I’d just got done with my job interview at Red Robin and the manager had asked me to come back for a second interview in an hour. I was feeling pretty good about this. I’d been looking for a job for ever—the only thing in my wallet was the beat-down crumpled leftovers of what used to be bus transfers and the bus drivers had stopped taking those a week or so back. I walked off to find a store where I could use my food stamps to get a sandwich and something to drink while I waited. There was a 7/Eleven down the street and as I walked up I noticed a lady sitting on a bench drinking a beer across the street. I got myself a microwave hamburger, a bottle of some gross coffee, and some breath mints and swiped my card and set off to kill some time. When I got outside the lady was nowhere to be seen so I saddled on up to the bench. But, as I approached she appeared, demanding fifty cents. “Lady,” I said. “I ain’t got shit.” “I gotta make a phone call,” she demanded. “And, I got nothing for you.” “Well, that’s my bench and I’m going to sit with you.” “Go right ahead,” I told her. “This ain’t the best place for a drink, but my friend died last night and I’m having one for her,” she said as she took a swill from her 211. She was a bigger girl. A white hoodie covered her ginger hair and the tattoos on her neck. She had real white teeth for being as rough as she was, but I didn’t care that much anyway. I apologized for her friends passing and mentioned having lost a friend of my own recently. She apologized for my loss and I said that that was alright. “She was an asshole anyway. I thumped her a while back when she tried to get crazy and take my man. But we’d made up the last time we’d seen eachother and I’d bought her some food.” I nodded, not really sure how invested in this conversation I wanted to be. She took another swag from her can and asked to roll a cigarette. I hesitated, decided, fuck it, and handed her the bag. She asked about my friend, how he passed. I told her that they found him dead in the bathroom and that while I hadn’t asked about the details I imagined that he OD’d or that his body had finally given out. “He had a taste for speed,” I explained. “He’d had a good run.” “I ain’t never done no speed,” She said. “But I do love me some crack.” I laughed. She told me about her friend. How she was a diabetic. Didn’t take care of herself. Died of pneumonia. “I’m from the upper middle class and ain’t used to this sort of thing. People don’t just die of pneumonia where I come from. “I ain’t ever been sick before. Ain’t had no cavity. Never had nothing too bad happen to me.” “You will,” I said. “Well, I take real good care of my teeth. And, my uncle’s an oral surgeon and if anything does happen to them I’ll have him give me some new ones. Shit, you know what happened to me? I was with my friends last night and we were partying, they had all sorts of dope and alcohol and all that. And, I was saying how sad I was for Ronda, my friend, when this guy puts a cigarette out on my face. Can you believe that?” “Nope.” “Can you believe that asshole put a cigarette out right on my nose?” “Yup. That’s pretty much the definition of ‘asshole’ right there,” I told her. We laughed. “Don’t get me wrong. I can be an asshole myself. I love crazy. But, I love beautiful crazy. Not scary crazy.” I nodded. “I’m a boss bitch. You know know what that means?” “That you’re,” I paused. “The boss?” “Well, I’m a boss bitch. And, there’s this crazy-scary bitch that hangs out downtown and one Friday night I was all did up and looking good. My hair done. My make-up on. And this bitch starts getting up in my shit about this and that and I told her that she best get outta my face. And, she didn’t like that. And, she had this taco salad. And I told her get away from me. And she threw it on me. You know, a ta-co sal-ad? With guacamole on it. And sour cream. And, that little weird orange cheese. She threw that shit on me. All up in my hair. And you know what I did? I molly-whopped her.” “I don’t even know what that means,” I told her. “It means exactly what it sounds like, MOLLY-WHOP. I molly-whopped that bitch. Just jumped on her and beat that bitch good. And, you know what? I think I did her a favor. My friends say that they haven’t seen her down there since. I molly whopped that bitch right into rehab. Fuck AA.” A couple in a car waiting at the light gave us a nasty look. It wasn’t the first I noticed. At some point in the conversation I’d told her about how I was waiting to go to my second interview at Red Robin. “That place has bomb drinks. This one, I think it’s called the Zombie Killer, whew. You serve that to one of your tables and they’re going to be like, giving you their wallets. Yeah. I’m a come visit you. You hook me up?” “Well, I gotta get the job first,” I laughed. “Oh, baby. Second interview? And, you with them pretty blue eyes and dressed up all dapper like you are? You got that job.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. And, I’m going to come visit you.” And, you know what? I got that job. And, you know what? I think that crack head with them pretty teeth and her molly-whopps was my guardian angel. And, I’ll always have a Zombie Killer for her if she comes in. She was the prettiest gargoyle I’ve ever met.
