Sleigh Bells @ Market Hotel in October 2009 (Photo Credit: Turkishomework)

Words by Andrew Parks

A few months ago, we wrote something on our Twitter account just to fuck with people and prove a point. Sleigh Bells had just dropped the digital version of their debut, Treats, and far too many self-anointed critics had already made their mind up about the Brooklyn duo. On one side: the hype mongers, the ones who think Sleigh Bells are here to rewrite the rules and rewire the sound of pop music. And on the other: the cynics, the ones who think Sleigh Bells are yet another example of a blog-driven obsession with being “first.”

Outside of seeing them at SXSW and sending one of our photographers to cover their show with Surfer Blood last fall, we largely avoided listening to Sleigh Bells. At least until the pressure became too great and we caved in, firing up a press copy of Treats and finding it exhilarating but, well, really fucking loud. Or as we wrote into the Web’s vast void, “It’s giving us a headache. This would have worked well on Korn and Limp Bizkit’s Family Values tour in the ’90s, though.”

Sure enough, a fan of Sleigh Bells saw our tweet and forwarded it to guitarist/producer Derek Miller. He then responded to us, basically saying it’s funny that we’re slamming the record after asking to interview the band several times. We explained that we weren’t slamming the record, that we were just giving a knee-jerk reaction in response to all of the hoopla that was happening that week. As for us asking about an interview in previous weeks, the idea there was to discuss what all of this Next Big Thing nonsense means in the scheme of things, not feeding the blog-fueled beast even more.

“I don’t really like to consider myself an ‘artist,’ but we work in a creative field and are sensitive to that shit”

“It’s funny, when I saw your tweet, I actually thought to myself, ‘Yes!’” says Miller, when we reach him during a tour overseas, “We actually joked about being a new-metal band during Major Lazer’s tour. [Diplo] was like, ‘You guys are the new Limp Bizkit.’ And we said, ‘Yeah! We kinda are!’”

To bring that point home even further, Miller played the moronic Korn song “A.D.I.D.A.S.” (a.k.a. “All Day I Dream About Sex”) during a WFMU radio show.

“I’m not running away from any of that,” he explains. “Dude, I saw Korn on the Life Is Peachy tour in Orlando. I was 14 or 15, and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.”

The lack of pretension in the music and general mood of Sleigh Bells is why we were ultimately drawn to them. Unlike their label boss M.I.A., the prickly pair knows they aren’t here to change the world. They’re here to deliver rock candy that’ll rot your speakers from the inside out, and to play shows that’ll reduce most rooms to absolute rubble, largely thanks to Alexis Krauss, easily one of the most exciting frontwomen in music today.

The following is easily the most extensive Sleigh Bells interview that’s been published yet, and the only self-titled feature that’s ever arisen out of a reported “Twitter feud.” So yeah—shit’s about to get real…

So are you ready to argue about how much we hate each other?
Yeah man, I’m ready for it. I’ve got my old Yankees cap out and everything.

Isn’t it a little weird how something so harmless can spread so quickly on the Web?
Dude, it’s kinda ridiculous. A couple minutes after [we talked], I had this funny exchange where someone was like, “Woah dude, this is crazy!” I actually deleted my Twitter app after that…

Yeah, I noticed you delete comments here and there.
We’ve been doing that since the beginning because we’re not huge fans of social networking sites. Any of them, really—like our MySpace has nothing on it, and I haven’t logged into our Facebook account in forever.

But you’re aware that’s how a lot of this nonsense spreads right?
Absolutely. It’d be ridiculous to pretend that I’m ignorant to it. The whole thing just makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. Something about it’s just really weird. First of all, I don’t see the need to tell someone whether or not I’m enjoying my hamburger. That’s just fucking ridiculous. There’s some value in reigning yourself in a bit and not getting on your knees at every opportunity for a little exposure. I don’t think it’s healthy for bands—for everything that’s good or bad about your band to be at your fingertips…literally. It’s terrible.

Right. As much as artists say that doesn’t influence them, it has to to some degree.
Yeah, man. I don’t really like to consider myself an “artist,” but we work in a creative field and are sensitive to that shit. We care; we want people to like what we’re doing. So [criticism] bugs us. Anyone that tells you it doesn’t is probably lying a little bit.

A lot of your positive press has been based on really backhanded compliments, too. Like the New York Times said, your riffs are “so audaciously straightforward they verge on brainless.”
Well, you know, critics have to be so on top of everything. We get a lot of ‘it’s like this meets this…but in a good way’. Or someone always has to mention how quickly this could all go away.

People also consider Sleigh Bells a guilty pleasure. I assume you don’t even believe in the concept of that…
Of course not. That’s ridiculous. I understand what [critics] are doing. That tone is so common, and so old, that we try not to take it very seriously.

So tell me a little bit about Alexis and her background in pop music—how it helped with your creative process for Sleigh Bells.
She used to do a lot of random session work, whether it was a jingle or demos that ended up going to Britney [Spears] or something. So she’s very patient. From a production standpoint, she’s good with abstract directions, like, ‘Okay, this has got to be sparkly’.

You used the word “sparkly” in the making of this album?
Sure. And you can use that against me. That’s fine. I deserve it. [Laughs] But yeah, it was probably a little embarrassing for her, because she was going out of her comfort zone. We were both vulnerable, and therefore, equal. It wasn’t too painful.

“You know how it is when you’re 15—that shit becomes your identity because it’s all your looking for.”

Vice's Creators Project, June 2010 (Photo Credit: Andrew Parks)

I love that you were literally going up to girls asking them if they were a singer, leading up to meeting Alexis. That did happen right?
Oh yes. As evidenced by me meeting her at a restaurant where I was waiting tables.

That happened when again?
November of ‘04 was when I first started looking [for a singer] in earnest. I had just quit my hardcore band (Poison the Well), and moved from California back to Florida. I really wanted to work with a girl because I prefer female vocalists and had been surrounded by sweaty metal dudes for the past six years of my life. So yeah, it took a while. I moved back to California and played music with some friends. I never found anyone [for Sleigh Bells], so I moved back to Florida.

Were you playing Poison the Well-like music when you moved back to California then?
No, I don’t know what it was, man. It was all pretty mediocre. I was pretty dead-set on not contributing to the noise of another band. That’s just static. I’d rather be waiting tables. So anyway, when I moved back to Florida, I hooked up with some friends and a different girl, and it was good. Sonically, the material I was coming up with was closer to the standard of what I was holding myself up to. It was close, but not quite there. There was like a band version of “Infinity Guitars,” for instance.

This was when the Surfer Blood guys were in the band?
Yeah, exactly. They’re all old friends of mine. It was [Surfer Blood frontman] J.P. [Pitts], [drummer] T.J. [Schwarz], and JP’s sister. We played a bunch of music together for a while. It was pretty cool. I had my ideas of what I was trying to do, and they had theirs. It was all band stuff. I didn’t get into programming until I moved to New York. So I was mostly playing guitar, T.J. was playing drums, and J.P. was playing bass and singing. It was fun. West Palm doesn’t have much of a scene, so you usually end up playing together at some point and trying stuff out. It’s been cool to watch them get their shit together, make a record, and have everyone love it.

What part of Florida are you from?
I was born in Pahokee, but I was raised in Jupiter, which is an hour and a half up the coast from Miami. So I surfed a lot growing up, right up until I got a guitar and quit surfing to focus on that.

What was Miami like for you? Did it fulfill a lot of the girls-in-bikinis stereotypes?
Miami’s fucking diverse. Jeffrey [Moreira], the singer from Poison the Well, grew up in a tough area, actually. Jupiter was a small little beach town with nothing, really. I think we got a Taco Bell in ‘91 and it was a huge deal. Like a lot of other parts of the country, there’s a real cultural void. My family’s still there, so I got back all the time.

Going back there must keep you grounded.
We don’t have any trouble with that. Not to be plain Jane or boring about it, but we’re extremely humble and critical of ourselves. I don’t need to go to a destination to feel grounded.

Well, it must be relaxing at least.
Yes. It’s super relaxing. My sister lives there with her family, about 200 yards from the beach, so I’ll just go crash with them, hang out with my niece and my nephew. It’s pretty dope.

Was Poison the Well an anomaly in your part of Florida then?
There were actually a fair amount of hardcore bands, mostly in, like, Fort Lauderdale. I was 15 when I went to my first hardcore show in West Palm Beach, at this place called Happy Days. And every once in a while, a band from Lauderdale or Miami would come up and just shred up the place. So the second I turned 16 and had a license, I was down in Lauderdale every weekend, for every show.

They were the cooler town then?
So much cooler. I don’t know if the music was necessarily good, but it was a lot better than what was going on in West Palm. So that’s how I got involved with the Poison the Well dudes.

And you were pretty much immersed in that music at that point?
Totally. That was the first exciting thing I’d ever found in Jupiter. You know how it is when you’re 15—that shit becomes your identity because it’s all your looking for. I don’t know if you’ve even been into hardcore.

I have, actually. I’m from Buffalo, so that’s all we had too.
Snapcase then, right?

Yep.
[Laughs] They were a great fucking band, actually—Snapcase.

Come to think of it, I may have seen Poison the Well when you were still in the band.
That’s possible—we played up there a bunch. Man, I’m still extremely close with the Poison the Well guys. They’re like my brothers, for sure.

“You just start thinking hardcore’s kinda ridiculous and restrictive—that you want to grow but your fans won’t let you”

The Fader Fort 2010 (Photo Credit: Aaron Richter)

What was the breaking point where you decided you needed to leave then? Poison the Well was getting more experimental around the time you quit…
I started becoming more controlling. You Come Before You came out in ‘03, and that was pretty collaborative, but after that, I wanted to do everything. We all wanted to diversify the sound, but a lot of times, we spread ourselves a little too thin.

Looking back, we were a pretty cool hardcore band when we were being straightforward and heavy. I feel bad saying this, but a lot of the melodic stuff we did is pretty fucking corny. But it’s where we were at. What the band used to be disappeared, and when one person is doing everything, all of the sparks go away. It wasn’t like a really shitty split. There were no fights. I was just unhappy. Everyone knew that. My involvement with the band had run its course.

As a listener, were you drifting away from that music, too?
Totally. All of us were, around ‘01 or something. Once you hear something like OK Computer, it’s like, ‘Wow!’, and then that leads into something like Björk, and so on. It’s all just a gateway into something other than just Converge records. Then you just start thinking hardcore’s kinda ridiculous and restrictive—that you want to grow but your fans won’t let you.

My personal turning point was going to see Hellfest in 2003. Metalcore—that style Poison the Well helped pioneer—was becoming really trendy and watching that for an entire day made me want to kill myself. It was just the same…fucking…band, over and over again. Which must be what touring felt like for you towards the end—just really repetitious.
Absolutely man. I had wanted to leave the band for so long. It wasn’t a snap decision. It was a long time coming. We had been doing it since we were 16. Not to be all fucking misty-eyed about it, but we were a family. It was also my job—what fed me and paid my rent. And since I didn’t have any savings, I had to be ready to wait tables once I left. I just knew that if I wanted to move forward creatively, I needed to make that break. The sooner the better.

You’ve gotta push through all of the shit, all of the mediocrity. I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing for so long. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m still doing that.

What do you mean? That you’re always second-guessing yourself?
Yeah, like with a lot of musicians, everything’s exciting when you’re in the moment, but the second it’s done, I start to hate it. I’m not there with Treats yet, but I know that after a year of playing it, I’m never gonna want to hear it again. I already want to get back into the studio, because we have so many new ideas. I wish I could live there, but now’s where the real work starts.

Is part of the problem that you’re worried about this ending any day now, because things move so quickly now?
No, I actually have a lot of faith in the material’s ability to stick around. I really do. That’s the only thing that saves a band from a hype cycle—does a record actually resonate? Is there anything exciting or memorable about it? For me, it meets that criteria. I don’t think it’s that great, but it’s the best we could do. And I’ll stand behind it.

Well, one of the best decisions you made was to produce it yourselves. I feel like one of the selling points with your label was the way you sound—that it’s this kind of anti-pop music.
Yeah, we spoke to a lot of labels and whittled it down to people who wanted to facilitate what we’re doing and trust our artistic decisions. It’s ridiculous to me that labels actually work with bands that they don’t trust creatively. When we were wrapping the record up, I actually wanted people’s opinions on the mixing and the mastering because they’re not just label jerks. They’re really good dudes. Michael Goldstone at Mom & Pop has been involved with some really great records, you know? Like he signed Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam. And then there’s Q Prime [Management], the people who back the label. And of course, Maya (M.I.A.). At the end of the day, we go with our instincts and they say, “That’s good; you guys know what you’re doing better than we do. That’s why you’re the one making the records.” I can’t really ask for much more from them.

Well, you’re an artist that essentially makes them look cool, too.
Sure, although I don’t think coolness isn’t a currency they trade in. Alexis and I aren’t really cool people. We’re too honest for that. And those dudes aren’t super hip, either. It’s not like we’re working with Pedro Winter from Ed Banger or something. It’s…different. [Laughs]

“Since it’s M.I.A., we thought they’d listened to it through a huge sound system. But no, Spike played it for her through his iPhone.”

Vice's Creators Project

So when did all of this label attention really start?
Maya got involved in September. The only people who were listening to our band then were our initial circle of friends. We’d played two shows…

Who were you hanging out with then?
No one “of note.” My oldest and best friend is a guy by the name of Will Hubbard. He now co-manages us. He’s actually the one who got me to come up to New York. Will and I have known each other since we were 13. He’s my best friend and a smart guy, so I trust him.

Was he involved with Poison the Well at all?
No, he was teaching at NYU for a while and really grounded in academics. I sorta sidetracked him. He was like, “You can throw a rock in Brooklyn and hit an idiot musician. Just come up here and start looking for people. You’ve been in Florida for a year and don’t have anything going on. What do you have to lose?” So that was a huge help. And as we got our shit together slowly, it made sense [for him to be our manager]. He co-manages with a guy named Bill Folds. I’ve known him for 10 years. He worked with Poison the Well forever, is a little older, and has a shit load of experience….

But anyway, I’m going to go back to the original question, about our circle of friends. That included a girl named Molly Young. Molly is a friend of mine now, but she was originally a friend of Will’s. She heard our music through him, loved it, and wanted to write about it for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are blog. Spike and Sasha Frere-Jones—another early supporter—both heard about us through Molly’s post, actually. So Spike liked it, and wrote us an E-mail saying he might want to use the demos on a future project. That was so encouraging, because I love what that guy does. And then a week later, we got an E-mail out of the blue from Maya. I still have it. In all-caps, she was like, “HEY, I’M SITTING HERE AT MY HOUSE, AND SPIKE JUST PLAYED ME YOUR SHIT. I LOVE IT. AND I WANNA SIGN YOU.” She didn’t beat around the bush.

