Apartment 26 for the Massive 'Music for the Massive' album

It's truly rare when a band comes along determined to change the very fabric of the contemporary music form. It takes a brave unit to spit in the face of convention and boldly forge their own path of rock and roll creativity. Apartment 26 is just such a band. Heavily electric, heavily eclectic, yet also heavily heavy, this young British contingent seem intent on playing the rock and roll game by their own rules-- destroying some time-honored musical "traditions" in the process.

As heard throughout their debut Atlantic album, Music for the Massive, all of these ground-breaking musical musings and brash rock and roll experimentations accomplish the net result of astounding the listener with their energy and unabashed sonic creativity... not bad for a bunch of lads still in their early 20s. Vocalist Terence 'Biff' Butler, guitarist Jon Greasley, bassist Louis Macan, keyboardist Andy Huckvale and drummer Brad Booker have been playing, thinking and dreaming music since the band's "core" members (Biff, Jon and Louis) first met as school chums at the tender age of 14.

With each step along that path, Apartment 26 (the name taken from a David Lynch film... a constant source of both inspiration and perspiration for this talented unit) has expanded upon a skeletal structure drawn as much from the heady rhythms of jazz as the straight-ahead fury of contemporary rock. And as Biff (who by the way, is the proud son of Black Sabbath's legendary bassist Geezer Butler) is quick to explain, his band's notoriously unpredictable and highly cerebral approach to their musical craft remains this band?s primary means of nurturing their "organic" sound.
Through the components of electronic energy, '40s-era jazz attitudes and 21st Century technology that serve as the key ingredients in the band's heady musical mix, Apartment 26 now emerge as an unpredictable, cutting-edge unit that as shown throughout Music for the Massive stand at the forefront of a new musical generation. It would appear that, despite his noble metal lineage, Biff is seeking to be his own man. Mind you, his current nonconformist musical actions are not in any way intended to detract from the admiration he holds for both his father and the Sabbath legacy. It's just that young Biff and his cronies realize that this is a new musical day, and they are very much a part of hard rock's new breed.

Ozzfest 1999 led directly to the band entering into the studio to lay down the explosively-charged tracks that comprised their first full-length disc, Hallucinating. But while that effort did little to "break" the band on an international scale, it served as the all-important stepping-stone in the evolutionary process that has now led directly to the emergence of Music for the Massive. Here, songs such as "Star Wars", "Stupid World" and "Be My Friend" show that this is clearly a band ready, willing and able to carry the hard rock form towards its next great frontier.

"The title of the album says it all," he said. "Whenever we come over to America, we always over-English ourselves, so that everything is something 'massive' so among our associates we were jokingly known as the 26 Massive. Our group of friends are The Massive, and we got to the point where we realized, essentially, even though as much as you write and perform music for yourself, you're really just doing it for others; friends, family, cd buyers, concertgoers, music lovers. So it's all of the people who listen to music-- or anyone who helps the band out in any way shape or form-- that are part of the massive. This album is filled with music for them."

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Apartment 26 for the Massive - Music for the Massive