In a recent interview on The Peer Pleasure Podcast, Dave Verellen says he “would love to” reunite with his former band Botch, an American metalcore / mathcore band he was in from 1993 to 2002. The band was made up of Brian Cook on bass, Dave Knudson on guitars, Tim Latona on drums and Verellen on vocals. Although the band did not produce particularly large catalog of music, it is considered a influential band due to its complex mathcore rhythms and use of unique time signatures.
According to the book Precious Metal, the band broke up in 2002 due to tensions between band founders Knudson and Latona. However, according to the Alternative Press, in 2007 Latona stated “The way I look at it, Botch didn’t break up because of personality conflicts. Botch broke up because we just weren’t meshing anymore on a creative level. Some of us had different musical areas we wanted to explore.”
Verellen believes the odds of reuniting with the band “are really low. But I mean, there was a couple of years where…Especially in the last five years, there was a lot of people that were like ‘Hey man, before this light goes off where you guys can no longer attract a crowd anymore, because they’re [the fans] all too out of touch or given up or whatever, you guys should do a show.’ And there was like a surge of bands doing shows again, Snapcase was doing shows again and some other hardcore bands were all getting back together.”
Verellen continues “So all this stuff was happening… all these promoters that came up from hardcore are now involved in the music industry and they can make it happen and they can fly you out and make equipment happen, and do all these things and make it really, really easy. We got to the point like ‘yeah, this could happen’. But then the question though, do we really want to do it?’
One of the things that came up… you know if people missed it, maybe they just missed it and it’s not fair to rehash it in some halfway 40-year-old version of Botch versus 25-year-old version of Botch. And we were really fearful that we couldn’t pull it off and it wouldn’t sound how people wanted it to or they’d be disappointed—all these different things that could occur.
So we kind of continually were saying why would we want to do this? There’s lots of reasons to do it, and there’s also reasons not to do it, and I guess eventually that won out. For the record though, I would love to do it.”
After Knudson left Botch, he formed the band Minus the Bear which lasted from 2001 to 2018. He doesn’t appear to be currently active in a band. Latona also does not appear to be currently active in a band. Cook, however, is currently active in the bands Russian Circles, which released its latest album Blood Year in 2019, and Sumac, which release its latest album Love In Shadow in 2018. Russian Circles were supposed to perform with System Of A Down, Korn, Faith No More and Helmet at the Banc Of California Stadium in Los Angeles on May 22 however the show was canceled due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
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