The Succulent Sounds of Dark Meat

What Dark Meat is trying to do is tour, but that has its own specific challenges when the minimum size of the whole organization is fifteen people. The band travels in a converted bus, which allows everyone room to sleep, and cooks many of its meals on a propane camp stove.

"The biggest difficulty is trying to make sure that everybody's on the same page and getting there on time," says Clack. "But there's not a lot of problems. Actually, the hardest part is paying for gas."

"It used to be coordinating our piss schedules," adds McHugh, "but it's really hard to keep everybody emotionally and nutritionally satisfied. We've gotten better at that. We actually make chow lines in parking lots. Most of us have worked in restaurants, so we can throw down."

Dark Meat hangs together as a unit, even when it comes to the age-old touring dilemma of what music to listen to on the road. "Our bus doesn't have a centralized sound system," McHugh explains, "so we end up just playing together a lot. We've learned a lot of Fairport Convention and Pogues songs, and we play those for hours."

In the midst of its hectic touring schedule, the unwieldy rock orchestra still manages to write new songs, and the bandmembers can't wait to get back in the studio to document the current sound.

"We hope to get the majority of the tracking done when we get back from tour," says McHugh. "We're already pretty tight after the first week of touring, so when we come back to Athens, we're going to record it as raw as we can and try to keep as many studio bells and whistles out of it."

Because the outfit's sound has evolved so much during the time that has elapsed since its debut, expect Dark Meat's sophomore effort to sound a bit different. "The chief inspirations," McHugh promises, "will be Sufis, the Boredoms and the Stooges." If anyone can pull off that train wreck of influences, it will be the diverse musical talents and personalities that make up Dark Meat. To illustrate the group's ambitious scope, McHugh points out that its original full name was Dark Meat Vomit Laser Family Band Galaxy.

"We're not a band," says the frontman. "We're a universe. And every member is its own planet."