Lion Sized

On its self-titled debut EP, Lion Sized rips and roars its way through six loud songs of calculated, aggressive, minor-chord post-punk. Recorded live this past summer at Uneven Studios, the disc finds the trio -- singer/songwriter Josh Bergstrand, bassist Duncan Barlow and drummer Rob Burleson (aka Number Three) -- plowing through its material in less than fourteen minutes, without ever sounding hurried or insincere. Indeed, few bands manage to be so profoundly impressive in so little time. Bergstrand spoke with us about supply and demand, the band's future and the new disc.

Westword: Lion Sized doesn't play a lot of shows. Is this strategy or necessity?

Josh Bergstrand: I'm just not very interested in playing a lot of shows. I would get burned out. We're all a little older and have been in the bands that tried to play every show we could get. Things are just different with us. We're busy, because Duncan and Rob also have d.biddle, and we have to balance that. It is also a thing where we don't want to play so much because we want to have a draw. There's so much going on in Denver, and you have to make every time you play an event; people have to know that you're not going to play again next week.

Your live sets are fast-paced and frenetic, with no breaks between songs even for water, let alone awkward banter. Is this something you guys decided would be a Lion Sized thing?

It's definitely a conscious choice, something we set out to do from the very beginning -- the idea that we would link the songs together and play them almost continuously, start to finish, and have the set just be music and try not to have anything else going on.

Does this seamlessness serve a conceptual purpose at all?

No, it's not really a conceptual thing; we can play the songs in any order. It just depends on how we want to write the set and what particular songs we're playing on a given night.

Does Lion Sized dream of bigger things -- label support and cross-country tours?

We're not really hungry to tour around in a van and just scrape by. We're not 22, and so we're pretty realistic, I think. My goal right now is to write the best songs I can write, and maybe someday record an album that I'm really proud of because every song on it is a song that I love and a song that I really believe in.

The EP sounds amazing for being recorded live. Are you happy with it?

It was by far the most fun I've had recording something. Normally when you're recording, it's just so sterile -- you're so separated from the way you're used to playing. But we were just in there rocking; we had a lot of fun with it. I would like to always record that way in the future.