I Am The Avalanche

What influences an Avalanche? Tall boys, all you can eat buffets, shitty hotel rooms, and volcanoes reports I Am The Avalanche’s website. Piecing together the best of Long Island punk, the Brooklyn quintet has crashed their way into the punk-revival scene with their self-titled debut released in 2005.

The band began with the break-up of singer Vinnie Caruana’s band, The Movielife. "The Movielife got off the stage in front of 3,000 kids," remembers Caruana, "then two days later I was working construction." With the change Caruana moved away from New York to work with Head Automatica in San Francisco, and it was there that the first Avalanche songs were written.

"I wanted to write about the things that were really affecting me emotionally and were basically just killing me," remembers Caruana. Through the songs he was writing, Caruana was able to deal not only with the change of not having a band, but also with the loss of a long-term girlfriend. The lyrics of Avalanche in this way are filled with emotion, and read almost like a diary. Seeing the potential in the new songs, Caruana rushed back to New York to start his new band.

Caruana quickly gathered together Brandon Swanson, the guitarist from Further Seems Forever, Kellen Robson, the bassist from Scraps And Heart Attacks, guitarist Michael Ireland, and grabbed drummer Brett Romnes from Reservoir. This collection of veteran hardcore musicians provided the punk foundation for Caruana’s fragile emotional lyrics. They flew out to Seattle in April 2005 to record their songs.

The result was a visceral and driving assault of sound and emotion, blurring the lines between hardcore, punk, and emo. Purely punk songs like "I Took A Beating" are as hard-hitting as their name, filled to the brim with intensely fast and distorted instrumentals. Other songs, such as "Dead and Gone," deal primarily with the angst of lost love, and show Caruana’s relationship pains while still providing an impressive, landscape of sound. I Am The Avalanche’s best moments come when they blend the lines between hardcore and emo, such as in "New Disaster," a song filled with both paranoia in the lyrics and unforgiving instrumentals.

Next on the plate for I Am The Avalanche is finishing their nationwide trip with Warped Tour, and their own tour with This Is Hell and The Blackout Pact. No word has surfaced yet on when a follow-up to their debut might be released, leaving us all to patiently await what more the Avalanche has in store.

More information about I Am The Avalanche can be found here.