After 10 years of making music Phoenix, Arizona folk-punk band Andrew Jackson Jihad still manages to do things a little differently with Christmas Island, its fifth full-length record and follow-up to 2011’s Knife Man.

For one thing, founding members Sean Bonnette (vocals/guitar) and Ben Gallaty (bass) became a quintet by welcoming keyboardist/guitarist Preston Bryant, drummer Deacon Batchelor and cellist Mark Glick into the mix with its latest release.

“They’ve been touring members with us for a few years now and they worked with us to a certain degree on our last record,” Gallaty says over the phone from the road somewhere in Ohio.

“Still it’s true that we’ve more fully incorporated them into the band and we did all of this record together.”

This time around the group also headed down to Dallas, Texas to record with John Congleton (The Thermals, The Mountain Goats and Okkervil River).

“Generally we just recorded at home in Phoenix, but it was good to be out of town and we had all of our energy focused on making the album this time.”

Additionally Andrew Jackson Jihad made the jump from Northern California punk label Asian Man to SideOneDummy, another California punk label, but one that’s located further south in Los Angeles.

“We didn’t necessarily know what we were doing with the recording when we went into it, but after it was done SideOneDummy expressed interest which was cool. Usually that seems to happen the other way around,” he says.

“This is the first record we haven’t done with Asian Man since we released our first full-length on our own originally, but we’re still really close with Mike Park [Asian Man founder] and he’s supportive of our decision.”

Still the band’s signature brand of silly meets serious folk punk remains, alongside the random references that require you to pay close attention to the lyrics and maybe even Google song titles such as Linda Ronstadt to get the full context.

“I think it’s fun to do that, I think inside jokes and references are fun and when people do get the references that makes it all the more special for them, though nothing is too terribly obscure,” he says.

One song off of Christmas Island, “Angel of Death”, touches nicely on infomercial culture with its Burning Hell-ish lyrics - “I am the Total Gym/I am the Salad Glove/I am the Slap Chop.”

“People do catch them and we like to reference lots of really common pop-culture stuff too. I don’t know if you have those Slap Chop infomercials airing up in Manitoba, but if you don’t know about it you ought to know about it.”

Now the band is planning to hit the road hard for the rest of 2014 and that includes some shows across the border in Canada.

“It is harder to get into Canada, but there’s a lot of cool people and fun shows to be had up there and we like going out of our way to play shows in places that might not get as much action. I’m really excited about Winnipeg, hopefully someone from the Guess Who will show up.”

Published in Volume 68, Number 28 of The Uniter (July 2, 2014)