Vinyl Record: Predator, You

Punk rock is best when it strives to be more than blood, sweat and three noisy chords. Such is the case with Predator, the hard-hitting trio of Brannon Greene (guitar/vocals), Mike Beavers (bass/vocals) and John Necro (drums). In less than a year, the group’s perfected a balance of pummeling drums, distorted bass chops, motorik guitar hooks, and dual vocals that strike with visceral grit and minimalism.
— Chad Radford

When Predator first started, it was me and Dave Rahn from Carbonas playing bass and drums and Valery Lovely playing drums and singing. We got together — I drank six Sparks to get into the zone — and we recorded. Dave got really busy touring in Europe, so me and Mike and John got together and have been writing ever since. We still play some of the older songs, but what we’ve written since then has come together when someone comes to practice with a basic idea and we start building on it.
— Brannon Greene

Even if we write something out, when we bring it to practice you never know what’s going to happen with it. I usually like what we make happen together more than what I had in my head, so it’s kind of pointless to write something and stick to it. Brannon and I have been in bands together for a long time and we’ve always wanted to write different-sounding stuff, whether it be something a little slower or maybe much faster, but it always comes out sounding punk because that’s the only kind of band we’ve ever been in, and that’s what we know how to play.

On the way up here tonight, Brannon was playing The Year in 7”s compilation on Dischord and some of the later Minor Threat songs came on. That stuff still sounds really hardcore, but they were striving for something else. It was the first time I had listened to it since I’ve been in the band. It made me think about how we approach our songs from a punk and hardcore mind-set but are trying to do something different with them. It sounds lame, I know, because Minor Threat is so like what you listened to when you were a kid. But man, those guys wrote really cool music when they were like 16 years old.
— Mike Beavers