Rock ‘n’ Roll Villains: Ravi Shavi unleash Special Hazards On their third full-length release, Special Hazards, Ravi Shavi unleash a collection of 14 songs chock full of grooves, trashy surf and classic pop. Gems like “Going Going Gone” come off like a letter to an old flame with singer/guitarist Rafay Rashid asking, “How’s the city, how’s your mom, do you still have a car, have you taken your pills, have you smoken a joint?” The wistful chorus features backing vocals from Roz Raskin. One of the older songs in Ravi Shavi’s repertoire, “Is It True,” is a sunny burst of classic pop buttressed by backing vocals from Raskin as well as Kate Jones and Emily Shaw of The Sugar Honey Iced Tea. “High Hopes” has a Cramps-style guitar-from-the-gutter stomp with a guest appearance by Ian O’Neil of Deer Tick. O’Neil also appears on “Violence,” which has an early 2000s alternative rock flavor. “Absent Minded Fool” is a lament with the feel of a cool flamenco guitar gone wrong. The final track, “Casino,” is my favorite with its eerily seductive lyrics like, “Why don’t you take a gamble, I’ll be your casino,” floating like smoke through the air over a funky garage backbeat. Special Hazards is available now on Ravi Shavi’s Bandcamp page with physical copies on vinyl and CD coming later this year. I spoke with Rafay Rashid to discuss pandemic living, how he and guitarist Nick Politelli write, and the villainous undercurrent flowing through Special Hazards. Marc Clarkin (Motif): How have you been spending this weird time we’re all in? Rafay Rashid (Ravi Shavi): I’ve been kind of going through it with everybody else. I’ve always felt that the world is ending, and this has just been sort of more concrete or a manifestation of that. I’ve been writing more and doing some side projects. I’ve been trying to spend more time with my friends and family while still, you know, trying to keep the disease at bay. I just got tested a week ago, not because I had any symptoms; I was just curious. I was negative, so hooray, right? No COVID for me! MC: One of my favorite songs on Special Hazards is “Sixes and Sevens,” where you have a great line in the chorus: “We’re not going to heaven, we’re still stuck in traffic.” How did that song come about? RR: Well that was the pinnacle of me and Nick Politelli, our guitarist, just writing in a frenzy to create material for the album. We had come up with God knows, like 40 to 50 songs. When we whittled it down, that was one of the ones that stuck. We kind of knew when we wrote it that it was going to stick. It was just a combination of trying to figure out how to be as abrasive as we were on our first two records while reflecting a little bit lyrically. It was more of a statement song in terms of where we’re heading. All the songs were written before COVID-19 or 2020. We actually wrote all these songs lyrically about four years ago. So everything that you hear on the album lyrically has been written well before this time, but yeah, it kind of felt prophetic in a way. Not saying that we’re soothsayers, but I feel like there’s a sense that like everybody kind of knew where this was headed. “We’re not going to heaven, we’re still stuck in traffic” is like, we all have to work through a lot of things in order to get to this idyllic place that our collective imagination brings us. MC: “Red Hands” is carried by a funk backbeat that kind of reminds me of earlier Prince. Were there any new things you want to try with Special Hazards? RR: So one thing about Special Hazards that is unlike the rest of the albums, it was a very concentrated time in which we were working on the album. On this one, because of the way the time schedule worked out with our label, we had a lot of time to work on demos. This was actually sort of a compendium of everything that we worked on while we were trying to catch up with ourselves in terms of releasing stuff to the label — whether it be album covers or waiting for the pressing plants, which take a certain amount of time. So we basically whittled it down to 50 to 60 of our best songs. I think this one was the most collaborative between myself and Nick. “Red Hands,” along with probably about 70% of the songs on the album, were a 50/50 effort between me and Nick, which was cool. So on “Red Hands,” Nick did all the music and I just wrote the melody and vocals on top of it. There was a cynical brooding element to it; our engineer pointed out that this is like kind of our foreboding album. MC: You made a video for “Casino,” which, in addition to being one hell of a jam, doesn’t sound like anything else you’ve done. How did that one come about? RR: I guess with songs like “Casino,” “High Hopes,” “Red Hands” and “Going Going Gone” we found a thread of a narrative in between these demos that we had done. Then we were like, “Where’s the story here?” even though we’re not really like a story or conceptual album band. We somehow found a story within the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink format. So we just picked the songs that fit the story, which was loose. It was somewhere between a heist and an emotional robbery. So there’s some love songs, there’s some nostalgic stuff, but then there’s some straight-up let’s go ahead and take what we can get type of thing. We did feel like the enemy a little bit — it came from a villainous perspective in a lot of ways. Email music news to [email protected] Summer Guide: The road to nowhere… I was telling my friend Louie that I had to write a music summer guide and he responded, “Guide to what?” Good question, damned if I know. Maybe the best songs to listen to at the beach? That list for local music always starts with Neutral Nation’s “Bad Music Beach” with honorable mention to Someday Providence’s “Summertime in Rhode Island.” Technically there is still The Mummies at Askew on August 23, but you’d get better odds at Twin River on roulette than whether that show happens. Sammy Hagar said live music should return to save the economy. He was willing to sacrifice himself for the benefit of his kids and grandkids. It makes sense. He had no problem sacrificing Van Halen. So … fuck him, I can drive 55. Black Lives Matter. Here are some new tunes to crank up like the fireworks in the middle of the night. Bob Mould — “American Crisis” (Merge Records) Bob Dylan is the best lyricist in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. He even has a lyrically stunning new album out but, with all respect to Mr. Zimmerman and his chart-topping 17 minute song, he’s not the Bob who came out of Minneapolis that the world needs now. I saw Mould solo in January in Fall River and he talked about coming of age as a gay male in the ’80s, when the emerging AIDS crisis was referred to as “the gay cancer.” “American Crisis” starts off with this lyric: “To come of age in the ’80s was bad enough, we were marginalized and demonized, I watched a lot of my generation die.” And he is just getting started. “Wake up every day to see a nation in flames, we click and we tweet and we spread these tales of blame … world turning darker everyday, in a fucked up USA.” This song makes it feel like he was phoning it in with his old band, Husker Du, on Zen Arcade. Zen Arcade was one of the best records of the ’80s. In under two and half minutes Mould and bandmates Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster power through more twists and turns than the Corkscrew at Rocky Point. In the fadeout Mould chants, “Silence was death, never forget.” Yes. And vote! steadystate — Fast Machine I loved steadystate’s debut EP, Two Moons, last year mostly because of the track, “Radiation,” which exemplified great electro-alternative ’80s rock ‘n’ roll. It took a while to appreciate the followup, Fast Machine, because it was kind of like going from Bowie’s Diamond Dogs to Low. Fast Machine is trippy in both a psychedelic and melancholy manner, kind of like the times. I recommend checking out Tyna Calderone’s (from Big Haired Sluts fame) video for the first single “Slider,” which was shot in Providence right after the shutdown on their social media. Singer/Keyboardist Christian Calderon ponders whether “our nightmares will come alive, or will they clean up everything.” The title track asks, “What’s the point of no return?” while the band paints a foggy ’80s electro-influenced wall of sound. The final track, “D+,” isn’t just my high school math grade, it starts slow till squalls of feedback usher in the beat. Fast Machine is the perfect EP to blast at the beach to chill between New Order and Jesus Jones. Malyssa BellaRosa — Affinity Malyssa BellaRosa has been a busy lady between this solo album and another record she’s ready to drop with her band, Sugar Cones.