Jordan Ranft, Author at Into the Void

Turn It Up a Little #2: Gratitude

Published on May 24, 2020May 25, 2020

In 2009 I spent three months in the Oregon high-desert in a wilderness therapy program for adolescents with behavioral and substance abuse issues. It was an involuntary program, the kind you read about in The Atlantic. Kids are woken up in the middle of the night by professional transporters, told to hurriedly pack their essentials, escorted to the airport, and flown to some remote reach of the American outdoors to learn accountability the hard way. During intake, they submit to a strip-search and relinquish all of their personal possessions in exchange for program-issued clothing and equipment. They are then brought out into the field, which in my case was an expanse of federal land in Central Oregon, where they join a group of other young maladjusts. The weeks go by. Time is filled with groups on how to use “I feel statements,” meetings with therapists, team-building exercises, outdoorsman skills, and physically grueling hikes from campsite to campsite. The term “shock therapy” has been thrown around to describe these institutions, their aim is to dissolve a person’s familiarity with their environment and identity in order to construct new behaviors out of the dissonance.

I don’t actually remember anything a therapist told me while I was in the program, all of my memories from my time in the wild are sensory. My numb face after waking up to find my tarp-shelter had collapsed on me during a blizzard. Listening to my name break into pieces of meaningless noise after shouting it every five seconds, as was required when you were out of staff eyeline, while trying to shit in a hole. What it feels like to wipe my ass with rocks, pinecones, snow, sagebrush, or dirt. The soft pop of my teeth breaking the skin of an apple. The off-key concert of several teenage boys singing their favorite songs to keep their minds occupied while hiking. The heat, the cold, the massive expanse of desert eating up our voices as we threw them as far as we could.

After completing the program I was sent to a longer-term facility in Colorado. Once we had passed through security and boarded our Denver-bound flight, the man tasked with escorting me handed over my iPod, which I hadn’t seen since intake some three months earlier. There was no music in wilderness, just terrible singing. I greedily shoved the buds into my ears and hit shuffle. Here was the first song that played.

Gratitude is not an American tenet. I am taught to want. To define every moment I occupy on a metric of negative space, what could be here but isn’t. It has been a decidedly effective means of getting me to buy shit that I don’t need, but has left me feeling unsatisfied. I’ve read some books that define gratitude as taking a moment to recognize that I possess everything I need to live, to love, to be content in the here and now. I think that is a reductive take and excludes those of us who are going hungry tonight, who have no place to sleep, who’s brain chemistry is fundamentally incapable of producing the necessary chemical chains for one to be happy on a whim. Do they not deserve the peace that comes from gratitude?

I propose gratitude as a singular moment, or a sequence of them, where the scales break beneath the weight of emotion. There is no taking stock, making sure the boxes are checked or needs are met, because what if they aren’t? Ten years after the wilderness I’m living pretty comfortably and, yes, do engage in that kind of mindful practice. But sitting in that middle seat in 2009, about to be flown to rehab, was a kid with nothing but inchoate fear humming beneath his skin. My mom and I weren’t speaking. My dad had been dead for four years and I wasn’t ready to approach the ledge to look at whatever boiling sea lived inside of me because of it. I was a good three years of relapsing away from even admitting I had a drinking problem.

Yet for the duration of that song, a strangely produced ballad about dealing crack and going to prison, I was overcome by gratitude. I hadn’t heard music in months and my mind could not hold anything but the immensity of listening to it again. I was grateful for iPods and Bay Area Rap and economy class middle seats. I had what I needed for three minutes, independent of all work there was still left to do.

I guess in the end I did learn something. I guess those sons of bitches in the desert got to me after all.

