Steadfast friendships, a taste for whiskey, and a penchant for Iron Maiden and Fugazi. These are the driving forces behind New Rock Church of Fire. The band is made up of bassist Mitchell West – who works with political advertising by day and brews his own beer (Mitchale) by night, guitarist and lead vocalist Floyd York – who pays the bills with a slew of odd jobs from catering to real estate photography, and drummer and singer Trae Lamond – who bartends at Chadwicks in Alexandria. Alexandria is, as it happens, the town where all three members grew up, learned to play instruments, and formed a bond at an early age.

As far as aesthetic qualities go, NRCOF can be summed up in a few words — hard, loud and fast. Their strong punk leanings can probably be attributed to their common love of Fugazi and Nirvana. And for personal favorites, Mitchell told us, "Trae's a big AC/DC, Motorhead, and Iron Maiden fan. I'm big into Drive Like Jehu and Queens of the Stone Age, and Floyd's on a big David Bowie kick." When all those sensibilities come together, the results are a big and dirty mix that comes in somewhere between Iron Maiden and Johnny Cash — but mostly Iron Maiden. With song names ranging from "Laces Out" to "Finger Blaster," there's quite a bit of levity with these three guys, who are as dedicated to having fun and enjoying each other's company as they are to making the most of their band. We've seen NRCOF a few times live, the most recent being this past weekend at Arlington's Galaxy Hut, where their set was accompanied by Terminator 2 (their collective favorite movie) in the background.

From jangly surf rock guitar to pounding hard core drums, NRCOF meld together the lifestyles, the preferences and the personalities of three people that know how to get along — and make some exciting, fun music in the meantime. Trae's a pretty explosive drummer. When he pipes up for his vocal role, which he shares with Floyd, you hear the eerie, deep tones of Glen Danzig. Floyd makes his guitar sing, and the shock of his punk rock yawp in comparison to his diminutive frame and soft speaking voice adds to the band's unexpected layers. Mitchell takes the bass for a mean walk, and makes the most of it as a source of melody and percussion.

So how did they land on the name New Rock Church of Fire? That's one detail they're not willing to share. They'll make jokes about it being named for Mitchell's grandfather, New Rock Church of Fire West, or after a prize winning race horse. But the real derivation is something they'd like to keep to themselves.

We caught up with the fellas of New Rock Church of Fire at the Arlington house where Trae and Mitchell live. Keep on reading for a raucous discussion about learning how to be a band, rockism, and Wheel of Fortune.

Visit them online at: myspace.com/nrcof

See them next: April 7 at Dr Dremos or April 28 at the Velvet Lounge.

Questions for New Rock Church of Fire:

So tell me how everything got started – when did you all meet, when did you start playing instruments, when did that turn into the band?

Trae: I’ve known Mitchell since middle school, and we grew up a couple years younger than Floyd. We all went to the same high school in Alexandria and we used to watch Floyd’s bands play. I think we all started young.

Mitchell: Trae and I started playing in bands in high school.

Trae: We weren’t in any good bands.

Mitchell: So we’d go see Floyd’s bands.

Floyd: Yeah but I wasn’t in any good bands either, so…

Mitchell: He’s older than we are, so we thought they were good bands. The older kids.

Have you always played the instruments you play now?

M: I started out playing drums, then I switched to guitar when I became friends with Trae, cause he was a better drummer than me.

T: I was in all city band. I played tuba.

(jokes about a polka album)

M: So, I switched to guitar, and then we started this band with Trae as the drummer, and three guitarists. Playing nirvana covers… so I decided it was time for somebody to step up and play the bass. And I’ve been playing bass ever since.

When did you form NRCOF?

M: It was late 2005. I had just moved back here from college, and Trae and Floyd had just moved back here too. We just kind of realized that we were already playing music and had all the right instruments, so why not start a band?

T: Actually, we came up with the name first.

M: We came up with the name, and then we had a band with a name for about a solid month before we ever practiced. We were telling people about our band, trying to set up shows, before we ever practiced. And then we started practicing. A lot.

When you came together to form NRCOF, did you have any ideas of, "I want the band to sound like this," or any major influences you drew from?

F: Gosh… no, I don’t think so.

T: The first song we came up with, it was almost like we were joking. We had five people in the room, we were all fucked up, and we sat down and were like "Yeah, let’s make it about dragons!" Pretty much the whole thing started out as a joke.

F: It wasn’t a joke!