It’s funny because we were wondering how she heard it—the context and the sound. Since it’s M.I.A., we thought they’d listened to it through a huge sound system. But no, Spike played it for her through his iPhone. She literally showed up in New York unannounced and said she wanted to go into the studio after that. It was intimidating, but I was up for it.

“It’s so unpretentious and single-minded in its goal—just so skeletal”

It was bad enough when you had limited equipment with Alexis, but you must have felt especially intimidated at the prospect of working with M.I.A.
Yeah, it was a major turning point I was totally unprepared for. But it worked, it contributed to the sound and the creative process. You realize that people like her are actually looking for that.

Did you have a lot of ideas for her before you went into the studio and worked on M.I.A.’s record?
I had a bunch of beats, some of which I didn’t think would work with Alexis, and some that I did want to use with Sleigh Bells. She came over on a Sunday, on her bike, and listened to it all—picking out parts that she liked about different songs. Man, I thought she was gonna come by in an armored car or something. I’ve seen people with less interesting careers walk around with bodyguards, you know? So I didn’t know what to expect with her. It was really cool.

So she selected some sounds and then…
We went into the studio the next day. We had a week booked, but we were there for three or four days. They were pretty long sessions, especially compared to Sleigh Bells. It really fried my ears because I work at a really high volume and can only take it for like six hours at a time. We’d have to go home because we couldn’t hear anything after a while. The song I did on her album is called “Meds and Feds.” We were supposed to get together to do more, but the timing never happened. I’d love to get back in the studio with her, because it’s amazing to watch her work.

The Sleigh Bells sound came out of working with simple equipment to some degree. How did you approach going into the studio, when you could have fleshed it out with so many other instruments and techniques?
I generally have a very clear of what I want, so the main process is digging through sounds. Like I know I need a clap, snare or kick, and I have 900 to go through until I find the right one. That’s how most of the days were—getting into the studio around 12 and then just triggering all of [the samples]. A lot of, “Nope. Nope. Nope.” I remember turning to [engineer] Shane [Stoneback] and saying, “Is this okay? Are you going to pull your hair out?” And he was like, “Dude, this is normal. This is what production is like.” He definitely had a big impact on the record, sonically and technically. I hate working in Logic and Pro Tools because it involves sitting at a computer and can inhibit the creative process. So having an engineer that works like lightning was huge.

And Alexis could adjust to your ideas quickly too?
Yeah, she was so quick. It’s amazing. She showed me up every time.

What were some breakthrough moments in the studio?
“Tell ‘Em” was one of our first collaborations. I had no idea what to do with it. I was just like, “Okay, here’s this double kick pattern and these guitar harmonies…I don’t know where to begin.” And she was like, “Oh, it’s just simple,” came up with the melody and I loved it. That was a definite a-ha moment.

Did she tell you about her pop background right away?
Yeah, the night I met her at the restaurant, she went home and E-mailed me immediately with some of the tracks she’d done. They were like Kelly Clarkson or something, though, so she said, “This is not indicative of what I want to do creatively, but this is my voice.” It was exciting—vocally, she’s just do diverse. I didn’t feel like we’d hit any walls.

And because of that range, there’s so many other types of records you could do, right?
I don’t see any end to it anytime soon. I feel like we’re just getting started. “Tell ‘Em” and “Riot Rhythm” are our two newest songs, and they came together the quickest. I really like “Riot Rhythm.” It’s so unpretentious and single-minded in its goal—just so skeletal.

That’s why people love the band—because it’s so minimal.
I hope so. That’s what I wanted to do so badly. I throw a lot of shit away, which can be disheartening. You can write 50 bad songs in search of that one good one. It can make you feel like a total failure, a total fake who has no talent—knowing about those 50 godawful ones no one else has any idea about.

Either way, the record’s out there. It is what it is. I don’t know if it’s good, but I do know it’s not terrible.

Photo By Clayton Hauck

Words By Arye Dworken

When we saw Against Me! headline the Music Hall of Williamsburg a couple years ago, frontman Tom Gabel looked like a superhero in a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, albeit a superhero who’s constantly switching between maniacal smiles and throat-torturing screams. One stand-out moment was when the 30-year-old punk provocateur belted out “Baby, I’m An Anarchist.” (Our favorite line: “When it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window, you left me all alone.”) Listening back now, it’s unclear as to whether Gabel is mocking the anarchy movement or simply relaying an anarchist’s love story. If it’s the former, then watching a roomful of punks sing along to the meta-critical words is borderline genius. But if that’s not the case, then the song is quite problematic.

Either way, Against Me! have retained their philosophical complexities while working within Sire’s major label system. And with White Crosses, the band have further polished their sound (even recording a piano-backed Boss homage called “Because of the Shame”) and sharpened the actual content. The title track is about abortion; “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” is about the fear of losing passion; “Rapid Decompression”—presumably influenced by the Stooges’ “Search & Destroy”—even has a response to the grumpy fans of yore…”Before you cast your stones/Take a look at yourself/How can you expect from someone what you won’t do yourself?”

More accessible? Perhaps. Any less venomous? Hell no. So with that in mind, we asked Gabel to discuss how his growth as a reformed anarchist has far surpassed his ability to grow a beard.

“In all honesty, I’d love nothing more than to not be considered a ‘political’ band.”

self-titled: So, Tom, how has your personal philosophy changed in a way that’s caused you to go from “Baby, I’m an Anarchist” to “I Was a Teenage Anarchist?” It’s quite a transition.
I didn’t originally write “Baby I’m an Anarchist” as a song for Against Me!; I wrote it with two friends of mine for a band we were talking about starting that never ended up materializing. [But] I thought it was too good of a song to never record. The song was a metaphor for what we felt happened between the anarchist protesters and liberal protesters at the WTO riots in Seattle. The anarchists and liberals stood together on many issues at that protest, but when the black bloc property destruction started happening, the liberal movement was quick to publicly disassociate themselves from the anarchists.

So we wrote the song as if it was almost a break-up letter between a couple, the couple being a metaphor for the anarchist movement and liberal movement. As for “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” I had the line “I was a teenage anarchist” written down in my notebook for a while, and I thought I could maybe build a song around it. I liked how sensational it sounded, like in a Michael Landon I Was a Teenage Werewolf kind of way, if that makes sense.  Or like a confessional account…like, “CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE ANARCHIST!” Then I thought the story would be ironic if this kid joined the anarchist movement because he wanted to be a revolutionary, because he finds that the anarchists are no different than the fascists—kind of a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” type thing.

“I Was a Teenage Anarchist” certainly wasn’t meant as any kind of allusion to “Baby I’m an Anarchist.” They just both have the word “Anarchist” in them. In hindsight, I wish I would have changed the lyric to “I Was A Teenage Anti-Christ.”

That sounds way less controversial. Why do you think that there aren’t many, if any, mainstream bands that are as politically outspoken as Against Me!? And is “White People For Peace” (from 2008’s New Wave) mocking the notion of rock stars singing about war?
“White People For Peace” is definitely mocking the notion of rock stars singing about war, ourselves included. It’s like the title of that old Chumbawamba album Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records, and songs about war do too. As for being “politically outspoken,” it’s not something that I aim for when writing songs. I just have opinions and I express them.

As for other bands…I don’t know. I think there’s a fair amount of bands out there that are willing to speak out in support of, or against, causes. Green Day have taken to mixing politics into their past couple albums. Look at U2—probably the biggest band in the world, and Bono has pretty much become a politician outright. I opened up a recent issue of Rolling Stone and there was a picture of him hanging out with Barack Obama in the Oval Office. And there was definitely a huge amount of support for Obama from the music world around the last election, from Jay-Z to Bruce Springsteen. In all honesty, I’d love nothing more than to not be considered a “political” band. The genre carries to much baggage.

Getting back to “I Was A Teenage Anarchist,” you sing, “Do you remember when you wanted to set the world on fire?” It’s nostalgic. Have you found that your angst has tempered since growing up, getting married, and having a child?
In part, the song is about fighting that feeling, that your angst is becoming “tempered” as you get older. I don’t think that it has anything to do with getting married or having a child though; I think it’s a sad reality of life in the modern world, it grinds you down. Like for instance, the first time in your life you feel like your rights have been violated by a cop—maybe you’re unfairly searched, or unjustly arrested, whatever. The first time that happens in your life, you’re furious. Then after the ninth or tenth time, you become kind of numb to it. You’re just as mad but you realize that throwing a tantrum isn’t going to do anything about it. Telling the cop to go “fuck himself” isn’t going to do anything, [and] trying to fight the cop is gonna get you thrown in jail, so what do you do? Again, just an example. And I’m not directing the question posed in the chorus to myself, I’m asking the audience.

“Dramatic, huh?”

Bruce Springsteen is cited as an influence on the new record in reviews—do you consider yourself a Boss fan? If so, what is it about his music that resonates with you?
[Bassist] Andrew [Seward] is the real super fan in the band. He has a tattoo of the Boss on the back of his arm. I’m a fan as well, but really, I’d never felt influenced by Springsteen until this album, with the song “Because Of The Shame.” And when I wrote that song, I set out to specifically capture a Springsteen vibe. I had a friend of mine pass away a little over a year ago, I wrote the song for her and her family. We use to hang out together and listen to Springsteen records; he was her favorite band. I wanted to write a song that captured those memories.

George Robello is drumming with the band…As a long time Hot Water Music fan, what was it about your band that differed from theirs that led you to success? How were the two bands similar?
Starting out as a band in Gainesville, it was impossible to not be aware of Hot Water Music. They’re hometown heroes there, and they were the band that was doing “it.” They were always out on the road on tour and they were always incredible live, [and] they put 100-percent into every show. We aspired to be like them in that sense, for sure. I think our musical influences might have been coming from different places—stylistically we differ, but the spirit behind both bands is pretty kindred. It’s incredible to be playing with George.

In songs like “Suffocation,” are you expressing your feelings, or are you channeling the angst of others? And what’s your general songwriting process when it comes to lyrics?
My approach to writing the lyrics for “Suffocation” was more of a free-flowing train of subconscious thought. I was taking various unconnected memories of people and mixing them together to try and form a reality. I try and mix up the way I write lyrics. Sometimes I’ll set a specific topic to write about, or determine a specific style to write in, set specific parameters, like no revisions. Other times I’ll just put the pen to paper and see what comes out. It’s important to me to challenge myself like that. With most of the songs I’ve written, I’ve started with the lyrics first, then formed the music around it.

I’ve always considered Against Me! a modern day version of the Clash, both in punk spirit and delivering a political message. Is it a mission of yours to always write music with a message?
That’s quite a compliment, thank you. The Clash are one of my all time favorite bands. I don’t approach writing songs with the rule that there has to be a “message” conveyed necessarily but what’s important to me is that I’m passionate about what I’m singing or writing.

“From Her Lips To God’s Ears (The Energizer)” has one of the most memorable choruses in Against Me!’s catalog. It calls out Condoleezza Rice by name. How did that one come about?
That was one of those songs that didn’t really take much effort to write really. I was watching the news and wrote the lyrics based off of that day’s top stories. I wrote the song on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The major label-hating “Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners” is a surreal song to listen to now that the band is on Sire. How was the signing with a subsidiary of Warner Brothers different than the courting process detailed in this song from Searching For A Former Clarity?
It wasn’t really all that different. But the lesson I learned through all our experiences with record labels is that in this day and age there really isn’t that much of a difference between the majors or indies. All those cliches and stereotypes presented in the song can be applied to both types of labels. That album was a concept record though, and that song in particular was really about how that whole world doesn’t really matter when compared to real life problems. The question posed was, “Do you want to know how it feels on the inside?”, and the answer was, “It feels like I’m dying.” Dramatic, huh?

Definitely. So, has the Butch Vig production [on the new record] changed your voice, or are you intentionally singing in a less throat-shredding fashion? And does it hurt to sing the old songs live?
My voice has changed a lot over the years, for sure. Some of that can be attributed to puberty. I started the band when I was 17, and to this day, I still can’t grow a full beard. A lot of it has to do with repetition, too. Since this band has started we’ve played around 200 shows a year for the past decade; add in a lot of whiskey and keep in mind most of those shows where in smoke-filled clubs. When we were starting out, I used to constantly blow my voice out. I’ve gotten better at controlling it over the years and knowing my limitations.

The punk scene is very incestuous in the way that punk bands listen to one another. Now that you’ve ostensibly broken free of that scene, what do you listen to nowadays?
I listen to everything. As long as it’s got intelligent or clever lyrics and a good melody, I’m in. I’ve been really into the new Off With Their Heads album lately, it’s fantastic. And I can’t stop listening to Dead To Me since we toured with them. Both the Little Brother EP and African Elephants are stellar. I downloaded the new Hold Steady album a couple days ago, as well as the new LCD Soundsystem, both of which I think are great. And then I’ve also spent a lot of time with the new Mumford and Sons album, which is probably my favorite release of the year thus far.

Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

One of the smartest metalheads we’ve ever met also happens to be one of the scariest: the Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato, a guy so ready-to-rip-your-face-off onstage (seriously, check out this SXSW video) that MTV.com once put him on a list of likely steroid users. To which Puciato responded, “While this isn’t the first time that someone has presumed that I take steroids, it is the first time that I can think of that it’s been publicly presumed. Although I usually take it as a compliment, it borders on slander when done in this way, and in actuality, it’s more of a shame that we live in a time in which people assume that you need to cheat somehow in order to actually achieve anything worthwhile.

He continued, “Your article says more about you, James, than it says about me. Regardless, thanks for the publicity softball pitch, and you can thank me in return. Keep practicing the whole ‘writing’ thing, cause it apparently doesn’t come that naturally to you. And meanwhile I’ll go pop all the huge zits that I have on my back, beat the shit out of my girlfriend for having a guy friend, start a fight at a sports bar, drunk-bang a bunch of 19-year-old sorority chicks and crush 20 Wendy’s double stacks.”

The singer’s rather bitchy retort is understandable but unfortunate. Unfortunate because it makes him look hotheaded—the last person you could imagine having a real conversation with, let alone one as dark and deeply personal as the following interview (abbreviated as a list of life lessons in our current issue). As it turns out, Puciato skipped a couple grades in school, is a voracious reader, and spends a lot of his free time taking online classes through California State’s Long Beach branch.

