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SNAPCASE photos courtesy Daryl Taberski.

SNAPCASE

INTERVIEW WITH DARYL TABERSKI
INTERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION BY JEFF JOBES
PHOTOS COURTESY OF DARYL TABERSKI

Innovators. That is perhaps, the most accurate way to describe Snapcase. When rock trends change like the kitchen trash, this hard working band from Buffalo, NY simply acknowledges and moves on. I sat down with singer Daryl Taberski in his backyard on a rare sunny afternoon at a time when the band was just starting to put together the material that would become End Transmission.

Are you the biggest band on Victory?
I don’t know, maybe worldwide. I think in the U.S., Hatebreed sells a little bit more than we do. If you combined all of our albums, then no. But their one record has sold more in the U.S. than any one of our records.

You guys have had offers, right?
Yeah, we’ve met with labels. When it was time to renegotiate our last deal, we decided that staying with Victory was the best thing for us. We’re not unhappy with the decision because they’ve worked really hard on our albums. They did an amazing job.

“We’ve toured with punk bands, ska bands, metal bands, nu-metal bands and we’ve had fun and done well with all those different categories and scenes. I think we bridge together punk and metal and hardcore all together.”

When do you see Snapcase fitting in the musical spectrum? You’re on Victory with all the hardcore, you just toured with Papa Roach, you were offered the opening slot on the current Soul Brains tour . . .
That’s the thing, we’re always careful. We don’t want to be too tightly categorized. We felt that was one of the negative things about staying with Victory. There’s a stigma with the label that you’re a certain sound or a certain type of band. I think that comes with a lot of independent labels, people expect a certain sound. We don’t want to be coined a ‘Victory band’ or a ‘hardcore band’, even the hardcore scene is where our roots are. Without that scene, we would be nothing. We owe everything to that scene, but at the same time we don’t want to be labeled. We’ve toured with punk bands, ska bands, metal bands, nu-metal bands and we’ve had fun and done well with all those different categories and scenes. I think we bridge together punk and metal and hardcore all together. It’s important for us to be able to go tour Europe with NOFX and have a good time like we did last year and also be able to tour with a band like the Deftones and have a great time. I don’t think there’s a lot of bands that can do that. We don’t want to fit in. We want to just be Snapcase.

You’re not pursuing an image?
No, we’re normal dudes. We’re not thugs, we’re not crazy, weird dudes. The music and the message and the lyrics speak for themselves. Snapcase has been a really lucky band. I mean, we were never really one of those crazy ambitious bands that was like ‘Okay, we’re gonna get big, we’re gonna go on tour, we gotta do this and that.’ We’ve always been a band that’s just gone at our own speed, which is why we only have three albums out in ten years. We never had high expectations and I think that’s why we have had some success. A lot of it has to do with being from Buffalo. We tend to work hard and expect little gain from it. Not that people don’t work hard in other places, but Buffalo is one of those small town/big town kind of places. It’s not an easy town to come out of and grow and be successful. Bands that are recognized out of Buffalo are few and far between. Ani DiFranco is an amazing story. And in the 80’s in Buffalo, you would go see the Goo Goo Dolls and you would go see Cannibal Corpse. And now they’re both such huge international bands. We’ve opened for both of those bands, so we sort of fit in between them somewhere, I think that’s kind of cool.

It seems that there’s two different camps when it comes to bands, one that has specific ambitions and the other that is in it just make good music. And it’s cool to see bands that are in it for the music actually make it.
Definitely. I think it gets harder and more challenging as you’re doing well, to do it for the music. We were recently offered some shows and we didn’t want to go out and play. But the offers were huge. But we came together at practice and asked ourselves why we were considering the offer and our initial response was that we wanted to do the shows because the money was good, not because we wanted to go out and play. So we ended up turning them down and deciding to stay home and continue to write because that’s what we wanted to focus on and that’s what we’re going to do. I’m really excited. We have our own studio, and we’ve been reinvesting all of our earnings back into the band to do something new. It keeps it fun and fresh and that’s what’s most important.

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