After 26 years of solid work, sludge rock survivors The Melvins have finally smashed the Billboard Top 200. At number 200.

Not getting due recognition can destroy a band. Still going after 26 years and 20 albums, the Melvins remain one of the most misunderstood groups in rock history, their legacy limited to a mere footnote for being Kurt Cobain’s favourite band. Yet from post punk to surrealist rock, their versatile career arc has proved so unpredictable that both Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, the band’s mainstays, can’t resist reading whatever is written about them online.

“It’s like watching a bad car wreck,” says an exasperated-sounding Dale. “I always think people are wrong anyway… but I can’t help it.” Buzz even remembers their very first review. “It was by [Sub Pop founder] Bruce Pavitt. He hated it. Thought it was absolute crap. I remember thinking, ‘man, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong’.” Ever since, the snarky frontman has consistently blasted popular consensus, insisting that if you get it, no explanation is necessary. If you don’t, no explanation will do.

“We’ve managed to completely piss people off to the point where, without trying, it makes you wonder what the hell is going on.” Buzz sounds agitated, his voice steadily rising. “People tend to say, ‘this is the worst song I’ve ever heard’. I mean… wow! I’m not doing this to be perverse. I’ve worked VERY HARD to get to the point where I can do whatever I want and make records the way I wish other bands would: doing things that are different and crazy. My fans understand that. If they don’t, then they’re not going to remain fans for very long. So be it. But I’ve thought about this A LOT. The reason why we’ve lasted so long is solely based on the attention to detail. I think if people started at the beginning of the Melvins’ catalogue and went through it, it’d be an amazing journey. All kinds of music! If we were a shitty live band or made terrible records, it would have been over a long time ago. The one thing that’s been completely constant and predictable is that we’re going to do things that are good. Sales don’t mean shit. I apologise for none of it. I’ve never wrong about anything. I can’t think of the last thing I was surprised about.”

No insecurities there, then. But perhaps any lingering frustration with the industry is understandable given the band’s back story. Luck has never quite gone The Melvins’ way. They recorded their first album, Gluey Porch Treatments, in 1986 when burgeoning San Francisco label, Alchemy Records, gave them enough gas money to drive down from Aberdeen, Washington. “The record came out to a resounding thud,” recalls Buzz. “We did a tour in ’86 and vowed never to do it again because it was such a disaster. We got a lot of trouble at shows. There was a heavy skinhead influence everywhere we went and they certainly weren’t interested in our long-haired antics. We lost money we didn’t have. You come home $900 in the hole individually and it might as well be nine million.”

When Alchemy founder Victor Hayden disappeared with whatever little money the label had, the band spent years searching for another record label. “We didn’t put another album till ’89 because no one cared,” says Buzz. “Then when we moved to San Francisco, the guy from Boner saw us play at the request of some girl who OD’d not too long after. He put Ozma out and for some reason, things changed. I don’t know exactly why. It was almost like the musical environment caught up to what we were doing. There was enough interest in that record that a booking agent said we could do a tour where we wouldn’t lose money. Quickly after that we decided to do it full time and haven’t had jobs since.”

After Nirvana’s breakthrough success, the Melvins were quick to benefit from the ripple that grunge sent through the record industry. Cobain had once auditioned to join the Melvins, but was apparently too nervous to remember the parts. As a committed fan he’d often volunteer to be their roadie and later even recruited Dale to play drums on Bleach. Atlantic were curious enough to take a punt on the band, signing them to a three-album deal. Yet even the Cobain-produced Houdini (1993) failed to endear them to a wider fan base. Opening for Nirvana’s final show was their last glimpse of mainstream audiences, but by then such experiences had soured any ambition to make it big.

“Nirvana did everything that you’d think they would be against,” says Dale. “They ran their band no different than how Bon Jovi would: having a big-time manager, big productions, tour buses – all that stuff. Which is too bad. We always thought that if we were in a position where we had money and became successful, we wouldn’t go down that route. It’s certainly about ego. What else could it be?”

The Melvins remain content with their cult following: a dedicated throng who understand that the only consistency to be expected from album to album is a fresh twist – even if it means losing as many followers as the last outing would have gained. “If you look at the grand scheme of everything we’ve done,” says Buzz, “the hard part comes in figuring out what to do next – if you want to do something that’s at all challenging. But you pay the price for that. People get upset. I’ve never understood why anyone should expect me to be predicable. Me of all people! I’m an eccentric weirdo. Probably a lot weirder than you would imagine.” He cackles madly. “There’s no way around that. I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.”

Yet for once, the Melvins appear to have found stability. Having gone through a multitude of bass players over the years, they’ve expanded into a powerhouse quartet by adding Big Business’s Jared Warren and Coady Willis on bass and additional drums. There’s no pressure or expectation from their label, Ipecac, as it’s run by friend and collaborator Mike Patton. In fact their accessible but still abstract new album, The Bride Screamed Murder, has earned the Melvins a spot on the Billboard Top 200 for the first time in their career – by selling just 2,809 copies in its first week. Even if the stability should prove short-lived, and the band suspect it will, what continues to keep the them together is an unwavering self-belief – one that Buzz believes is questioned at every turn.

“I ran into Slim [Moon] from [indie label] Kill Rock Stars years ago and he said, ‘don’t you ever get tired of playing loud rock music and wanna do something else?’ I just stared at him. ‘Like what? What are you talking about?’ This is it for me! I don’t have anything else. I have to make this work. If I make stuff nobody believes in, I’m out of business. That is it! The difference between me and people like him is that the light is gone out of his eye. It’s gone. I haven’t lost that magic.”

