Venerea Shake Their Disease To Get More Serious

Our Lady Peace, The Rolling Stones and Rufus Wainwright have all done it. Now, Swedish punk/hardcore foursome Venerea can join their ranks as musicians that, despite not being American, use their songs to criticize the policies south of our border. Singer/guitarist Andreas Flygare says Venerea don’t consider themselves a political band, though new song "Guantanamo" in particular is a clear break from the light-hearted, Blink-182 style of immature music they’ve always played.

But writing protest lyrics like "a population in denial" was a conscious decision for Venerea, as was the heavier edge on One Louder, their latest release.

"We wanted to evolve in that direction since most of the songs we’ve done in the past, the heavier, the harder stuff is always what comes out best of Venerea, so it came quite natural to make it even more in that direction," Flygare says. "We wanted to have a hardcore edge on it because that’s what we do best, really."

The band’s embracing of a harder style seems to have brought them some luck. Over the course of their 12-year life span, Venerea have been signed to numerous labels — three from Germany, two from Sweden and one that "was never really a label" and has since "vanished from the surface of the earth." Now signed to Bad Taste Records, based in Sweden, Flygare says, "It feels like we’re finally home."

Between bouncing from label to label, Venerea’s lyrical content changed from issues like porn and beer to songs that, according to their website, "will send Good Charlotte back to kindergarten school." Surprisingly, Flygare says he doesn’t mind pop-punk (he cites Green Day’s American Idiot) and he loves Canadian indie folk-rockers The Weakerthans.

"We’re all big fans of The Weakerthans," Flygare says. "They’re one of the best bands that have come up in the latest years. I really like his [John K. Samson’s] songwriting. He writes really brilliant lyrics."

But regardless of their move to more meaningful territory, their championing of Canadian indie and their wish to tour our country, one fact remains — the band used to call themselves Venereal Disease. Flygare says he completely understands people who, despite the name change, might not take his band seriously.

"I joined the band in ’97 so I don’t really have anything to do with that name but we’ve been around for about 12 years now, so we kind of stuck with it anyway," he explains. "But it’s a pretty silly name and if we were about to start a band today I guess we would come up with a better name. Venerea started out more as a fun punk band, I think, so in that case the name goes pretty well with the music. But today, we’ve evolved and we’re not really the same kind of band anymore. But I guess we’ll have to live with that."

source: ChartAttack_by Angela Kozak