Quick, punchy, authentic hardcore from Milwaukee, Big Laugh’s first full-length, Consume Me, out now on Revelation Records, brings back so many pre and post hardcore feels. It’s a record for everyone, from punks to hardcore kids, and that’s the way they like it. Big Laugh is proud of the unity in their Midwestern scene, and they’re honored to have a record coming out on Revelation.
“We come from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the most part,” says vocalist Zack Moffat. “We’re all pretty much from here, besides our bassist. For us, it’s always been an amalgamation because our scenes have always been small enough. I grew up in a very rural area, so anything that was fast or loud or just intense was something I like. It didn’t matter what kind of band it was. I’d get into Youth of Today, and at the same time I was getting into grindcore or power violence. I couldn’t differentiate those at the time, ‘cause I was so young.”
At this point Revelation Records is like the Empire State Building of hardcore. Consume Me comes in at REV 198, just shy of the two hundredth floor. Moffat considers where it fits in the catalog like this. “It’s been kind of a long time coming. We got asked after our 7-inch came out during Covid. It took a minute to get all our cylinders firing, but I’m super pumped. Revelation is obviously massive sound-wise and all over the spectrum… I mean eighties, nineties and beyond. They put out some awesome records by Dare and Tørsö and Urban Sprawl, and then Adam from Revelation asked us. I was very stoked to do it.”
While Big Laugh was stoked, it was also a challenge. “I don’t think anyone in the band at the time had written more than 10 minutes of music at a time,” Moffat admits. “Coming up with something that’s cohesive and well-rounded was something that was definitely a challenge, but a challenge we accepted fairly eagerly. With the 7 inch it was, I would come up with a riff or a skeletal structure of a song, then I would bring it to the band and it would just slowly kind of get tinkered with and morph into what eventually would become a Big Laugh song.”
Big Laugh’s inspiration and influence for Consume Me goes all the way back in hardcore to some of the original Revelation Records and super collides those ideas with new Midwestern punk rock framework.
“Judge, I feel like is a band that, at a time before metalcore or heavier, hardcore didn’t fully exist yet. They were a perfect amalgamation of no frills, heavy, intense music. And that was just something we always wanted to carry with us. We always wanted to play hardcore shows and punk shows and everything in between. And yeah, being a band in Milwaukee is incredible. I feel like we, along with some other bands, like World I Hate, from here, and then the more punk bands coming out, like Unlawful Assembly, we all play shows together. We all go to each other’s shows and they’re always awesome. I very much put up for my city, as cliche as it sounds, but I definitely love being from here and being able to have that space to just kind of do whatever we want. We all still support each other. I find that very, very fun and fulfilling.”
Big Laugh’s musical background is a wide gamut. Moffat’s influences are too, early Revelation Records releases and artists are among them. He lists some of them, and describes the importance.
“Vic DiCara from Inside Out and 108, one of my favorite guitarists, he’s a massive influence on me for Big Laugh. Gavin Van Vlack from Burn — people that were very much willing to take other influences. I know with Gavin, he was very interested in a little bit of jazz and Black Sabbath. [He] somehow made one of the most interesting 7-inches and LPs of all time.”
After a lineup shake up and enduring Covid, Big Laugh was ready to build on the success of the 7-inch.
“We [emerged with the] recent lineup, Jesse on drums, we all come from slightly different musical backgrounds. Sometimes I would just come up with a riff and we would jam something kind of on the spot and then flush it out later. My thing was trying to take time to let things kind of simmer down and then rest, go back on it with fresh ears and that was pretty much the writing process with the LP. It was just a mishmash of coming up with full songs. Some songs took months, some songs we wrote in a day, but for the most part I would try to come up with that least a rift to spark the idea of what was gonna come out of it.”
Moffat describes the band’s very personal messages, “Our vocalist, Drew, he writes the lyrics, and he writes them alone. I’ll speak for him, as best as I can, it always comes from a personal place. It’s very abstract. It’s just him growing up as someone who experienced things for the first time. It was during Covid and he lost a friend to suicide. He wrote a lot about that and other experiences in life. It’s about a moment in time.”
From Big Laugh’s message in the music to their love and respect for the community, Moffat and Big Laugh are proud to be from Milwaukee, to be carrying along the DIY tradition and to be supporting the scene through benefit shows and showing up. Moffat concludes, “I think it’s the most passionate project I’ve been a part of; I’ve literally sweat and cried and bled with these dudes and I think it kind of shows. We’re a band that plays live first and foremost. That’s always been the most fulfilling and satisfying part of this. I wouldn’t ask for it any other way,” finally Moffat applies that live DNA to making Consume Me. It’s always fun to do whatever you want, in terms of writing and thinking outside the box, pulling from wherever you want, that’s been my favorite part — playing whatever I wanted to play and it works — I’m excited to show the diversity of the songs on the LP.” Wake up the world, Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Big Laugh is bringing Consume Me to it and it’s a big record for them, hardcore fans and Revelation.
Photo courtesy of Big Laugh