And his one-track train of thought not too long ago, as Dillinger wrapped up their fourth LP, Option Paralysis? Absurdism, the Camus/Kierkegaard-led philosophy that there’s no point in trying to tap the meaning of life because it’s all bullshit anyway. Or at least that’s what we thought it meant…

“I know this isn’t very rock ’n’ roll, but I did very well in school”

So we originally asked you to write an essay about Absurdism. Why did you end up passing?
Well, the thing is, most of my school work is essay-based already because if they gave us online tests, you could just cheat. So it’s becoming difficult for me to write without it coming across as a monologue. And when you’re starting with a subject that’s moderately pretentious to begin with, I didn’t want to be like, ‘Well here’s my essay on the nature of life.’

You don’t have the definitive answer about the meaning of life?
I don’t, actually. We’re all messed up in our own way and just trying to find what resonates with us.

So when did you start taking online classes?
A couple years ago. At the beginning of each class, they tell you what you need to do and the deadlines for everything. You’re completely on your own. There’s no extensions or anything. It’s actually very impersonal—like there’s no direct interactions with another person, really. Although that’s not all that different from universities where you’re in one big room and no one talks to you personally. But yeah, they basically send you back  an essay that’s about your essay.

So you don’t even know the name of the person you’re dealing with?
I do, but it’s completely irrelevant. That’s a good thing in a way, as it means there isn’t any favoritism or anything like that.

Did you start college before you joined the band?
I went to a couple of places in Maryland forever ago and didn’t finish. I don’t really care to now, either, because the thing I was going for seems moderately…When I was a kid, I thought of school as a glorified work certificate—something that’s going to make you money. Everything’s about, ‘Pick something! Pick something!’ How can you pick anything to commit to when you’re 18 years old and haven’t lived much yet?

I picked something that’s pretty bland: a business degree. And throughout the course of doing Dillinger and being self-managed, I’ve learned way more just through trial and error. I understand the need for degrees, that you need to prove to employers a basic level of competency. But as far as getting something out of it yourself, I think you should just go to school for the enjoyment of it.

I was just thinking, we’ve never had as much pressure to go to college as now, but at the same time, when all of the great enlightenments happened—whether it was the Greek philosophers, the Jewish philosophers or whatever—they weren’t done by people who were forced through some sort of diploma system. They had a general love of learning something about themselves and the world. I kind of have a hippie-ish mentality about it all. I think if you love something and are good at it, you’ll find a way to make a profit from it.

I have two friends who are graphic designers and the one who didn’t go to school is doing better. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go necessarily, but when [the more successful designer] submits things to people, they don’t ask him about his degree. They ask him what he’s done, and if it’s mind-blowing, it’s mind-blowing.

“We have no reason to think we’re a part of anything special”

So how much school did you have left before you quit?
A year. I know, I know…I was so close, but I got burnt out. I  know this isn’t very rock ’n’ roll, but I did very well in school, like I skipped grades in high school. I actually graduated the month after I turned 17. As soon as I made the decision that I needed a break from school, the band asked me to join basically. I thought it would last a couple years, but here we are now, a decade later. It’s pretty strange.

So what classes are you taking now?
Mostly upper level psychology and sociology classes. I took a couple economics classes so thank I could look at that from a macro level, too. It was particularly interesting, because I started taking it as the economy started to fall apart. So it was nice to see how there’s so much going on there than what the average person realizes. This whole thing has changed my views of what people should be taking in high school and middle school, too. The most important things to learn are about yourself, the world around you and how you fit into it all. That makes you more sympathetic and aware of people. If you had a good psych or sociology background, you’d be able to see things so much more objectively. You wouldn’t make decisions based on irrational things like religion or any form of superstition—whatever nine out of 10 people let color their worldview.

The pace at which things are happening today is kinda frightening, too. It’s like how much more alive can the whole [computer] experience get before we become post-human? Maybe that definition is different than what people expected; maybe it’s a reliance on machines more than something with actual cyborg parts.

Have you read a lot of Philip K. Dick before?
Yeah, have you read Raymond Kurzweil before? He pretty much invented the synthesizer, sold the idea, and used his insanity/genius to come up with the idea of singularity—the idea that technological change would become so fast that it’ll eclipse our ability to even see it happening. The world would just become this Big Bang of ideas, an inconceivable point in this century. This shit sounds like it’s straight out of the Terminator. He’s like, the second a computer’s powerful enough to run, say, the human brain, the next logical step will be for it to somehow create something that’s smarter than the human brain. At that point, we’re God and we’ve started the circle [of life] again, where we’re self-reproducing to the point where who knows what the world will look like?

What’s the name of the main book he wrote then?
He wrote a book called The Singularity Is Near. You should read it just for the holy-shit-this-is-kind-of-insane appeal of it. Computers are already better at doing math than us, so how much longer will it be before we’re a worm compared to them? Who knows? It could go either way.

Have you always spent a lot of your time reading?
[Laughs] Yeah, I’ve always felt like I need to learn something. What I’ve been trying to figure out lately, however, is ‘why?’ Why do I have an insatiable need to know what’s going on when you can’t possibly know what’s going on anyway? What I’m starting to learn is that it’s an endless circle that can only lead you to insanity…or giving up at some point. That’s where I found myself at the end of last year—with this depressive anxiety. My girlfriend would say, “Why do you care about this stuff when you can’t control it?” And I’d say, “I wish I didn’t give a shit in some instances.” I wish I could wake up and say, ‘Oh well, this is all out of my control!’ But if you really think about it, we have no reason to think we’re a part of anything special. Dinosaurs were around for 150 million years. We’ve only been around for a fraction of that time, and yet, we have this egocentric view about it all.

Well, people want a purpose in life…
Which leads us to Absurdism and the following question: How do you rationalize getting up and giving a shit about what goes on during the day if you believe you’re no more important than a gnat you just killed on the wall? What I’ve resigned myself to is the idea that I’m here and it’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s a complete accident, and unless I want to kill myself, I have to live here until my time is up, whether it’s me getting hit by a bus at 40 or dying of cancer at 89. I might as well make the best of it either way, and not think about it too deeply. Some people do that naturally; other people have to drive themselves crazy to reach that realization.

So you had to consciously tell yourself to stop worrying?
I had to because I was really in a never-ending spiral toward the end of last year. The writing of the record kinda dug it up in a way. That’s the funny thing about free associative writing—you start to unearth things from your subconscious, and the things you tend to put there are things you don’t want to deal with. And sometimes when you dig things up, you can’t put them back away. Writing the record really caused me to evaluate how I live my life, from why I’m not a better person to why I’m not a completely immoral person. Between that and turning 30, I just kept thinking, ‘I need to figure this out!’ or I’m gonna kill myself and have some sort of breakdown. That led to realizing it doesn’t matter how many books you read at the end of the day because you still really don’t know anything.

“Morality and religion have nothing to do with one another”

What’s the course you’re taking right now?
It doesn’t really have anything to do with what we’re talking about right now. It’s a sociology course about marriage.

And you’re going to decide if marriage is right for you by the end of it?
[Laughs] Marriage is obviously a terrible social experiment in terms of the percentage game. You’d never start a business if you heard there was a 40-percent success rate.

That’s 40-percent of people are happy or not divorced?
Not divorced. So that’s not even taking into account what percentage of the ’successful’ marriages are in fact miserable marriages. So who knows? People don’t like to be put in a box. If I’m in this room with you and the door is closed, that’s fine, but if someone locked us in here, we would freak the fuck out. I think that happens with a lot of people. People get married for the wrong reasons. They get married for emotional reasons, or if they’re insecure about something, and yet at the end of the day, you’re supposed to grow forever with this one person. How can you manage going down the same road 20 or 30 years from now, and not be faking it? It’s really bizarre to me. You wouldn’t agree on a job application to work at a place for the rest of your life. So it almost seems backwards to me to decide to be someone’s life partner at the beginning of your life. I’d rather look at someone when I’m 90 and suddenly think, ‘Oh, we’ve been together for the past 70 years. That’s rad.’

Marriage is a massive industry geared towards women’s emotions. You’re fighting a losing battle as a guy if you resist it.

So your course looks at the psychology of marriage?
Yeah—why people do it; does it still have a place in society today; is the industry surrounding it the only thing propping it up? All of those questions… What it boils down to is that I’m obsessive, so I have to focus on something at all times.

Well, everyone’s searching for themselves in high school, so what did you focus on back then? Religion?
Interestingly enough, I went to a religious school despite my parents not raising me as any [one religion]. Our school district was just shitty, and it was the only decent private school.

What kind of school was it?
A Catholic one…I guess at the end of the day they’ll take anyone so long as you give them money.

Were you confirmed or anything?
No, no no. I never ate [communion] or went to church on Sunday, either. I don’t agree with any of that taught as fact, but I didn’t have to fight it because I knew when I was 11 years old that it’s all ridiculous. I don’t mean to offend anyone. That’s just how I feel.

Well, I think a lot of people are just afraid of death. My parents consider themselves Catholic but they don’t go to church or anything. They just want to believe in…something.
Yeah, most people have to [believe in something] at some point—whether it’s when you’re in jail or about to die or whatever—just to keep yourself from being terrified. Maybe when you and I are old we will change our mind about it all for that very reason…

Personally, I just think it’s a bit arrogant to believe any one religion is right, when they’re all based in the teachings of other human beings…
Well that’s the other absurd thing—there’s no such thing as one wrong or right religion. I’m not gonna tell my kid that there’s nothing going on that we don’t know about. But just because there’s an absence of knowledge doesn’t mean that there’s a need to create something.

You identify yourself as agnostic then?
No, because agnosticism is saying you believe there’s a higher power; you just don’t know who it is, whereas atheism says, ‘unless you prove it to me, it’s not there.’ It’s so bizarre to me that atheism is considered such an evil thing. Morality and religion have nothing to do with one another…If you teach religion as a form of mythology to kids—as in, ‘this is what some people believe and why’—I think that’s okay.

Yeah, cultural studies courses about religion are actually really fascinating…
Because it goes hand in hand with so many major philosophies.

And so many major films. Like the age-old idea of the hero and how he’s redeemed through a quest…
The Joseph Campbell book (The Hero’s Journey)?

Yeah.
That’s one of the reasons why civilizations that never encountered one another have such similar beliefs—because certain motifs and shorelines resonate through most people. But to equate any of that with facts is irresponsible. If you’re not going to tell your kid he’s a Republican and can’t believe in creationism when he’s a year old, what gives you the right to baptize him and say he believes in Jesus?

“You can’t make a song that’s kinda depressing; you have to be ready to kill yourself when writing it.”

So are you parents more like you?
They’re culturally Christian. They put up Christmas trees and like Santa Claus, but they don’t go to church or anything like that.

They must think you’re a little strange…
They think I’m insane, yeah. So I don’t really talk to them about it too much.

What got you into Absurdism in the first place?
I’m trying to think of how it started…You know [Søren] Kierkegaard? Well, he was kinda the bridge between [Friedrich] Nietzsche and [Albert] Camus. Obviously Nietzsche is absolute nihilism—nothing matters, everything is worthless—and I thought that was just as silly as saying everything is meaningful. So a friend of mine told me to check out Kierkegaard because he’d gone through a depressive breakdown a couple years ago, where he was suicidal and was feeling some of the same anxieties and depression I was feeling now. So I read some of that and then I found the next person who contributed to that train of thought, Camus…I read that book The Stranger and then just started devouring everything—The Plague, Exile and the Kingdom, The Myth of Sisyphus…It all just made sense to me, and felt like exactly how I was feeling. He thought that every field of social science leads to this one question, and this realization that everything is inherently absurd and there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, there’s two things you can do besides kill yourself—adopt a religion or somehow learn to deal with the inevitable anxieties that come with the fact that our lives are inherently absurd. That’s kinda where it all ended for me…

A lightbulb went off in your head basically?
Yeah, because you go from point A to Z, and back to A again…It was hard for me to write the record, so it’s hard for me to read the lyrics now or even think about being in that headspace. It almost feels stupid now. It’s like being bummed about a girlfriend and suddenly snapping out of it.

So your lyrics for this record were written in the heat of your depression?
Yeah, I think that’s important as an artist—to put yourself in this completely raw territory, even if you feel ridiculous looking back at it later. That’s where the best art comes from. You can’t make a song that’s kinda depressing; you have to be ready to kill yourself when writing it. For the same reason, you shouldn’t make music when you’re kinda happy. You should feel ecstatic. That’s how it translates to other people.

What’s a song on the new record that captures that pain better than anything?
The headspace I was in when I wrote the lyrics kinda colored the way I think about them. So it’s weird for me to even think about that time period. It’s like coming out of a fog suddenly and saying, ‘Okay, now I get it.’

Do you even read this Absurdism stuff anymore?
I can’t. When I did, I read it all—I bought everything on Amazon, because when I get into something, I absolutely obsess over it. And then I move on. This is especially bad because it’s a rabbit hole with no end, a train of thought that’s designed to lead you to insanity…The answer is there is no answer.

What are some books people should start with if they’re interested in learning about Absurdism?
The Stranger is a good start. It’s a little tough because nothing really happens for half of the book but by the end, you realize that’s kinda the point. You have to make yourself get through it. It’s not some amazingly written book, you know? It’s not Faulkner; it’s the kind of book that makes you think ‘I can’t believe I’m reading this’ throughout the entire thing. At least until a light clicks on…

So you shouldn’t start with that?
Probably not. The Myth of Sisyphus is good. It’s story about a guy who’s stuck rolling a stone up a hill, and every time it goes over the hill he has to start over again. Even though he knows the ball is just gonna roll back down, he has to find a way to make the process enjoyable. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s not the journey, it’s the destination,’ because you know we’re all gonna fail. We were all born with a death clock around our necks. For some people, it runs out when they’re five years old, and for others, it runs out when they’re 100.

That’s a short story, I hope? Not 200 pages of rolling a stone up and down?
It’s only about 70 pages, but it’s also commenting on other things. Anything early by Kierkegaard is good, too, although he found religion later in life despite spending most of his life saying that Christianity is a form of suicide. It just goes to show you that no matter how hard you try to get away from it, most of us need a comfort blanket sometime. I’m not gonna die peacefully; I’m gonna die screaming, violating trying to hang onto life and scaring all of the people around me.

The Dillinger Escape Plan are one of the headliners on this summer’s Warped Tour.