I don’t know how it happened but I went from not that drunk to really drunk really fast and then it was almost morning and I was having trouble remembering how it was that such a pretty girl and I took up stumbling down Mission St. arms linked against sobriety, restraint, and the cold, past taquerias and cell phone stores and the late night drug dealers and why everything seemed to be smiling at us— even the harsh pink and purple neons beamed brightly upon our sloppy courtship. I fell down. I remember that. And we may have kissed. There was the smell of baking bread and in my head I asked, “what is all this?” and we bought a fresh yellow cake with cream cheese frosting and some other tasty things. That bakery smelled so good. I smiled like an idiot and when we got back to her room we fell to the cold hardwood floor and on to the cake and on to each other and this time kissed for some time. But that was all that we did, that kissing, because she was sick of being a slut and I was in love with some other girl. And so we fell asleep in our clothes on that floor our arms wrapped around one another in solidarity against the cold and the hangovers to come.
The Leonard Cohen Cocaine Blues
“I hate it,” she begs. “Turn it off.” Just thinking of that sad old bastard’s croon gives her a headache, she says. Makes her feel like she used to when he would fuck her like she wasn’t there,
when he’d pointlessly thrash against her for hours, over and over and over trying to make himself cum; makes her remember trying to sleep afterward as the sun rose and her heartbeat beat too fast; how, as she’d lie there, not crying, he’d fall asleep almost instantly leaving her to listen to those sad songs and tell her self that she wouldn’t do this again just as she’d told herself the last time she’d sweated her way through the later hours of the a.m. that she wouldn’t be doing this again. “I hate it,” she says.
Reunion
Tonight, when the smell of blood and grease overwhelmed good sense I imagined kissing you again.
That first time, so long past, I saw deep red light up your freckled cheeks I almost asked you to marry me. Probably I did. Tonight, after we drank that other bottle and gave up whatever pretense brought us back together it felt like, maybe, we really could have loved each other forever.
Watching Biloxi Blues at 3 am
I like the idea of tender hookers guiding scared boys slowly slower so slow to that soft oblivion that is so frightening before we realize how soft soft is.
The Reatards, Teenage Hate + Fuck Elvis Here’s the Reatards
The other day I saw a group of kids whose mother had them all dressed up like little punk rock dolls: mohawks, Ramones t-shirts, studded bracelets, etc. And, of course, she had her Zeke hoodie over a GG Allin t-shirt on top of some of some brand new bondage pants from the mall or whatever. I threw up in my mouth a little. Joining the Republican Party and hosting a Grateful Dead bootleg party seems punker than this. Though this lady and her children might like Teenage Hate if they’d ever heard anything other than Fear (there’s an awesome cover of I love Living in the City on this) or whatever schlock she’s still drooling over,Teenage Hate would hate her and for this I love Teenage Hate.
Black Lips, Arabia Mountain
Fuck yeah. I remember driving around Portland, Oregon one morning in my friend’s car listening to Good Bad Not Evil while waiting for the liquor stores to open. We didn’t really care that six am was still an hour away and that the rearview mirror had disappeared when we sideswiped that parked car. The CD started over and we just laughed at our stupidity and pretended to know the words we sang along with. That record rules. Arabia Mountain’s better. I swear it.
Making Freindz, Social Life
Tami Hart seems to have had a hand in nearly every badass project of the past decade. Not really. But she’s got a pretty impressive resume. She’s played with the Coachwhips, Mika Miko, and MEN; put out records on Mr. Lady; recorded with Kathleen Hannah; as well as a bunch of other shit. Now, she’s put out Making Friendz, Social Life, a sweaty mix of Justin Timberlake influenced disco-ish punk songs perfect for a prom dance of the alienated, which would be a lonely and amazing experience.
