[Photo Credit: Ethan Hansen]

Band: Stalemate

Members: Kevin "K-Dawg" Perreira - Drums

                   Geoffrey Rush - Bass Guitar, PSP

                   Cory Waldron - Lead guitar, Vocals

                   Mattew DeMello - Key Boards, Vocals, Guitar

Stalemate started in a small Rhode Island high school and has continued to flourish in the post-secondary school world at Quinnipiac. In the microcosm of adult life, high school, Stalemate created the Grand Experiment, a 14 track masterpiece of a young, small garage band.

Blossoming into maturity, Stalemate puts a new work of art on the table titled, We Will Carry You Out To Sea. The exuberant, idiosyncratic vocalist, one part of the dual singing team, Matthew DeMello, stopped by the CollegeOTR office to tell us about the new album and the trials of being in a band.

As we started the interview Matt set the boundaries on his musical predilections, "You listen to an album like Abbey Road on shuffle. It's blasphemy." To him,  album oriented rock is the essence of solid music, not an album slapped together with a couple of hit singles.

In sum the band is literally a mash up of varied personalities and music tastes, "Stalemate, it's playing chess. A cooperative, friendly mental game," says Matt after pointing out K-Dawg, drummer, as the mediator and all around firm hand of the band.

Later on, we got to speak with vocalist, Cory Waldron, who has a background in nu-metal and an interesting appreciation for Phil Collins, "definitely, Phil Collins during the Genesis years." Soft-spoken Waldron, a triple threat with guitar, singing, and songwriting skills, approaches song writing by creating a fictional plane for the listeners to relate to, "I write a story instead of writing the emotions literally." On a track like "You're Not A Morning Person, Are You?," Waldron's rich, allegorical writing adds a much appreciated flair to the music.

Fans of Stalemate love the music, and if not the music, they adore the band. In Matt's words they live by a simple code, "we've been doing it [making music] because everything else sucks."

Isn't that as a good a reason as any to continue making music?

Must Have Tracks: "Will 4 President" (featured) and "Maybe Tom Cruise Has A Point"

Do you like it, does it suck?! Let us know, we'll leave your raunchiest posts up. Seriously, let us know what you think!!!

A call to all OTR readers!!! If you have untouched, awesome music that you'd like to see here, send it to organicdiscordance@gmail.com, or hector@collegeotr.com.