Photos by Bryan Sheffield

Words by Kory Grow

“Singing always felt like a concussion, and I got a lot of migraines from doing it,” says Malefic, the mysterious man behind the atmospheric black-metal group Xasthur (pronounced zas-ter, like disaster). “Sometimes I wonder if it has caused some damage to my head and my memory. If there was any right or wrong way of doing this, I’m sure I did it wrong.”

As of this past March, Malefic has stopped worrying about his art affecting his physical health. He has decided to end Xasthur after 14 years, releasing a final record (Portal of Sorrow, out now on Disharmonic Vibrations) and returning to life as suburban Los Angeleno Scott Conner, ex–black-metal musician. “I’ve been saying I’m sick and tired of [Xasthur] for too long…and now, I’m going to back it up,” he explained in a blog post. “There are or have been literally 18,000 black-metal bands; it does not matter if there’s one less.”

The thing is, Xasthur—formed after Conner grew sick of playing in death-metal bands—was considered one of the country’s few black-metal pioneers, with Malefic’s avant-garde approach earning him respect from metalheads and musos alike. Forced to create music by himself after he had split with most of the band’s members early on over creative differences, Malefic used drum machines and layers of guitar to paint haunting sonic murals of despair, marked by an echoey scream so fierce it would leave him with those pesky headaches.

He was in the right place at the right time, too. In the mid ’00s, when many of the scene’s European founders had quit, gotten incarcerated, or died, Xasthur’s music began getting positive reviews and word-of-mouth mentions in the underground. He then cofounded the black-metal supergroup Twilight alongside members of other American bands like Nachtmystium, Leviathan, and Krieg, and toured and recorded with critical darlings Sunn 0))). Adding to his legend, Malefic often refused interviews, and his public feuds with labels like Moribund Cult and Southern Lord (addressed in open emails to the press) gained him notoriety.

Success aside, Malefic grew frustrated with making music, finding it harder to be creative. Nonetheless, his final album is one of his most experimental yet, featuring the bleak but beautiful melodies of Marissa Nadler and swan songs that have more in common with Sergio Leone and Bernard Herrmann than Darkthorne or Burzum. That’s the way he likes it, too, judging from his comments in the following Q&A, which was culled from a 6,000-plus–word email interview (the only way he talks to the press, in the rare event he does). As with Portal of Sorrow, this interview is meant as a goodbye, a final look at the man once known as Malefic.

“Please pardon how long and ‘self-indulgent’ my responses were,” he says. “I might as well make up for all the interviews I never did and all the ones I won’t be doing.”

For our full interview with Xasthur, please check out the latest digital issue of self-titled here.

Photos by Aaron Richter

Interview by Andrew Parks

As a general rule, we never interview artists at South By Southwest. While some publications are happy to squeeze a couple pull quotes out of a five-minute conversation, we’d rather save our enthusiasm for a later date—one where we’re not all high, drunk, rushed or some twisted combination of all three.

We made an exception for one artist this year, however: Zola Jesus. And not just because we’re still obsessed with the operatic pop songs on her Stridulum EP and its steel-plated, self-produced counterpart, The Spoils. The 21 year old isn’t able to tour much, as she’s currently wrapping up her French/philosophy degree in Wisconsin, so self-titled figured we’d take what we could get.

What we didn’t expect was the first, and so far only, interview with Nika Roza Danilova and her full live band. While that may seem unnecessary (she’s a solo artist, right?), the group’s innate chemistry could lead to some collaborations on Danilova’s next album, which is expected early next year. And even if it doesn’t, the way the young singer is learning to apply her sky-scraping melodies and subzero soundscapes to an actual band says more about her position as one of today’s most thrilling artists than a simple one-on-one session would. Here’s the supporting cast, then:

ALEX DEGROOT (keys, samples, backup vocals)
NICK TURCO (keyboards, bass)
SHANE VERWEY (synths)
NICK JOHNSON (drums)

You can catch this speaker-caving incarnation of Zola Jesus over the next couple months, including a one-off show at Glasslands in Brooklyn tomorrow night. It’s close to selling out and features a bunch of s/t-approved Sacred Bones artists, so you might want to snag tickets now here. And if you’re not in New York, all other dates can be found on MySpace.

“You can call me whatever you want, but if you do it enough times, I’m going to get irritated”

(L to R: Nika Roza Danliova, Nick Turco, Alex Degroot, Shane Verwey, NIck Johnson)

Normally, I hate writers who ask who does what in a band, as it shows a lack of research. But since you guys are new to most of us, are any of you in other projects right now, too?
Alex Degroot: Yeah, I’m in a band called Sonmi with my fiancée. It’s a little more psychedelic, but a similar setup, with a female vocalist. It’s the light side of this [laughs]—a sunnier Zola Jesus, in a way.
Nick Johnson: We’re [points at Shane Verwey] in a similar situation. We play in a doom-metal band called Jex Thoth.

[Looking at Nick's T-shirt] I see you’re also a fan of Hellhammer…
NJ: Yeah, Shane and I play in a couple of metal bands, actually. Jex Thoth is the main one, but we’re also in a black-metal band called Wormsblood.

That’s your isolationist black-metal project?
NJ: The outsider shit, yeah.
Shane Verwey: It’s a sporadic thing. We have a recording that’s going to come out soon, but we’re pretty much focused on Zola Jesus and Jex Thoth right now.

Are you just saying that because she’s sitting here?
AD: Considering we drove 24 straight hours to get here, I’d say we’re all pretty devoted.
Nika Roza Danilova: [Laughs] I’m still in school, so I couldn’t miss any more time than these couple days.

So how do you all know each other?
NRD: These three guys (Shane and the two Nicks) live together and are my boyfriend’s best friends. And I met Alex at local shows. He’s a really good audio engineer…
AD: I recorded all of the vocals on [Stridulum], so it was a smooth transition from there in terms of doing live stuff.

The production on it sounds great. Was it just you working on the recording then?
AD: She recorded the instruments in demo form, and then we got together to do the vocals and clean up the demos a little bit.
NRD: He helped me make it more presentable.
AD: The songs sounded more structured and poppy than The Spoils from the beginning, though.

So who first played in this band version of Zola Jesus?
NRD: Me, Nick Turco and Shane played a couple shows in August and September of last year, and then we added the other guys.

The Spoils is very much a bedroom recording, so what were some of the differences between your early solo shows and when you brought them on board?
NRD: Playing solo shows was tough. I rarely did them, and if I did, they were usually with my ex-boyfriend Dead Luke. He’s also on Sacred Bones. Anyway, things got weird with him, and we broke up…I played some solo shows with just a Casio in New York, but my live situation was never ideal until I found this supergroup.

Supergroup huh? Are you going to record your next album with these guys then?
NRD: I don’t know yet. Because my songs are so production-based, I’m not sure how I’m going to do that. Either way, we’re all going to keep collaborating…

How about you say a couple things about each member then?
NRD: Okay. What I like about Nick Turco is he has a good sense of melody and can pick anything up immediately. We actually have a project together called Nika + Rory. It’s all pop and R&B music. Pitchfork wrote about one of our songs, but it was basically Auto-Tuned Rihanna stuff.

Is this to show people that you’re not that serious?
NT: People think it’s ironic, but we all really like pop music.

Are you planning on properly releasing any of this material then?
NRD: Definitely. Once we get some more songs done, we can start shopping it around. Maybe Virgin or Interscope will be interested…So that’s that. Moving onto Shane, I met him at my boyfriend’s house. He doesn’t work much, but he plays music constantly.
SV: I have a part-time job, but, yeah, I rely on the kindness of strangers a lot.
NRD: Alex, on the other hand, played some shows with me in the past—ones where we each did solo sets. We eventually talked about collaborating and how I wanted to clean up my productions a lot. As far as technical stuff goes, he’s always on top of his game, and was a great addition [to the band].

Speaking of the production, was that an aesthetic choice originally, or a matter of the means you were working with at the time?
NRD: It was a little bit of both. There were times where I couldn’t exactly get the sound I wanted if it was clean, so I used the textures to my advantage. At the same time, I’ve always loved industrial music, so it’s got that grinding, crunchy effect to it, too. The Spoils was definitely my industrial, experimental album.
AD: I feel like a lot of the older stuff got pigeonholed as “lo-fi.” Some of that was a conscious decision, and some of it was not, so it’s nice to see her breaking away from that now…

I definitely prefer the new record because lo-fi music has such a stigma now—this reputation as a way of hiding bad songwriting.
NRD: It definitely helps to actually be a good songwriter.
AD: This is a better outlet for the songs…
NRD: Yeah, I wanted to prove to myself and everyone around me that I’m not a ‘one-trick pony’. There’s a lot of things I want to do as an artist, so this is just a natural progression.

“There’ll be this 20-minute epic jam in the middle of a 40-minute practice that’s like Steely Dan meets Goblin meets Mariah Carey”

Is industrial music something you’re all into? Us writers seem to be turning that into a bit of a trend now, too…
NRD: Yeah, I get that [comparison] a lot; that, and Siouxsie [Sioux]. You can call me whatever you want, but if you do it enough times, I’m going to get irritated enough to break out of it. Maybe that’s not healthy, but I like to challenge what people think.

Right on. Well, you’ve got a couple more guys here to talk about…
NRD: Nick [Johnson] is such a good drummer. At first, we weren’t sure about adding a live drummer because the music has this cold, rigid, harsh feel to it. But when we got him down there, we made it work.
NJ: We just had to mess around until we found the right vibe.

Did you have to change your entire playing style for this?
NJ: Oh yeah. Zola Jesus [songs] are really strict—it’s hard translating a programmed beat into a live set. I definitely try to break out of my mold a little.
NRD: I love how he brings that black-metal feel to a song like “Manifest Destiny” though. It’s so intense.
AD: We’ve tried it even more metal than that, too. It got to be too much…
NRD: It started to sound like Iron Maiden.
AD: It’s easy to look at Nick and say, “That’s a metal dude right there,” but he’s into everything. You never know what’s going to happen when we rehearse, either.
NRD: Things get really eclectic. There’ll be this 20-minute epic jam in the middle of a 40-minute practice that’s like Steely Dan meets Goblin meets Mariah Carey.

Like most people, I don’t know anything about Wisconsin. So what’s the Madison scene like?
NRD: It’s weird, and because it’s a college town, the turnover rate is really high. You might find a group of people who are great, but in about four years, they’re gone.
NJ: There’s a great history of hardcore and powerviolence bands, though. A lot of drone and psychedelic stuff, too.
NRD: I’ve been guilty of this too, but a lot of bands will just say, “Oh, we have a show coming up, let’s just wing it.”
AD: We have Julian Lynch right now, but he’s only there temporarily because he’s going to school.
NJ: Jex Thoth is weird because our vocalist lives in California. We can only get together once in a while because of that.

Do you have anything new on the way?
NJ: We have an EP (Witness, out now on I Hate Records) with three new songs on it. Me and Shane are very happy with it. It’s pretty somber, but heavy and crushing at the same time. There’s a New Wave of British Heavy Metal influence slipping into it, too. We’re pretty lucky to be doing it.

“If I was going to be a singer, I figured I’d be the real deal”

I know she’s standing right here, but why did all of you decide to work with Nika?
NT: She’s an incredible vocalist, obviously. People are ultimately there to see Nika. We’re just there to set the scene and give her the energy to bring the house down. [Laughs]

Well, from an engineer’s standpoint, what do you think is special about Nika?
AD: I was actually worried she was gonna break my microphone when we were recording. She’s easily the most powerful vocalist I’ve ever worked with.

Did you have to get some special equipment for this then?
AD: I used a pop filter, a barrier that goes between a vocalist and the microphone…What I really liked about Nika at first, though, was how we connected over R&B music.

What do you love about R&B so much?
NRD: The content isn’t always the best, but the melodies are just so strange and experimental.

Was anything strange sampled on your EP?
NRD: Yeah, the song “Stridulum” uses a sample from that movie in the chorus.

What’s that movie about?
NRD: It’s hard to explain. A lot of people trashed it for being too abstract.
SV: It’s an accidental art film.
AD: Well, this telekinetic girl makes a bunch of doves fly into this one room and this choral music comes in….
NRD: I get a lot of inspiration from films, especially the scores and moods. So when that part came on, I had to get an audio rip of it.
AD: That’s one thing that was fun about this project—all of the sounds that she gave me were pretty raw and ready to sculpt.

Did you have a bank of samples to work with?
NRD: No, I just keep playing with sounds…
AD: A lot of it comes from this one Yamaha keyboard. Live, we break up all of the samples and play them.
NJ: Working with Nika isn’t stifling. It’s an inviting environment, and she’s always up for something new.
NT: There isn’t a lot of friction in the band. She also lets us do our own crazy things during the songs—some of which end up staying in them.
SV: Being able to improvise in the moment is crucial.

Did any of you play on the new record?
AD: I didn’t want to tell her at first, but I sneaked some synths on there. They aren’t obvious…
NRD: But they add so much!
AD: I actually didn’t admit any of this until our drive up here.
NRD: I’d like to collaborate more in the future. It’s just a control thing.

At least you’re willing to admit that. With that in mind, I have some one-on-one questions [the rest of the band says their goodbyes and walks away]. So the first thing everyone notices about you is the power of your voice. When did you start taking lessons?
NRD: I’ve always loved singing, and when I was 10 years old, I started singing opera. There were these advertisements for singing tapes that you send away for, and when my mother realized I was [ordering] them, she was like, “That’s a scam! That’s a waste of money!” So she enrolled me in opera lessons and from there, I took them off and on for 10 years. I had a lot of anxiety though…

What sort of anxiety? Not feeling confident as a performer?
I was constantly picking things apart—just doubting everything. What I was hearing is not what I thought I sounded like.

Kinda like when you hear your voice on an answering machine for the first time and can’t believe how awful it sounds?
Exactly.

So you started at 10 or 11?
Yeah, maybe even a little earlier.

Why opera? That seems a little heavy for a 10 year old.
It was the only thing I knew. If I was going to be a singer, I figured I’d be the real deal. The opera is so formidable and powerful like that.

Did you actually go to the opera when you were younger?
I went to a few. I don’t know what it was…

The idea of being an opera singer appealed to you more than actual operas then?
Right.

Did you have one influential teacher during this time?
I had one, and it was a constant battle. I respected her, but she knew I had all of these issues, too. I actually just started seeing her again, and she said, “You know what? Everything I taught you when you were a child…you need to forget it.” And I thought to myself, ‘Why are you telling me this now!’ She gave me some experimental techniques, though.