Sole & the Skyrider Band, Hello Cruel World
There’s a part of me that really wants to like this, but there’s the other, more prevalent part that recoils at how melodramatic it seems. But, if you’re into the Anticon label, you’re probably going to go ape shit for this. I’m not.
Dom, Family of Love
Family of Love is the sort of twisted and delicious sort of pop music that is great to turn up past really loud and drive around aimlessly to. It is also the sort of thing that has been falling through the cracks of the major music industry for the past thirty years, either relegated to bargain bins and dropped by the label or completely ignored from the get go. It’s rad that this and other music like it is out there getting pushed by big labels. The song “Some Boys” is worth the price of admission alone. Yeah.
He tossed and turned on the floor all night and finally saw the sun peaking into the windows. He pushed the covers away, quietly pulled together his belongings and went outside. No need to wake the others. His snoring probably did that all night.
Stepping out into the freezing morning air he shivered and pulled some newish-denim over older long johns and some wool over his trembling arms. His bare feet blued. He pinched some tobacco from the pouch and put it in a rolling paper. With a half-conscious twist the cigarette was in his lips, a match already lit.
Satisfaction. That first cigarette of the morning. The sun was coming over the mountain. There wasn’t any of the traffic or chatter of his hometown. Just the commerce of birds chirping and the creaking of ice falling from the trees.
He thought of all the people that moved to places like this. Buying mountain gear. Stetson hats. Patagonia. Ready to rough it in the mountains. Leaving a month later, defeated.
He was enchanted with the land around him. Felt that urge to live and die and sleep and fail and fall apart within it and wondered, even without the costume, if he were doing the same thing. Wasn’t he just another idiot from the world of traffic and Latin gangs underestimating nature? Entertained by the cuddly and cute, Made for Disney bears and wolves?
He dragged his cigarette down his throat. He wasn’t John Muir. He didn’t want to be. He was just another man that didn’t want the life he’d left, trying to find another. He was himself.
He was cold.
The birds kept chirping. About what, he didn’t know. Were they celebrating the beautiful landscape around them or vying for dominance. He didn’t care. But, he was glad. Glad not to know and glad to be so far from what used to be home.
He thought of that place. The hustle down on Elm St; anxiety in the supermarket; crying over nothing, everything; rent; spending the rent money not on rent. He sighed. The birds chirped.
Well, all that would come back. Soon. Sometime. At some point or another. He didn’t know and it wasn’t worth fretting over. He was okay at the moment. Right now. This morning. And, it felt pretty good.
He coughed, spit, took three quick drags from the end of his smoke. He regarded the mountains. Exhaled the smoke. He felt the sun trying to beat through the cold and his wool. Warmth.
Raymond Gonzalez, the drummer for LA’s Dirt Dress worked a nine hour shift before leaving to go to Texas for South by Southwest. Just in case you’ve never had the pleasure of driving from California to Texas in one shot, you can take my word for it that a drive across only Texas can feel like some sort of Navy SEALS endurance test. And going from LA to Austin in a single bound is some type of super hero shit that would turn even the most hardened among us into jackals raving for their mommies to hold them.
Anyway, after working a full shift and quickly scrambling to get ready Gonzalez was behind the wheel where, aided by a twenty-four pack of Starbucks DoubleShot Mocha Coffee Drinks™ he would stay for the rest of the drive.
The first time I went to go interview Dirt Dress my then-girlfriend of five years came by my house to loan me a digital voice-recorder since mine had crapped out on me a couple hours before I was supposed to meet them. Since she’d been having a lot of crazy family drama after Christmas it wasn’t immediately troubling that she seemed a bit puffy around the face like she’d just been crying. “Everything Alright,” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just a lot of stupid shit with my brother and my dad. So, I brought you fresh batteries for this thing since these ones are about to die.” And, with that we started trying to figure out how to work the soon-to-be-hated VN-1000 Digital Voice Recorder, a machine that would play a minor but important role in the complete cluster-fuck of an evening before me.
