Bryan Cirillo – Xperience Monthly – an Interview, by James Mullen

Bryan Cirillo Interview.

GLENS FALLS –  If you’ve ever heard someone declare punk rock dead, I can guarantee you that they’ve never crossed paths with Bryan Cirillo. One of the hardest working people in Glens Falls music, he performs both solo and with rising punk rock outfit Death Cult Pharmaceutical (DCP) which includes Brian Britton on guitar and Flora Stargazer on bass as well. He’s also been booking his own shows at Scally’s Roadside Bar & Grill in Hudson Falls, attracting lineups featuring some true heavy hitters of 518 music such as We’re History, Under the Den, Seize Atlantis, and ShortWaveRadioBand just to name a few; on May 19th, they’re at it again with a bill that includes Blase Debris, Ike’s Wasted World, Gozer, and Ice Queen. I caught up with Bryan at Rock Hill Bakehouse Cafe in Glens Falls to talk about his journey in music and the concert series at Scally’s.

JM: Tell us a little bit about your musical journey like how did you get into music, where did you start, how have you grown, and what are some of your big influences?

BC: Well, I’m 32 years old which sounds weird to say, because it feels like yesterday that I found out about punk rock. Sum 41 and Blink-182 were a major influence on me of course, but then I had an older cousin who’s like 7 years older than me who was like “You think that stuff is punk rock?” and I was like “well, YEAH! Of course it is!” and then he showed me Sex Pistols and Bad Brains and it kept going further back in time. For me 1977/1978 sounded like a hundred years ago and I couldn’t believe punk existed back then. Now 70s and 80s punk feels like it may as well have come out yesterday for me.

I started playing drums in a band called Irate Government when I was in 6th or 7th grade; I was in the Long Island punk scene as I got older which kind of bleeds into the New York hardcore scene, so that’s where I first got to see what putting on DIY shows was all about. I moved up here in 2011, didn’t think I’d ever be in a band again but then Arch Fiends happened which was a band I was in with Dan Wade and Matt Bastard who are now in The Hauntings, so they’ve been a huge part of the journey as well. Then I moved on from that project and into DCP and my own solo material as well, but DCP has really been going strong the last 2 years or so.

JM: You mentioned your solo stuff, you do a one-man punk band as Lex Naturalis; how’d you start doing that?

BC: That’s just a backlog of everything that I’ve written since I left my band No Vice on Long Island. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do musically, or who I was gonna meet and what was gonna happen. I just had these songs, not all of them have lyrics but a lot of them have structure and are pretty much there. Emancipation, the title track of my EP from 2021, I remember I wrote that riff probably 10 years ago, but you stay with it and write lyrics to it. So that project is really just a back catalog, that’s kind of my own baby I guess.

JM: Yeah, and that’s all brought you to Death Cult Pharmaceutical. You guys have some pretty awesome gigs lined up, including GEM Fest on July 22nd at The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls. How much have you evolved since you first came onto the scene? I know you added a new bass player recently and solidified a new line up, how has that journey been?

BC: That’s been an interesting journey, I don’t want to say too much. I mean, all the best to our former members! We’ve had a few lineup changes here and there; Brian and I, the other Brian, Brian Britton, he’s been the main squeeze. The two of us are the original members, most of the songs are songs we had written when we started jamming. For Screaming in the Rain, he had the guitar part written and we didn’t really have a drum set. He had a studio, so we were messing around on the studio drum pad and I thought “This is cool”. We had just met, we were working at the same retail outlet location and he remembered me from Gug’s. Everyone remembers Gug’s in Glens Falls.

Brian and all his friends who are now my friends remembered me from Gug’s, and we’re like one big happy family. A lot of us work together and hang out together. This is a band that has a lot of support around it already from our group of friends and we really appreciate that.

JM: You guys have been putting on some great shows at Scally’s Roadside Bar & Grill in Hudson Falls, you’re coming up on your third one on May 19th and every line up is more loaded than the last; how did that relationship start, and how does it feel to be able to bring shows like that to this part of the 518?

BC: It feels awesome because I hadn’t really thought about running my own shows for a long time; I had done it a couple of times growing up on Long Island. Then I just thought, I could still do it the same way that I did it, I’d just have to find the right venue that would appreciate that and just let us do it DIY and not ask us for the world. Scally’s has been great like that.

A friend of mine was friends with Amanda (Scally), and she had wanted to have a birthday party there and invite some of her favorite bands to play, so she had basically booked a show for her birthday, so here I am a couple of years later thinking I could do the same thing. So I went to them, I worked with Matt Ames on it who I had been discussing other venues where he would run sound and I would get bands, he had said he was still DJ-ing at Scally’s and IRod also DJs there, so they sort of knew them better than I did and they vouched for me that first time. Now we’ve built a lot of mutual trust with the venue, and at the last show they really expressed how excited and satisfied they were with the new crowd of people coming in.

I hand pick the bands on each show, and I have a roster of bands I’d love to include. I look at SuperDark and Dan Asylum down in Albany, these people are doing a great job getting an eclectic variety of bands from all over to show up in the 518, but they’re doing it in the southern part; I think it’s time for Lake George and the northern part of the 518 to start getting on that train.