Beauty Killed the Beast to Play Yockey Tonight

By Jescy Rodriguez — Local bands may come and go, but Beauty Killed the Beast is here to stay.  Beauty Killed the Beast is the brainchild of various musicians from various Sioux City Colleges. Two of them — Jordon McCubbin, a senior Psychology Major, and Mike Kessel, a junior Mass Communications Major — are from Morningside College.

The band is comprised of Kessel (guitar), McCubbin (unclean vocals), Chad Reddick of Western Iowa Tech (guitar), Steve Schager of Briar Cliff University (clean vocals), and Josh Marihart (drummer).

Their very first show will be a free event held in the Yockey Family Room Located in the Olsen Student Center at 3905 Peters Ave. Doors will open at 10 pm. The show is sponsored by the Morningside Mass Communications Department.  Opening for the show will be bands Solstice on Fire and Renewed Revive. Beauty killed the Beast will be headlining the event.

“If we had to fit in one specific genre, metalcore would probably encompass where our sound is now, but we are much more than that,” said McCubbin

“I agree, we all have different takes on what our band should be and we try to blend our own personalities and tastes and meld it together in order to make something new and our own,” Kessel clarified.

Beauty Killed the Beast is a relatively new band, only being in existence for about five months.  Members of the band express that their progress as a group is actually coming too rapidly for their own liking.

“I feel like we’ve improved almost too much since November.  We have a difficult dilemma on our hands, because each song we put out there is better than the next.  The songs we will be playing at the Yockey are songs we worked on three months ago.  In my opinion, the songs we wrote a couple weeks ago that no one has heard yet, blow the songs you will hear tonight out of the water,” said Kessel.

“We all feed off of each other way better now.  I did not expect all of the music to come together so quickly.  We’re all just are pretty good at what we do, so when we get together we can all feel us getting better at the same time,” McCubbin added.

An associate of the band, Jordon Fourcloud, recaps the leaps and bounds he has seen the band make within the last five months. “It’s coming together pretty nicely.  If I could describe the band in one word it would be ‘evolving,'” he said. “They are constantly growing and getting more technical, their sound is changing and becoming something that is more attuned to their personalities.”

One of the most striking and catchy parts of the band is their name.  When deciding to name their own band, Beast had to go through a few processes to reach their own verdict.

“We started out by writing pages of single words we liked and tried combining them and came out with some names like Scarlet Horizon or Cumstain Pantaloons, but it was nothing we could really come to a consensus about,” explained McCubbin.

“Then we decided, movie quotes are what other bands have used in the past, why not try that?  As a group we had come really close to picking No Place Like Home, until we watched King Kong.  One of the lines at the end of the movie after Kong is dead says, ‘No, maybe it was the Beauty Killed the Beast.’  Once we heard that we were sold,” said Kessel.

Although they are talented, members of Beauty Killed the Beast feel they wouldn’t be where they are now without the hard work and help all of their families and friends.

“Our friends and families are really helpful.  I remember a couple times where one of our families would help us out by letting us play at their place.  Molly Baker helped the band out one time by fixing us up with some pizza during one of our rehearsals.  A good friend of the band, Brooke Spencer, took our band photos for us, which saved us a bunch of money for professional quality photography.  My roommate, Breckin Anderson, even helped us name one of our songs. We’d really like to thank them for all the hard work and dedication to our band and attribute our success to them,” Kessel said.

“We’d also like to thank the scene out there, especially Solstice on Fire and Renewed Revive.  They’ve been a real big help in our progress as a band and we wouldn’t be here without their contribution,” McCubbin added.

Molly Baker, theatre major and friend of the band, has been itching to see them perform. “I’m looking forward to the show!  I even made my own band T-shirt to go see them”

Beauty Killed the Beast performs tonight at the Yockey. Future shows include an April 6 show at Chesterfields, for the Battle of the Bands.  There will be a $10 cover charge at the door, but if you contact a band member and get a ticket through them the price is $8.  If you want to get the $8 tickets to see Beauty Killed the Beast, contact Mike Kessel at mhk001@morningside.edu or Jordon McCubbin at jmm032@morningside.edu.

You can also go to their Facebook page and like their band page to get more information about their upcoming events at http://www.facebook.com/beautykilledthebeastband.