An unusually large lineup and an (almost) appropriately large crowd convened at Athens, Ga.’s 40 Watt on Saturday, Nov. 10. Formica Man and Athens natives Tunabunny delivered energetic sets, but it wasn’t really until über-bearded New Zealander Liam Finn took the stage that things started to fill in on the floor. An impressive showman, Finn managed to keep the audience engaged through every second of the floor-bound fiddling and fussing that comes with being a one-man band.
Maybe it was because the music itself actually delivered. Finn’s tunes were chord-y and emotive, at times harkening back to the mid-90s golden age of guitar alternarock. But even if each song appeared to fit a template at first, there was almost always a twist. In addition to his trusty looper, Finn deployed an armada of octave machines, flangers, dirt boxes and every other pedal you can think of, always to good effect. Instead of merely overdriving guitars to make them louder, he would find compatible timbres and blend them to create new flavors of resonance. You get the sense that some of this stuff could be achieved more easily by pressing a space bar. But Finn’s the kind of guy who’d rather work for it, even relying entirely on live percussion played by you-know-who. He displayed impressive chops on the kit, even managing to rearrange loops with a spare foot during the infinitesimal moments between kick drum hits. By the time he delivered a personalized tune about being an “Athens virgin,” Finn had won over just about everyone in the room.
Then, with gracious speed, Deerhoof filed onstage. There were cheers.
Listening to their records, it’s not hard to glean that this group rarely wants for ideas. But in a live setting, you also realize what a staggeringly talented collection of musicians they are. While there weren’t any warp-speed, Steve-Vai-sanctioned guitar solos going on, the members’ understanding of rhythm – and the many ways in which to turn it on its head – was borderline virtuosic, improbably calling to mind the technical prowess of nerdier bands like Battles and the Mars Volta. On innumerable occasions throughout the set, Deerhoof veered off into time signatures so odd and unexpected, it was like watching a troupe of trapeze artists pull off stunt after stunt. And all night they did it without a net: shaggy drummer Greg Saunier roughs it on a spare three-piece kit, confidently tossing off the chance to bury mistakes beneath a mound of blurry tom fills.
But don’t worry: Deerhoof aren’t going to write any hour-long prog operas anytime soon (I don’t think). Despite the pronounced “jankiness” of their rhythmic engine, the true unifying force behind their live show is a strong dedication to the ethos of straight-up rock. There is ample noise and energy, and all the combinations of loud-soft/fast-slow shakeups that render each full-band crash absolutely huge. They’ve nailed these devices, skillfully conjuring and combining them at will. And above all, the performance was expressive, a quality that seems to slip the minds of many equally nimble musicians. Throw in the robotic pixie dance moves of frontwoman/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, and you have a show that’s just weird enough to fascinate while precluding any accusations of gimmickry. Deerhoof may be an against-the-grain act, but they’re too focused a unit to fall back on faux-showmanship.
Despite what you could maybe call a bit of inclement weather – Hurricane Sandy tore through New York City just as the band’s tour was supposed to begin – Deerhoof have made it out onto the road to support Breakup Song, its latest release on Polyvinyl (the label). Vinyl (the mag) was fortunate enough to catch up with drummer Greg Saunier a week before the tour’s kickoff show in Dallas.
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Vinyl Mag: A lot of people experienced the new album for the first time through the Youtube video that was all one track. As a result, I can’t get it out of my mind that the album almost is one big, long track, composed of various movements.
Greg Saunier: While we were making [Breakup Song], I had deejayed some shows – before the band played and then after – and they would turn into dance parties. I had only ever thought in terms of “what’s going to make it sound like a great album?” But the idea of an album, as a format, is not even as popular a format nowadays. It’s much more likely that you’re hearing a sequence of unrelated singles, and the only thing that relates them is that they share the same roomful of people, and there’s room to dance. If you want it to be danceable, it would be pointless to put in even one song that’s not danceable. You’d have to start over again from scratch. This is something that really struck me, and I kind of learned it the hard way while I was deejaying [laughs]. It was a fun thing to realize, and we tried to sequence [the album] as if it were a continuous party, and that’s why there are no breaks between songs – you don’t want to let it flag even for a second.