M: No, but, our first song – seriously – was born out of the theme song for last of the Mohicans.

It’s a good song.

M: No, it’s a great song! That’s where that first one came from.

F: It doesn’t even sound anything close to that now.

M: Yeah, it’s completely different now than it was that night.

Does it have a name?

M: It’s called "Castle of Fire." And, it started as this weird little jam and we kinda changed things around a lot and added new little parts to it, and then one night we were all sitting around after band practice and wrote lyrics to it. And the lyrics were this epic story about a knight saving a princess from a tower, who’s being held there captive by a dragon…

T: It’s all a big metaphor. No, it’s not. Not at all.

M: But this little one riff jam that was the first thing we played when we all got together, it turned into this 7 ½ or 8 minute long song, that we close with every single time we play. It’s got this big instrumental outro and it’s about dragons. It wasn’t at all what we were going for.

F: No, not at all.

M: But then the next song we wrote was completely different. And every song we write changes just a little bit. Ya know sometimes we’ll go really hard, really punk or hardcore or whatever, and sometimes it’s almost like country-influenced songs.

Your shows tend to be very loud; you pass out earplugs and seem to really embrace it. Is volume a part of your aesthetic?

Trae points to himself

M: It just happens because Trae plays so loud, so we have to turn ourselves up to hear ourselves over Trae. He just beats the shit out of the drums.

F: Usually you’ll practice softer than you play, but we practice almost louder. Whenever we’re playing, practice or a show, we play the same way.

M: The only time we don’t play loud is when we play at a place like the Velvet Lounge where they have a sound system where they can really mic us and mic Trae and bring it all together. But when we just play somewhere where there’s no real sound system and we just set up and go, we just turn it up so loud, cause otherwise we can’t hear it.

T: It’s hard to play quietly.

Floyd comes and joins the rest of us at the table, and leaves his previous pursuit of looking up pictures of Stonehenge and Gravedigger. I’m told it’s for an upcoming show’s flyer.

How did you translate forming a band, practicing, to booking gigs, playing out?

M: We played just kind of very loosely at first – band practice was more like happy hour, we were more just having fun together than really practicing. The songs would kind of just come out of us jamming. We’d be like, "If we ever played for a crowd this song would be so much fun," but we never had any aspirations.

F: No, none at all.

M: It was, "If we ever play a show, if we ever play a show…" And then this guy named Big Worm who's in this awesome brocore band...

T: But he used to play hip hop, with a keyboard…

M: Right. He asked us if we would open for his band. He’s a friend, he hadn’t heard us or anything, he just asked us to open. So we did, and it wasn’t very good.

Where was the show?

M: At the Laughing Lizard Lounge in Old Town.

T: It was a disaster.

M: Well maybe not a disaster, but… right. And then another friend of ours asked us to play another show, and it went a little bit better. And then another friend of ours asked us to play a barbeque at his house down the street, and that went a little bit better, and then we got ambitious and decided to try and start booking shows. I remember our first time at the Velvet Lounge, we were so excited to play.

T: That was huge for us. We had like two days’ notice.

M: They called us on a Wednesday and said "We’ll let you open up for these bands on Friday," kind of like an audition to play there more often. We were so pumped, so excited. We get there and we start setting up, and Rob – the sound guy at Velvet Lounge, who’s just notorious for…

T: He’s a ballbreaker. Like if you don’t have the right guitar strings, he’ll call you a dumb shit. We had a drum set where the heads on the drums were original, from the 80s. It sounded like I was hitting cardboard boxes.

M: And he was micing it and eventually said, "I won’t mic this crap," and went downstairs. Then he came back up and said, "Your friend told me that you were ready to play on a Friday night, you guys aren’t ready for shit, you’ll never play here again…" We were just so defeated. It was terrible. We ended up borrowing the drum set from one of the bands that was playing after us, and he came back up and agreed to still do the sound for us. Then we go downstairs and find that all of our friends had showed up on such short notice, seriously 30 or 40 people. The support was awesome, but I was just trying to look my friends in the face. I was so nervous, I seriously felt like, "I just wanna go home. If all my shit wasn’t set up upstairs I would just go. Home." But we got up there and we played and it actually went really well.

T: It was one of our best shows.

M: The other bands were really into it, the audience was really into it. Rob came up to us and told us we could play there whenever we want. So, we were really scared for a little bit there. But since then, Rob’s been great about getting us shows there and other places.

