DELUGE!: A History...
Deluge is a family... We've been a young band, a great band, a horrible band and we've been apathic at all the wrong and right times. I could tell about all of the members that have come and gone throughout the years, or I could tell you about how Dave and Anthony started Deluge in 2004 as a highschool grunge band, only to kick Anthony out and humbly ask him to come back years later. What's really important though is that as soon as bassist Kurt Kluba joined Deluge the first tastes of success followed. We cut our first EP "Let's Go, Tokyo!" in 2006 and soon our music was spun on college radio stations across Canada. We were young and wild, just out of highschool and getting paid to play shows for the first time. We'd spend our money indiscriminately on tour by buying hotel rooms and Dairy Queen feasts and then we'd wonder where all of our cash went when we wanted to record a follow up EP.
We thought we were just one show away from being famous.
We were young and stupid.
You see, when you do something for long enough, sometimes you question yourselves and the thing that you used to love. Deluge became a familiar lover to us, one whose touch was so soothing that the thought of not having became nigh impossible to stand. Every band has a curse and ours has always been the curse of drummers. We couldn't hold on to one if we tried and if we could hold on to one, we didn't want them. We stalled as a band, it may have even killed us had we not been so stubborn. We made it work. We recorded new songs. We partied harder than ever. We survived.
Anthony was Deluge's first lead singer when we started in 2004. To say he was a bad singer at the time would be giving him too much credit, to say he was near awful would be more accurate. We betrayed Anthony over MSN messenger by inviting him to a group chat and proceeded to kick him out of the band with a cruelty only teenaged boys could fulfill. Then, to our horror, we replaced him with Dave, only to find our he was much much worse. When you're young though, you learn from your mistakes... Anthony went and found a tremendous amount of success with other bands and Dave finally learned how to sing, but barely. Then in 2009, we asked if Anthony would fill the spot of our then consistent missing drummer. Now I know what you're thinking, I thought Anthony played guitar and sang, you're right, he did... until now. We brought him into our band and forced him to learn drums, which he did quite admirably. I like to think we broke the curse of drummers that day. We righted all the wrongs we had based our band off of for so long when we kicked Anthony out the first time. Of course it was difficult becoming friends again, but as the years wore on Anthony became a crutch that has held Deluge up when we'd have preferred to just let it all fall down.
We have always been a 3 piece, or as we liked to call ourselves for so long... a power trio. That was until long time friend and handsome gentlemen Mitch Bunda was ousted from his band local band here in Calgary. In many ways, we acted like a sports team when we asked Mitch to join Deluge. He was a free agent and we were a lowly and underfunded team smelling blood in the water, we picked him up when he was at his lowest and in turn he made us much much better. The only thing was, he was a bassist and we needed a lead guitarist. Once again, we shanghaied him (just like Anthony) into buying a guitar and an amp and becoming a guitarist.
For the first time in history Deluge will actually be releasing an EP at a time when we still play all of the songs live. We finished "The Nether" in early autumn this year and are completely infatuated with it's sound. Where our first full length album "A Flash Fire of the Lungs" (2011) was more dirven by teenaged angst and the feeling that life had been unfair to us, "The Nether" (2012) was the musical evolution where we realize that we really don't know anything and that is fantasticly terrifying. We are stuck in the middle and "The Nether" to us is the most beautiful purgatory imaginable.
I guess we could say Deluge has always had bad luck, we never win anything and we've never been the cool band in the Calgary music scene. But what we are is Deluge and this is what we do. So no matter where you are, and with whoever you're there with. Thank you.
Deluge, November, 2011.