Interview: Gus Hais of Blackcat Elliot
*This interview originally appeared in our November 2024 issue.*
Photos by: Kiki Vassilakis
Blackcat Elliot has been rocking the Albany scene for as long as I’ve been alive. No, seriously: we were both born in 2001.
With their fourth release, When The Smoke Clears, released last month, it might be natural for fans to wonder how much music the trio has left in them—but this is no finale. In fact, the band was hoping to put out this record even earlier than 2024.
“All four [records] have been released on our own,” Gus says of their current catalog. “And for this particular one…with Covid and stuff, it brought us to this time as four years, otherwise I think it would have been out a couple years ago.”
While this delay was unfortunate, it wasn’t the longest gap in the band’s career. They went a startling 13 years without a release between 2006 and 2019, though not necessarily by choice. At points, they even went on hiatus from performing live. While at first the delay was a simple byproduct of busy lives with day jobs and children, it wasn’t long before a much more menacing obstacle appeared: Gus had a serious health scare with his vocal cords.
“There was a point where they were telling me that I wasn’t going to be able to sing again. I was like ‘woah, woah, woah, that can’t happen!’ I knew that this was a very important part of my life, playing music, writing music, and last but not least, performing. There’s no way that this little thing is going to stop me from it.”
Thus, after a nearly two-year battle, Gus defeated the odds and was ready to get back on stage. Ready to start a new era, he made a pact with his bandmates: “As long as the band keeps going, we are not going to take this amount of time again to record and put something out.” And so, they began creating their 2019 record, There Is No Good In Us.
“This is no finale…”
While that record was a triumphant return, the latest release takes a bit of a different approach. Keeping the band’s sound fresh and current for over two decades has required the crew to get creative and avoid entrapping themselves in redundancy. Gus says this record is a triumph of that experimentation.
“I noticed with this specific album, as opposed to the previous ones, we really focused a lot on song structure,” he explains. “A lot of the artists that we want to emulate and grew up with, you want it to sound like it was mostly straight ahead Ramones, The Clash, three chords, verse-chorus-verse kind of thing. But with this album, we really experimented with trying different patterns, so to speak. Adding a bridge here and there, a variety of different things. But there’s still a couple songs on here that have the old Blackcat Elliot sound and song structure for sure.
“We wanted to do more of a live approach. We didn’t really want to over saturate the songs with too much production and too many guitar tracks. That was kind of an interesting avenue we took for this album as well, which was different.”
Even before releasing this record, however, the group had been enjoying a great year. Back in the winter, they were awarded the Listen Up! award for Garage Rock/Punk Artist of the Year. About this, Gus tells me, “It’s definitely an honor. All of that keeps us motivated and keeps us going to see what the next step will be. Trust me, there’s a lot of times, a lot of nights, where each of us text or call each other and say ‘hey, I think maybe it’s time to slow down.’ But it’s funny because within a day or two, somebody else will lift that person up like, ‘hey, let’s just see what else we can do.’ When you get nominated for something like that, it just makes you really feel like you’re still in the game, you’re still part of something in the area because there is a lot of talent around here.”
Finally, amidst all the celebration of the new album, there are also plenty of moments in which the music is serving as a way to heal from loss. One of those newer-sounding songs off When the Smoke Clears, Gus explains, is an emotional acoustic track he wrote called “Take It Or Leave It.”
“I wrote that song after my dad passed away [in 2021]. A couple days later I sent it to the band and we worked on it,” he explains. This was to be no typical Blackcat Elliot headbanger, though. It needed something different. “I was just saying I think it would sound cool to have a piano on this piece. We ended up getting Doug Reynolds, another great local guy,” he says, resulting in what is certainly a standout track on the record.
Just after the release of the album, another loss devastated the band: the passing of their former bassist, John Brierly, otherwise known as “Johnny Mystery.” Johnny was a longtime member of Blackcat Elliot, playing a large part in the writing of the band’s 2005 record, Never Come Clean. His musical presence stretched far and wide across the Capital Region: The Va Va Voodoos, The Mysterios, The Lawn Sausages, and North Allen were just a few of his endeavors. It was a startling, crushing loss for many friends and fans in the area, hitting local musicians especially hard.
Once again, in a time of darkness, music presented itself as a way to heal. Gus got a call from Dave Graham & The Disaster Plan to get in the studio with another former bandmate of Johnny’s, Rob Skane of The Lawn Sausages. Dave had written a tribute song in honor of Johnny and wanted to gather some of his former bandmates to record the track and remember his legacy. Together, the three recorded the aptly-titled, “Johnny Was A Mystery.” The tune debuted on all streaming services on October 4th, a mere month after his passing.
Looking to the past of this band, it’s easy to see a lifetime inked into their songs: triumph and tragedy, tradition and growth, adversity and persistence. But throughout it all, a few things remain true: there is the music, there is the love, and there – for many years to come we hope – is Blackcat Elliot.
