Sincere

Antwerp speaks Flemish and rocks stylish. The home town of Sincere is home to the world's biggest diamond market, and the way the Killerboy quartet plays, it is a match for any of those rocks: Sincere are hard, brillant and dazzling. Their own descriptions of themselves are different: Sincere *... would rather move their ass on stage than look like zombies *.. left a whole lot of people wanting more *... think watching them play is more fun than reading this boring biography (for which they don't give a f***)." There's a story to tell, all the same. Singer Robin Fitters and bassist Tom Goethals spent three years looking for musicians who shared their views: powerful, energetic, spontaneous music -- deadly serious, sexy, yet ironic messages; that was the way they wanted it. The year 2000 brought an end to their search with Steve Braeckmans (drums) and Stijn Bombeke (guitar). The punk and emo days of the band's two founders are long gone, but they have left their mark: half of Sincere lights up the early days of grunge with a generous helping of glam punk. "Killerboys On Acid", first single and title song of the horror thriller Anatomie 2 (cinema launch: February 6, 2003) is that sort of song: a caustic guitar line meets the sexily weepy voice of the auratic 50-kilo singer, discharging in a hysterical shout on the pain threshold. "Darkside Escort Service", title song of the album and maybe Sincere's most typical track, sums up rock'n'roll in a hookline whose reductiveness is reminiscent of Kraftwerk: "You really have a nice little pussy, baby sugar". And that is no crass macho attitude. One glance at the singer's physiognomy … ". Robin Fitters looks like a hybrid of girlie and alien -- tells you: This is a mixture of true love confession, flirting and irony. "Another Day" is the opposite extreme to these weirdly ambiguous rock numbers. Just a simple piano line accompanies the pensive vocals. Originally planned as a B-side and recorded as a rough sketch between two studio sessions, the song turned into indispensable icing on the cake. It is joined by dry-as-a-bone rock ("Hypothermia"), pathos-laden ballads ("Carrie"), upbeat alternative pop ("Oh My Sweet Something") and experimental electronic reverie ("Angels"). The album was recorded in the summer of 2002 in a studio near Antwerp, in which big names on the Belgian music scene like dEUS offshoot Zita Swoon and Das Pop regularly work. This was obviously an ideal environment for fruitful cooperation, but as so often, Robin could not find a suitable duet partner locally and had to go to Cologne, seventy-five miles away, where Christoph von Freydorf, singer with the German band Emil Bulls, was doing studio work at the time. Their "Zero" fuses two musical universes -- to androgynous laments, urgent pleas and bestial CRIES. The mix was put in the hands of partly Paris-based American producer Daniel Presley, whose credits include Faith No More, Breeders and Spain; and to underscore the supranational appeal immanent to the recording, mastering in the legendary New York Masterdisk Studios was a must. The first fateful step across the German-Belgian border had already been taken in the summer of 2001. Three months after Sincere had won the important Demopoll contest, a talent competition held by Belgium's biggest radio station Studio Brussel, they were in Brussels to win the national level of the Emergenza newcomer festival and went on to play the Taubertal Festival im August, competing against some 20 finalists from a field of 1800 competing bands Europe wide. True, Taubertal "only" gave them second place (the winners from Stockholm clearly had better haircuts, according to Sincere), but their cocky, aggressive stage show and the indefinable aura of the Belgians ensured that management was in place within months (Oh My Sweet Entertainment, Munich), a demo recording followed, a record deal was made (Columbia) and to top it all, a publishing contract was signed (Edition Kicks & Delights with Warner/Chappell). Sincere chucked in their jobs ("We're the kind of guys that skipped school because they said that one day they would be in a rock band anyway") and went for a series of shows, spread out over the year, and after recording was finished in November 2002, their first concert tour through Germany. "Kick High -- Best of Emergenza" was the name of the tour, and its 15 stops took in France, Luxembourg and Italy. It gave a foretaste of the coming months. Sincere are bounding with energy and play with dry humour, provocative attitude and melancholic depth. In 2002 and 2003 the band played many big festivals mainly in Austria and Germany where they proved to be the crowds favourites more than once. Or to say it with the words of Andy Cairns from THERAPY “ Sincere from Belgium make good songs and rock on stage “. Go see them or better book them and be astonished! Four killerboys on acid will come to make every boring place on this earth a killerplace to be!