Pittsburgh double-guitar four-piece Sistered hit a powerful stride on their self-released debut full-length, New Sky. They don’t have much of their hometown’s blue collar disaffection to their sound, but there’s something restless and immediate in their material all the same, and their willingness to blend genres so early on into their career speaks of good things to come. If you missed the news yesterday, they’ll be sharing the stage with Sweden‘s Truckfighters on that band’s July US run of dates, and as they’ve already played with the likes of 3 Inches of Blood and Skeletonwitch, I’m obviously not the only one out there impressed.

Which is reasonable, when you consider that the memorable punkish blast of “God Save the Child Brides” comes a mere 24 minutes before the blistering black metal crossover assault of “Midnight Renegade.” Sistered seem to have an ingrained ability to transcend genre confines, and for a band really just getting their start playing together, it’s an accomplishment that the record is cohesive at all, let alone carrying the breadth of its post-rock instrumental title track or the thrashly riffage of “Story of the Witch.”

I reviewed New Sky not too long ago, but I wanted to get more background on Sistered and get some idea of where they were coming from as a band, the conditions under which the professional-sounding album was recorded, and some of the themes they’re working with in terms of musical and lyrical content. Throw in one about Pittsburgh venues and one about what they’ve got coming up next (aside from that Truckfighters show), and it’s an easy Six Dumb Questions.

Sistered is vocalist/guitarist Jesse Meredith, guitarist/vocalist John Dzziuban, bassist Cary Belback and drummer Josh Egan. Dzziuban was kind enough to field the following. Please enjoy.

1. How did Sistered get together? Was there a mission when Sistered got going sound-wise?

We went through a few lineup changes before things solidified. Jesse (vocals/guitar) and Cary (bass) were playing together and Josh (drums) and I had made music for years in various bands. I joined with Jesse and Cary when they wanted to add a lead guitar and we eventually brought Josh into the mix and it was very apparent early on that we had something unique and interesting with a good live swagger.

From the beginning we knew that we wanted to have diversity and the ability to bend and blend genres all while maintaining something that was our own. Every song and every part has pushed our boundaries and made us better musicians individually and better as a unit.

2. How long were you working on New Sky, in terms of the recording? What was the studio time like? The album is very cohesive and natural sounding, but still clear. Did you want anything particular out of the studio experience?

New Sky took around three months to record. I’d begun recording bands around Pittsburgh about a year before we started the record and had gained some pretty good experience in engineering and mixing, and Cary had experience building and working in a local studio, so when it came time to record, it made a lot of sense for us to do it ourselves. The studio was the basement of Josh and his brother’s house, which is conveniently broken up into a couple of different rooms. We built sort of a makeshift studio with a tracking room and a control room and we left it all up until things were pretty much done. We tried to keep things as live and natural as we could and just make a record that sounds how we do when we play shows. I think we achieved that.

3. How does the songwriting process work? Are there multiple songwriters in the band? The songs are very diverse and sound like they could have come from different contributors, but do they?

All of the ideas begin with Jesse. He and I will usually get together on guitars and develop whatever ideas he has and then we’ll take them to practice and we’ll all develop them further and structure them and make changes. It’s very much a group effort, with each of us having input and each of us having a hand in the writing process, but again, they all begin with Jesse. He really is an incredibly talented, diverse writer.

4. Where did “Midnight Renegade” come from, and what are the lyrics about? I can’t make out most of it, but I keep catching “sexuality” repeated.

”Midnight Renegade” is about rejecting the morals and beliefs instilled in us by a religious upbringing and freeing ourselves of that dead weight; casting off the belief that our desires and wants are all wrong and sinful. It begins by saying “I am the Midnight Renegade,” but later says “You are the Midnight Renegade,” a juxtaposition that asks, who is the sinner, the people breaking the rules, or the people making them?

5. Let’s say I’m in a touring band coming to Pittsburgh from out of town. Not much of a draw. Do I want to play 31st St. Pub or The Smiling Moose, and why?

Honestly, they’re both totally sweet! 31st St. is owned by a guy that looks scary as hell, but is actually an awesome dude to work with. It’s a dark, loud bar with a lot of punk and metal history in it.

The Smiling Moose has a nice, big stage in a small room, with a powerful sound system. The sound guy, Sean, is a really good dude that knows what he’s doing. He also has a college radio show that we’ve played a couple of times.