Originally published in The Stool Pigeon, June 2010.

Nas could have quit music after his first album. Some wish he had. He started too early, he says. Dropped out of school in the eighth grade, deciding to educate himself at home in the high rise blocks of the world’s largest housing project: Queensbridge, New York. He pored over the Bible and the Qur’an, studied Africa profusely, never imagining that he’d record an album about it one day. Back then Nas was desperate to record a demo, so he bought recording time from a “heavy metal dude” with a studio and rounded up every beat-maker he could fit into the car. Large Professor was one of them, though at first he wouldn’t even speak to Nas – he just wanted his tunes in circulation by whatever means necessary, even if he didn’t get paid, even if it was via some kid he’d never heard of. But he was impressed by Nas’s hunger and lyrical deftness.

When Large told Nas he was producing beats for some big names, he didn’t believe him. But then he’d sneak Nas into studios on the recording budgets for Kool G Rap and Rakim whenever they didn’t show up. He’d teach Nas how to get on the mic, how to hold himself, and eventually found Nas a spot on Main Source’s ‘Live at the Barbeque’ in 1991. Nas was out of his mind with excitement, bum-rushing through the backdoor of clubs so that when it got to his verse he could take in the room, sipping ginger ale from a champagne glass. If only they knew that was him, he thought. But it didn’t take long for the buzz to sweep through New York. MC Serch offered to be his manager, netting him a record deal with Columbia, and soon the best DJs in the business were queuing up with the beats of their career. It would have been easy to choke under the pressure. Instead, Nas delivered one of the greatest hip-hop records of all time. Arriving in 1994, Illmatic was a cohesive blend of sharp rhymes and crisp production – a peerless guide through life on the streets that still sounds fresh today. The reception was unanimous: hip hop’s teenage saviour had arrived and already the world was his.

“When I did Illmatic,” Nas says, “I took a trip to Europe for the first time to promote the record and the label overworked me to the point where I got sick. It was just press after press and I never experienced anything like that. What I did realise was how big the record companies were and how they had Europe on lockdown. I saw where my music was startin’ to reach people. But when I created it, all I thought about was my ’hood and my city, basically. I figured that anywhere people loved hip hop, they would like it. But I had no idea how big it would get, had no idea I’d be talkin’ about it over 15 years later. No way.”

Illmatic’s impact went to Nas’s head, but it didn’t sell well. With It Was Written, Nas returned with a cocksure crossover album that rocketed to number one, kicking hip hop into the mainstream. “It was a young music; it still is,” he continues. “And it’d been held back from the mainstream for so long that by the time it reached there, everyone got excited about this new phenomenon. [Hip hop] is what it says, what it talks about. I’m an MC to the truest form. I like to think of myself as carrying on the traditions of MCs before me. So I talk about everything I feel. One day I want money. So it’s life in the fast lane. – materialism, violence, sex. The next day I… I hate money! I’ve learned a powerful lesson about money. It’s like, ‘Woah!’ So if an artist can express all those different experiences, that’s what I call the real shit, you know? I appreciate the guys who tell all the experiences, not just fake it with one – like it’s all bad every day. Haha! I try to be as real as I can be.”

The purists didn’t see it that way. Those who celebrated Nas’s initial success were offended by his assault on the charts. But Nas had studied others’ careers, saw the ceiling they hit, and convinced himself that he wasn’t going to get caught out doing the same thing. He saw it as his responsibility to do something different, to fill the void of whatever people were leaving out. So he cooked up a new persona inspired by Scarface, calling himself Nas Escobar. The analogy – the determined street urchin who hustled his way to the top only to grow complacent in a fog of excess and egotism – proved more fitting than he’d admit.

Rather than continue to examine the world around him with intelligent ghetto narratives, he churned out simplistic gangster tales that celebrated the trappings of his flashy new lifestyle. People kept saying that he couldn’t top Illmatic, so he kept reproducing the same style of album cover, kept assigning a hot producer to every track, trying in vain to reproduce that initial burst of magic. “I got greedy,” he admits. “I’m a fan of several different producers and I wanted all of that. Nah mean? I wanted all a’ that. And that’s what I needed to do.”

Each release would be preceded by a teaser track that seemed to herald the return of Nas, only for fans to discover it was one of few album highlights. The sales kept coming and the anticipation never dimmed, but after a series of flops and non-events, Nas couldn’t recover his standing in the minds of those who mattered – not with albums like The Firm (1997), a slick but unimaginative outing in corporate rap, or Nastradamus (1999), which featured uncharacteristically emotional numbers such as “Some of Us Have Angels” or “God Love Us”; not with his own line of Fila sneakers; and certainly not with a music video where he was crucified alongside P Diddy. Yet Nas revelled in it, claiming he was a lone soldier waiting for the game to catch up, believing that whatever damage he caused would inspire the next crop – even if his own reputation suffered.
Then in 2001 he took exception to Jay-Z assuming the mantle of king of New York, launching a full-on attack with mixtape track ‘Stillmatic (freestyle)’ – a foolish move, perhaps, when Nas was the only one who believed he was still on top. Jay-Z struck back by dropping ‘The Takeover’, dissing him for going soft and falling off since Illmatic [“Went from Nasty Nas to Esco’s trash. Had a spark when you started but now you’re just garbage. Fell from top 10 to not mentioned at all.”] It was the catalyst Nas needed to raise his game, inspiring a return to form with Stillmatic and, in particular, the retaliation track ‘Ether’ [“How much of Biggie's rhymes is gonna come out your fat lips? Wanted to be on every last one of my classics”].

