Live music and touring have been on lockdown and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we sat down for a fun “Top Five” session with Joey Agguire, drummer for prog metal band Sifting!
Hello everyone, this is Joey Aguirre from Sifting writing to you during Quarantine in Los Angeles, California. What a crazy time to be alive, I’ve been locked in my apartment for over 3 months now, what kind of shit is that? For me personally it’s been rough because I haven’t been able to go to our studio and play drums during all this time, we haven’t rehearsed at all either so it’s been hard keeping up with practice for me. Fear not, because we’ve been working on something special for our fans for some time now. We’re cooking up a single that sounds like it’s going to be one of our best songs ever, we all have been emailing each other ideas for it and I personally think it’s going to be an epic one. It has everything you can ask for in a metal song; heavy, groove, djent etc. Aside from that we’re working on making a documentary for our 10th year anniversary which is definitely awesome. It was all Eduardo’s idea and we’ve all been asking people from the industry to participate in it so I’m super stoked for that.
Anyway, I’m here to talk about 5 albums that have changed my life. It was very hard for me to pick 5 albums to be honest as I feel it should be for every musician, there are tons of artists and albums that have inspired me endlessly and still do, but I really wanted to concentrate on speaking about albums that I can listen to start to finish and also have inspired my drumming in a major way. I have no particular order for them I love them all. Here it goes..
Metallica – Metallica (1991)
I can’t say enough good things about the black album, it’s perfect in every way. I’ve been listening to it since I was 10 years old, Lars Ulrich was one of the first drummers to inspire me in a major way, but it was not only him, Metallica as a band had a huge impact in my life, the first song I ever played in front of an audience was “Enter Sandman,” I’ll never forget that day as it reassured me of what I wanted to be in life, a drummer who would inspire people like me.
Slipknot – All Hope Is Gone (2008)
In my opinion, Slipknot is the perfect band any teenager filled with anger and rage could ask for, and that was me. It is the first band I ever saw live and it changed my life forever. Joey Jordison became a god to me as soon as I saw him play his drum solo on his crazy drum riser that would hang him sideways and spin around. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life and probably still is. It was on the All Hope Is Gone tour when I got to see them live for the first time, it was hard picking an album from Slipknot because I love their entire discography, but I feel like this is the era were their image was the most brutal and evil and it felt so perfect, the stage presence they had was insane.
Born Of Osiris – The Discovery (2011)
This album was my introduction to “Djent” the crazy chugging sound with crazy breakdowns, it got me hooked so hard. This album has an excellent level of musicianship but to go with that they had amazing artwork and lyrical content. The drummer Cameron Losch has a huge part in writing stuff and his drumming on this album along with Jason Richardson’s insane guitar skills pushed me into getting my double bass technique right and led me to a path of wanting to only become better and better, learn harder and more intricate stuff. I was already into prog metal and was already playing stuff from Dream Theater and bands like that, but after I heard this, to me it was some of the hardest and most complicated metal drumming I had ever heard and I loved that.
Animals As Leaders – The Joy Of Motion (2014)
The first time I heard this I was on an acid trip in an old apartment in Hollywood, I simply could not believe what I was hearing, this was for sure some of the craziest music I had ever listened to, sober or not. When I heard the breakdown for “The Woven Web” I was so high it was almost like I was listening to it 10 times slower and it still sounded so crazy and I was trying so hard to understand what was going on. Animals as Leaders is an instrumental band, there are no singers to distract you from the instruments, and honestly, I don’t think they need one, the instruments are played so well and their technicality is so out of the charts, to me that is what prog metal is all about. Matt Garstka is the most influential drummer in my career so far, everything he does he does flawlessly and smoothly. The next day I was in my drum lab at Musicians Institute jamming the breakdown to “The Woven Web.”
The Contortionist – Language (2014)
This Is a band I discovered through some of my classmates while in music school. We were all smoking weed hanging after school the day this album came out and we all just sat in a couch quiet as fuck listening to it start to finish. When it finally ended, we were like “holy shit.” The atmospheres they use and the grooves they have is insane combined with the perfect mix of djent and vocals that have screams and cleans too. This album is one I feel I can listen to doing anything, relaxing, working out or driving on the road. Joey Baca the drummer has some awesome fills and grooves in this record it inspired me a lot in my drumming. It shaped me into having a better and tighter groove in metal and in music in general. It’s definitely worth checking out.