By the time Dirt Dress arrived in Austin, twenty-four empty Starbucks DoubleShot Mocha™ cans were rolling around the boys feet while the creamy liquid sloshed around in their guts. Gonzalez had driven all the way from California. Singer and Guitarist Noah Kwid had spent the drive enjoying mocha after mocha, and I’m not sure what bassist Jose Bacilio had done.
The madness that is SXSW was already in full swing when the boys stepped out into the feverous Texas sun. “Everyone was drinking,” Kwid said. “And, so I thought that’d be a good idea.” And, so beer after beer soon got mixed with whiskey, which was poured on top of countless Starbucks DoubleShot Mocha Coffee Drinks™ and left to cook in Kwid’s belly throughout that first hot Texas day.
After tinkering with the VN-1000 Digital Voice Recorder and getting what I thought was a vague handle on working the thing, my then-girlfriend-of-five-years and I lied down to relax for a moment. The tears immediately started flowing out of her along with the I-don’t-know-what-to-do’s and they-keep-telling-me-too’s and soon a picture was forming. That I was the devil in her family’s minds was nothing new. That they’d introduced another nice guy with a good job wasn’t too shocking. But, this whole her agreeing with them thing was. “Wait, what’d you just say?”
“Well,” She said. “Maybe we should take a break.”
“A break? Wait. What? Are you breaking up with me?”
And, there about fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave to go and ask Dirt Dress what instruments they play and why they play them, my world stuttered and then just collapsed in front of me.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Lack of sleep and too much booze compelled our three heroes to seek shelter at the studio apartment their friends had offered to share with them. But, SXSW being SXSW there were damn near fifty people crawling all around the place and there was no place to sleep. Exhausted, they made their way back to the van to try and sleep. But, as soon as Kwid laid down to put the Mochas and the day behind him he got right back up, opened the door and collapsed at the wheels and let fly a milky stream of Starbucks DoubleShot Mocha Coffee Drinks™, whiskey, and whatever cheap beers had been available.
Slowly picking himself up and licking the fuzz off the back of his teeth Noah realized that he was in Texas without a toothbrush or a comfortable place to sleep.
Head reeling from the emotional bomb I’d just received I stopped into a bar next to the venue where I was meeting the band and ordered a double well whiskey and whatever beer was cheep. “What and the fuck just happened,” kept repeating in my head and I barely had an answer.
After a couple minutes I made one foot follow the other and went to go and meet up with Dirt Dress. We all shook hands, I mentioned the fact that I was an emotional wreck, checked that the VN-1000’s batteries were ready to go and conducted a haphazard interview, apologized for my very apparent drunkenness, laughed at what an ass I must look like and rescheduled another interview.
I woke up the next day and listened to the brief interview on the VN-1000 to make sure I hadn’t embarrassed myself too much. But, hearing my voice come crawling back to me in a wash of static and stuttered questions from the night before was too much. I shut the thing off and went back to sleep.
A couple days later I met up with Dirt Dress to try and do the interview again, but as I was interviewing them I looked down and noticed that the recorder was flashing that it was full. I whipped out a notebook and wrote down the tale of SXSW you’ve just read above, figuring I could pull enough from what I had gotten on tape and the story about the drive across the desert.
But, when I went to transcribe the interviews there was nothing there. Just a blank screen.
“You’re fucking kidding me?”
What can I say? Dirt Dress are great. And so are toothbrushes. And girlfriends. But, I can’t vouch for heartbreak, digital recorders, or Starbucks DoubleShot Mocha Coffee Drinks™. Especially twenty-four of them in one sitting.
John Roller, GestapoKhazi’s singer, looks like some amphetamine-fueled predator tonight as he paces back and forth over the beer soaked floor. Behind him guitarist, Eric Fettes, flays his guitar like a hummingbird flutters its wings, drummer Michael Shelbourne pounds the floor toms like some cromag demanding dinner, while Dan Graziano holds the whole thing down on bass as they drill into the introduction of the song, “Miss Temptation,” building a tension something like the sound of screeching brakes before a car accident, until the music stops for one quiet moment, and the band explodes.
