Car Bomb

Car Bomb

Car Bomb is a US mathcore band from Rockville Centre, New York, active since 2002. The group’s lineup includes Michael Dafferner, Elliot Hoffman, Greg Kubacki and Jon Modell.

Style and influences

Car Bomb plays a technical, highly fragmented form of metal that shifts riffs, reverses them, cuts them short and changes tempo abruptly. Their sound combines the polyrhythmic complexity associated with Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Botch with the aggression of Coalesce and Converge. Their music also sits across djent, experimental metal, hardcore, metalcore and progressive metal.

Formation

The band’s roots lie in the early Long Island hardcore and metal scene. Around 2000, two bands, Neck and Spooge, rehearsed in the same basement space under a butcher in Rockville Centre, which the musicians called the Dungeon. Greg Kubacki and Michael Dafferner wanted Neck to move beyond the standard hardcore scene, while Jon Modell and Elliot Hoffman were playing in Spooge, a more technical band with influences including Zappa and early Mr. Bungle. In 2002, Modell recruits Kubacki for a project that develops into Car Bomb. The group then rehearses for eighteen months through several lineup changes before Dafferner and Hoffman join to complete the final line-up.

Writing and themes

Car Bomb’s members describe their creative process as methodical and self-critical, with ideas repeatedly broken apart and rebuilt. Their professional and personal interests include computer programming, graphic design, astronomy and quantum physics, which also reflect the band’s interest in control, structure and complexity. The lyrics of tracks such as “Rid” focus on self-examination and the destructive process of analysing aspects of the self to exhaustion.

Recording activity

The band begins recording in early 2004 in the house then occupied by Kubacki and Modell. That recording becomes part of the band’s early output as they work to reach a wider audience.