“We naturally get wiser and softer,” says Nas. “I mean that comes with life. But with rap music there’s no chance to get soft! You have to fight for your moment to be different because it’s so street. You kinda get soft on ’em just as bait. You bait them in and once they start talkin’ shit, you trap ’em and you finish ’em off. So the competitive spirit of hip hop never goes away. You may get wiser, you may become more mature, your understanding of music may get better; you may get smarter and it may give you a more poised, patient way of recording. But at the end of the day, once you step into the ring – it’s on. It’s so competitive you can’t get soft even if you wanted to.”

Given the break-up of Nas’s first marriage and the death of his mother, the timing of the feud couldn’t have been worse. But it also provided an opportunity to step out of the game and reflect. He went through old notebooks, cringing at the arrogance but reassured by the potential. It was time to end his ‘fur coat era’, time to rediscover the introspection he made a name for himself with. God’s Son (2001) acted as a harbinger of maturity, ushering in a new phase where he began exploring emerging aspects of his personality. Then 50 Cent blew up, taking a pot shot at Nas on ‘The Piggybank’ [“Kelis said her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. Then Nas went and tattooed the bitch on his arm”]. But by now Nas had grown tired of petty feuds, believing they were eclipsed by a far more pressing issue: the increasing enslavement of rappers to the record business.
To the fans who believed that confrontation is hip hop, Nas’s public make-up with Jay-Z upon signing to Def Jam was considered a convenient cop out. But Nas argued that the gesture was bigger than the battle, that it was meant as an antidote to the industry’s politics and power struggles. So he declared that Hip Hop Is Dead in 2006, just to shake things up again. These controversies always bought Nas more time on the mic and, two years later, Nigger (later renamed Untitled) was another chance to impress those who hadn’t lost faith. But he knew he couldn’t go on like this. Even after five number one albums, a new tact was necessary, if just to make it interesting for himself.

“I have to prove myself every day, man. Every day. Probably the only one of my generation who has been out there as long or longer is Snoop or Wu-Tang. Outside of that, I’m the one ahead. Pow! If you look at the lifespan of the ones who came before me, a lot of them were short lived. No matter what people say about the art form of hip hop as a fad or a gimmick… I’m still here. I’m here and I’m kickin’ ass! I got more ass to kick.”

Enter Damian Marley – son of the man whose status in music Nas has always dreamed of achieving. Marley grew up listening to tapes of Biz Markee and Slick Rick that his cousin would supply him with and developed a thorough understanding of hip hop as a consequence. He saw something of his own style in Nas’s and became convinced that they’d make a formidable cross-genre partnership.

“Something I respect a lot about Nas is that he’s always been an artist with a sense of responsibility,” he says in a near-undecipherable Rastafarian accent. “He’s always risen above the money and bitches level, never been afraid to say something different, and can appreciate the impact that can have. Because it’s not all about money and bitches. That’s still there, and you need to have it, because where they’re comin’ from they don’t have money and they want girls to look at them. There’s a lot of that in reggae and dancehall too. It’s all about competition: rhyming about who’s the better MC. They’re just followin’ their dreams and nothin’s wrong with that. It’s a part of the culture. Nas has been through all that and he’s still hoppin’ up dem stairs. It doesn’t leave you once you find success.”

The invitation to collaborate on a reggae-rap fusion album about Africa represented a chance for Nas to switch his style up, to infiltrate the mainstream from a new angle and to finally work with one just production unit. It was also a welcome distraction from his public and costly break-up with Kelis… and her lawyers. [“Lawyers will be lawyers, man. Everyone’s getting’ their money. Working on this record got me through that. But let me not speak too soon.”]

As a best-of-both-worlds collaboration, Distant Relatives is an accomplished if uneven release, but it’s the undeniably fresh tracks like ‘As We Enter’ that may be enough to finally win back those who had written Nas off. Still, it’s no Illmatic and, with a hearty chuckle, Nas himself admits that that weight of expectation is likely to linger. “I have no control over it. My real fear is if people were to turn around and say, ‘you know what? Illmatic was bullshit.’ Because there are so many fans of that album, including myself, that if it turned out that the album wasn’t what people thought it was, that would be my biggest fear. It’s like people showin’ me a photo album. Anytime someone mentions Illmatic it puts a smile on my face because they hear it as an album, I see it as my life – a part of my life I never thought I would outlive because of the conditions that were around me at that time and how ignorant I was to the world. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I didn’t know I was still going to be here today. Certainly not. So when people mention Illmatic, I just have to smile. It almost brings a tear to my eye because I’m still here. I can’t believe it. But I’ve still got a lot of growin’ to do.”

Originally published in The Stool Pigeon, June 2010.

Leap of Faith: Canadian electro punks HOLY FUCK are devoted to the free

spirit of uncompromised music and they curse bands who need to be liked.

Lights out. Total darkness. A packed Berlin club gasps as the music keeps pounding: roaring and squealing, glitching and backfiring. This is not electronic music. There are no samples. This is not instrumental post rock. There are no crescendo-building templates. This is endorphin plundering, blood-vessel bursting electro punk that has the band pouring with sweat, struggling to pump their energy into instruments that were there only seconds ago. Gradually the audience begins to laugh, bemused by the band’s unwavering composure. But this is exactly what they want: a chance to be robbed of control and to stumble blindly into inspiration.