So that you’re not a standard opera singer?
Yeah. Like she isn’t focusing on things like posture. She says the singing comes from a different place than that.

Did you perform a lot throughout high school?
I did a lot of recitals and that sort of stuff. I had this physiological response to stress where I’d lose my voice before performing…

[Our associate editor, Aaron, starts talking] Amy Winehouse has the same problem. I interviewed her during her first press tour, and she would freeze up, put her head between her legs, and just keep saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
That poor girl. She’s so incredible, and now she’s pretty much gone…

Let that be a lesson to not take up a drug habit.
Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to be one of those people that drops the ball. I’m very serious about this.

Did you have some breakthrough performances as a kid, where you stopped freezing up?
Not until recently.

“There’s vomit everywhere here. It’s kinda like the apocalypse.”

You must have had some rough solo performances.
Oh, yeah. Always. The first two years of my [Zola Jesus] shows were rough.

Was one really bad?
Sure, there was this one in Lafayette, Indiana, when I still played with my ex-boyfriend. He was upfront doing guitar solos and I was in the back, where you couldn’t hear me. It was really confusing.

Guitar solos?
Well, we used to cover “Baby’s On Fire” by Brian Eno. Not after that performance, though.

What are you covering these days then?
I covered [Justin Bieber's] “Somebody To Love.” [Laughs]

Do you have a lot of the next record in mind already?
Some of it. I start with the sounds first, not the songwriting, so it can take a while. I have summer school coming up right now. That way I can keep touring, move to L.A., and start working on the record.

L.A. huh?
My boyfriend lives there now, so that’s been in the cards for a while.

You’re done with school in the fall then?
In August, actually.

One last thing: what are some non-musical influences on this record?
I’m really into philosophy and films. Lyrically speaking, I don’t know…

Well you’re not trying to be too obtuse on this record. You write pretty upfront pop stuff.
The thing is, the music’s so theatrical that if I had over-the-top lyrics, it’d be cabaret basically. I’d rather they be like old folk songs—where you say what you need to say flat-out. You know: “It’s not easy to fall in love.” That’s true, isn’t it? I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m from the Midwest, and very straight about everything.

Who are your favorite philosophers?
I really like [Arthur] Schopenhauer a lot. He’s really dark, but only because he’s a bit of a martyr. He believes in suffering—that there’s no point to pleasure in life because man doesn’t deserve it. I believe in that, that you have to work hard and live like an animal. It’s really painful, having all of that anxiety come out.

You seem pretty happy, though.
Oh yeah, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

Where are you pulling this pain from then?
The world. The world is a very negative place. Just look around. People are indulgent and decadent. They’re never thinking about the long-term. I mean, there’s vomit everywhere here. It’s kinda like the apocalypse.

Like his hero Aphex Twin, Solvent squeezes an incredible amount of emotion out of nothing but synths and samplers. At least that was the case on his two-disc Demonstration Tape collection, a decade-spanning retrospective that could have been called Soul of a New Machine…if Fear Factory hadn’t taken the title way back in 1992. The recently-released Subject To Shift, Solvent’s second proper LP for Ghostly—the previous one being 2004’s Apples & Synthesizers—takes the moody machine template of his earlier work to another level by applying shifty electro/coldwave/avant-techno beats to realms usually reserved for the Faint (“Don’t Forget to Phone”), Kraftwerk (“Formulate,” “Caught a Glimpse”) and, err, black-metal (the demon-derived vocals of “Take Me Home”). And then there’s “Loss For Words,” the closest producer/singer Jason Amm has ever come to crafting a straight-up synth-pop song, as opposed to a straight-up synth-pop song that’s haunted by the nightmares of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.

Solvent sparks a rare U.S. tour at Wierd’s weekly New York party—the one helmed by this guy—tonight, so we spoke to him at length about everything from the second-coming of electroclash to the sorely-overlooked basslines of Skinny Puppy. The Toronto-based musician also let us premiere the video to “Loss For Words,” one of the most heartbreaking animated shorts we’ve seen since Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” clip. Real talk.

“I’m definitely disappointed that it was mainly the blatant, tasteless aspects—the Peaches end of the spectrum—that seemed to catch on”

Can you start by giving us some background on the new record? It’s taken you forever to finish, hasn’t it?
Subject to Shift has been done since [last] August, and since then, I’ve been working in a different way—using only hardware, and taking a more improvised approach. It’s sort of a return to my roots, but also reflects a new-found interest in acid and other forms of raw late-’80s/early-’90s dance music.

I’ve been working on [the new record] for the past five years, but the majority of it was done during the first half of 2009. It’s definitely the most stylistically diverse record I’ve done, and I’m not sure that there’s any sort of obvious unifying concept. There’s a few ‘classic’ Solvent-style instrumentals on there for good measure, but I would say that the majority of the songs on the record are darker and more vocal/song-oriented than past Solvent material. Several people have told me that it sounds like a different singer on every song, but it’s all me.

Is your old side project Black Turtleneck still active at all, and how did that come about in the first place?
Black Turtleneck is no longer active. The other guy involved in the project, Thomas Sinclair, approached me about working with him as a vocalist, which I was looking for at the time. I wanted to do a Soft Cell/Yazoo-type synth-pop duo, where I would be the quiet synth nerd in the background. He ended up becoming involved in the music and production as well, which initially seemed like a good idea, but was actually a problem for me in the end. I just wanted a singer/lyricist, and the other input was mainly a distraction, and often a compromise.

“My Radio” (from Ghostly’s seminal Disco Nouveau compilation) is still considered one of your biggest singles—a rare example of modern electro done right. Looking back, does it surprise you that electroclash caught on with kids, at least for a little while? And doesn’t it kinda seem like some of its substance-less ideas came full circle with the popularity of Justice and that whole Ed Banger/Institubes sound?
Considering the enduring popularity of synth-pop bands like Depeche Mode, Human League and Soft Cell, I’m not surprised that electroclash also became popular. Songs like “Don’t You Want Me?” and “Tainted Love” never left the public conscious. And since the mid-’80s, there had been a real lack of good pop music produced with blatant synthesizer sounds. Electroclash became the first music to really address this, so it understandably got a lot of attention. It’s had a huge and lasting impact, too, not just with all of that bombastic buzzsaw techno like Justice, but also in mainstream pop and hip hop, from Britney Spears to Kanye West.

I’m definitely disappointed that it was mainly the blatant and tasteless aspects—the Peaches end of the spectrum—that seemed to catch on, rather than the subtle, classicist sides. I wish it could’ve produced another Vince Clarke-like synthesizer genius, or another band with the kind of depth and originality of something like OMD or Fad Gadget.

“Sometimes the vocoder is perfect for a given track, but I do also use it as a crutch”

One of the things that’s integral to your music is its melancholic side—the sense that the songs are quite emotional despite being inherently electronic, and to some degree, inhuman. Has that been a goal of yours all along, and do you feel like that idea is missing from a lot of today’s dance/electronic music?
This hasn’t been a goal that I set out to achieve. These melodies just come out of me, and I feel such a deep and profound emotional connection to them, it’s beyond anything I could ever hope to express with words. It’s very gratifying for me when people can hear this in my music; it makes me feel as if they are able to know me somehow. It’s hard to find deeply emotional and expressive music in general. It’s no more lacking in electronic music than in acoustic music, in my opinion. Aphex Twin has produced some of the most personal and emotional music I have ever heard, for example. Then again, some of my favorite Aphex Twin tracks are completely cold, hard, inhuman, and emotionless.

Ironically enough, one of the things Pitchfork pointed out in a review of Demonstration Tape was how hopeful and major key your songs are. Were they missing the point a bit? I mean, while some of the songs are definitely upbeat/uplifting, there’s definitely a darker side to a lot of it.
I suppose there are a few darker songs on there. “Think Like Us,” for example. I definitely think that the Pitchfork review was pretty far off the mark. I’d say that the dominant mood in my music is a feeling of sadness—longing for the past, rather than an optimism for the future. There might be a few full-on happy/upbeat songs, but most of the times the melodies are far too melancholic to be mistaken for happy. Anyway, I don’t care about 99-percent of the records that they talk about on Pitchfork, and they rarely review the kind of records that I care about, so it’s no big surprise or disappointment to me when a Pitchfork reviewer doesn’t get Solvent.

You were described as a “robot music composer” in your original bio. Are you alluding to the fact that you make electronic music from a ‘machine’s perspective’, much like how Kraftwerk and other artists explore the blurred line between man and machines?
I actually wrote the foundations of that bio myself ages ago, when I used to release my own records on Suction Records. That “robot music” description is actually getting pretty old; I should probably ditch that now. Originally, I meant it as some kind of reference to antiquated technology—something that was once futuristic and daunting, but that has become more familiar and even nostalgic over time, much like analog synthesizer sounds in general. But most people just read it as some kind of boring Kraftwerk cliche. And understandably so.

What are some not-so-obvious influences that you’ve had over the years?
I think that the most obvious and direct influence on my music has been Aphex Twin, and that’s a reference that rarely comes up when people talk about Solvent. Initially, I was always compared to Aphex Twin and Autechre, but people stopped bringing those names up after I started name-dropping synth-pop bands in my interviews and press releases. Another big influence for me is Skinny Puppy. I don’t think many people can make the connection, because they’re focusing on the dark/horror aspects and distorted vocals [of their music], instead of the basslines and drum machine techniques. Skinny Puppy had some amazing, often funky basslines, and I’ve definitely been influenced by the way that they would heavily process the 808 drums with things like distortion and tight, metallic delays.

Probably the most non-obvious influence would be The Beatles. I rarely go out of my way to listen to them anymore, but I was absolutely obsessed with them when I was young, like from the ages of 8 to 12 I would listen to them endlessly. I’m convinced that this has played a significant part in my strong melodic/pop tendencies.

“That music was an absolute fuck-you to techno culture, and that’s what I loved about it”

You use a vocoder effect on your vocals a lot. Has the crossover popularity of people like Daft Punk made you consider dropping that approach completely?
I suppose if vocoder started turning up on every record on the radio—like how Auto-Tune has been—that might make me drop it. But no, I wouldn’t stop using a vocoder just because someone popular like Daft Punk used it. Anyway, I think that when I use the vocoder it somehow sounds different than when anyone else uses it; it’s like you can hear my voice and personality still coming through. Not a lot of other people use a vocoder for melodic pop vocals in the way that I do. That being said, the main reason that I use a vocoder so regularly is because I’ve wanted to make vocal pop songs, but I’d rather not sing. I’ve got some songs on my new record where I’m singing without a vocoder, and it took me forever to record them. I’m just way too critical and self-conscious of my natural voice. Don’t get me wrong—sometimes the vocoder is perfect for a given track, but I also use it as a crutch.

What’s the deal with your label, Suction Records? When did you meet Greg (Lowfish), and why did you two hit it off, personally and creatively?
Gregory and I ran Suction Records together from 1997 to 2007, mainly to release our own records. [Ed. Note: It was relaunched on a limited basis recently.] But we did release some other artists as well, such as GD Luxxe and Skanfrom (the latter now well-known as Sleeparchive in the techno world). We met in junior high, so I’ve known Gregory since we were 14 or so. Besides one other friend, we were basically the only people in our high school who were heavily into electronic music, especially when it came to stuff like Skinny Puppy and Front 242. He even had a studio during high school and was producing music, which I thought was amazing. We didn’t really hang out together, though, him being a clean-cut type and me being a full-on goth. (Those people didn’t mix during the ’80s—see Pretty In Pink.), But anyway, we kept in touch and became good friends when I started producing music in the early ’90s.

Speaking of people not mixing well together, what were your tours with VNV Nation and Freezepop like? Did people ‘get you’, or did a lot of the music fly over their heads?
Freezepop is definitely more popular than Solvent, but not by such a huge margin. So it really wasn’t such an ‘opening act’ scenario, and it seemed like a lot of the Freezepop fans were either familiar with Solvent, or at least were able to get into it. Opening for VNV Nation was tough, because they are like the biggest band in that whole EBM/goth scene, with really passionate fans, most of whom were really just there to see VNV. They weren’t too interested in hearing an opening act, especially one with such a different sound. Having come from an industrial/goth background, I guess I sort of figured I knew something about that crowd and that my music could win them over, but instead I was met with a lot of disinterest.

You’ve been able to cross over between club audiences and living room listeners, though. Do you like toeing that line?
When I started off, I was totally immersed in that whole Rephlex/Warp Records side of things, and I was really against club music. Those people probably considered what they were doing as some form of techno, but to me that music was an absolute fuck-you to techno culture, and that’s what I loved about it. And before that I was really into new wave, synthpop, and EBM, where I would go to alternative and goth type clubs. People danced in these clubs, but in my mind none of it was music that was made for dancing; it was songs that you could dance to. If anyone had suggested to me during this time that what I was listening to or making was techno or dance music, I would’ve been totally offended.

I still think that 99-percent of club music is totally foul, and nothing depresses me more than being stuck in some club listening to hours of pounding cookie-cutter dance music. So as you can imagine by what I’ve said so far, it has never been a goal of mine to straddle this line. I’ve always just tried to make good songs with good beats, and occasionally they end up working in a club/DJ context. If you read a lot of interviews with Depeche Mode, they say more or less the same thing—any dance club success that they have is unintentional, and isn’t a factor that would influence the direction or outcome of a song. I’ve come to respect some periods of dance music, though, like early Chicago acid house. I was just reading this article in Wire about the Roland TB-303 bass line synthesizer, where they described how the earliest acid records (“I’m Losing Control” by Sleezy D, and “Acid Tracks” by Phuture) initially cleared the dance floor when Ron Hardy played them at the Music Box club, before they eventually became the biggest dance records in Chicago. Now this seems like an exciting chapter in dance music—where the biggest DJ in the biggest club is willing to play something totally alien, and will play it again even after clearing the floor with it. This is the kind of individuality and conviction that is seems to be totally devoid in clubs, where the DJ plays what the punters want to hear, instead of being there to tell the punters what they should want to hear.

Do you still collect vintage analog gear, or do you have more than enough of it already?
I have a pretty good collection of vintage synths and drum machines, and I usually pick up one or two new things every year, but my collection isn’t that huge. I don’t have any modular synth systems for one thing. If I could afford to, I would love to have a museum-sized collection! No doubt, I am totally obsessed with synthesizers, and you can be sure that if I ever win the lottery I’ll be glued to eBay for weeks.

