Matthew - Vocals,Guitar
Kody - Drums
Dan - Bass, Vocals
Casey - Guitar
Toxic - road manager/merch bitch
Zombie - OG merch man
Influences
Proudentall, drive like jehu, minus the bear, vitreous humor, misfits, tears for fears, hot snakes, at the drive in, north of america, black sabbath, ten grand.
Sounds Like
a middle school graduation or a playground fight.
Ricky Fitts broke up last year, leaving behind this interesting debut album that combined screamy, frenetic post-hardcore, math rock and emotive early 90's indie rock, a sound that brings to my mind bands like Drive Like Jehu, Braid and Superchunk, but tinged with some really cool use of electronics and chaotic riffing. Can't really say that these guys sounded like any one band in particular; the drumming is great, with lots of time sig changes and expressive playing, the guitars go from angular, Midwestern post-hardcore riffing to frantic, abrasive bursts of metallic energy, and the band's two vocalists Dan Davis and Matthew Wiseman have distinctive voices that play off one another really well. They're an interesting variation on the post-hardcore stuff I'm used to hearing, definitely something different from the rest of Init catalog.
if you would like to purchase rickyfitts cds, or 7" records, check out init records.
if you would like to purchase rickfitts LPs, check out exotic fever records.
Band You Should Have Known
Ricky Fitts were an emotional indie/hardcore band from Wichita, Kansas. The band existed from 2002-2006. The band put out two seven-inches and a full-length record before their untimely break up in 2006. The band’s amazing 2005 record, Wizard Lisp, should not be missed. It is top-notch stuff in this genre…powerful and incredibly moving. You can get the CD or LP ridiculously cheap right now from Init Records or Exotic Fever.
Description:
After a long wait, RICKY FITTS' highly anticipated full-length CD finally sees the light of day. Taking the best parts of early 90's emotional hardcore bands and modern day screamy hardcore bands, adding their own uniqueness to every track, this is one recording that is certain to achieve great acclaim down the road. Fans of bands like Ten Grand, Drive Like Jehu, Proudentall, Fugazi, and At The Drive-In take note.
Reviews:
Copper Press:
"Ricky Fitts is to Wichita, KS what Black Sabbath was to Birmingham, England, a quartet that has balled up the rage and frustration of a life lived in a once-promising city that nearly everyone save for its inhabitants has forgotten about. But the quartet also rages against suburban apathy and avarice ("That's, Like, What, Half A Cheetah?"), the cruelty of time as it moves forward and leaves good friends behind ("Castelvania 21") and pauses to meditate on hurt and lust ("A Black Cloud in a Hot Blonde's Mouth"). Whereas Sabbath wrote massive, plodding riffs, Fitts' music moves along at a pace commensurate with the world around it, though, by the time the album has wound to a close thirty-some minutes after its opening notes (with longtime live favorite, "You'll Sleep, Alright, But It'll Be in a Coffin") you feel like you've lived a lifetime. Wizard Lisp isn't a metal album but it might as well be for its weightiness and its ability to soothe the disappointment of restless, youthful dreams beginning to evaporate on the bridge between the adolescent and adult worlds."- Jedd Beaudoin
New Scheme, The 14:
"Ricky Fitts' debut record starts out innocuously enough. "That's Like What, Half A Cheetah?" begins with a heavy-handed, mid-tempo drumbeat and a bright and melodic dual guitar line. The next two minutes feature a persistent buildup, which pulls you straight into the record. At almost four and a half minutes, it's a bold choice for the opening track, because it's one of the least definable or immediately gratifying tracks. But the more I listen to this, the more it seems to work perfectly as the opener. We'll call that good decision 1.
Musically, this combines angular, upper-Midwestern post-hardcore guitar and vocal sensibilities with more frantic, dynamic rhythms and song structures (think Majority Rule or Yaphet Kotto). There are a number of things that make these guys much more versatile than even that pretty broad description gives them credit for. There are two vocalists, both with very distinct voices that are pretty different from one another. This adds a couple clear and welcome extra layers to an already involved sound. The distinctive vocals help grant Ricky Fitts pigeon hole immunity, though they aren't really the main focal point of the songs that often. The Rhythm section, as it works live, is pretty dominant in many of the songs in the studio as well. Kody Ramsey's drumming is fucking loud, but the tone he gets out of his drums more than justifies it. There are a number of things about Mike Lust's recording that fit Ricky Fitts' sound, though the drum sounds are first on that list. Despite a heavy-handed approach, the drums are just as often bouncy or sparse as they are intense and persistent. They work at both extremes, but like songs as a whole, the nimble transitions from one to the other are what set this apart somewhat.
