Apostle of Hustle is coming to Ohio and will draw from its latest album, “Eats Darkness,” at its 8 p.m. concert Tuesday at the Newport Music Hall.
The track, Snakes, from the band’s third album, sets the tone for the aggressive and moody ride listeners will experience.
“It’s a very conflicting record,” said the band’s guitarist, Andrew Whiteman. “It deals with battling. That’s part of where the aggressiveness comes from.”
The battling aspect surfaces in the album’s theme of dealing with the worst in life and turning it into something good.
“It is a concept record,” Whiteman said. “Somehow things are working on you, maybe unconsciously, as well.”
Whiteman credited the sound clips inserted between many of the songs as a reason the record is able to produce such a variety of melodic flavors while remaining coherent.
“At first I wanted to do shout-outs to the little hip-hop mix tapes and dance hall mix tapes I used to get,” he said. “And because I knew the record was going to be about conflict and fighting, I was just going to put gun shots and sirens and thunder claps in between these songs. But then when I started to sit down and do them, I started to add voices of poetry, natural sounds, and then I started to put messages and clues in them about the song that follows it.”
Listeners can think of the album as a book — an intense book about overcoming the difficult aspects of living and what happens to people as they transform through adversity.
The sound clips act as chapter breaks to prepare the audience for what is ahead.
The record is very dense, and that is the main reason it was kept to a shorter length, Whiteman said. Originally, there were more breaks in the music, but they were left out of the final production.
“For the people that like [the breaks], I’m probably going to put it on the Internet on the blog when I’m done with this tour,” he said.
Unlike artists who prefer a particular part of the music-making process, Whiteman isn’t picky.
“For me, I like it all,” he said. “I suppose the studio is a funnier place because you can be more schizophrenic in the studio. You might get a take down and you think it’s amazing, and then two days later you listen to it, and you wonder why you thought it was good.”
A unique aspect of the band is its desire to focus on a few simple ideas for a record instead of experimenting too much with a new idea or expanding on an already recognizable sound.
“I wanted to de-expand on certain things,” Whiteman said. “I just wanted to make it faster and simpler.”
What can people in Columbus expect from a concert delivered by Apostle of Hustle?
“It’s a highly rhythmic situation,” he said. “There’s a lot of pounding rhythms going on with us, but it’s also very intimate.
“It’s like if you go to a bar and you’re listening to that song, ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’ by Tom Waits, and you’re getting drunk listening to that song, and you pick someone up, and you go back to their house with them,” Whiteman said. “And then instead of making out, you start having a pillow fight. That’s kind of what it’s like.”
More information on the band can be found at apostleofhustle.com and canvasmedia.ca/apostleofhustle.