Hanging out at GestapoKhazi’s house, the venue/crash pad/rehearsal space/ aptly titled “The Bad Pad,” Roller flips the record, lights a cigarette and talks about the last show held at the Bad Pad and some of the ‘oh-so-fun-things’ that can happen when you invite the world into your house to see some bands play.
“Things get a little crazy,” he says, with an ‘aw-fuck-it’ sort of expression on his face. “The last show, more than usual. I think the first band was a bit mellower than what people were expecting. And, so, when we went on everybody went a bit nuts, trashed the place.” And this shows; In the front of the house the walls are caved in and punched out in various places, while the carpet is chewed apart, littered with bottle caps, boxes of records, and a “Deluxe Anniversary Edition” of Monopoly that has been sharpied by someone to reveal the true desire behind wanting to purchase Marvin Gardens: “get the $, bitches, & nachos.”
Besides the forceful redecoration, there is also the fact that having shows at your house is usually illegal. At one show the Long Beach Police showed up and issued a warning to shut down the party, saying that if they had to come back somebody would get arrested.
“[The] Problem is, the person they were talking to didn’t live here,” Roller explains. “And, since it’s kind of a big place we didn’t even know that they had shown up. So [when] they came back mad as all hell, instead of a noise ticket, we ended up getting arrested.
“But it was worth it, that show ruled.”
GestapoKhazi formed in December 2008, when guitarist Fettes convinced Roller and Shelbourne to play with him. “Mike and I were already in another full time band and Eric had a different bass player and drummer playing his tunes at the time. But little by little he kicked those guys out and brought in Mike, Dan and I.”
With the bands line-up solidified the boys wasted no time and immediately started playing up and down the west coast and recording. Within the year they had enough material for five seven inches and a twelve inch EP and had been playing damn near every night. Rather than waiting around for a label to pick them up the band takes a “do-it-yourself” approach, designing and releasing the majority of their own records. According to Roller, the bands’ DIY approach is based not only on self-reliance, but also comes from being broke and stubborn.
“The idea is, if you’re highly-opinionated and don’t have the dough to pay someone to make it sound and look the way you want, you find a way to make it happen on your own,” Roller said. “We record in our own studio, release most of our records, and print the majority of the packaging by hand.
“The benefits are complete control. Drawbacks: Less exposure. I’d take artistic control over exposure.”
By the end of their set tonight the walls are as sweaty as the band and the audience is a drunken bunch of converts baptized under a wave of reverb and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Roller’s bright blue eyes glare out into the dark room.
One long insomniac night I sat blinking into the darkness chasing my thoughts in circles and going nowhere. Bored and frustrated I gave up on sleep, turned a light on and decided to listen to the CD my friend had me promise to listen to by Greg Cartwright’s band, the Reigning Sound. The sad-bastard lyrics (“I don’t require that you be true to me just as long as you come home”) and moody country tinged dirty rock ‘n’ roll on Break Up, Break Down filled me with a strange lop-sided joy, and almost justified another sad-sack-sleepless night.
But, the Reigning Sound is only one of many musical outlets Cartwright has had his fingers in. After Forming The Oblivians in 1993 he’s gone on to make records with Mary Weiss of the Shangri La’s, played drums in the Reatards and most recently teamed up with Coco Hames and Jim Cohenof the Ettes to record and release Strychnine Dandelions, as the Parting Gifts.
“Coco and and Jim hired me to produce the Ettes album that came out last year,” Cartwright said in an interview over email. “We all stayed in touch and some time later Coco called and asked if I might wanna do a duet or two, maybe make a single out of it or something.” Cartwright agreed and headed down to Nashville where the band planned to record five tracks, take the best two and put out a single. But, plans change.
“Being that we were pretty happy with everything we cut, we were having a hard time figuring out which songs to trim. We decided instead to record some more songs and try to make an LP. I made a couple trips back and forth but I think the overall time spent on the record was something like two weeks or so.”
Cartwright says that there’s no over all theme or concept tying the record together. “It jumps around a lot,” he explains. It’s “more like a collection of individual songs than a conceptual thing.”