Despite a strong opening track, the best moments on Wizard Lisp are still further into the record. The second track, "Edward, Unlock Her Floodgates Of Passion" has probably the strongest opening of any song here. "B.D.P." is the most intense offering, as well as the best example of the revolutionary impact Casey Loren's more dissonant guitar lines can have on a song. It's essentially the most hardcore-involved song here, but thanks to a slow, haunting guitar line it turns into something else entirely. This happens to some degree throughtout the whole record, though it's most clearly displayed in "B.D.P." In another real pronounced mood shift, this is followed by the slowest and most haunting track on the record, "Castlevania 21." There are a number of strong vocal harmonies between guitarist Matt Wiseman and bassist Dan Davis throught the record, and this features one of them, as well as a great back and forth part. But the song also features Wiseman's most haunting and versatile vocal performance on the record. He finds common ground between a frustrated squeel and a more maxed-out (but still melodic), crackling half spoken/half sung approach. The vocal line completely monopolizes your attention on the song in a few spots, (as it does throughout) though it is at its height here.
The record's real standout track closes the record. "You're Going To Sleep, Alright, But It'll Be In A Coffin" starts off quickly, and essentially never lets up. If "Castlevania 21" was put over the top by Wiseman's vocal line, this is where Davis' vocals are perfectly suited to completely steer this song. The closing track not only starts off much quicker than other songs here, it has the most pronounced up's and down's. And by the time the melodic, bass-driven breakdown arrives about two minutes into the song, it's pretty clear that this is easily the best song on the record. It closes with one of their most angular parts, which is immediately followed by one of the most intense and fluid sections. The back and forth vocals are utilized perfectly here as well, covering almost every base they've established throughout Wizard Lisp. Leaving most of what gets annoying about post-hardcore these days at home (in Ricky Fitt's case, Wichita), and bringing along a number of elements not commonly included, makes for one of the most refreshing takes on hardcore I've heard in years. Yes fucking sir."- Stuart Anderson
Heartattack 50:
"A driving and energetic (those probably mean the same thing...yeah, I bet they do.) mix of bitter hardcore and indie rock. Sorta like The Party Of Helicopters meets The Vidablue meets Meneguar in a dark alley, but everyone has flashlights. Are there any dark alleys in Wichita, Kansas? Kansas...okay, I have a segue here. The nine tracks on Wizard Lisp are alot like that movie Return To Oz with Fairuza Balk. 1) They both take place in Kansas. 2) They both jumble creepy, dark elements with playful ones. 3) The drummer, Kody Ramsey, sorta looks like a wheeler. Sorry, Kody. Your band still rules though."- Mike Haley
Skyscraper 22:
"I once spent two days holed up alone in a hotel room in Wichita. I was driving back to Denver from Denton, and spent my whole stay watching overpriced porn, eating thick, gluey diner food, and fruitlessly trying to write a feature on Chin Up Chin Up on my malfunctioning laptop. It was raining like crazy, some fucked up November Wheat Belt sleet, and the local news kept going on about a hometown psycho called the BTK killer whom I'd never heard of before. All in all, Wichita struck me as a weird and mundanely otherworldly. And gray. Really, really gray. Ricky Fitts is from Wichita, and though I've seen the band live twice and listened to their debut full-length, Wizard Lisp, a few times, I still can't draw any solid correlation between my perception of their birthplace and the music they play. Their sound isn't gray, that's for sure. It's splashed, actually, with vivid spurts of angularity, frustration, and just enough self-deflating humor to keep the whole thing from collapsing into unwitting parody. After all, Ricky Fitts falls squarely into a largely forgotten school of noisemaking known as Midwestern emo. You remember: Boys Life, Sideshow, Gauge, Giants Chais, and hosts of other corn-fed bands that wrung some earnestness from the (admittedly magnificent) artifice of coastal forebears like Hoover and Drive Like Jehu. Point being: While there's no doubt that small-town boredom and repression can account for the majority of the world's punk rock and ritualistic murder, I'd hesitate to infer that the guys in Ricky Fitts would have wound up binding, torturing, and/or killing anyone if they hadn't stumbled across post-hardcore catharsis. And that's really what Wizard Lisp boils down to: Instrumental dynamics as a metaphor for mood swings and sudden drunken rage. Angst sabotaged with an implicit grasp of the absurdity of angst. And above all, melody and harmony hamstrung by a nearly religious celebration of ugliness and chaos. Just as Wes Bentley's characeher, Ricky Fitts, says in American Beauty, "Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take is, like my heart's going to cave in." Even in fucking Wichita."- Jason Heller
I just wanted to say how sad it makes me that you guys broke up, you should know that I still sport my RF shirt all over the effin' place, since buying it when you played WArehouse 21 in Santa Fe many, many years ago. I love you guys, I'm sorry to see you go, I am checking out your other projects. Hang tough.
Just wanted to say thanks for all the continuing support, just reached 20,000 profile views and it means a lot to me even though it may not seem like much still.
Thanks again for the support and I hope you come to enjoy more of what I make in the future =)
DeFog
Thanks for joining the Wolf Pack! It’s great to have you. Come check out our comic galleries and tell us what you think. Look out for our manga “Altered State” coming May 08.
It features a Small Brown Bike retrospective, Akimbo, Brent Eyestone (Magic Bullet/Forensics), Will Killingsworth (Ampere/Orchid), Ryan Ferguson (No Knife) and much more.
You can download a copy by clicking on the cover below:
You can also order a paper copy of the new issue, or download past issues by visiting: www.thenewscheme.com