T: Yeah, now he only busts my balls. We’ll get up there and everyone’s fucking up and he’ll be like, "You were fine, you were fine. Drummer, you suck." I’ve been there like five times and he still always calls me "drummer."

M: And every time we go there, he makes Trae buy something ridiculous.

T: Yes! He’s like, "Well actually, if you buy this $150 accessory…"

M: Trae has to spend at least $300 before he comes back to the Velvet Lounge every fucking time.

T: But then I get there and it’s, "Oh you bought the wrong shit, you should have gotten this one. It’s gonna give you a much juicier sound. Why’d you go to guitar center anyway? You should have driven out to California and bought these rare, soviet…."

M: So from then on…. Now we’ve gotten to a point where I barely even work at my job anymore, I just try and book shows.

How do you go about it? Do you call venues, or try and hook up with other bands, or…?

M: Both. Floyd and I have just started looking at a lot of other bands’ pages. We’re trying to play a lot out of town right now, so what we’ve been doing is just looking at where other bands are playing out of town, then just calling those clubs and trying to get on a bill.

Are there any bands that you’ve played out with a bunch of times, or that you like to gig with or anything?

T: The Blackjacks are fucking awesome. They’re just the coolest guys.

M: Boi-Voyce is the best band we've played with. They're from Richmond. We’ve only been playing out less than a year. Like last summer we played out once maybe twice. Now we play two or three times a month, in D.C. and out of town.

When you go out of town, where are you going?

M: We just played NY, we play Richmond a lot, Harrisonburg. We’re playing Blacksburg next weekend.

So, the first time I saw you guys, you were all wearing jump suits. Are those gonna make a reappearance? Is there any other special apparel that you guys have planned?

M: We’ve got something in the works. It may not be the jump suits, but we’ve got a big, big thing planned for the summer.

T: We want to have a theme show or something.

M: Yeah, we got some big plans. It’s not all finalized yet.

Under wraps, got it.

M: Yes, awesome costumes to come.

So, you’ve got a couple tracks up on your MySpace page, and as far as I know you don’t have an EP or an LP or anything like that.

M: Actually we’re working on that. What we’ve been doing is we take the cash that we make at the end of the night —

T: All $35. $80 on a good night. We put that away.

M: Yeah, basically I’ve got this box in my room where I’ve been keeping it all. Well, it’s all gone now! We just last week went out and spent it all on nice microphones.

T: We had planned on going to a recording studio, but we decided to get nice equipment and do it ourselves instead. Floyd had some experience recording himself, but we had to learn how to mic the drums and all that.

M: We’re actually in the process of all that right now. We’ve gotten quite a bit done – we’re working to record all of our songs.

Oh you have? Just with friends or by yourselves or…?

T: Just the three of us.

On the computer?

M: Yeah, we use Pro Tools. I’d say in the next two weeks or so we’ll have all of them done and we’ll be able to get an actual full-length CD out there.

Do you like how they’re sounding?

M: So far they’re sounding really good.

F: There’s a lot of frustration involved.

You guys exude a lot live, how is that translating?

T: Well, like the one song we have up on our MySpace page – "Laces Out" – it’s just fast and loud, and just dirty. And when we’ve been recording now it’s like "Stop – we fucked up there. Let’s redo this part." But a song like that, you can fuck up as much as you want and it’s fine – you just have to do it really loud.

F: It still sounds dirty, even with the starting over.

T: Well, Floyd is pretty much in charge of the recording.

What are those frustrations you mentioned?

F: Well, we did something months ago, when we had a lot less of the technology, and it sounded a lot better than what we’re doing now. I find myself trying to replicate that sound, and it’s just frustrating.

M: With Pro Tools, you can tweak the sound infinitely. You could spend two weeks on just the snare drum. So how do we know when it’s exactly what we want? We’re just sitting in the basement, tweaking the EQs on one small little part.

T: And trying to agree is hard, too – sometimes I’ll like the way the snare drum sounds and Mitchell will think it’s the completely wrong sound.

M: Yeah definitely. We can definitely just plow through the recording part – we’ve been playing these songs for a long time, the recording’s not the difficult part. It’s mixing it, and putting it all together that’s consuming all our time.

Have you written any new stuff lately?

T: Right now, our focus is just, record everything we have already, and move on.

M: We have some ideas for new songs that we’ll start working on as soon as we’re done with this recording. But we decided that it would be best to put all of our energy into getting recorded. It’s something we’ve been talking about for so long. I mean, on our page, we have two mediocre – if that – live recordings from a show more than six months ago.