I’d say a touring band should play at one, then come back and play at the other. Seriously, that’s what I see a bunch of touring bands doing.

6. What’s next for Sistered? Any shows coming up or more recordings this year?

Next, we’re gonna tour regionally, playing this record and a bunch of new stuff; we’ve been writing at a pretty furious pace and have more than enough material for another record. So we’ll probably begin recording that later in the year, it’s gonna smash the shit out of the first one.

We’ve already had the privilege of playing with some great bands like Lo-Pan, Skeletonwitch, 3 Inches of Blood, The Ocean and a bunch of others and we have some more coming up with some bands that I love like True Widow and Fight Amp.

We’re gonna continue building on the momentum we have right now and see where it takes us.

Sistered’s website

Sistered on Facebook

Some records genuinely get better with volume, and that seems to be the case with New Sky, the self-released debut full-length from new-school Pittsburgh bashers Sistered. The four-piece make some predictable moves throughout, and guitarists Jesse Meredith and John Dzziuban (lead and backing vocals, respectively) add a few wispy post-rock melodic flourishes to the barrage of assaulting riffs, but I’ve found that when you turn it way up and just let the eight tracks overtake you, it hardly matters whether or not you see it coming, or what stylistic turn is next. When approached in the right mindset, New Sky is heavy with an admirable intricacy behind it, punkishly raw and yet metallically weighted in a vague progressivism. There are a few standout moments and a few missteps, but the overall clarity of Sistered’s presentation and their unabashed sense of preaching to the choir have a charm to them that serves the band well throughout the 41-minute runtime.

There’s a bit of a genre-blend happening along the line of New Sky, the thrash riffs of the instrumental guitar-led opus “Talkin’ Shit From Outer Space” (no word on whether the title was intended to make fun of Joe Satriani, but given some of the noodling within, there’s a good chance it was) soon giving way to the darker doom rock of “Story of the Witch” to launch the album’s back half. The shorter, punkish “Shut Your Eyes” launches New Sky, and almost immediately there’s a groove to latch onto in the drumming of Josh Egan and the bass of Cary Belback, who display almost universally the trappings of a soon-to-be-underrated rhythm section. The late-arriving vocals from Meredith and Dzziuban are semi-melodic shouts that’ll be familiar to anyone experienced with the first Torche EP, but that turns out to be just one of several tactics Sistered have at their disposal. As upbeat album-highlight “God Save the Child Brides” plays out with backing gang shouts and gruff older-school hardcore punk drunken fronting yelling, I’m more inclined to want to be a part of the cavalcade than pass it up. The chorus is infectious and the song still has enough of a rock edge that I don’t feel like I’m being taken somewhere I’d otherwise resist going.

New Sky’s biggest turn comes with the transition from “God Save the Child Brides” into the title track, which finds Sistered embarking on the kind of sentimental-single-notes-over-chords chicanery that I’m told the mop-topped pop kids eat for every meal of the day. That intro soon gives way to chunky Mastodon-meets-NWOBHM riffing and farther-back shouting from Meredith (presumably) and maybe overly active hi-hat work from Egan as complement for an already angular guitar line. At 8:18, “New Sky” is second only to closer “Blood Red Fog” in both track length and scope, but it’s the first show of Sistered’s ability to transcend genre and be something more than “modern riffy punk metal.” An extended break recalling the intro leads into the song’s second half, gradually building to a satisfying instrumental culmination that touches on both the prior-heard melody and chugging heft. It’s the kind of song you’d like to take a second to process, and Sistered do tack on a couple seconds of silence to the end, but as they should, they soon launch into “Layer of the Empire,” which might be the heaviest of the more riff-based tracks on New Sky, taking a kind of pre-Spiral Shadow-era Kylesa approach to post-doom with an engaging stutter in the guitar, subtle vocal melodicism, thick bass and well-used crash in the drums. The opener is forgettable in comparison, but with the ensuing three songs – i.e., “God Save the Child Brides,” “New Sky” and “Layer of the Empire” – Sistered make a good case not only for the diversity of their approach, but also their identity within that variation. “Cool tunes, bro,” one might say if encountering the band for the first time at Pittsburgh’s Smiling Moose or some other similarly-minded venue.

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