Turn It Up a Little #1: Cuffing Season

Published on November 21, 2019November 22, 2019

Turn It Up a Little

The slide guitar is always on the verge of tears. Ten strings stretched horizontally across a fretboard and picked at like a keyboard, it makes the loneliest sounds in music. Its timbre is warm, but the notes are strained fragile things. Warbling cries echoing from the bottoms of watered-down whiskeys and warm beers. Melancholy in its purest American form, it was prominent in every forlorn country ballad from the middle of the 20th century. Listen to its drunken weep behind Hank Williams Sr. in his 1949 song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

I love how Hank manages to convey a physically embodied sense of loneliness. We often forget that emotions aren’t simply an occurrence of the mind. We do not express them through cognition. As on the nose at this is to say, we “feel” our feelings. A person overcome with joy will experience an uptick in energy and tactile sensitivity. If someone is angry they will lose peripheral vision and their muscles will tense. When my anxiety kicks in I can pinpoint the exact place in my stomach where my guts begin coiling around themselves. When I am lonely I feel as heavy and blue as Williams’ whippoorwill, and flying, let alone leaving my house, seems impossible.

Psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers have been hard at work for millennia trying to determine where emotions come from. Are they physiological responses to thought, a chemical reaction from the firing of specific neural pathways? Or are they a primal form of thinking, a precursor dredged from the warm folds of our reptilian brains? I don’t have an answer for you, and I doubt this was on Williams’ mind when he wrote his song. He was far too busy noticing how long a night could last with no one to share it with, how even the moon moving behind clouds feels like an act of abandonment when you are the only one to see it.

New research suggests that loneliness can be as bad for us as smoking. Analysis conducted by Brigham Young University found that social isolation can increase the chances of premature death by up to 50%. It factors into high-blood pressure and cholesterol, depression, and has even been linked to degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. When we factor this in, it’s hard to accuse Williams of being melodramatic.

Of course, the loneliness referenced by BYU is completely different from the kind that Hank and Akon sing about. The study addresses social isolation, the songs focus on romance (specifically a lack thereof). I feel as though a lot of songs about love are actually about longing. Yearning is just more common an emotion than satisfaction, and so there is a bigger market for music that soothes the lonely heart. I’m not pompous enough to say there is something inherently weak about wanting to find someone to be with, and I’m not cynical enough to say I don’t want what the love songs talk about. However, I find myself asking why this impulse is so strong and so collective. Why is romantic loneliness powerful enough to keep me up at night and running through YouTube playlists about solitude? Is it another trick of the reptilian brain, my animal-self squeezing the necessary glands to make me seek a mate and carry on my bloodline? Is it destiny, am I shirking a higher purpose by being alone? Or have I just been programmed by the culture I live in to feel less-than if I’m single? At this point, you should be able to guess that I have no answers, just a bunch of stupid emotions.

I’m afraid that being alone means that I’m not good enough to be with someone. In the past, I’ve treated that by jumping into relationships predicated on disproving that fear. I wouldn’t recommend it. Taking a step back, it’s obvious how very cruel it is to make someone else responsible for our insecurities. A more fitting term for relationships like this would be “hostage situations.” I’ve decided that the best thing for everyone is to work on myself and wait until I’m comfortable being alone before I start looking to be with someone. It’s not a mind-blowing revelation, I’m not waiting for a medal in the mail for exhibiting a basic aptitude for emotional health, but I will say that so far it’s been going quite well. I hang out with friends, I hike, I go to concerts and get paid money to write about them, I meet with my therapist and talk about being afraid, and I’m seeing measurable improvements in my self-esteem. It’s pretty textbook shit. If you work on yourself you end up feeling better, who would have guessed?

This isn’t a confessional blog, and I still get lonely sometimes. I’m writing this because we are now entering a time of year known as “cuffing season.” The term has been adopted over the past few years to describe the fall and winter months when people experience an increased desire to pair off and hunker down with someone. Psychologists think it may be a simple matter of body heat. It is colder during this time of year so that dumb animal-brain starts craving something warm to sleep next to. Another theory is that the shorter days lead to an increase in social isolation, we are more apt to go home for the night than go out with friends, and we start looking for someone to keep us company. It could just be we want to be loved and the holiday season tends to have a special kind of whimsy to it. Again, there is nothing wrong about any of this, body heat, companionship, magic, or love, but I worry there are people who, like me, are willing to compromise themselves and another person in order to obtain it.

