Black Light Burns
Interview with Wes Borland
Words:  Scott Harrell

Appearing:
June 19, 2007
Garage Bar, St. Petersburg

June 21, 2007
BackBooth, Orlando

June 22, 2007
Culture Room, Ft. Lauderdale

June 23, 2007
Floyd’s Music Store, Tallahassee

June 24, 2007
Freebird Live, Jacksonville

Wes Borland doesn't need anybody to tell him that, to a vast majority of those who know him at all, he's still the weird guy with the body paint and contacts from Limp Bizkit; he's well aware of that, thanks.

“I mean, that's fine,” he says. “Limp Bizkit is what I'm most known for, and until I'm known for something else for a long period of time, that's what's gonna be there.”

Whether or not separating himself from his former position in the public consciousness would've been easier had he not filled it with such eye-magnet spectacle is moot. What's done is done. And the musician and painter heavily implies that he wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as Bizkit's guitarist without having that visual element as an expressive outlet – it wasn't so much about distinguishing himself from his fratty bandmates as it was doing something, anything creative while stuck in an endeavor he found artistically unsatisfying.

“I felt like I was painted into a corner in that band, because they wanted to concentrate on having 'a sound,'” explains Borland. “In the beginning I didn't do that as much, because there was more creative flow in the music. But once we had quote-unquote 'hits,' the label or Fred Durst, Limp Bizkit's frontman or whoever would come in and say, 'we've got to do another song like this, so it'll be another success.' And that's not how creativity works. You can't turn from somebody who does stuff naturally into a factory that makes another version of 'Nookie.'

“I had to find other ways to express myself. And the visual element was something that, when I looked around for open doors, that was one of the ones that was unlocked.”

If it was a quest for artistic gratification that led Borland away from Limp, he didn't find it immediately. While he officially quit the band in '01, the years that followed were marked by contractual entanglements, a half-hearted reconciliation for the making of Bizkit's dead-on-arrival '05 EP The Unquestionable Truth, Pt. 1, and a couple of projects (Big Dumb Face, the aborted Eat The Day) that might best be described as unfocused.

It was while sifting through the ashes of another unfinished musical endeavor, The Damning Well, that Borland finally found the elements he was looking for; they eventually coalesced into the group now bringing him back to the marketplace and touring circuit as a bandleader in his own right. Black Light Burns is the result of several years' worth of experimentation with personnel and style. Its just-released debut album, Cruel Melody, features contributions by the likes of star session drummer Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle, Guns N' Roses, a fucking million others), former Nine Inch Nails member/studio  journeyman Danny Lohner and even Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano, and a sound inspired by everything from Bauhaus-esque Gothica to crushing industrial-metal hybrids.

“Basically, while making the record, we tried to do whatever felt natural, and not think too much about a specific sound, because I wanted one moniker that a bunch of the sounds I liked fell under,” says Borland. “When we picked out what the record was going to be, out of all the music we had, it just felt right. It felt like, 'wow, this is what we are, this is it.'”

Cruel Melody is also Borland's coming-out as a lead singer, a role he was leery of taking on before now.

“I just had this image of my ideal singer, and I never found it,” he says. “I was asking people the impossible, trying to mold them, and that's just not right ... so I realized I was going to have to step into that spot, and try to be the best version of what I had in my head that I could be.”

Alternately evoking Peter Murphy's baritone menace and Trent Reznor's anguished howl, his voice provides a common thread running through Cruel Melody's disparate yet uniformly dark sonic characteristics, as shades of electronica, fuzzed-out sludge, acoustic strumming and groovecore chunk surface and dive in a layered production Borland likens to the way he uses color when creating visual art:

“I basically write music like I do paintings. I plan the concept out, then build the song like a collage. That's how the whole record was written, adding on layers of sound, then stripping some away to make others pop out. Just bringing together the right elements, and taking away what wasn't necessary.”

In the wake of the album's completion, Borland put together a road version of Black Light Burns, featuring drummer Marshall Kilpatric (The Esoteric), guitarist Nick Annis (Open Hand), and bassist Sean Fetterman (Turn of the Screw), and his trusty laptop. The combo cut its teeth on a stint supporting modern-rock airwave staple Chevelle and, following the release of Cruel Melody, is now in the midst of the headlining trek that serves as Black Light Burns' proper introduction to America's heavy-music fans.

And, hopefully, as notice for good and all that Wes Borland is no longer that weird guy with the body paint and contacts from Limp Bizkit.

“The important thing to me is, for the first time in my life, I feel completely honest and heartfelt and 100 percent behind this and committed to it,” he says, “instead of kind of being uncertain about the project.”