While I use a computer for sequencing and recording audio, I’m pretty strict about using only analog synthesizers and drum machines. I’m not tempted to use soft synths or even virtual analog hardware synths, because to me they just don’t sound very good. They’re very flat and one-dimensional sounding. Using analog gear definitely adds a lot of work to the process—tuning and synchronization issues, and the fact that they’re always breaking down—but it’s worth the effort, for the sound. Taking a fully digital, all-software approach is not even an option, in my mind. It would be like choosing to be colorblind over seeing everything in color.

Let’s talk about your remix work to wrap things up…What was your initial reaction to Soft Cell asking for one? Were you nervous about the prospect of messing with their music?
I’ve remixed Soft Cell twice now! They were my favorite band growing up, and they’re still up there as one of my all-time favorites, for sure. So of course, remixing Soft Cell has definitely been career-fulfilling. It would’ve been tough if I’d been asked to remix one of Soft Cell’s masterpieces, like say “Memorabilia” or “Say Hello Wave Goodbye,” but the two songs I remixed were far from perfect, so there was a lot of room for me to rework them in the remix.

What are some artists you’d love to remix who haven’t asked just yet?
Well I just remixed a song with Alison Moyet singing, and I made it sound like a Yazoo song, so that was definitely another big one that I’ve able to cross off my list. (Yazoo’s “Upstairs at Eric’s” is my all-time favorite record.) Remixes are nice, but I think at this point the ultimate thing for me would be to collaborate on some songs with one of my favorite singers, like Alison, Marc Almond, Siouxsie Sioux or Phillip Oakey from the Human League. I would actually love to join the Human League—not that I’ve much liked anything that they’ve released since 1982, but somehow I’m totally convinced that I could make a killer Human League record with Phillip and the girls! Another thing I’d love would be some sort of recognition or validation from one of the “big three”—my absolute synthesizer heroes, Daniel Miller, Vince Clarke, and Richard D. James. Actually, I know that Daniel Miller bought and owns a Solvent 7-inch, but if I could have something a little more direct from any of those three geniuses, I could definitely die a much happier man.

[Photo by Edward Bishop]

Interview by Ilirjana Alushaj

You’re not still referring to Tracey Thorn as “that girl from the deserts-miss-the-rain video,” are you? Let’s hope not. After all, Everything But the Girl’s been ‘on hiatus’ since 2002, and Thorn just released her second album in three years, the rather spare, synth-free Love and Its Opposite. Considering two and a half decades separated her debut (A Distant Shore) and 2007’s Out of the Woods LP, this is reason to rejoice, reason to think that one of the most important female vocalists of our time (see also: Marine Girls, several key Massive Attack singles) has finally found a way to balance three kids and extensive studio time.

self-titled spoke to Thorn during a rare press day in New York.

“I just had to leave electronica behind for this album and say this is what I am doing now. This is my current project.”

How did you end up working with Ewan Pearson on Love and Its Opposite?
I collaborated with a few people on my previous record and Ewan Pearson was one of the ones suggested by Ben (Watt, from Everything But The Girl). We got on so well that I ended up deciding to work with him with this record.

Pearson is predominately a dancer producer, and this album is very acoustic and folky. Why did you believe that would work so well?
Well I think it’s more to do with the fact he hasn’t had an opportunity to work outside of [that realm], as he knows just as much about folk as he does electronic music. So this time ’round I said to him, I would like to make a more acoustic record and I don’t want to do loads of collaborations. I wanted to be more focused and just wanted to use him.

So does this mean Love and Its Opposite was a full-on collaboration or is it something you wrote more or less on your own?
I tend to write very much by myself. I sort of got together with Ewan when I had songs basically finished in terms of the writing process, as I am not one for the writing as you go. I can’t sit there and write a tune and just sing ‘la, la, la’. I have to sing something so even if it is a rough of where the words are going to go.

Was there a reason you wanted to try the folk direction?
It was basically for me to set myself the challenge of thinking of things a different way. Generally when I have done dance collaborations, the other people have sent me a backing track and I have written vocals for it. It was a bit more of a 50/50 process and I really enjoyed doing that. But I like that now I had to work without a safety net. I am the one now who has to deal with the silence on every track and find a way to fill them in. But also…I am not an electronic producer and that kind of limits my musical arrangements.

Would you like to learn more about that side?
No, not really. It’s just not me; I’d get bored so quickly.

I guess then it’s funny for you, then, that you are so well known for your more electronic tracks.
Yeah I know! But you can’t do everything. It’s so true! I especially realized this working with Ewan.

How does this album differ from your last in your mind?
In a way they are both quite you know…divorced but I think of it as just a different slant. I think each time you do a different thing you almost have to exclude something, to make it a different character. I just had to leave electronica behind for this album and say this is what I am doing now. This is my current project.

I really like your album artwork for this album. Did you decide to take more control of this side of the album too?
No. Like I said about learning electronic production, I feel like I can’t do everything. So I left it all to designer John Gilsena. I had nothing really to do with the design. John kind of came to me with this idea of using stock family photos and altering them. I really love the result.

This album sounds very personal and intimate. Are your lyrics autobiographical?
No, not always. I tend to put things in first person because it sounds better but a lot of is true; not necessarily about me, but from people who surround me.

A story however seems to unfold with the album as if it was one person. Was this purposeful?
It wasn’t deliberately started like that, with me thinking about characters, as it was more a bunch of songs written over time. In retrospect, however, I can see why people hear that.

Do you always need to be writing?
No, I have long gaps when I don’t write at all. In a way, I am a bit wary of writing all the time, actually. I would like to think that I come up with some great songs [that way].

Have you ever thought about writing for other singers?
No, I haven’t actually, and I don’t think I would find it an easy thing to do. Maybe because I am so used to writing for my specific style.

“The real issue was the tension between Alice and me. I wanted to be the main singer and she was taking more of the lead vocal role in the band.”

It is sort of a full circle going back to folk due to you starting out in a band I really loved, Marine Girls. Was that your first musical project?
Yeah, well, I was in a band before that actually but yeah…it’s a weird thing that the support of the Marine Girls are coming back and are being noticed more than they ever were.

I find it interesting as well how a lot more people than I would imagine reference that band.
Yeah, it’s Kurt Cobain’s fault.

Ha!
It’s a strange one…I mean we only ever made two incredibly simple records.

I remember being really intrigued as it was so sparse and you had no drums.
Yeah, because we never had a drummer. We did a few gigs at college and managed to get it together to make a second album, which was quite tricky as we had left school and were living in different places.

And now people have more interest in it than ever.
I think it had to do with that idea of what we were doing was very different at the time; being very suspicious and very distrustful youth, we had no connection at all to the music industry.

It is funny to me that there are a lot of current bands trying to replicate the sound groups like the Marine Girls had, when in reality if you had then what we have now you would try and make the most polished piece possible.
Totally! You know I used to find it frustrating as we weren’t trying to be simplified and lo-fi. That was just us to the limit of our abilities.

Why write amazing pop vocals and then bury them in a way that they are hard to distinguish anything from the sound?
I know. I think towards the end of Marine Girls, it became slightly patronizing—saying it was okay to be a version of women that was very naive and not very polished.

And your first solo record came right after Marine Girls?
Well, actually around the same time, as I had time apart from them. I don’t think Marine Girls could have stayed together, as not only had we all moved away from each other but the real issue was the tension between Alice and me. I wanted to be the main singer and she was taking more of the lead vocal role in the band.

When did Everything But The Girl come about then?
About the same time as well, when I met Ben at college (The University of Hull).

Wow. OK, so now this new album is done, have you been working on anything else?
At the moment, Ewan and I are thinking about making a Christmas single.

Really?
Yeah, we’ve been saying it for years and it has always been to late, but this year we hope it will happen—a single and maybe a cover.

Converge fans, meet Kurt Ballou's guitar

Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

Whether you’re into metal or not, you need to see Converge at least once. Aside from being one of America’s last remaining hardcore bands, they are easily one of the most intense live experiences you’ll ever endure—a blinding battering ram of a rock show that’ll probably result in a bruise or two. But hey, you’ll feel like a better person in the end. And if you’re like us, you’ll have the pictures to prove it.

The following is an interview I conducted with Converge’s guitarist/widely respected producer (Kurt Ballou) last fall. We saved it for their next headlining tour, which happens to touch down at New York’s Santos Party House tonight. That show is sold out, but you can find other dates on the group’s month-long North American trek here.

As for what’s discussed herein, expect: Ballou’s new Black Flag-meets-Birthday Party project, the band’s guest-dotted Axe To Fall album (current and former members of Neurosis, Disfear, Cave-In, Hatebreed, Genghis Tron, Undertow…), why he doesn’t listen to too much metal anymore, and much, much more.

“He was practicing so much he tore his finger apart and had to do his solo encased in Superglue.”

So the main thing that jumps out at me about this record is how you were able to make so many guests sound so seamless. It’s as if I wouldn’t know half these people contributed without looking at the liner notes.
Well, we have a long-standing friendship with all of the people on the record, plus a mutual respect and understanding of each other musically. It’s not like we chose people so we could put a sticker on the cover of the record that said, ‘Featuring so and so…’

It’s not like we told people they could do whatever they wanted, either. There was an editing process, helped along by the trust our friends have in us.

When you say things were scrapped, do you mean full songs, or just specific parts?
Not full songs; just certain people’s parts were edited or cut.

Was anything written with a certain person in mind, or did you choose everyone after the fact?
Each song was different, really. Like “Cruel Bloom” actually started as a Cave-In/Converge collaboration, but none of those guys played on it when we were writing the song. They helped embellish it, but then we stripped it back and took a different approach to it.

So it was originally going to be a heavier song?
Yeah, and when we decided to take a mellower approach to it, we thought Steve [Brodsky] would be an ideal vocalist for the song. So [frontman] Jake [Ballou] wrote some lyrics, which Steve modified and sang. Once we received what he did, we did a little bit of editing and ended up changing the chorus to a choir-type thing after the fact. We wanted it to sound like a sentimental song—the kind of thing a bunch of friends could share at the end of the day, around a fire.

There was a lot of back and forth with different people [on other songs] like that.

It’s interesting that you chose so many people to contribute to such a small part when that’s something you guys could have easily sang on your own…
Well, it started with me doing seven tracks of myself, but it didn’t sound broad enough. If I was recording someone else’s record and I was under a tighter time constraint, when it might have just been a couple people. But with a Converge record…

You’re not on the clock so much…
Well, I’m on the clock. We barely made the cutoff for this album—literally 11:30 p.m. on the last possible day we could deliver it. So we were definitely under the gun, but the little things are the difference between a good record and a great record for me.

Did Sean [Martin, ex-Hatebreed guitarist] have an extra good time since he’s pretty much given up playing metal for producing hip hop?
Yeah, he was stoked. He was practicing so much he tore apart his finger and had to do his solo encased in Superglue.

There are certainly some killer solos on the record.
Yeah, I have to mimic Sean’s live and it’s not easy.

“It’s not like our riffs are like King Crimson or Yes, but they embody that style from a philosophical or academic standpoint.”

I’ve heard your guitar style is very hard to replicate, too. Is it kinda unorthodox?
Yeah, I guess. I’m a self-taught guitarist, so I got my start by mimicking what other people do, from a musical or recording standpoint. Ultimately, it’s meant I’ve developed slower than my peers, but it’s also given me a more unique style. It’s a little more rhythmic. I’m more of a mathematician than an artist at heart, so that drives me more.

Did hearing the approaches of other guitarists to Converge songs make you want to mess around with your playing a little bit?
It definitely helped me expand what I’m doing. I have the technical chops to play what they’re doing, but it’s not something that I come across naturally.

Not to single anyone out, but are there any parts that really stuck out to you after someone sent them?
Steve’s stuff on “Effigy” is really awesome. He came out with a great melody that I’ve since learned, but I don’t think it’s a song we’ll ever play live unless we do it with Steve or another guitarist. There’s three or four guitar parts on that song—giving it a really chaotic feel—so playing with just one guitar and one bass doesn’t sound full enough [to attempt that].

The guitar solo on “Wishing Well” is pretty rad, too. I’m honored to have [Ulf Cederlund of Entombed and Disfear] on the record because I’ve been a fan of his music for a really long time. That song’s tuned in a really strange way, though.

How many of the new songs have you been playing live?
Around four songs a night. There’s maybe six or seven that we’re capable of playing live. We’ve been a band for a long time, so there’s a lot of songs we want to play in an hour. We also use a lot of different tunings, so our sets are often structured around that.

We’re also a really physical band live, and it’s hard to do that and still pull off these songs.

I read somewhere that [drummer] Ben [Koller]’s been listening to a lot of prog and you wrote some of your parts with that in mind.
Yeah, I try to tailor my writing to the abilities and tastes of the people I’m playing with. And since Ben’s been going in a prog direction with his personal taste, I did that with my guitar playing as well.

Someone casually listening probably isn’t going to pick up on that, so what’s an example?
“Dark Horse” is a good example, but the best is probably “Dead Beat.” It has a lot of abrupt, odd time signatures and guitars dancing around. It’s not like our riffs are like King Crimson or Yes, but they embody that style from a philosophical or academic standpoint.

Well, you’re putting it all into a Converge context…
That’s what we’ve done throughout our career: take an influence from one place and put it into the context of a different place. You’re taking an idea from something, not the sound.

Since most of this happened in the past year, was there ever a discussion of, “Yeah, we’re gonna bring all of these people in,” or did it happen more gradually?
Ever since we started collaborating with Cave-In a few years ago, we liked the idea of doing a collaborative record. We don’t wanna go beyond the scope of what Converge is, but we also don’t want to be repeating ourselves. One way to do that is to make yourself a little bit uncomfortable. It forces you to rethink what you’re doing and approach things a little differently.

The collaboration thing is a bit like trying to spice up a marriage isn’t it?
Yeah, we’re swingers basically. [Laughs] We’re having a key party.

And in turn, you’re forced to appreciate the people you play with regularly.
That’s true. One of the main differences between Jane Doe and When Forever Comes Crashing is the change in membership, with [bassist] Nate [Newton] and Ben [joining the band]. I’m still the primary riff writer on those records, but the change in collaborative musicians made all the difference in the world for making better music in my opinion.

“When I was younger, I remember leaving shows with something to think about every time. That doesn’t happen as much these days.”