Which could also be an explanation of Cartwright’s music itself. Though there’s a definite rock ‘n’ roll and punk influence running through most everything he’s put out, that’s a wide playground to tromp around in and Cartwright and co. haven’t just been hanging out by the monkey bars.
Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Cartwright came of age listening to his father’s large collection of rock ‘n’ roll and British invasion records and started going to punk shows when he was a teenager.
“When I was growing up there was a pretty thriving punk scene happening in Memphis, and by punk I mean, I dunno, like a fringe culture. Freaks and weirdos doing their thing. A genuine local sound. This was later eclipsed in the late 80’s by hard core, straight edge and other such nonsense. This led to me leaving my peer group behind in favor of older people who would rather drink than discuss political movements. People who liked rock and roll.”
And, people that like rock ‘n’ roll will like The Parting Gifts. Shot through with Cartwright’s gloriously despondent lyrics and Hame’s Wanda Jackson-esque rasp this is a record that could help the sleepless through a cold and lonely night.
I have this theory that there is no band called Wavves; or at lease not a “band” in the classic sense of the word. I think that Wavves is the work of some uber geniuses who sat down and pumped one of those super-computers, the ones they use to figure pi out on, full of pop music and pus from pimples and any other thing they could find about shit-headed teenaged boys and, and told it to write a record based on the algorithm it found and out came this self-centered, whiny, ode to sulking over petty shit and bad potty training. It’s an astonishing piece of art.
John Wesley Coleman, Bad Lady Goes to Jail
Apparently this guy works at a pizza parlor…and has a book…he works as a garbage-collector as well, though maybe I read that wrong…I wonder if he looks as cool as Martin Sheen in Badlands…hmm…I like it…honest…stupid at points…no one being honest wouldn’t be…cool sounding organ on “Can’t stop dreaming”…”Go Baby Go” is cool. Not cool enough to get you pregnant, but…it’s catchy…any of you ever heard of Shane White…anyway…you should probably buy this…or go to Austin and see if he’s Badlands-cool…Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Sonny & the Sunsets, Tomorrow is Alright
With a doo wop sensibility and a “who-gives-a-damn-that-the-house-is-on-fire” kinda cool, Sonny & the Sunsets sound unflappable and make you feel the same way, like if you were listening to this record and walked in on your spouse of the past ten years making out with your Ferrari-driving mid-life crisis having neighbor you’d just roll your eyes, laugh at how stupid the whole scene was, and walk right back out the door humming along with the Sunsets. But, as soon as the record reached its end you’d turn into a puddle of sadness and rejection wailing at the injustice of it all. That’s how cool this record is.
Zola Jesus, Valusia
This would be the perfect EP to listen to as you were driving through a desert landscape, somewhere between New Mexico and El Paso would work just fine. The haunting synthesizers could flow out and fill that desolate landscape with their eerie vibrations as you settled deeper into your seat and watched the road fall away behind you—next stop 85 miles. Similarities to Siouxsie and the Banshees and PJ Harvey abound.
My Disco, Little Joy
There’s a kind of bravery woven into the repetitive tensions that holds Little Joy together. Songs like “Youth” and “Rivers,” especially, seem to declare some sincere belief in and a demand for the impossible—like some child of the cold war convinced that he can level the Berlin wall by will alone, staring it into oblivion. My Disco blend their influences together well without a becoming a parody or a joke. Well worth a listen
Eternal Summers, Silver
When I was eleven my fifteen year-old juvenile delinquint cousin moved in with my mom and I after she got out of Juvenile Detention, or jail for kids; it was a sort of last ditch effort by her parents to place her somewhere before they just gave up and handed her over to the state. Unfortunately, it was only a week before her and my mom got into a hair-pulling contest, and she slipped away into the night leaving behind three cassette tapes: Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Violent Femmes, S/T, and The Dead Milkmen, Big Lizard in my Backyard. I listened to these records over and over, in love with the idea that there was music out there that could make you feel so alive.
Group Love, EP
You know that feeling when the sun comes up and your feeling a little giddy as you and your friends spill the last bit of warm beer and someone suggests you go to the beach and watch the world wake up from there, but you don’t really want to go anywhere because you’re happy to just be sitting there in some dirty living room with these people you love? That’s kinda what this record feels like. But, I might just need to get a little sleep myself.
