http://www.intakeweekly.com March 9, 2006 Devilish good band Band's latest CD is influenced by a new take on heavy rock. By Jessica Halverson jessica.halverson@intakeweekly.com Formed in 2002, Devil To Pay hit the ground winning, as it were, when it took the Battle of the Bands title during its second year playing out. Soon thereafter it landed a deal with Benchmark for its first record, "Thirty Pieces of Silver." Now, the metal band led by guitarist/vocals Steve Janiak, 34, breaks out its second full-length, "Cash is King." Band members Chad Prifogle, drums; Matt Stokes, bass; and Bob Bridges, guitar, all 34, will join Janiak to host the "Cash" release party at the Melody Inn March 10. Here Janiak talks about the album. In what ways is this record different from the first? We definitely have a lot more cohesiveness as far as what we wanted to do. The band hadn't been around all that long when we did the first record. I think we'd been together for a year or so, and the first record was the first 11 songs we had written. On this record we wanted to have more options so we initially had a goal of writing 20 songs and picking the best ones, and we narrowed it down to 14, which is kind of long for a CD nowadays, it's, like, 70 minutes. We didn't have a definite goal in mind to sound a certain way; I think we just picked up where we left off from the last record. There are a couple tracks that were written right after that last record. One of them could have been on the first record. I don't know, there's a different feel with the new guitar player. Do you like it better than your last record? I think it's definitely the next step for us. It shows a little more of our influences than the last record, which we're really proud of, but it's a little more one-dimensional. This one has a little more stylistically to offer than the first record. With this record, what is the DTP sound? It's still a modern take on the early founding fathers of heavy rock like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, early ZZ Top, but a little bit more of an influence from, say, Soundgarden. It's heavy, but it's not really nu metal; it's not what's popular today. There's not a real specific genre that you can pin exactly to it. We have elements of doom metal, but we're definitely not doom metal. Some people like to call us stoner rock, but we're not exclusively stoner rock, if that makes any sense. You can spend a lot of time classifying music, but it's really just a culmination of what we like and what we perceive the music that we would want to make and want to hear. What did you write about for this record? Well, a lot of the lyrics are kind of a reflective point on how money is power and corruption leads to more corruption. It's not a very bright and happy, pick-me-up sort of theme. It's more like being upset with the way things are in the world and wanting them to change and wanting to change things for the better. I don't know -- a lot of it's in metaphorical terms, so it's hard to really decipher it -- but I guess the main theme of the record is that things are not so good in the world around us, and I'd like to take a baseball bat and fix that. Each song is a slightly different take on different things. There are political themes, religious themes -- railing against the system as it were.