“It was fun!” recalls the band’s Brian Borcherdt, the next day. “Things like that are a metaphor for how it is. We’re going up on tightropes every night without safety nets, trying to do this thrilling, daring, weird music. It was hard to play but we get through it by embracing those moments. Like when you unpack your suitcases after flying, you know things are going to be broken or battery acid will have spilled everywhere; something will be ruined or isn’t going to work right. So while there’s obviously something serious driving us, you still have to go up there and do it with a smile.”

Holy Fuck are not a high-tech band. There are vocoders, guns, 35mm film synchronizers and various implements bought in a pawn shop for a dollar, but none of it is programmed. Since forming in 2004, the Canadians come up with songs by improvising and then record them live the same day. Much to the chagrin of every engineer they’ve worked with, they look for as little control over their mess of sounds as possible: no building tracks in pieces, stacking in layers or adding in after-effects.

“The concept was to do something different with compromised equipment, so we didn’t have too many options,” says Brian. “Therefore we surrender our desire to will it in certain ways. Just let it be what it is, make no apologies about it and hope it’s something unique. Sure enough, I don’t think a lot of people like it. These days there’s a desire to make everyone like what you do because of this blogosphere where everyone’s trapped in a horrible battle of the bands. It’s really annoying. I think it’s okay to let it be murky and weird; a bit distorted. It’s nice to be free of that and not give a fuck whether people like it or not.”

They are only interested in what the moment can uncover, submitting to the energy even if it requires crashing out for 10 hours afterwards — as it does today while the band’s tour bus winds through the Austrian mountains. Though Borcherdt and fellow keyboard-and-effects geek Graham Walsh comprise the group’s core, their third album, Latin, is mainly driven by drums and bass, making its live reproduction a physically demanding process for the other two members. Drummer Matt Schulz won’t even eat for two hours before going on stage so as not to risk soiling himself. “Luckily he’s a very fit, buff and handsome man,” says Borcherdt. “Personally I find the adrenalin and the frenetic pace of the songs snaps me out of whatever I’m feeling. You have to be very alert to hit all the buttons at the right time and execute all these little things. I’d find it harder to sing and play guitar when you’re not feeling up for it, like when you’ve just eaten a big kebab and you gotta sing sad songs into a microphone while burping up onions. I guess that’s what’s fun about it: not having to be this overly romantic figure, like, ‘Oh I’m trying to capture the essence of my retreat to Berlin’ or something.”

Meaning, then, doesn’t necessarily factor into the equation. It’s not songwriting in any storytelling sense, but an emotive spirit that pulsates with ambiguity. You can commit random acts of violence to it, but you cannot sleep with it on. You can assemble a child’s playhouse to it but you cannot perform surgery to it. Yet whereas many musicians act offended at the idea of people doing “other things” while listening to their music, Holy Fuck are perfectly happy to soundtrack everyday activities.

“I’d be a little disheartened if people were only putting our music on at parties because then you’re not really listening to it,” says Borcherdt. “Personally I like music the most when it’s in my headphones, when I can do something and feel moody. People tell me they were jogging or working around the house with our music on and they felt like it was driving them. That’s cool because it really means you’re listening. We’re an ADD generation and probably getting worse all the time, so there’s nothing better than knowing people are paying attention to it.”

Though glad that their throttling rhythms, patterned textures and cyclonic beats can penetrate the world of routine tasks and chores, the band would prefer to be considered more of a challenging listen than mere background noise. Sometimes when you look back at your favourite records, you realise they’re the ones you weren’t sure what to think of at first. Yet the minor details that stuck out as odd or even jarring at the time are often what keep them sounding fresh or intriguing years later. This is precisely where Holy Fuck sees themselves.

“That was a big, inspiring force behind deciding to start a band like this,” says Borcherdt. “If we had an endless sample bank to choose from or a digital plug-in on a computer, how would we know when a song is done? In the end it’s probably not going to be as sweet or as melodic or as perfect as it could have been in another’s hands or with other instruments… but maybe that’s the inspiration. It’s not really about what we’re playing; I don’t think Casios make us special. It’s more about the end result. So far the spark has been there when we need it.”

Originally published in The Stool Pigeon, June 2010

Twin Sister – Lady Daydream

If no other band sounds quite like Twin Sister, perhaps it’s because no one else would make music the way they do. You’d think they were asking for trouble: a group of songwriters writing their own parts in widely varying styles, then mashing them together by huddling around a computer or emailing songs back and forth until reaching consensus.

Yet these New Yorkers turn bubbling dream pop, jarring funk rhythms and ambient instrumentals into an unpredictable flow just as compelling as Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. That similarity doesn’t end with the music, however. Singer Andrea Estrella and guitarist Eric Cardona were a musical duo of high-school lovers before joining the backbone of another band, despite having ended their relationship. “If Eric and I are split on something,” says a soft-spoken Andrea, “I’ll pair up with the bass player and he’ll usually team up with the drummer. Dev (Gupta, keyboardist) is in the middle; he’s just neutral.”

Where Twin Sister differ, though, is that they enjoy twee-like levels of co-operation. They’ve just had a dinner party where each band member contributed two oddly distinctive dishes as a thank you to all involved in making their new mini-album, Color Your Life.

“We’ve been friends for so long that even when we get mad at each other, we know we’re just going to make up,” says Andrea, giggling nervously. “It’s like a family. We don’t shoot down each other’s ideas. When someone comes up with a part that’s completely different to what the rest of us are into, we always try to work with it and melt it in.”

This process is so transparent that the band have shared group emails on their website, illuminating the conflicts involved in deciding on a band name. That was back in 2008, shortly before self-releasing their first EP, ‘Vampires with Dreaming Children’. While no one took much notice at the time, Color Your Life went viral, netting them a record deal within weeks. In true team spirit, the band have quit their jobs together and scored a shared credit card.

