The Tea Party, Alien Ant Farm, et Bif Naked

Back in 1990, Jeff Martin, Stuart Chatwood and Jeff Burrows all knew each other and had played together in the close-knit Windsor, Ontario Rock scene. The trio had a marathon jam session in Toronto’s Cherry Beach Rehearsal Studios and decided to keep playing together afterwards.

Once they decided on the name (named for Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’ legendary has sessions and not that little thing that happened in Boston a couple of hundred years back), they self-released their debut album the year after they formed. Only 3’500 copies of the album were ever made but it was enough to get them a deal with EMI Music Canada, which they signed in 1993.

The album went platinum in its home country the year after its release but it was also their breakthrough hit in Australia, a country where they continue to be very popular to this day. It was with their debut major label album, called “Splendor Solis” that they began experimenting with their trademark Indian music influences.

The band wrote and recorded a lot of the music utilising open tunings and goblet drums to achieve the sound, while still mixing it with their psychedelic blues backing. However, it wasn’t until their third album “The Edges Of Twilight” and specifically the single “Sister Awake” that they truly realized their potential. “The Edges Of Twilight” would be their most commercially succesful album, going double platinum in their home country.

The band would go on releasing albums to great success until 2005, when the band abruptly split due to creative differences. The members would drift into solo careers but they came back together in 2011 for a set of live shows and a new album, 2011’s “The Ocean At The End”. This is a rare act with talent, vision and a desire to create what’s never been heard before, we’re lucky to have them, and they’re a live act to be seen as soon as possible.

Trust me on this, there is far more to this band than just that single. In fact, Alien Ant Farm is one of the true originals on Nu-Metal, coming together the year after Korn changed the face of heavy metal with their self-titled debut album.

The band was something pretty unique within the scene itself, a band that had a sense of humour about themselves. For one, their band name came to original lead guitarist Terry Corso through a surprisingly existential thought.

He wondered whether all life on Earth had come from an experiment done by, in his words “entities from other dimensions”, and that we were being monitored by those same creatures like we were living in some kind of Alien Ant Farm.

I’m sure it was a train of thought that had nothing to do with certain smokeable substance whatsoever. At all. Anyway, they stood out at a time when Nu-Metal was a mainstream concern, so of course they were going to be big. It was at that point that “Smooth Criminal” was released; in the lead up to their first major label release “ANThology”.

It went to number one in Australia and New Zealand, top three in the U.K and topped the Modern Rock charts in the U.S. If you were alive and not living under a rock in the summer of 2001, you definitely heard it many times.

Since then the band has released a handful of albums. The band toured solidly through the 2000s as well, performing shows with the likes of Hoobastank, Fuel and on the Vans Warped Tour. There are fewer bands around with more live experience than them. And a night out with Alien Ant Farm, will surely be a night to remember.