by Geno Thackara
Looking for some new tunes to kick off the season? Nothing says “summer” quite like the Jersey shore. As their name suggests, the Asbury Park quartet Deal Casino is all about providing a flashy, exciting good time. Their approach is rooted in the time-honored tradition of fun, loud rock and roll, emphasis on loud.
Deal Casino Photo by Andrew Holtz
The band’s frontman, Joe Parella, appeared in That Mag‘s pages a couple weeks ago when playing solo and unplugged at a Sofar house show. He started that set by talking about breaking things. Was that a joke?
“No, not really an exaggeration,” he laughs. “I just got my guitar fixed. I just glued it together. It definitely gets crazy out there. You can only do so much acoustic, after all. You have to do what the music calls for.”
Often it calls for addicting hooks you can crank up to the rafters, but he explains that they’re not strangers to the toned-down approach either. “It’s usually just me and Jozii [Cowell] because he brings an electric guitar and creates the landscape while I do the acoustic thing. Then sometimes we all play together with tambourines and bass and try to tame it down a bit. It’s a totally different animal. We figured we can take that path of saying we’re only a loud, in-your-ear rock band, or we can try to do both things and be more versatile.”
Bassist Jon Rodney agrees that variety is key. “It’s cool because we’re all from different backgrounds, so it keeps the originality through the roof,” he tells me. “Joe P and I grew up listening to classic rock stuff, then Mike [Linardi] was on the 80s kick for one thing, and Jozii was into punk. Our sound is a real mixture and we love to rock out.”
Cowell says it’s a tricky thing to manage jobs with different shifts, but they’re making it work. “Two of us work in restaurants, so we’re always busy nights,” he offers. The others work teaching music or running a rehearsal studio. “So it’s a good mix. Luckily all our jobs are pretty flexible with our schedules.”
Mixing things up is the reason they’ve started out with a handful of EPs before working up to bigger things. Parella explains, “We have three right now and we’re done recording the fourth. The others, we kind of put ’em in the past. With every EP we kind of think, ‘well, the last one sucked.’ That’s why we do EPs—we keep getting better at writing songs and deciding what we want to be all about. Each one is basically another step. We don’t even play a lot of the songs from those older ones. We’re trying to stay relevant to ourselves now.”
The newest one, Nika, (named after the band’s dog) is coming on July 10. Philly gets an earlier chance to see the band in their element at MilkBoy in Center City this Friday, June 5, so come downtown if you want to rock out and aren’t afraid of a little shrapnel.