“It’s been a big shock,” says Andrea. “In school I was never afraid of going up in front of everyone. But now the crowds are bigger, it’s like, ‘are they really enjoying it?’ When I feel like no one’s listening, I get all… clammed up. I need a drink or two. I prefer when everyone’s pumped and dancing. I hope we get more comfortable,” she says gently, adding a final nervous giggle. “I’m sure we will.”

The godfather of garage revivalism has a souvenir of England permanently stuck in his leg. Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer has burned through a dozen bands in as many years, quickly becoming the most prolific figure in San Francisco’s underground scene. But it was a joke side-project that almost cost him a limb. After smuggling cocaine into the UK while touring faux German techno outfit Zeigenbock Kopf, who were charting unexpectedly in Europe, Dwyer smashed up a bar in his underwear and awoke days later in a London hospital.

Glass had become lodged in his leg and the prognosis was amputation. “Every day they would trace the infection on my leg and it was getting closer and closer to my cock,” he says, pulling up a trouser. “I was just getting sicker. The doctor was under-staffed and irritated; wouldn’t give me any medication. Then these two Jamaican night nurses wheelchaired me to a phone and helped get me on a plane. My Chinese herbalist back home flushed out my blood; fixed me in days. Basically when your body can’t eject something infected, it gets encased.” He points at the bubble under his knee, inviting a touch. “So one day a piece of glass may come out and if it does, I’m going to have it polished and turned into an earring.”

At first Dwyer feared that mellowing his amphetamine intake might mean slowing down. But since starting Thee Oh Sees, another side-project-turned-full-time-band, he has been steadily gaining disciples one seven-inch at a time. While playing the Matt Groening-curated ATP festival recently, Dwyer even found two fans who’d each drawn one of his record covers on their chests. “It was an older gay couple, completely out of their minds. One had The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In, the other had Help on his chest. They were hilarious. We got a great snapshot and I was like, ‘that’s the next fucking record cover right there.’”

It’s easy to understand such enthusiasm. Thee Oh Sees are the pinnacle of garage pop: urgent but uplifting, infectious but intense. Within the space of nine albums, the breadth of their sound has coasted from gentle psychedelia to full-on hard rock, proving that garage can be well-produced and still sound edgy. The grittiness is partly due to Dwyer’s vocal style: a soft falsetto developed by singing through an old phone mouthpiece but perfected by regularly biting microphones.

“My teeth are fucked,” he says, wiping his fringe into his glowing blue eyes. “I can’t bite my nails anymore; can’t even open a packet of crisps. I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life, not so much anymore, but where once I thought, ‘my teeth are fuckin’ fine!’, now they’re like, ‘nooooo, we were actually cracked the whole time.’”

Wearing a sweat-stained wife-beater over black jeans and brogues, Dwyer blasts through a one-song sound-check before shouting, “That’s essentially that. How do you feel?” across the venue. “Um,” stutters a dazed sound engineer. “That’s twice as loud the last band to check the lines. As in, A LOT louder.” Dwyer just shrugs. “Wait till there’s a room full of English flesh soaking it in. Then we’re goin’ to get drunk and turn it up.”

Dwyer isn’t one to mess about. His rent in San Francisco is low enough that he can spend any downtime gleaming ideas, manufacturing inspiration for his rallying cries with brute force. A week is the longest his four-piece has spent recording an album (2007’s Sucks Blood), while the newly released Warm Slime was captured live in eight hours. Occasionally label reps come knocking, but Dwyer is happy to plough on independently, even if it means getting criticised for his prolific work rate.

“I get grief about that all the time,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m 35; I stopped caring about what people think 10 years ago. I mean we have to keep up with ourselves, frankly. Believe it or not, I edit out a lot of dog shit. So if people think I’m putting out shit now they can’t imagine how terrible it would be if I wasn’t laying down the law. The live set changes so much that to slow down to work on a masterpiece would mean playing songs that were three or four years old. And I don’t really have anything else to do! But If it starts to suck, tell me and we’ll talk about it.”

A warning appears in the inbox: She writes all music and lyrics, Him just produces and arranges, so assuming otherwise is a misconception best avoided. Normally this would suggest a difficult interviewee, but it’s hard to imagine indie’s platonic sweethearts being anything other than easygoing. You can sense it in their seamless pairing: she’s the cutesy Hollywood starlet who grew up in showbiz, he’s the soft-spoken, intensely private songwriter who forbids photography at shows. Together their wholesome duets channel American’s golden age of pop, replicating its timeless qualities with a saccharine finish.

In a dimly lit Marylebone hotel, M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel are munching on lunch ordered in from Wagamama. Ward resembles a freckled Johnny Depp, with streaks of grey flaming around each ear and his boots looking like they’ve been subjected to prolonged kicks of frustration. He’s well-known for getting interview fatigue before you can press record, treating each question like an invoice to worm out of.

Yet he steps up gamely to the first subject, enthusing about how to make a cover-version sound like an original and how David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ is over-produced. But a chill drifts in from the opposite side of the table. Deschanel does not look impressed: a faux-pas has been committed. As if on cue, Ward takes off his glasses, pockets them in resignation, and shuts down …until Deschanel spots something suspicious in the edamame. Ward springs forward as if discovering a bomb under the table. “Serious?” He scrutinises the beans in alarm before sending his manager out to fetch a lemon crêpe, retiring once more.

