicks and binge drinking; but I think that it’s the other songs that give this album it’s special feel.
‘Dear Demon’ is a good example which is basically a letter to the devil asking where and when did I go wrong. ‘Rock Bottom Rock n roll’ started off as a super slow, honest blues song till it turned to the swinging rock n roll tune you know. While, ‘Tapped Out’ that I think that in today’s economy everyone can pretty much relate to haha.
One of my favourites is ‘Feel Like A Fool’ which closes the 15 song album with a mellow, heartfelt vibe. This song gets me every time.
I’m really proud of this album and even more importantly, people from all around the world seem to like it, which still feels like a dream to me.
You have quite an extensive European tour in the works including Germany, Belgium and the UK… I know you still have some available slots but at the moment your only date in the Midlands region is at Rock Zombie in Dudley on 22nd November. Have you finalised your tour dates yet? And do you have other details about the shows, like who’s supporting you?
Yeah, it’s our first tour outside our country and I can’t wait to hit the road! I’m really excited meeting up some amazingly supporting people we got to know through the bands Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram profiles this year. We’ve still got a hole in the schedule here and there but I reckon that after 14 gigs night after night we’ll appreciate the occasional day off.
I still don’t know who’s supporting us but we’ll definitely post about it on our Facebook page. We try to be as involved as possible with the choosing of our support acts – we wanna make sure that if a rocker decides to come to our gigs he’ll know that he’s getting what he paid for.
Is it important to you that Chase The Ace are an active live band? And what can those attending the shows expect from a live show?
We live to play live. You know, our music is not too deep and doesn’t have all kind of weird ethnic instruments. We’re here to rock as hard as we can. We always put on a show with loads of fast, catchy, power driven tunes and try to make a party of every situation. I don’t really get why musicians sometimes take themselves so seriously – its entertainment and we aim to keep it that way. So if you’re around come party with us!
If you could tour with any band who would it be?
Ooh that’s a good one. If it’s ANY band I’ll have to say Motley Crüe or fuckin AC/DC! If I had a time machine I’d love to be going back to 83 and hop on stage with Van Halen and Aerosmith haha. If I wanna be a bit more realistic, I’d love to support Airbourne, The Darkness, Crashdiet, modern day Skid Row are pretty wicked at the moment. But to be honest we just love to play to people so even if Elton John called us, will be on the first plane over haha
You have already produced a few tasty promo video’s for the album, are their anymore to come?
Oh yeah, there’s plenty more!
When we started the band we thought of different ways to break the border problem and spread our rock to all corners of the world. Videos proved to be an awesome way of doing that. I gotta say that if it weren’t for help from our friends and especially Tomer Fuchs (who filmed and directed most our videos) this wouldn’t be possible. So thanks guys!
I reckon we have 3 more videos in the making for our debut album. It was so much fun making them… in one of them we got this awesome dude with a mini fuckin helicopter that came by and gave us loads of shots we only dreamed of when watching Bon Jovi and GNR videos. Another one started as a super positive bar video but quickly turned into a massive party where all the cast and crew got totally wasted. Hopefully we still got some nice shots along the way haha
What does the future hold for Chase The Ace? Do you have plans for a second album or live shows next year?
If all goes well, we’re here to stay! We’re already working on another tour during 2014 – I hope it’ll be one of many next year. Actually, we’ve already written and recorded most of our second album so that also should be out sometime in 2014. This year was the best year we’ve had as a band and we’ll definitely do our best to keep the ball rollin for many years ahead.
Is there anything else you would like to add or say to Midlands Rocks readers?
Yeah! Well I really can’t wait to meet you guys, we’ve gotten loads of support from rockers in the UK so I promise we’ll return the favour by giving it all we got on stage in Nov. Till then, you’re all invited to visit our Facebook page! We like to keep touch with our followers as they’re usually pretty wicked, so hit us up!
http://Facebook.com/ChaseTheAceBand