Even though the songs all sound quite different from each other – that in itself isn’t meant to be arty; that’s just how it sounds the way the party gets deejayed. You’re switching from artist to artist, most of the time. In my case, you’d put on one song from Motley Crüe, you’d put on one by the Zombies, and they’re all danceable.
VM: So you’re trying to work within your own vernacular, but trying to find every disparate corner in the same little room.
GS: Yeah, exactly. Dance music doesn’t have to mean disco … When we decided we wanted to make a dance record, we ultimately ended up with no songs that were like that. We ended up cutting everything that was in a disco vein. Dance music is still very wide open – you can feel like it’s a limit on what you’re doing, but really it opens it up even more. If you’ve got one dance song on your record, then, boy, you’d better make it a disco song. But if every song on the record is dance, then you suddenly realize the range of what that can be. A lot of it was kind of a heavy metal approach to dance music, and that’s not normally thought of as dance music, but when you listen to early Motley Crue, or the Scorpions, or something like that – of course it’s dance music. One of my favorite songs is “Come on and Dance” by Motley Crue, actually, and people started moshing to it when I played it at those dance parties. It is danceable.
Then we got into trying to do stuff influenced by Cuban mambo music from the 50’s. It’s not the kind of dance music where you sort of space out; it’s not like a rave. It’s much more starting and stopping; it’s very tense-sounding. There will suddenly be a pause, and then some guy yells, and then it starts again. It doesn’t flow; it’s almost stiff-sounding. I just completely fell in love with that over the past year or two and was trying to think of how that is dance music, and how we could make music that has something like that quality.
And then, last summer, we played in this big supergroup with a bunch of musicians from the Congo like Konono N˚1. We did a tour in Europe last summer with them. That was basically dance music, too. The show would be up to two hours of basically dance music. There were all these things I learned to play on the drums from playing with them that were very different from anything I had ever done before. I started playing stuff that was a lot more repetitive, and kind of a lot simpler. Once my hands and feet started being in the habit of playing like that, it changed the way I played a bit, too. So I think the album turned out different, as a result.
VM: Those briefed ahead of time on the dance-heavy nature of the record were probably expecting something closer to the four-on-the-floor disco thing you mentioned earlier. Yet it’s obviously nowhere near that area.
GS: There’s a second in “Mario’s Flaming Whiskers III” that I think has a bit of that – a bit of house beat to it. That was Satomi’s [Matsuzaki, Deerhoof bassist and vocalist] song, and she wanted a house beat on that one. But other than that, it doesn’t sound like disco or house.
VM: Do you find it liberating or limiting – or maybe even both – to be known as a “weird band”?
GS: [Laughs] In our actual day to day existence – like when we’re on tour, for example – I think that’s something that comes into play when journalism enters the picture. When we have a new release, journalists often want to describe it that way. Or sometimes it happens with booking. When a tour is first being set up, it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to play in Athens. Where should we play? Who should we get as the opening band?” A lot times the promoter will be like, “Who’s the local weird band? We should get the local weird band.” [Laughs] But the thing is that, yeah, I see that, but in a way it doesn’t touch me, because by the time we show up in Athens, what I see is people dancing, I see people with big smiles on their faces, and where it fits in in some kind of music blog or music history book is the furthest thing from anybody’s mind in the middle of a loud rock show. I don’t think of my music in any category, and I feel extremely liberated. Sometimes I feel limited by my own creative limits or my own abilities to play the drums, but I just see that as a challenge all the time, and try to trick myself into finding something new that I didn’t know I could play or write.
VM: You guys have managed success in two different eras. When you were starting out in the nineties, it was more the era of records sales. Now we’re in an age where you’ve got to keep the touring machine going. How have you managed a smooth transition between the two?