Maserati, Pyramid of the Sun
If I drove a spaceship this would be the perfect record to cruise around the galaxy blaring. As it is I don’t even know how to drive a car, but listening to this record makes me want to learn how so that when the time comes that spaceships are available to the average citizen I’ll be able to drive my self to the NASA DMV, get my Rocket Permit and then swoop on out to the moon blasting Pyramid of the Sun.
No Bunny, First Blood
The man in the bunny mask pulls off another coup de grace here in First Blood doing the “Fuck Yourself” in style while getting dumb and in trouble while sounding like every rock ‘n’ roll record in his and your collection. Does it break new ground? Fuck no. Is it the perfect soundtrack for a champagne and underwear party? In-fucking-deed. Enjoy
Most of these reviews were published in either Monster Children #28 or #29. Fuck yeah Monster Children. www.MonsterChildren.com
Starting a band can be such a pain in the ass. Just ask the Crocodiles about the two years of false starts, lazy musicians, and wasted time they spent trying to pull something out of the ether after their old band, The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower, broke up.
Live, the Crocodiles wear the honest, open-jawed look of people fucking. As singer Brandon Welchez flails about the stage pin wheeling his arms and falling this way and that, Charles Rowland wears a raunchy leer grinding the neck of his guitar into the speaker of his amp while the rest of the band gyrate and hammer out the set with an abandon appropriate for a pagan fertility festival. The bass pulsates tightly along with the drums, burrowing into your chest, and building a tension that finally finds a release in Welchez’s piercing howl.
It’s an amazing show; one that totally obliterates any doubts about the group’s expansion from a duo to a five-piece band. “Initially we wanted to start the band with a more orthodox line-up,” Welchez says.
“But,” Rowell Interjects “trying to start something new with other people was really frustrating. People would just quit two days before we had a show. It was so weird, after being in a semi successful touring band (The Plot to Blow up the Eiffel Tower), to just be sitting at home for a year or two trying to get people motivated.”
“Trying to get a crappy band together,” Welchez interjects. “So, we just said ‘fuck it, we’ll find some way to do it just the two of us.”
And, so, with a fuck-it attitude and no idea what kind of band they were forming (Welchez: “Maybe we’d both play guitar, be mellow or something”) the Crocodiles got to work, quickly playing their first show at a teen recreation center in Bakersfield, CA.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” says Rowell “We only had like four songs. But, it was such a cool feeling. We were so excited to be playing again, even if it was, like, in Bakersfield or something—just the two of us; just get in the car and drive.”
Building on this excitement the duo wasted no time, using an iPod, a drum machine, and a computer recording program they quickly recorded and released the 7” single Neon Jesus and started playing shows wherever they could (“‘Hey, Chuck we got offered a show, You want to do it?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘It’s booked.’ ‘Let’s go.’”) all the while trying working out the snags of playing live as a two-piece.
“We were able to record and book tours and get everything done super fast, you know,” Rowell explains. “We toured all last year in a car—just any show we could get, it was great. Just him and I smoking joints, driving around the country, and listening to music.”
In May 2009, they put out Summer of Hate—a beautifully deranged swirl of feedback and drum machines cascading around Spector-like ballads and darker synth-pop—on Fat Possum Records. With good reviews and word of mouth spreading the duo hopped the pond and buzzed around Europe a couple times and then came back to the States, booking tours with bands such as Ladytron, The Faint, and The Raveonettes.
Frustrated at having so much of their live show at the mercy of random sound technicians at various venues, (Welchez: “If the sound guy decides not to raise the volume, it’s going to sound like some rickety assed toy drums.”) Rowland and Welchez ditched the iPod and brought in the live band that they’re touring with now.
“We play as a five piece now,” Welchez explains. “And, it’s a lot of fun. But starting out as a two piece is good for anybody because you have the safety and camaraderie of being a band, it’s not as intimidating as doing it by yourself and it’s so tight knit, small that it can be sort of liberating.”
