U.P.O.

UPO’s Epic debut album, No Pleasantries, is “a heavy, emotional, thought-provoking, inspirational, exciting, and dynamic,” says UPO guitarist Chris Weber. “It evokes a wide spectrum of emotions and moods, and we’re definitely proud of it.”

This L.A.-based band bursts forth with a massive, crushing, roaring, guitar-based sound that is classic, very contemporary, and easily capable of filling a large concert hall, while retaining a melodic core that forms the heart of each of its dozen tunes. And in Shawn Albro, who roams vocal territory marked by The Cult’s Ian Astbury at one end and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell at the other, UPO may have the first great new rock singer of the new millenium.

Chris and Shawn were friends for years before putting UPO together. Shawn, a native of upstate New York, knew he wanted to be a musician since he was a child: “I listened to everything,” he recalls. As for singers who influenced him, Shawn took inspiration from “anyone that I could tell sang from the heart, or had a powerful voice that had something unique about it.” Leaving home immediately after high school, Shawn worked across the country playing in bands, “none of which were anything I was gonna be seri-ous with. I just honed my songwriting skills, practiced, and got live experience.” Finally Shawn landed in L.A. in 1989.

Los Angeles native Chris Weber did his own litany of stints in various bands before meeting up with Shawn. The pair, though young, had long-term plans to make some seri-ous music together one day. They met at the Reading Festival in England, and decided that the time was right. “In June of ’97,” Shawn recalls, “we just started writing some songs and boom, it worked. Everything was right.” In three months, the duo had assembled a potent demo and attracted label interest, although “we didn’t even have a band together yet.”

Chris says that finding the right rhythm section was relatively easy. “Ben (Crouch) Shirley was a friend of Shawn’s, so we asked him to come down and it worked out really well. He had a lot of the aggression that we wanted as far as a live player. He also crouched so low while playing that his bass would literally scrape the floor.”

“Then we looked in the paper for a drummer and saw this ad that said ‘I’m gonna kick your L.A. ass!’ and asked the guy to come down. His Bonham-esque style was an awe-some partner to our style, and after less than ten minutes we knew he was the guy.” That man is Tommy Holt.

“There’s a whole strange story to how we got signed,”says Shawn. “We never shopped our demo or anything. I gave it to a friend of mine, who gave it to his girlfriend, who gave it to her boss at MCA Publishing. He just happened to be on the phone with Steve Richards, who’s now our A&R guy. Our friend put the CD on in her boss’s office, and Steve said over the phone, ‘What’s playing in the background? Put the phone up to the speaker! I’m coming over there!’ So he went over there, and shortly thereafter we were hashing out a deal with him.”

That deal led to the recording of No Pleasantries with fabled producer Rick Parashar (Pearl Jam, Temple Of The Dog) at the legendary London Bridge Studios in Seattle. Bristling with thick guitars, pulse-pounding grooves, and Shawn’s powerful vocals, the album opens with the positive, whipcracking energy of “Circle Of Life” (“It’s like a ‘wake-up-and-get-out-there’ kind of thing,” says Shawn about the track. “Bust out of the rut you’re in, forget about ‘I wish this’ or ‘I wish that’ and go make it happen yourself.”) Then No Pleasantries stomps the listener flat with killer tracks like “Freaks and Pigs,” “Dust,” and the inspirational “Feel Alive.” The album is already on its was to classic status even before exploding into the first single, “Godless,” which Chris describes as “an incredibly pure song in every sense.”

Chris and Shawn get that same feeling about their band (whose name doesn’t stand for anything – your own interpretation is encouraged), for which the right moment came some time after the two young musicians first met.

“We’re very fortunate and happy with the way things are going,” reflects Shawn. “We got to work with the producer we wanted, we got to record where we wanted, we got to make the record that we wanted. As long as people think it’s a great rock record, and it makes them think and feel a certain way, then that’s cool.”