If all of the music throughout history can teach us anything, it's that you aren't alone in feeling lonely. It is, apparently, one of the most common things for people to feel, and damnit if we haven’t soundtracked every inch of that emotional terrain. I don’t know what kind of comfort that provides you, but you should know that loneliness didn’t kill Hank Williams, although I’m sure he probably did cry, and last I checked Akon is doing all right. Loneliness passes, it always does, it’s the nature of these fickle emotions to come and go. So as the days get shorter, the air becomes crisp, and you are suddenly seized by that heaviness, remember how very intact you are. Call your friends. Put on your favorite jacket (you know the one) and go to a concert. Get a therapist. You are good enough even when that prickly creature in your brain is howling something awful, and there are thousands of songs to get us through the nights that last longer than they should.
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Play Music When I Die

Published on July 5, 2019July 9, 2019

Music

Morbid as this may be, I think a lot about the music I’d want to be played at my funeral. Death is so large and infuriatingly inevitable. A black ship in the fog, creeping closer and closer to port, its outline understood but its substance and heft unknowable. You could argue that art itself exists because it functions as a collective pool of our prefrontal cortexes’ attempts to grapple with our mortality. Creativity, a byproduct of an unsolvable equation.

On the contrary, we may also view art as our closest proximity to conquering death. Songs, books, plays, and paintings, if they’re good enough, outlive their creators and can be passed, like talismans, from one living set of hands to the next. Maybe, then, I fixate on the music they’ll play at my funeral because it reduces my death to something small enough to hold. I am gone, here is a playlist, a bric-a-brac landscape of everything I hope you feel when you think of me.

Thousands of years ago we took sounds from the world around us, strained them through the lenses of ourselves, and made music by slapping animal hide drawn taught over a frame, by pushing breath through dry reeds. In the end, we disperse back to the earth—the mother of song—and leave the living to play us off properly.

Two weeks ago, on a Saturday afternoon, a good friend of mine texted me that he had found his brother lying on the floor at home, dead of an overdose. I was at his house within an hour, the coroner van was just leaving as I pulled up. I’ve been sober five years now. Anyone with some time under their belt will tell you that if you stick around long enough in recovery, you’ll make a lot of friends who don’t make it. That never makes it easier, though. Death has the unique ability to hit as hard the tenth time as it does the first and every time someone I know dies I am at the mercy of my grief equally.

I’ve never heard a good answer to the question of what to do when someone dies. For that matter, I’ve never given a good answer either. As far as I can tell, the best that I can do is show up for the person I think is hurting the most and just sort of amble around with them. So that’s what I did with my friend. Two other close friends and I took him to the beach and then to a Chinese restaurant, we toasted to his brother and held him when he broke down. We talked about what happened and also about movies and also about nothing in particular. We gathered up with him and collectively whittled away the minutes of that first day, and none of it felt entirely real. And every time we got in the car I asked him if I should play music, and he would say yes. The songs didn’t matter, I threw my library on shuffle. But I think we were both terrified of what lived in the silence right then, something endless and beyond language. So we hid in the half-listened sounds of Sam Cooke, Led Zepplin, Top-40s pop, and whatever else until everyone was tired enough to finally fall asleep.

I met with my friend the next day. It wasn’t much easier than the first. We went to a meeting together because I guess it’s always good to stay sober when you’re grieving. On the way home I asked him if I should play some music. He said yes and then made a specific song request. He asked me to play “How to Save a Life” by The Fray, which some of you may remember as the feel-bad song of 2007, a ballad about trying to stop someone from dying. I asked him if he thought that might be a bit on the nose. He laughed. I did too. Then I played the song. On the drive back to his house, we shouted along to every lyric with the windows down, unconscious of how very deranged we must’ve appeared.

A song will never raise the dead, and when it ends the quiet comes rushing back, bringing with it all that heavy pain we don’t know how to face. But for four minutes in my car, my friend and I were lifted up, by a ridiculous song from a ridiculous decade, and offered a glimpse beyond the cold steeples of our grief. Regardless of whether or not it signifies anything larger, music mattered to us at that moment more than anything else.