M: We didn’t know what to do – go to a studio, how to do it ourselves. But I think we’re doing the best thing right now for us. We’re saving money, and the quality’s going to be pretty great, and it’s fun.

F: When you go and have to do it somewhere else, on their terms, it’s hard to get comfortable.

M: And we’d be rushing through it to try and save money, cause those places charge by the hour. So we probably wouldn’t get the results that we want. This way we can just take our time, at our house.

T: But no matter what, recording is never going to be as good as us just getting together and playing. When you’re recording, you record the drums. Then the guitars. Then the vocals. Then the bass. And it sucks to not all play together, that’s when we’re best. That’s when any band’s best. I hate it – I’d rather just record all of us together. Looks around I love you guys.

So nice. You guys are like a family in the New Rock Church of Fire. A congregation even!

M: We like to steer clear of any religious implications, actually. There’s a record label that got in touch with us, and got really excited, so we looked them up on the web – they’re a Christian rock label. I think they think we’re a Christian rock band. Showing interest in us solely by seeing our name.

F: It’ll probably be the first of many.

T: I say we do it man. I’ll sell out, what the hell?

M: Fuck it! Christian rock’s real popular!

Floyd improvises a Christian rock song off the cuff

How does your writing process work? Is it mainly one person, are you collaborative…?

T: That first song was just complete collaboration. Then like the next five were Floyd saying, "Hey, I’ve got something to mess around with." And since then it’s just been all over the place.

M: It’s almost always a total collaboration. Usually the person that brings something to the table is Floyd. "Here’s a riff I’ve been playing around with," or ya know, Trae will start a drumbeat, I’ll start a bass line with it, and it just happens.

T: "Laces Out" — start to finish, lyrics everything, done in 20 minutes.

F: That was an exception.

M: An exception of a pretty short, simple song.

F: Yeah, that’s happened exactly once.

M: We normally just add things, throw out ideas, and grow it by playing around with it. But we very rarely seem to use verse-chorus-verse. We always seem to steer towards pretty strange song structures. I think it comes from that kind of writing style – where do we go from here, what should we do next.

F: That new song we’re working on doesn’t even have a chorus. But it works somehow.

Tell me about the very special occasion that recently brought you all out to LA.

T: Well! I ah, in my infinite wisdom, I tried out for Wheel of Fortune. I got the call back. And then I went out there… and I came in second place. I sucked. God dammit, I didn’t win it.

F: It was over before we knew it. It was the three of us and four friends.

M: And we had a Chrysler Seabring that all seven of us drove around in.

T: The whole WoF experience though, was fuckin weird.

F: Second place is no place, Trae.

T: I know. Let me tell you about the green room. I was the most normal person there. Or, at least I thought so. They film five episodes a day. Plus the two alternates, there are 17 people in there, plus 8 production assistants who are so amped up and ready to go. It was very overwhelming. And it was at 7:45 in the morning.

F: And you wore a white shirt even though you weren’t supposed to.

T: Yup. And some lady told me that I looked like a square and I needed to pull my collar out, so I ended up looking like leisure suite Larry.

What’s your favorite venue to play in the area?

F: To be determined.

M: Yeah I think we’re still sort of new – we haven’t played everywhere.

T: Our home base is definitely the Velvet Lounge though. We’ve played there more than anywhere.

Is there anywhere you haven’t played that you want to play?

M: Yeah, we want to play Rock & Roll Hotel really bad. I mean of course we want to play the big places, too – 9:30, Black Cat – but realistically, I think we really want to play Rock & Roll Hotel next. We like Solly’s a lot too. It’s such a cool, big room, but they’re real weird about letting you play late.

F: Yeah, they’ll pull the plug. Seriously.

M: We’re still really new around here though. We’ve played just as much out of town as we have around here. If not more.

What do you see as the pluses and minuses of the D.C. music scene?

F: On the pluses, there’s a lot going on.

M: There are a lot of things just starting to happen. The negative is that it doesn’t feel like a lot of the clubs are out to give local bands a boost. They’re there solely to make money. There’s nobody that’s just itching for new music – not a lot of people just go and check out random bands. I don’t know if that happens anywhere, but I definitely don’t see it much here.

F: I don’t know – you’ve got all these venues that on a Friday or Saturday night will all have full lineups. I think there’s a lot going on. Certainly not all of it can be good – but it’s not all bad either.

Photos courtesy of the band.