Detroit proto-metal marauders The Octopus play a wicked style of fuzzed-out riff rock that draws blood. Formed by guitarist J Frezzato and vocalist Masha Marjieh and rounded out by bassist Matt O’Brien, drummer Chuck Burns, and keyboardist Adam Cox, the band honor the musical legacy of their hometown—think The Stooges and MC5—on their debut album, Supernatural Alliance, which drops March 30 through Rise Above Records.
The Octopus have an interesting story concerning how they got their band name. It involves dreams inside of dreams—or, maybe, just a simple exchange between guitarist and vocalist. You make the call.
“I had a series of dreams about a group of former U.S. and Russian military operatives traveling the globe in a steel octopus, which was a submarine and a space ship,” Frezzato says. “It also served as this floating sea station that ships could land on. This was after Armageddon; all the world governments had collapsed. It was a comic book inside a dream I kept having. It really troubled me.”
“Then, right around that time, I ran into this girl I hadn’t seen since high school,” he continues. “She’d been in Hong Kong, and she just turned up at this bar on the night before Thanksgiving. She was like, ‘Hey! I just had a dream about you!’ Those were the first words out of her mouth. She told me this long dream she had, where her and I had gone into Susan Sarandon’s basement, because Susan Sarandon wanted to show us something. She took us into this cavernous basement room, and Susan Sarandon had a giant octopus hanging from these chains in her basement over a vast reservoir of water, like an underground lake. I was like, ‘That’s the dream you had about me?!’ She’s like, ‘Yeah.’”
“Then, the next day I went to this bookstore, and there was a book on the shelf called ‘The Octopus,’ by Jim Keith,” Frezzato says. “I bought it, took it home, and read it, and it scared the hell out of me. I’ve got an octopus phobia, I should tell you. Meanwhile, I was putting this band together with Masha, and she was like, ‘What do we call it?’ And I said, ‘How about Octopus?’ She went for it.”
Even though the band are from Detroit, they don’t make a big deal about it—or care.
“I don’t know, I mean, that’s not anything we really think about,” Frezzato says. “We live here. We grew up here. Over the years, it’s been weird watching people have geography be a really large part of their story. I remember when being from Detroit was a real death sentence for a band. Like, ‘Why are you from Detroit? Why don’t you move to an actual city like New York or L.A.? Don’t you want to “make it”?’ Which is so laughable it’s sick, as time has proven.”
“Then, it became a sales thing: ‘Hey, everybody! We’re from Detroit! We sound like the other bands from Detroit!’” he continues. “And then, it was a thing people wanted to counter-promote: ‘We’re from Detroit, but we don’t sound like any of the other Detroit bands!’ There’s just so many layers of jive going on, none of which has a goddamn thing to do with what a band sounds like or whether or not what they’re doing is powerful or has ideas behind it or is sonically appealing.”
“I’m a grumpy guy,” he notes. “I guess that’s a long way of saying, ‘I don’t really care.’”
Frezzato may not care about the band’s geographical location, but you should care about The Octopus. Supernatural Alliance will scorch your eyebrows with its raucous, psychedelic proto-metal.
