Update: Hans Condor's record release show has been rescheduled for Nov. 27. Dos Cobras will no longer be performing at the event.
On a warm evening in early May, the parking-lot stage outside Soft Junk was buzzing with a combination of trepidation and crackling, anxious excitement.
For the majority of punks and black-clad rock ’n’ rollers milling outside the East Nashville art space, this was their first sight of live music since the world shut down 14 months prior. In loose huddles sprawled across Howdywood (as the outdoor area is sometimes called, after a nearby sign), everyone seemed to be asking the same thing: “Is this really happening?”
But it wasn’t just the prospect of seeing dudes shred on guitars for the first time in a hot minute that had tough guys on the verge of shedding tears. Something even more unlikely than the seeming end of a global pandemic was happening onstage: Hans Condor, a legendary presence in Nashville punk, was back.
“That show was special,” singer-guitarist Charles Kaster tells the Scene, looking back a few months later during a sit-down at the band’s practice space in Madison. “Everybody started coming forward, like, ‘Is this OK? Is this OK? I think it’s OK!’ Next thing I know, there’s a beer can flying somewhere and we’re like ‘Yeah! This is it, we’re back!’ ”
For more than a decade, Hans Condor raged across Middle Tennessee with legendary live shows, where Kaster routinely spit in the face of danger by jumping off of whatever he could climb onto — an amp, the lip of the stage, the house that was in the backyard of Fond Object — often handing off his guitar first for safekeeping. Meanwhile, bassist Erik Holcombe and a succession of drummers including local-rock champion Ryan Sweeney thrashed in uncut rock ’n’ roll ecstasy. The band has gone on hiatus two times since the Aughts, and some fans might have expected them to slip away quietly.
In person, they’re as loud as ever. And on Breaking and Entering, out Tuesday via Dial Back Sound, their notorious live show has at long last been captured on recorded media. Tracked during two sessions in 2016, the LP functions like a primal scream, with songs like “Rock n Roll Animal” and “All Messed Up on Death Metal and Shit” bursting with the same energy that you’d be anticipating if you were on the way to see them do a late-night set at Foobar (the East Nashville spot you know now as The Cobra) in 2014.
The first half was recorded at what was then called Grand Victor Sound — aka the historic and once-imperiled RCA Studio A on Music Row, which was at the time being leased by Ben Folds — thanks to a shoe company, of all things. Converse picked the Condor as one of five local acts to record at the hallowed studio for free as part of a promotional effort called Rubber Tracks. In true Hans Condor fashion, the band showed up late, half-drunk, with a mess of battered gear that would have had Chet Atkins spinning in his grave.
“If you like what we do, this is what you get,” Kaster recalls thinking. “You get three dudes cranking their amps up to maximum volume and going for it every song. That’s it. We’re not going to change for the studio. I think the big studio appreciated that.”
The second half was recorded a short time later in a more ramshackle style befitting the band’s chaotic energy. Crammed together in The Shed, the one-room home studio of Kaster’s friend Eliott Virula, the trio ripped as hard and as loud as they possibly could. It was so loud that Sweeney, who was playing drums at the time, could barely hear himself.
“It was like guerilla-warfare recording,” Virula jokes. “We think it’s lame when you record piece by piece. I used to record like that because that’s the only way I knew how to record. And then, when [Hans Condor] started playing, it really showed me that recording like that could be fun. … It was that session — I had no idea what I was doing but it worked out. Everything I recorded from there on out was live.”
Despite being tracked at total opposite ends of the studio spectrum, both sides of Breaking and Entering feel like the same snarling, caged animal. Kaster, Holcombe and Sweeney crash through these 12 songs, using the raw power of the full band live in the studio to wrestle the visceral energy of their live shows into a record that sounds like a collection of long-lost Goner Records deep cuts.
Though the album was ready, Hans Condor was not in a good position to release it. Sweeney left the band mid-tour in September 2016, with Virula pinch hitting on drums to carry them through the rest of the run. Later, Kaster moved to Iowa. And then, in 2018, Holcombe — who had long been one of Nashville’s underground heroes from his time in heavy bands like Snakeskin Machinegun and Asschapel — took his own life.
It seemed like the Hans Condor story was going to end in tragedy. But in 2020, Kaster reconnected with Erik’s brother Roger Holcombe. Roger played drums in the original incarnation of Hans Condor back in 2007, and he and Kaster started trading songs back and forth over email. They ran into the same problem the band had when they first set up at Grand Victor: They couldn’t cobble together a blistering punk statement one instrument at a time. They had to do it live.
“When you get in the same room and you just do what you do with something recording, it’s so easy,” Roger Holcombe says. “I was trying to do it like, make a click track so [Kaster] would have references to come in on and all this. And I’m like, ‘Man, this shit isn’t working. Like, why don’t you just come down to Nashville for the weekend? And we’ll just drink some beer and play some music and record it.’ ”
And so Kaster did. One weekend in December 2020, he made the trek down to Nashville and met up with Holcombe in Virula’s new incarnation of The Shed. They banged out some new songs, with Virula taking up the bass.
“I remember the exact moment that the band got back together was when I asked [Holcombe], ‘What are we going to call this new thing we’re doing?’ ” recalls Kaster. “And [he was] like, ‘Let’s just call it Hans Condor.’ ”
Kaster stayed in town, and on Friday, the reconstituted trio celebrates the memory of Erik the best way they know how — by releasing the recordings they made as a band five years ago and throwing a full-on rager at The Cobra. Joining Hans Condor for their record release show are darkwave duo Dos Cobros, folk-punk outfit King Lazy Eye and, for one night only, a revival of Erik and Roger’s band Snakeskin Machinegun.
This show and Breaking and Entering aren’t a swan song — Hans Condor is here to stay, for good this time. They’ve already got a whole new record nearly in the can, due for release early next year. Watch out for flying beer cans. And if Charles hands you his guitar, know that something wild is about to happen.