When you said you don’t want to go too far beyond the scope of what you guys are capable of doing, does that mean you’ll never write a record with a bunch of songs that are like “Wretched World” or “Grim Heart/Black Rose?”
We could potentially have more of them on a record, but I don’t think it’s likely, just because they don’t feel like Converge songs when we play them live. an entire record like that in the foreseeable future. I’m not opposed to it, though. I like those songs as much as anything.

We’re not gonna force a song onto a record that we’re not 100-percent confident in. With that said, if you’re gonna put out an album that’s 30, 40 or 50 minutes long in this age of downloading and iPods, you need to have enough diversity on the album to hold the listener’s attention for its duration.

Do you find yourself listening to any newer metal records anymore?
Not really. Because I’m a producer, I’m listening to music 10 hours a day when I’m not on tour. And since most of the bands I record are heavier, I end up listening to mellower music. I like the shuffle function on the iPod a lot—that gives you a nice variety.

Do you have a favorite metal record this year?
Well, I just recorded a Trap Them record that’s the best thing they’ve ever done. That’s all that comes to mind right now…I really don’t keep up on current releases. I listen to mostly old stuff.

Any other anecdotes you can share about the Axe to Fall sessions?
Well, this band’s been together for 10 years, so we’re all pretty comfortable with each other. There’s the usual squabbles, but we respect one another’s opinions, so our arguments are a lot more productive than other bands. I don’t want to say this album was easy to make, but it was definitely an enjoyable process.

Was the mixing part rough since you had so many parts to make sense of?
I feel like the last record was harder than this one. It was the first time I tried doing all the mixing and recording myself, so I held myself to a really high standard on it. That last one has a bit more character in the way it sounds, too, although this one sounds better.

Character meaning happy accidents and welcome imperfections?
Yeah, the drums in particular are a little rougher around the edges, which adds some charm. This record doesn’t sound Hollywood, but it’s definitely slicker than previous ones.

You have a secret hardcore project in the works, right?
I don’t know if it’s secret. We’re still on the hunt for a singer. The drummer is Mike Justin, who’s currently playing in Earth Crisis and previously played in Trap Them, Unearth and the Red Chord. And the bassist is Tim Cohen from 108.

You’re not getting your hardcore side out enough in hardcore.
Nah, it’s not that. It’s just that I like Black Flag, Bad Brains, the Birthday Party—that sort of thing—and there’s only so far you can go with that. It’s also that Jake’s lyrics aren’t direct. They’re more artistic and personal. I appreciate that, but I also appreciate lyrics that are more outward. I don’t want to say something more hardcore or political, but maybe something that’s a little less veiled—say what you mean kind of lyrics. That makes more sense in a straight-up hardcore standpoint than a Converge one.

Plus that never happens in bands these days…
Yeah. I think that’s what it is. When I was younger, I remember leaving shows with something to think about every time. That doesn’t happen as much these days. Kids are exposed to new sounds, but not new ideologies. I don’t want to be in a preachy band. If anything, my generation put a stop to that because we were sick of the previous one…

Well, you can put your ideas out there without being militant about it.
It’s difficult to maintain that level of unrelenting idealism. You can explain what you believe, and let people follow that or not based upon the ideas you put out there.

[Lead Photo by Duncan Bryceland]

By Andrew Parks

While it pains us to admit it, we first heard Metal Box—Public Image Ltd.’s infamous canister of career-defining 12-inches (a.k.a. Second Edition)—a couple months ago. And not even by choice. The 1979 album simply started playing by chance, a forgotten eMusic purchase salvaged by iTunes’ shuffle function.

To be honest, we thought it was a Swans record at first. After all, the deep, slightly demonic vocals on the album’s 10-minute opener (“Albatross”) sound exactly like Michael Gira—three years before Swans formed, mind you—and Keith Levene’s steel-plated guitar chords, why, they’re post-punk personified, a dovetailing hint of the decades to come. Elsewhere, “Careering” proves that A Certain Ratio wasn’t the only band the Rapture ripped off on their breakthrough record. (Check out the wobbly vocals of “Echoes,” then compare “Do the Du” to “Killing.” Who needs a sampler when you have a decent record collection, right?)

Basically, if you listen to Metal Box all the way through, and pair it with PiL’s other masterpiece, The Flowers of Romance, John Lydon’s brief, blustery run as the snot-nosed frontman of the Sex Pistols becomes a highly-influential footnote—a statement that needed to be made before he could pursue his true calling. And not just the jittery, profoundly paranoid PiL cuts (“Memories,” “Death Disco”) that’d provide the foundation of disco punk and dance rock more than 20 years later. While Romance’s bleak, strictly minimal soundscapes sound like early Nine Inch Nails demos, PiL also delivered a stack of subversive pop tunes on their later records, including “This Is Not a Love Song,” “Rise,” “Don’t Ask Me” and “Disappointed.”

With that in mind, and a well-received reunion run—PiL’s first in 17 years—happening between now and two nights at New York’s Terminal 5 (May 18-19), we hunted Lydon down at his hotel room late last week. The name he left at the front desk? Pussy Lindquist III. Yep. Once a punk, always a punk…

While you read this massive interview, may we suggest listening to the two-part radio show below? Captured way back in 1977, it pissed off the Pistols’ ruthless manager (Malcolm McLaren, who passed away earlier this month) because it proved “Johnny Rotten” was indeed John Lydon after all—one of the greatest record nerds of all time.

Download audio file (Capitol%20Radio%20Show%201977%20%28Part%20I%29.mp3)

John Lydon, Capital Radio Show 1977 (Part I)

Download audio file (Capitol%20Radio%20Show%201977%20(Part%20II).mp3)

John Lydon, Capital Radio Show 1977 (Part II)

—

“Anyone who adheres to that kind of uniform is showing they’ve missed the boat completely. Green Day, for instance…”

self-titled: Well hello Mr. Lindquist.
[Laughs]

You must enjoy making writers ask for “Pussy” at your hotel.
No, no. They keep misspelling it. It’s supposed to sound like “Pew-ssy.”

Is that a name you use a lot?
No. I mean, I always use a different moniker when I check into a hotel. It started out years ago, to keep fans from annoying [me] all night long. If you use your regular name, the phone doesn’t stop ringing. And so I figured I’d have fun with it…

Isn’t “Banging the Door” (from Flowers of Romance) about that?
No, it’s actually about people banging the door back when I lived in London. And most of the people banging the door back then were the police.

Never looking for you though, right?
Oh, of course they were. [Cackles]

So how was your show in Portland last night?
Really brilliant. I really enjoyed the audience’s reactions and participation. It’s a wonderful thing.

So are you seeing a mix of young and old fans at these reunion shows?
It’s a very varied bunch, which has always been a major achievement in my mind. I’ve never liked being at concerts and seeing people from the front row to the back all dressed identical. I’ve always managed to avoid that trap.

Except for about a year after the Pistols formed right?
It kinda went there for a bit, because the trash media tried to sell the whole thing off as one uniformed punk kit of, ‘Please adhere to this’, but it was never about that to us.

Do you ever get a kick out of how commodified punk clothing is now, comparatively, what with Hot Topic and all that?
Can you explain what you mean?

One of the points of that store is selling various punk rock uniforms…
Well, there were outfitters like that from all the way back when we started. I don’t have a problem with people selling it. I have a problem with people who think that’s the easy route to being a punk. And indeed it isn’t. Anyone who adheres to that kind of uniform is showing they’ve missed the boat completely. Green Day, for instance…

I actually just saw their Broadway show.
And how was it?

If I had epilepsy, it would have given me a seizure. It was basically an assault on the senses for 90 straight minutes—almost too loud, between the lighting and the music.
[Laughs] Forcing people to sit down and endure it seems absolutely negative to me.

Ah, but a soccer mom next to me pumped her fist throughout it.
Green Day have always been [commercial]. It kinda figures that they’d be misled in that direction. So willingly, too…Pete Townshend could kinda get away with that because Tommy really was a rock opera. People really hated the Who for putting it out at the time, too. They didn’t understand [why the band was doing it], but Green Day…that’s just daft. It shows what a bunch of dull puddings they really are.

Writing the first PiL single, “Public Image,” must have been a major release for you, as it closed the door on the Pistols at the time.
It wasn’t closing the door on the Pistols. It was just opening a new one and showing where I stood in terms of the world. Above all else, it needed to feel honest. It needed to have integrity, which I found sadly lacking in the management (Malcom McLaren) of my first band.

[PiL] was a clearinghouse for me. It’s always meant absolute freedom. And with freedom comes responsibility. That’s why my songwriting is all about the truth, all about trying to find out what emotions really are, and how not to be misled by them.

I love a good pop song, you know. I love the whole verse/chorus format, but to broach some subjects properly—with the respect due—you need to step outside the format. Beyond music, almost. That’s a difficult concept for people to understand. It’s not about me trying to be avant-garde or deliberately ‘jazz-fusionist’. It isn’t that at all. It’s a gut reaction to the subject matter. Like “Death Disco” is a song about the death of my mother. And it’s even more applicable now, as my father died last year. You don’t want to wallow in tragedy, but the loss of a parent is a serious thing. It’s extremely hard to come to grips with. Like I say in the song, there are times in life when “words are useless,” where you can’t possibly channel an emotion without a guttural yell.

You also applied the spaciousness of dub to a new kind of music, what would later be called post-punk…
Well, I never set out to copy anything. I’ve always been really interested in textures—stuff like Can and Kraftwerk. My record collection is extensive. I’ve got three libraries spread over two countries. I’m just a nonstop music buyer. If anyone puts something out, I want to hear it. The only thing I ever really spent money on in my whole life is a really excellent, A-1 transparent sound system. It doesn’t even need to be loud. It just needs to be absolutely clear without adding any amplified distortion to anything.

And your wife doesn’t want you to get rid of any of those records after all these years?
Not at all. That’s my life. I’ve dedicated myself to making music. The only thing that’s ever stopped me is record label shenanigans and a lack of record label support.

Well, that’s been pretty consistent all along…
It has since the beginning. It’s amazing how disjointed it all is. You try to have a career and it’s rather rudely sabotaged by record label involvement or lack thereof. The record companies here didn’t even distribute the first two [PiL] albums. They promoted the next one (1981’s The Flowers of Romance), and then they deliberately withdrew. And over in England, they supported the first two (First Issue, Metal Box), then withdrew [their support] from the rest.

So I had two completely different marketing concepts going on at the same time for the same band. Not the same players, but the same band—it still had the PiL logo on it, you know? That’s one thing, too—people viewing PiL as this fractured production line. It’s not my fault at all. It’s record companies creating odd environments that are negative to my work.

So now, after a really long break and some apologies, people are starting to understand songs like “Albatross,” “Disappointed” or “Rise”—that they all work together, that they’re all part of a bigger story. It’s great to share that with an audience that actually knows their stuff a bit. All ages, all types, from college professors to little teeny bopper girls. It’s great. That’s the reward. It shows that what I’m doing means something.

“We know where the punk movement went. My god, how many bands trudged down the same road at 90 miles an hour?”

Do you remember the reasons record companies gave you for not wanting to release your music in the ’80s?
Yeah. “That’ll never sell.” “That’s too different.” And “you have to go mainstream if you want any radio play.”

Have you spoken to any of those people in retrospect?
Well, as time went by, all of these alleged ‘musical geniuses’ were replaced by even dimmer-witted ‘musical geniuses’.

The record companies are all imploding now, aren’t they? For the past 10 years in particular, especially EMI and Virgin. What they’ve become is accountant led. They’re warehouses for distributing old stock. But they’re very selective about what that old stock is. They don’t mind paying the likes of Janet Jackson $80 million to sign her up, but they wouldn’t spend two shillings on me.

Which has forced you to support your own touring, right?
I’ve had to raise the money independently, but let me tell you something. When the Pistols broke up, I had to pay for PiL with whatever money I could scrape together, too. There was nothing coming from the record label.

So you had to chase them down for whatever money the Pistols were still making?
They just consistently kept me in debt. The old trick, you know? But the more problems they put in front of me, the harder I fight to make sure I succeed. It can be quite difficult, but I’m still here. Just talking to the media takes a lot of planning…

Yeah, you’re forced to talk to us now.
No, I’ve never had a problem with that. This is the wonderful world of communication. I love doing interviews. It’s how I learn. Believe me, I’m picking your brain as much as you’re picking mine. It’s how I get a gauge of how things are going out there.

What’s the gauge on me right now, then?
For you? That’s my business. So long as you don’t editorialize this and add nasty little snippets that didn’t occur while we were conversing, I’m happy.

Well, not to kiss your ass, but the second I heard early PiL stuff, it was like, ‘Oh so this is where many of the bands I’ve liked over the past five years stole their ideas.’
I don’t mind people being influenced, but when they don’t own up to where it came from, that’s really hard for me to take. It’s blatant thievery in many cases. What bands don’t understand is there’s a genuine thought process and emotions behind these songs. It’s not something you can just jump on and say, ‘Oh, that’s a new genre, and I can do it too.’ That’s wrong. The bands I’ve always loved have been true to their inner wisdom and turmoil. If you’re not writing from the heart, you’re just filling up space, and you’re in it for greed.

We know where the punk movement went. My god, how many bands trudged down the same road at 90 miles an hour?

Since he’s originally from the Damned, do you ever talk to [guitarist] Lu [Edmonds] about that?
Not at all. Me and Lu go back a long way, but our musical interests are so diverse and extreme that the punk years don’t matter anymore. Even in the Pistols, when I wrote a song like “God Save the Queen,” there’s no verse/chorus in that. The fact that it became a pop song is quite an achievement. The record company didn’t understand that at all—that I was already experimenting.

A lot of that came from your mother originally, right? She was quite a record collector?
Yeah, my mom and dad. They liked all kinds of music.

Do you remember what first stuck a chord with you?
Oh, mad Irish stuff. And they drove me bonkers with the Beatles. I could never tolerate that.

Not even the experimental stuff?
No, I don’t know what it was. I think it might be because when you’re young and tired at 12 o’clock at night, and your parents are screaming “she loves you/yeah, yeah yeah!”, it kinda really annoys you. [Laughs] It becomes a big, black emotional slur. Probably unfairly, but there it is.

You grew to like the Kinks though, right?
Oh, yeah. Ray Davies’ songwriting is stunning. I really like literature in songs. It was a completely different way to go about songwriting at the time.

I know you don’t like to over-intellectualize stuff, but what have you been reading lately?
Nothing in the last year because I’ve been too busy putting this together. I’ve also stopped listening to other music because I don’t want any distractions.