GS: [Laughs] Sorry, the reason I laugh is because it was in the nineties – the quote-unquote era of record sales – that we sold no records. It was like, from 1994, when we started the band, to 2000, it wasn’t like no records sold, it was just that not enough sold to ever break even on anything. I’ve got to give Kill Rock Stars credit for putting out our albums. For the first seven years of the band, everything we put out lost money. I’ve got no nostalgia about the good old days [laughs]. That doesn’t exist for me. It exists in that I knew it was true for some of my friends, but it was never true for Deerhoof.
As much as we do like putting out LPs – and I like colored vinyl, and we put out cassettes of our last two albums, and for this last album we put out a book of flexi-discs – deep down, I have never cared that much about format. And it’s just me; I’m not even speaking on behalf of the whole band. On behalf of Deerhoof’s drummer alone, I have never cared about format … I’ve been happy that our music is available in this other format, the mp3. Or, like you were pointing out, not even the even the mp3, just a Youtube video, which you can’t even download. It’s just something you press play on, and then you can either watch it or not watch it, but you hear it playing in the background. As a person in a band that always does something special for Record Store Day, and who has always been on indie labels that are heroic, I think – Polyvinyl and Kill Rock Stars, I think of that way, heroic in that they even continue to exist in the face of a very difficult market – I’m not the best mouthpiece, honestly. If record labels cease to exist, and physical formats end tomorrow, we will still be a band. We would still make mp3s and still go on tour. I feel like a very successful band in that we are still playing and we still love playing. In fact, we love playing now more than we ever did. As far as living through two eras … I plan on living through a lot more than two. I plan for the era to come to put the previous two to shame.
One of these days, the owners of Max and Farm 255 will meet for drinks and hash out a truce to end the noise war that plays out every Friday and Saturday night in downtown Athens. As of Fri., Oct. 26, that day had still not yet come. Nevertheless, psychedelic ambassadors MV & EE battled the wall of dance music from Max next door and delivered a particularly intense set of far out folk, at one point going so far as to cease fighting and actually capitalize upon the sonic interference from next door.
Despite the looping caterwaul the band had created on stage, there came a moment midway through the set when a strong dose of four-on-the-floor bass drifted over from the Max patio and settled over Farm’s own outdoor area, easily equaling in volume, if not quite drowning, MV & EE’s wailing improvisation. But instead of halting the show or even shooting their neighbors a dirty look, the duo simply locked into the newly introduced tempo and continued to jam, deftly reorienting the song to accommodate the ineluctable. Looks of confusion gave way to a ripple of knowing smiles as, one by one, the crowd caught on to the musical hipshot it had just witnessed.
The openness of MV & EE’s performance style makes this kind of spontaneity an ever-present possibility. All night, clean, fingerpicked guitars and hushed vocal harmonies established breathing room, humming along gently before crashes of distorted chords and screaming lap steel tore jagged holes in the meticulously woven fabric. While Matt Valentine jerked his instruments all over the place, physically wringing every last overtone from his slew of guitars and banjos, Erika Elder remained almost eerily stoic. Both performers exhibited great degrees of control, handling the musical violence like vengeful, feedback-hungry deities stomping out the cities named in their respective honors. Yet the term “indulgence” was absent from the post-show discussion; instead, the abrupt turns and extended crescendos scanned as pure, veneer-stripped exploration. Valentine often spent long periods crouched in front of his amp, head bent to receive his own punishment in the pursuit of perfect screaming sustain or the right brand of squall from his juiced-up, phaser drenched machines. Meanwhile, Elder lent voice to the madness, squeezing tender melodies out of her armory of lap steels and various oddities, the highlight of which had to be the “Mandobird,” a miniature Gibson Thunderbird strung like a mandolin.