“I just pulled something strange out of my mange tout,” says Deschanel, happy to take over. “That doesn’t faze me: I will still eat the rest of it.” She proceeds to trot out the banalities with media-trained shrewdness, steering the conversation to underline who does what. “There are boundaries. I write alone. So that’s that.”

Vol. 2, as with its precursor, was a long-distance collaboration where Deschanel wrote songs in the middle of the night during film productions and emailed tracks to Ward for polishing. The uncanny similarities between their songwriting styles, she explains, are due to a shared love for classic acts like the Everly Brothers. But if that really is that, surely she doesn’t need Ward for interviews and photo shoots: the two things he seems to loathe more than anything.

Pressing for an explanation is difficult. So far Ward has remained curt and vaguely disdainful; always shrugging, yawning or holding his head in exasperation, spewing fragmented sentences like: “Because the songs were so good. Next question.” Songs are not up for discussion either. “Better to show, not tell,” mutters Ward. “We don’t like to give interpretations to people.” Deschanel agrees. “I won’t be doing VH-1 Storytellers.”

With shoes off, hair tied, a baby blue cardigan to match her bulging eyes, Deschanel resembles one of those dolls that plays back a pre-recorded inanity when you pull their string. Anything that veers from staid territory is batted away with: “I don’t know how to answer that question… It makes my mind go blank”. One unquotable stock answer follows another until the most interesting thing at the table is the sight of Ward trying to eat his crêpe with chopsticks. When asked if he prefers working in the background, such as with Jenny Lewis or Monsters of Folk, he mumbles in a disinterested monotone: “Yeah, no, um…um.”

“Obviously, Matt, I don’t want to answer this question for you,” Deschanel interjects, “but I feel like it’s all fun.”

“I’m very lucky to have a great… uh… job,” adds Ward. “Um… I love She & Him because I can just focus on guitar and arrangements. I love that perspective.” Is that because you find it more comfortable? “I don’t know… It’s something that takes me back to when I first started playing guitar. I never used to sing. I just played guitar into my 4-track. It was my first instrument… and um… I live a good life. I’m good right now. You know what’s funny about this crêpe, though? It didn’t have any lemon or powdered sugar. I think it was just a plain.” Oh. “Like, it had the subtlest hint of lemon. Could you think of a crêpe that was like that before? Probably with lemon curd or something, right?” Eh… “Okay, it’s lemon juice. There’s lemon juice there but normally, in France anyway, there’s like lemon curd or… preserves… but there wasn’t in there.” Okay. “I think there was lemon juice in it. Anyway… that’s going off the subject.”

The blockade is in force. So what does Ward not want us to know? Matthew Stephen Ward grew up in Ventura County, California to a Mexican mother and American father in a Baptist household where his older brothers and sisters jostled to control the radio. He started recording when he was 16 and, not wanting to wake anyone up, learned to sing quietly. He studied English at Cal Poly, moved to Portland with a handful of college pals and married a writing professor in 2001. Ward gave a tape to Howe Gelb (whom he was a big fan of) after a show and Gelb released his debut, Duet for Guitars #2. After five well-received albums he met fellow Californian Deschanel in 2006 during the making of The Go-Getter and together they recorded a song for the film’s closing credits. The actress had been writing country pop songs for years and though encouraged by her family, it wasn’t until she “found the right person” in Ward that she felt ready to launch a second career.

But they share another, lesser-known mutual interest: Twin Peaks, the surreal TV series by David Lynch and Mark Frost. Ward has been a long-time Lynch fan, occasionally burying references in his lyrics, while Deschanel’s mother acted in the show. “My dad directed three episodes too,” she says. “I was kind of obsessed with it, even when I was nine, because it’s so good.”

“Best TV show ever,” grunts Ward. When talk turns to the annual Twin Peaks festival, where hardcore fans flock to the show’s setting in rural Washington State, Ward pipes up, his attention stolen back from checking emails and reclining ever further under the table. “Well yeah, I went to one of ‘em…” For a moment, the mask slips. Then, realising he’s revealed something, Ward backpedals furiously. “I mean… I just happened to be in the area… I’m not that crazy about it that I’d go out of my way.”

At this point Deschanel sits up on the armrest of her chair, her legs swinging apart, vying for attention. If it wasn’t for those leggings, it’d feel like an outtake from Basic Instinct. Ward, meanwhile, holds a crumpled napkin to his mouth as if trying to knock himself out with Chloroform.

Okay, time to wrap it up. But not before one last attempt at understanding Ward’s reticence. For years, he only played support slots. Even with a strong following and several albums, fans frequently had to go to someone else’s show to see him. Sometimes they still do. But why? “I don’t know…” There’s a glint in his eye. He thinks about answering. We’re almost there. You can sense it. A wry smile creeps in; a hint of recognition. He opens his mouth, holds his breath… “I just like working with talented people.” The wall crashes down again, bringing silence with it… until Ward chuckles awkwardly. Showing, maybe, but not telling.

Originally published in The Stool Pigeon, April 2010

Avi Buffalo – What’s In It For?

For a teenager who signed with Sub Pop before finishing school, Avi isn’t afraid of lampooning those investing in his career. He impersonates a crusty old fart whenever quoting label reps [“rah, rah, this is the single, this is the single”], and a schmoozy cheeseball when recalling the A&R’s approach [“Ayyyyyyy, I hear you’re doin’ some stuff”].

But the 19-year-old Californian is entitled to sound frustrated with his development. At the age of 13, he was mentored by bluesman Joel Weinberg who would throw him up on stage every week. “At first I sucked and had no idea what was going on. He gave me a lot of tough love, showing me how to express myself in a tasteful way. Anyone can get a guitar tutor but he taught me more about the depth in using music emotionally.”

