Stabler enjoys its Special Victims Unit
Guitarist Austin Naamani and drummer Lake Tracy of thrash/punk band Stabler want to keep things easygoing and have from the start. Named after a fictional detective, Naamani explains, “For me, Stabler is all about having fun. Lake and I have been jamming and having fun since high school. I don’t write any of the lyrics, but I’d like to say that each song stands on its own. As much as we love ‘Law and Order: SVU’ and Detective Stabler, it doesn’t play much of a role in the composition of our jams.”
Influenced by bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, Charles Bronson and Spazz, Naamani and Tracy both gravitated toward local punk/hardcore. Naamani benefited from an older brother who took him to his first show, noting, “After that, I got into going to more local shows through Will from Xerxes, who I was in a band with briefly my freshman year of high school, and Patrick Ryan, whom I met at Atherton.”
Of his own experience, Tracy says, “Volunteering at the Brick House kinda opened a lot of doors for shows for me, because it was always different styles of bands, and being a broke young-teen-kid-adolescent-whatever, it gave me a chance to see it.”
As a whole, Stabler’s songs are brief and to the point. Clocking in at just a little less than 10 minutes, Stabler’s 10-song release, The Squadroom, pulls no punches. About their sonic aesthetic, Naamani says, “It’s just our style, I guess. We like the idea of fast, short songs, but we also have a lot more influences than that. That is probably the biggest reason why we fit so much into such a short amount of time.”
Adds Tracy, “Limits were never set. Playing slow gets boring fast … exhausting.”
At the end of the day, Stabler are committed to high energy and good times. Naamani says of his ideal show, “I love seeing our friends up front having a good time.” For Tracy, that ideal show is simply a “circle pit and walls of death.”
For more, investigate facebook.com/stabler502.
This article appears in April 30, 2013.