When I go into a project, it’s always 100-percent. Believe me, it’s an awful lot of work to put this together. With all of us involved, it’s been 24-hour days with very little sleep. And now, the actual live presentation of it is a relief but the 14-hour coach journeys are not. [Laughs] I can guarantee you that the infrastructure of America is collapsing. To travel these highways and byways—all these bumps and pothole-surfing—is appalling. It’s impossible to sleep.

Wait until you get to Philadelphia and New York.
Yeah, I know. The coach driver said, “You ain’t felt nothing yet.” If you want to get political about it, Republicans, how dare you? How dare you bitch and gripe about anything when you let the country collapse?

I’m actually on my way to becoming an American citizen, too. I love this place and its people.

You’ve never gotten tired of L.A., huh?
No. Since there’s no [bad] weather, I don’t have to worry about [my health]. (Editor’s Note: Lydon contracted spinal meningitis when he was 8, a condition that left the singer with a crooked spine and his signature stare.)

So I saw some Coachella clips and the band actually looks pretty tight. You’ve worked with Bruce and Lu before (‘86-’90 and ‘86-’88, respectively), so does the success of the shows make you want to start work on new material?
The aim is to collect enough money to put ourselves in a recording situation, and in doing so, change labels pronto. Because the lack of involvement from our current crop has to stop. I view them as legally hindering me, and I intend to be removed from that problem by any means necessary. It borders on illegal behavior.

The industry doesn’t have the brains to see that if you don’t invest in the future, there won’t be one. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense to me. And I’ve watched it happen all the way down the line. Outfits like Massive Attack and Smashing Pumpkins give a nod and a wink to the PiL way, and yet, their life has been rather easy. Maybe because they’re more comfortable, watered-down versions.

I don’t mean to be bitter like that, but it does kinda upset me. I think I’ve done an awful lot for the world of modern music, and I haven’t seen much of a financial reward for it at all. I know the respect is there from the audience, but there’s been a great deal of problems from the media over the years. They’d much rather point the finger at me than the real problem—the record industry itself. This is why I took great pleasure in telling them where to put it when we were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Because the very people who voted us into the museum asked us to pay for the privilege of sitting there during that dreary ceremony. For what? A bauble? A bit of iron?

People like Blondie should know a hell of a lot better than running at that event. She caused terrible fractures in her own band, didn’t she? (Blondie was inducted in 2006, when Debbie Harry refused to let bassist Nigel Harrison and guitarist Frank Infante perform with her.) I mean, how ugly is it? That lust for accolades? It’s a terrible, terrible thing.

Well, that’s where your name came from right? A novel about an actress’ ego (Muriel Spark’s The Public Image)?
Yes, it was supposed to escape that.

Egos certainly did a lot of damage to the Pistols…
It did because of management mishandling, and management egotism. Malcolm was a very structured person, and very prone to jealously. Of course I miss him now, because he’s a human being, you know? Nobody’s perfect. There’s some warm moments there; just not many. [Laughs]

I just have to be honest about it. I’m being fair to him. He would loathe what they’ve turned [his death] into in England.

All of the gushing tributes did seem a little odd…
All the bandwagon hoppers have lept on it as a chance to get their names in the paper. It’s quite ugly. It really is.

Well, when anyone dies, people often try to make the death about themselves, not the person who passed away…
That’s it, isn’t it? Flowers and coffins don’t wrap well around a person like Malcolm. He’d be appalled.

“I love my inheritance but I have a much brighter future, oddly enough.”

What about your own writing? Have you had any time to…
I’ve written fairly consistently over the years because I love my inheritance with the Pistols and I love going out with them. I’ve just never made enough money to get PiL back together, which was my original ambition. I’m not trying to be subversive about it. I’ve always made that very clear to the chaps. They’ve wanted me to write new material for them, but I can’t. As soon as I put pen to paper, PiL is where I want it to be. I want it to be uncontaminated.

Any idea where that direction might be next?
When we hit the studio, we will find out.

Seems like it might get a bit dark. After all, you’re having a rough couple years…
No, no, no. There’s always hope.

Is that one misconception of the Sex Pistols—the role anger plays in your songs? Like you say in “Rise” from PiL, “Anger is an energy.” It can be a positive thing, right?
Yes. I’ve never wrapped myself around self-pity. Why would I? I’ve been through some major childhood illnesses and travesties and survived. And I’m quite happy about that. I’m not one for wallowing in misery. The Sex Pistols, to me, was not a negative band or narcissistic. It was positive, and it created deliberate, purposeful, helpful, change. And in the long run, that will be seen.

So you don’t feel angry these days?
No, there are many, many things I’d like to get my teeth into, but I’m always viewing it as a positive way of solving a problem. It goes all the way back to “God Save the Queen,” the part where I say, “No future/No future for you.” That’s meant to be a question. There will be no future if you don’t do something about it; if you don’t stand up and take a side. Have an opinion, you know? Involve yourself in a debate.

Life is a learning process, and all of the fools out there who just close down their brains, well, you’ve made your party choice. You’re basically a Republican. They are the book burners, the ones making claims about Nazis and socialism when that’s what they’re doing themselves. That’s the irony of it. They are so close-minded it’s appalling.

You must have been mad about how the press spun that incident between you and Bloc Party’s singer…
It was all a publicity scam so this silly band can sell their new record. But it’s been that way for me throughout the years. It disgusts me from time to time. That’s why I’ve tried to stay away from the E! Entertainment, Access Hollywood side of things. My pubic image is limited deliberately.

Outside of a couple TV appearances (I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, a trio of Discovery Channel docs, a commercial for Country Life butter that had Brits crying “sellout” despite Lydon’s real reason for taking the piss—self-funding the PiL tour)…
Well, you know, the world is full of dirty-minded people. It’s a hard fucking life when you come across some of these characters. The lengths they’ll go to is utterly surprisingly…How much poison can you put up with?

Kids themselves are pretty poisonous now, though.
Right, with Perez Hilton leading the charge. It’s all rather silly. That’s why I don’t like the Internet much at all. There’s an awful amount of jealous people in this world. A lot of crimes relate directly to that one sin: jealously. We’re constantly battling the seven deadly sins. For me, it’s religion, like I wrote that one song “Religion” (from PiL’s debut album, First Issue) while I was in the Pistols, but there was no way that band would cope with that subject matter. So that limitation with the Pistols is always in my head. It’s a shame.

So it’s safe to say a lot of the early PiL stuff—the lyrics at least—was written while you were in the Pistols.
Yeah, I love my inheritance but I have a much brighter future, oddly enough. [Laughs]

Got one last thought to leave us with? Any life lessons?
[Laughs] Two songs come to mind: Magazine’s “Shot By Both Sides” and Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Two very good records. There’s a lot of great music out there if you bother looking for it.

Very true. Thanks John.
Thank you. May the road rise with you…

[Photo by Travis Huggett]

By Arye Dworken

Hot Chip is ostensibly the electronic equivalent of The Revenge of the Nerds. Frontman Alexis Taylor, gawky and slight, sits across from us wearing over-sized spectacles, while his partner in harmony, Joe Goddard is zaftig and unkempt and shows off to us a newly purchased John Coltrane T-shirt. Along with Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin, Hot Chip will never be confused for, let’s say, Kings of Leon or the Strokes in their partying heyday. These gents are married and having children. They are “settled down” (Taylor even admits later that he finds going out to be jarring in contrast to his domestic routine).

Nevertheless, Hot Chip has made the best album of their career. And that record is also impossibly cool. One Life Stand is the London quartet’s revenge: the perfect and uncompromising amalgamation of winking humor and unabashed sincerity. The band has finally found the confidence to include references to X-Box and Wheel of Fortune, and a nearly seven-minute doo-wop inspired track which actually includes the refrain “humunnah-humunnah” (critical Wire Magazine reviews, be damned!).

Hot Chip was in New York City to promote their fourth release and while in town, they also performed at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg. The crowd was full of very attractive people dancing carefreely to synth hit after steel drum-infused synth hit. The intimate show’s attendees were at their coolest in their tight skinny jeans, and flannel/ gingham shirts, pogoing throughout the whole night’s set. It was the perfect revenge.

Let’s reminisce about the good ole days. I remember in Austin when you all performed a showcase with M.I.A. and LCD Soundsystem. You weren’t even signed yet.
Joe Goddard: At that point, we went to SXSW because Stephen Bass (of label Moshi Moshi) convinced us to come.
Al Doyle: I remember getting so drunk. It was a chaotic night.
Alexis Taylor: I don’t even remember playing it.
AD: We all took our shoes off. Paul Epworth was the doing the sound that night.
JG: We had just met the DFA guys and that was a turning point for us. As soon as James [Murphy] had gotten interested in us, all the labels came running after us. They could have signed us beforehand for like, two pence, but once they came around, we asked for me.

There’s a weird duality of humor and sincerity in Hot Chip’s cataloge. How do you juggle both in the content?
AT: There’s no real decision about being funny or being sincere. It’s expressing how you’re feeling, and I guess we’re a mixture of having a sense of humor and feeling real about things. A lot of people don’t think there’s a place for that in music and they’re taken aback when we attempt to do that.

With the new record, it’s not so easy to discern when you’re joking though and when you’re being forthright. “Brothers” could be a paean to the band and to the concept of brotherhood, but it could also be meta- and ironic.
JG: I put a line in there…” I can play Xbox to be free.” It’s a funny line that sounds funny. But my brother does in fact play a lot of Xbox and I find it rather depressing. It is sincere, but I like to have these moments where the narrator says something that may seem stupid. It can be both.

“Wrestlers” is another song that stands out in the cataloge. You reference wrestling maneuvers like Half Nelson and Full Nelson, but also slip in “Willie Nelson.”
AT: That kind of made sense to me though. It felt right that Willie Nelson should be in a song about wrestling. It would feel like he would be sitting by the sidelines watching the match like celebrities watch basketball.

Well, Hot Chip is like hip-hop in that regard; The random associations but they’re all somewhat related if not by word similarities alone.
JG: One of my favorite rappers is MF Doom. A crazy random rapper but the lyrics all sounded so right to me. I guess I’ve also been influenced by my childhood. I was obsessed with hip-hop when I was 11, or 12…House of Pain, Cypress Hill, EPMD, Souls of Mischief, De La Soul. Alex and I were very into De La Soul and we bonded over that. I don’t listen to hip-hop much any more. I don’t really have the time for it.

My favorite song on the new record right now is “Take It In.” It’s been on repeat. Where did that stellar chorus come from?
JG: It does reference a lot of 80’s house music. In my mind, melodically, it’s inspired by a few different things: “Promised Land” By Joe Smooth. There was this song “Set It Off” also that inspired us. But we wanted this song to sound like a church choir—no distinctive vocals but merge them all together so that it would sound classic. Al and I talked about “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac and how the voices all come together.
I didn’t know this at the time, but the song goes from minor chords to major. That helps in letting the chorus stand out more in contrast.
AT: On this album, we used that trick a bunch of times. “One Life Stand” does that. The thing about the ending of “Take It In” is that there’s a piano, my only real contribution to that song, are those piano chords that are never plays beforehand in the song. It makes it stand out from the chorus.
AD: Alexis suggested we put it as the last song on the record.
AT: And of course the label wanted it to be the first song on the record.

Made In The Dark came out less than two years ago. Why are you working so hard?
AT: This is our job.
JG: I think we’re kind of ambitious.

“Slush” from the new record is a strange song for you guys. Doo-wop vocals? Really?
AT: I can’t remember why I started doing that “humanah-humanah” vocal but it just came into my head. It was one of those very simple melodies you think somebody has already written and recorded already. The song had a strange quality to it, and the chorus and the end section all happened in a few minutes. It all happened quite naturally.
JG: It’s the longest song on the record.
AT: I started recording it at home and it was an 11-minute version originally and I had to cut it down until we got to about 6-minutes. I was quite influenced by a couple of songs…we’ve done some ballads on the last record…but none of them have been treated this pop. I was thinking about George Michael’s “A Different Corner,” and I wanted to allow ourselves to make a big ballad. The other production influence was Swamp Dogg’s “God Bless America.”

Do you feel yourselves gravitating to mellowness and moving away from out and out-dance?
AT: I think sometimes we’re a bit exhausted by dance music. We DJ and we play dance music quite often. I think at one point Joe said I don’t ever want to listen to techno again. But you get back into it. You move toward the mellow stuff and then you miss the techno stuff.

You mentioned that you guys DJ often, and I was wondering what you guys prefer to DJ.
AT: “I Was Drunk” by Riva Starr is a standard.
AD: Really good gypsy techno. At the moment, I’m listening to a lot of techno. But the only bad thing about techno is that sometimes it goes for a really long time and it sounds a bit alike. I remember in Ibiza…hearing a song that played seamlessly well into another. We the realized accidentally that it was the same song. We played it twice in a row without realizing. [Laughter]
JG: We’ve started to get this network around the world where people are sending us really interesting, and inspiring stuff. I’m listening to a lot of new garage stuff now. There’s a new generation of producers interested in bringing garage back. It’ll never become popular here but there’s a newfound energy in the scene.

Do you guys still get a chance to go out?
AT: I just had a baby so I only go out when I DJ. Which is kind of strange because when I go out now everyone around me wants to have a massive night out. I don’t know how to do that any more.

So I should say that I much prefer Hot Chip’s sincere side. My favorites are “One Pure Thought,” “Boy From School,” “Take It In…”
AT: I gravitate toward melancholy quite often. I mean, but one of my favorite films is also “Raising Arizona.” But this idea of questioning our sincerity, which I’ve read in a lot of interviews…this bothers me. It’s hard for me to understand how people cannot believe what we’re saying. Like if I break my hand by punching a wall, how is that not believable? Would you question that? The hand is broken. We’re being as upfront as possible yet why is it so easy to misunderstand it? For a long time, a lot of people were very resistant to the idea that we’re capable of both, even within the same line, why is that so hard to understand? Smog does it all the time.

Being that your all respectively fans of pop music, are there any aspirations to collaborate or mingle with the mainstream world? I heard there was an Alicia Keys remix?
AD: It wasn’t very good. [Laughs]

So it won’t leak.
AD: I don’t think that would be wise of us to allow that.
AT: I think Shakira would be a lot of fun to work with.
JG: I don’t know. The more you get into that world, the more people and opinions you find yourself surrounded by. Right now, we’re comfortable. Most of us are in loving relationships, we don’t make a ton of money but we make enough. We’re friends and business partners. A lot of bands struggle to have a career and have to jump through a lot of hoops to get what they want and we’re lucky not to have to do that.