Avi began practising the guitar 14 hours a day, playing in three bands at a time, including one with older R&B musicians that would rehearse late into the night, causing his grades to suffer. After recording with Aaron Embry [Elliot Smith, Janes Addiction], the producer tipped off Sub Pop. “It threw me for a loop. My parents didn’t even believe me. I had no idea it could be this soon. It scared me because I wasn’t sure I was ready to be heard. I didn’t feel like my craft was sharpened. I still don’t. A lot of these songs are pretty old. So it’s a bummer that we’re going to have to work this record for a year straight.”
The indie pop prodigy seems to have outrun his own rate of progress. Infectious lead single ‘What’s In It For?’ was pivotal in getting Avi Buffalo’s self-titled debut released but all the kid hears is a clunkier, younger-sounding version of himself.

“It’s not what I want to be about. But if we were to leave it off the record, I don’t think Sub Pop would even put it out. They heard it and were like, [gruffly] ‘okay, we’re gonna do this’. It’s hard. I’m definitely lost, musically, and I need to find a path. I’m bringing a 4-track on the road. People have told me that it’s hard to find creative opportunities on tour, but I think I can totally make it work.”

Joseph Childress – Chariots [Exclusive]

Joseph Childress has made some of the best music you may never hear. After recording a debut of startling folk titled The Rebirths in 2006, Childress – the son of a minister from Colorado – up and left to hop trains across America. “I was a lonely mess; hungry and sick all the time. I don’t even remember where the name came from. Someone just started calling it that because the only place I had my name on it was the CD-R itself.”

He’d hitchhike between truck-stops, sleep in stairwells, work on a cattle ranch and even stumble upon an apparent dead body in an abandoned house. Then, after getting arrested in New Orleans, Childress fled to San Francisco where he lived in a car and walked dogs through Craigslist until he could afford to rent a cupboard in a friend’s house. After playing shows with Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, Childress eventually recorded another record with Mike Coykendall [M. Ward, Jolie Holland] but this, too, has gone unheard.

The problem lies in Childress’s reluctance to put himself out there. This is his first proper interview and even that took some negotiating. At a time when countless bands are scrambling for exposure, the 26-year-old sticks out like a hip hop artist uninterested in success for fear of having nothing to rap about.

“I once had a meeting with a publicist,” Childress explains. “He just gave me statistics and talked about money. It was so separated from the actual art that I got freaked out. So maybe that’s a part of it. You can feel when someone is emotionally invested in something. If it’s gonna happen, I feel like it should happen organically through a process I’m comfortable with. And if it doesn’t… I just create music because I have to. If not, I would explode.”

Childress has some friends who’ve become established names in music but he feels the rigours of the industry have stagnated their output. When people are focused on being famous, he says, it’s no longer about the music – not that he thinks anyone is lining up to sign him.

“I never thought that people would give a shit. I play shows and have a great experience… but then I almost feel like I fade away. Because who am I to be this type of person that people would latch on to? People tell me all the time that [my music] deserves to be out there, but I still don’t believe them.”

Having recently lost his job, Childress says he wasn’t able to eat much last week. But part of him relishes turning to the guitar as a healing device. “Sometimes I feel nervous about the fact that I enjoy writing songs when I’m struggling. In terms of success, sure, I want to reach more people. It just has to be done in a way that I know I’m not going to lose anything I hold dear in being happy and creating art. That’s the best I can give you. I think it really is a roll of the dice.”

*Joseph hopes to release The Rebirths this summer through his friends at Endless Nest.

Behind the velvet curtain of London’s Bush Hall, The Tallest Man On Earth is holding a hen that has somehow strayed backstage. “She knows musicians play here,” he says gruffly, seemingly confused by his own words. Kristian Matsson is near-delirious, barely resembling the impish figure who normally prowls the stage, bearing teeth, narrowing eyes and volleying back heckles with flashes of feistiness. Instead he’s saving himself so he can do all that later tonight.

Deadlines help him focus. It worked last year when the Swede set himself the goal of writing second album The Wild Hunt on the road and recording it in-between touring. It worked, too, when Matsson first went solo. He had been in garage bands for years but always played the acoustic guitar on the side, studying blues legends like Son House.
He gave himself two weeks to get an act together for his debut show, choosing a stage name that would force him to come up with something special. “If the songs weren’t good enough or the crowd didn’t like me, then the name would seem stupid.” His strum-and-wail style resulted from an epiphany after stumbling across a way to channel the energy of his blues heroes without matching their proficiency.

“I played a lot of finger-picking but I’m not the kind of person who can do that until you nail it,” he says. “Because I always get ideas on the way. I can’t sit around and wait for inspiration. I just put myself in the right position. I used to write my songs really differently and never felt connected to them.” He lets out a deep exhale. “‘Into the Stream’ came to me while messing around. Then I wrote another song with the same kind of feeling behind it and then another. Something happened. It went so quick.”

Matsson has chosen two rickety old seats for the interview but already it feels like the wrong choice. Our faces are intimately close. Close enough that when a passing mention of Bob Dylan causes his entire body to flinch, I feel it too. Eye contact becomes uncomfortable, so whenever he searches my face in scrutiny, I focus on his miniature ears, his wispy goatee or those black jeans that few other 28-year-old men could squeeze into. Together we stare at the big pair of black knickers sitting atop an open suitcase in the middle of the room.