The music that is played when those I love to come to mourn me isn’t really about me at all. I worry about what will be played because I hope it comforts my people the way they need it to. Death is endless, and songs are short. But I hope my loves hear something that reminds them of me, and I can reach back across that final threshold, a warm hand for them to hold, if only for a moment.
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Into the Noise Pop, Day 1: The Love Language and Teenage Fanclub

Published on February 26, 2019February 27, 2019

Live Shows/Music

There are spots of carpet at the San Francisco Fillmore that are so sticky they almost pulled my shoes off. It’s quite startling. I’d be standing with my note pad or camera, trying to think of something snappy to write for this article, and when I’d shift my feet it felt like the floor was trying to pull me deeper into it. If there wasn’t music playing I’d expect to hear an over the top slurping noise, as though I was walking through a swamp. During the headlining set, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub paused for a moment between songs and said with a thick Scottish drawl, “Jerry Garcia, James Brown, Hootie and The Blowfish. They all played on this stage. Now we are too.” It didn’t feel like he was addressing the crowd as he spoke. His eyes darted around the ceilings and walls, drinking in the arches and contours, realizing he had the same view now as many legends did before him. He was speaking to the spirits in the room, he was speaking to the room itself. It was a fitting venue to kick off this year’s Noise Pop Fest, The Bay’s love letter to independent music and local talent. What better place to inaugurate something than from a stage with so much history. What better place to watch it happen than from a carpet with just as much.

All I want is to save the world, but I’ll settle for my scene. The Bay Area arts and music community has been taking hit after hit for decades now. Money has pushed generations of artists out to the fringes. The monoculture of tech has homogenized what art and which voices are represented. These struggles aren’t unique to where I live, but I can’t think of many places where they are more severe. So here I am on day one of six, covering an independent music festival, writing an article I imagine only a couple hundred people will see. Fighting the good fight, if you will. And I gotta say, so far it’s been quite delightful.

With how immediate and severe everything in the news cycle is these days, I think we are all prone to forget how nice it feels to have a pleasant time without it being brought into a larger sociopolitical context. I walked into the Fillmore on a Monday night fully expecting to leave with some badass, Lester Bangsesque angle on how to kick this series of posts off, and instead, I noticed how happy the well-packed room was. Everyone just seemed stoked to have something to do on a Monday. The Love Language, the night’s opener, played an energetic set full of swooping melodies and taut, lofty indie rock. Stuart McLamb, a stringy man with stringy hair, sang beautifully about love and loss. The band is apparently well known for their lyricism. I couldn’t really decipher any of the lyrics, but the cadence at which they were delivered left me feeling as though something profound had been said. After I left the photo pit, I went to the back of the venue, and noticed someone in the sound booth had lit incense. Given that most concerts smell like B.O. and stale weed, it was such a welcome change of pace.

During the intermission, I met a guy from Scotland who had seen Teenage Fanclub 17 years prior in their home city of Glasgow. “They were a much bigger band, then,” he told me. “It was a crazy show.” Another man approached us and told us he thought he was the only Teenage Fanclub fan in San Francisco. I’ve never seen someone so excited to be wrong. A lot of people weren’t even aware that this was the first night of a larger festival, which at first was concerning, but then I realized how cool it was that all these folks just came out for a show independent of a larger event.

Teenage Fanclub was peak dad-rock. It took me a minute to get into it. I’m so used to screaming, rapping, and belting that I wasn’t prepared for singing that was softer, flatter, and relied on subtle harmonies. Between songs, Norman would tell non-stories to the crowd. “We sat next to a famous Australian musician on a plane last week,” he said, “we aren’t going to play any of his songs, though.” There was a beat of silence before the crowd realized that he was done talking, someone screamed “WOOO,” and they went into the next song.

It threw me off a bit. Here I am trying to peel back the layers and write something compelling, deep, and masturbatory, and here is a really enjoyable show. No veils were pierced at the Fillmore last night. Instead, another bright layer was added to the venue’s immense history, people had a nice time, and I got home before 11:15. Honestly, that’s how a Monday night should be.