It was an appropriately radical device for a radical night. Between the late start time, the two-party decibel pissing contest and sudden cold snap outside, nothing went exactly as expected – all of which only gave a couple of seasoned performers an excuse to jettison expectation altogether.
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Below, check out VINYL’s exclusive interview with Valentine:
Vinyl Mag: You guys have a reputation for being especially prolific, coming out with new records several times a year and touring hard behind them. How does recording compare to playing live?
Matt Valentine: They’re all the same in theory, but the records take, in some cases, a really long time to make, whereas the live experience is so nice because it’s immediate and, as you play, you’re reacting to so many things in the environment, things that aren’t necessarily great for a record, but are very appropriate for that moment in time. Sometimes things that sound really cool live have a space, but they don’t necessarily need to find their way onto something that is going to be a little more of an expensive release for someone to buy and listen to.
That’s where we came up with Heroine Celestial Agriculture, which is a subsidiary of our long-running cottage label called Child of Microtones. We’ve been doing that since 1999. For the Heroine thing, we basically harvest these live shows – they’re unadulterated but nicely cleaned up – I comb over them with mastering, and we spend a lot of love making sure they sound good and have a nice vibe to them. They’re basically like the lowest forms of art [laughs], and the LPs are like the highest form of art. And knowing that we have something going with that, as well as having these great labels that want to do albums that we’re interested in, the lines aren’t as blurred as they could be, but the ultimate thing is just trying to get cool-sounding stuff down and out to other people to hear.
VM: Does most of that creativity spring from working things out on tour, or exploring more plentiful and expansive options in a studio environment?
MV: It mainly stems from having a good work ethic. We’re into playing music as much as possible and dig being around music and creative people as much as possible. That inspires us. The studio environs are cool for a different kind of color; it’s expansive but not as ephemeral, and that aspect of it is terrifying. We try to find a balance. I get into this thing called “spectrasound” which has the sound dancing all around the stereo field- the aim is that people should want to keep coming back to take a spin.
VM: Your sound has changed fairly significantly over the years, encompassing everything from classic folk arrangements to some pretty spaced-out adventures in improvisation. Is there a conscious arc to your development, or does each batch of songs reflect the specific things going on in your lives at the time?
MV: I think the “space” and the jams were always in there, as were the songs/compositions. We’ve also always mixed amplification with the folk forms. I reckon the conscious arc is, “Don’t look back, set the controls to future wave.” Sure, the songs are snapshots of the sounds of the environment…it all gets in there. I dig topical songs, but I don’t think we’d ever get a six-figure deal on topic.
VM: A lot of notable songwriters — especially those incorporating roots elements into their music — seem like they’re pushing toward their own perfect vision of the cleanly composed, A-B-A-B ideal. You guys frequently seem more focused on faithful, moment-by-moment transmissions of vivid impressions, pulling the listener onto the banks of a river or into the passenger seat on a long drive. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to capturing experience in your chosen medium?
MV: Yeah, A-B-A-B can be a drag; we try to bring some chaos theory and extended love-ins into that form. It’s a groovy formula, but we love to break traditions.
VM: Did you engineer Space Homestead yourself, or were you working with a producer?
MV: I guess I was the chief engineer, but there are other engineers on it. We worked with Jarvis Taveniere, who’s got the Rearhouse studio, the original Woods studio. We also worked a little bit at Buttermilk Falls, which is Jeremy Earl’s home studio, and I engineered sessions with that, but he helped me, since were just doing the D.I.Y. thing in his studio. Erika and I engineered some stuff at our house, and Justin Pizzoferrato engineered some of the cuts at his studio in Greenfield, Mass.
It helps to have someone else twiddling the knobs, so you can just use one side of your brain [laughs], not burning synapses worrying about levels so much as playing notes. But usually we like to do them ourselves. Woodsist pressed the album on their label and did the distribution.
VM: What did each participant bring to the sound of the album?