Though initially guarded and self-conscious, Matsson slowly thaws. He often distances himself from his storytelling but, once disarmed, admits otherwise. “Yeah… it’s not just fiction. I say a lot of things sometimes.” He laughs nervously. “It’s the beauty of starting a story from your life and then letting it take a turn. You play around with your own character and see what happens. Sometimes you write a song that you think is about someone else only to figure out that it’s about you. For me, it’s not that straightforward. But you keep doing it and – bam! – inspiration comes. Just like how there’s always some part of you that’s not tired. You just have to try to find it.”

Harlem are quickly earning a name for themselves as party animals.

Not that they care. “Well, fuck!” bellows Curtis O’Mara. “Congratulations to us for being the most fucked-up band possible!”

Although these garage brats signed with Matador last year, O’Mara decided to keep his job as a chef, just to preserve his sanity between tours. “Right now it helps me be normal. If I’m out on the road doing crazy shit, it’s good to do something simpler so I don’t have that desperate anxiety that comes without a linear day-to-day life.”

Asked to elaborate on the crazy shit, O’Mara has no shortage of dope stories. “I was convinced I was trapped inside a cheeseburger. I ended up having a voodoo wedding ceremony in it with some girl I met.”

Bandmate Michael Coomers, meanwhile, was increasingly pre-occupied with the cloud he noticed creeping behind him all day. “Fuck! My mom’s gonna read this and then it’s going to be all over,” he says. “She’s already read enough stuff that makes me look like the worst kid she could’ve possibly had. Although, the other day, she said, ‘You’ve turned into less of a fuck-up than I thought you would.’”

The mischief began when O’Mara and Coomers hung out together as teens in Tucson, Arizona. “We terrorised everybody,” says O’Mara. “We’d drive around, run over garbage cans, pee on our friends, throw beer bottles. We took it there.”

They formed various punk bands, like Teen Suicide and Smart Pussy, each one spurred by the volatile dynamic developing between them. “Sometimes we come at each other like, ‘I can’t stand you!’” says Coomers, slightly disconcerted that he’s just found a heart with a swastika painted on the back of his van. “It’s definitely got all the trappings of any good friendship. Curtis used to refer to me as being the mother and, at first, I didn’t like that. But then I realised that mom’s the one who does all the work and dad just puts on an apron and says, ‘I’m makin’ hamburgers tonight!’ So, yeah — fuck dads, man. They’re the worst.”

They went their separate ways after school, with Coomers drifting from town to town as a couch-surfing stoner, getting fired from every job he’s ever had and either growing bored or wearing out his welcome in the process. His fascination with “witchy” places drew him to various haunted tourist traps, like the sites of Jack the Ripper’s murders in London, totting up plenty of ghostly encounters along the way.

“A little girl came to the bottom of my bed once after a shooting in Oakland,” he says between drags. “She told me to close the window and lock it. That one was really fucked up. Then I went to this house in North Carolina where somebody killed themselves in the bathroom. Though I didn’t know that, when I walked in I thought somebody was behind the shower curtain and pulled it back. So I went downstairs and told my friends, ‘You have a ghost up there!’ They all got bummed out ’cause that was their friend who died.”

The pair eventually reunited in 2007 to start a new band where they could alternate between guitar, drums and vocals. They couldn’t afford to tour so they’d sublet roach-infested shacks between cities, picking up bassist Jose Boyer after finally settling in Austin, Texas. Armed with belting hooks and the effortless swagger of vintage R&B, their bombast erupted into 2009’s self-released Free Drugs and took shape with its acerbic follow-up, Hippies.

But Coomers is keen to distance their sound from obvious reference-points, like the seminal 1972 garage compilation Nuggets, and bristles at any mention of ‘lo-fi’: “I’ve no idea what that fucking means. Low fidelity? Does it sound like a crappy stereo? Have you ever seen a record player that says ‘lo-fi’? You want to come listen to something on my lo-fi stereo?”

Indeed, he’s been stuck with that label since he began making music and insists that while others actively pursue the aesthetic of shoddy recordings, Harlem simply aren’t talented enough to accomplish anything else. He’s equally modest when it comes to their live show.

“Honestly I think there’s far more interesting stuff on TV. Like… like… like… like… do you know how many advances have been made in TV and how few have been made in music? It’s insane. They have dogs talking and it looks like the dog is actually talking. We can’t do that. We stand there with some archaic instrument acting like we just did a magic trick. If that talking dog was in a band, that’d be entertainment. Even if the dog was just the manager hanging out back or one of the band members’ girlfriends saying, [in squeaky voice] ‘You’re doin’ great, honey!’ I’d be like, ‘This is the best band I’ve ever seen!’”

Coomers is classic frontman material. He’s outspoken, funny, intelligent and temperamental, generating priceless quotes at every turn [“I’m pretty convinced the brain’s just some bullshit that’s a red herring”]. By contrast, O’Mara tears through his points with blunt force. Yet he gushes about discovering Nirvana while blasting a mixtape as a drunken teen, citing the lasting impacting it’s had on him. Recently the band’s growing taste for debauchery has made him reconsider that influence in another light.

“I didn’t think it was an issue until people were like, ‘Hey man, some pretty hardy partyin’ you got goin’ on there.’ I guess sometimes you get swept away. I just love playing music. If I can keep that, I won’t be so suicidal.” When asked if he sees himself burning out or rocking on until he’s senile, O’Mara turns gravely serious. “That’s a scary question. I think about it a lot. I’m not sure which one I’d be most satisfied with. I can’t tell. I just want to be remembered as a nice guy with a pretty face.”