MV: We definitely get along with everyone who plays on the records on more than just a musical level. Otherwise, I don’t think we could work with them. They’re like extended family, and we have a kind of deep bond where sometimes you don’t need to speak much or even really give much direction. They’re people who are just really groovy players, so they bring a spirited and inspired vibe when they play. I think that’s most important.
VM: What do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t going at it full-time with the band?
MV: Oh, man. At this point, I don’t think I know anything else [laughs]. I think I’m kind of grandfather claused in and out…stuck. We used to sell records – we worked in record stores together for a long time, probably a good 15 years. I started working in record stores as a teenager. Record stores still exist, but on a different level than when I cut my teeth in them.
I do a lot of mastering for bands. I do our own label. Erika does a lot of graphic art. She does pretty much all the layout for all the records. She works for a few pretty wild organizations freelancing up in Vermont. There’s this thing called Strolling of the Heifers, which is a big annual parade for farmers and local businesses.
You know, I’d probably be doing something in agriculture. It’s like I’m already doing sonic agriculture; I’d probably dig my hands a little deeper into the dirt, grow some vinyl on vines [laughs].
Would you like the V8 or the hybrid? The bacon burger or the salad? No, sorry, you have to choose. And since we’re already forcing you to make difficult decisions: Do you want your rock refined or raunchy?
… And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead have no problem dealing with this eternal conundrum. While 2002’s Source Tags & Codes stubbornly insisted on delivering real hooks and interesting compositions, it didn’t pull nearly enough punches to qualify as not hardcore. While you couldn’t call the album typical of the genre, you also couldn’t ignore the fact that any time a chance for understatement arose, the band took it into the alley behind the club and rearranged its face – reaffirming, in resolute and polarizing fashion, their own scene cred.
While Trail of Dead did go on to explore some other options, most agree they missed a signpost along the way, privileging extremity and caginess over focus and precision. Now, ten years after Codes, they present Lost Songs [out Oct. 23 on Superball], a record that recalls not only the sound, but the ethos of the band circa 2002.
Frontman Conrad Keely still sees the world through the same intensifying lens; every breakup is an apocalypse, every memory a 2×4 to the solar plexus. But Keeley is forty now, so instead of blotting out the sun with stories of failed relationships and professional frustrations, he’s more concerned with the zombified indolence that keeps people from taking action as the world falls apart around them.
“We’re catatonic, looking for something new,” Keely wails on “Catatonic,” sounding like a football coach trying to rally a team of seniors still hung over from last night’s prom. Fortunately, Trail of Dead have a way of making themes resonate both lyrically and sonically, bolstering the lyrical frustration of “Catatonics” with spazzy guitar lines that evoke the persistent itch of a hard-to-reach rash. Throughout the record, this same theme of destructive inertia resurfaces over and over; on “Open Doors”, Keely laments the ways in which hardship nudges us all down the easiest, least effective routes, everyone “[w]aiting for the answer/Walking through open doors.”
Closer “Time and Time Again”, with its acoustic strums and surprisingly melodic bass line, is Lost Songs’ greatest departure, and maybe its greatest achievement. Instead of turning inward and clawing at the walls of his skull, Keely gives us a melancholy anecdote buoyed by resignation instead of rage. “Drifting through the crowd I saw you glancing away/Terrified to meet my eyes,” he sings, the plain fact of his failure uncharacteristically speaking for itself.
The one sad takeaway from “Time and Time Again” is that it doesn’t belong; that, no matter how well done, that kind of song on this kind of record – a record otherwise so consistently vicious – is destined to be known as the runt of the litter. Until Trail of Dead work up the courage for another, more thoroughly considered reinvention, they’ll be captive to their own insistence that you simply have to choose.
In this age of hybridized genre tag mania (proto-post-stoner-jam-metalcore, anyone?), it’s become easy for bands to lay claim to invention by slapping synths, reverb, drum machines, etc., on top of blasé retreads of well-worn forms. Amid the innovation inflation Continue reading “REVIEW: Night Moves’ debut full-length Colored Emotions”