Aesop Rock and Tobacco Are a Dream (Nightmare?) Team on ‘Malibu Ken’

Published on January 27, 2019January 28, 2019

Music/Music Review

There will always be a subset of Aesop Rock’s cult following that prefers his earlier music on Def Jux when he was working almost exclusively with Blockhead. Personally, though, I’ve found everything he’s released since his move to Rhymesayers to be way more compelling. Late-career Aesop Rock has allowed himself to become more human on the mic, injecting humor, confession, and, most importantly, specificity into his projects. With how unbelievably dense and cryptic he can be, the salience of a subject in his more recent endeavors has, if not blown them open, left the doors to understanding his lyrics slightly ajar. Even though you may not catch every, or many, of his tangled references, knowing that at the core of this Gordian knot lies a discernable idea, experience, or object tethers you to the whirlwind.

This clarity was most apparent on his last solo album, The Impossible Kid, for which he earned substantial critical praise, but it was present, although inchoate, on Skelethon as well, where he rapped about mummifying a cat, Bob’s Donuts in San Francisco, and refusing to eat vegetables when he was young. The Tom O’Bedlam character from King Lear comes to mind; Edgar masquerading as a deranged vagrant in order to cover his true identity from those that may hurt him. The last decade has seen Aesop Rock slowly emerge from a protective shell of obfuscation, still a bit mad, but more accessible than ever.

Malibu Ken takes a step back from the emotional weight of TIK, putting Aes’s dark humor and hip-hop roots in the spotlight, and it’s his most successful collaboration to date by leaps and bounds (with an exception of Bestiary by Hail Mary Mallon maybe giving it a run for its money). Regarding Tobacco’s contribution, think less “producer” and more “living pile of analog synths, Betamaxes, and discarded Atari cartridges.” The man, known best for his work with Black Moth Super Rainbow, is a maestro of queasy, vintage electronica, and his personality shines just as bright on the record as his rapping comrade. From the twinkling blips of chiptune over a static-laden bassline on “Corn Maze” to the vocoded hook on “Suicide Big Gulp,” he sets the project in a glimmering, 8-bit purgatory.

The album hits its stride when the two artists are playing to each other’s strengths: Tobacco amplifying the metallic rustle of Aesop’s voice and cadence, and Aesop letting the flickering neon of Tobacco’s production to swell and take up space on the songs. I’d say this happens on about three quarters of the tracks, but on “Save Our Ship” and “1+1=13” it didn’t seem like they were able to connect in the way they needed to. The rest of the album, though, is inspired.

It’s really nice to watch Aesop Rock be as weird as he wants to be, and on Malibu Ken, it seems like he’s having a blast throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. “Acid King,” the first single released from the album, recounts the killing of Gary Lauwers by Ricky Kasso, the “Acid King” of North Port. Aesop weaves the story in his usual circuitous way, making sure to establish a sense of time and place through a litany of references. “Same year Bowie dropped / Two horns hatched and matured to gore Northport’s ’84 / Here is ’84: Mary Lou Retton, Excitebike, AIDS, Jeopardy!” Another standout is “Churro,” which is simply about the time two bald eagles ate a cat on a live stream, with Aesop contemplating both the conservational and brutalist implications of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Aesop has always been funny, but this is perhaps him at his most overtly hilarious:

You could be sitting in your office feelin’ testy
Spilling coffee on a spreadsheet
Thinking “Jesus Christ, my life is dismal”
Two seconds later, you could stare into a portal
That reminds you there is more
Than what your awful nine-to-five permits you

. . . I wonder if some dude was sad because his cat had run away
And thought, “Maybe I’ll load these eagles up to feel connected”
Then got to watch his little Fluffy torn to pieces by the very nature
He had sought to ease him through his deep depression

We also see him returning to his roots as a fundamentally good rapper on “Suicide Big Gulp,” which is as straightforward of a boom-bap track as you can get on a collab between an experimental electronica artist and the king of esoteric lyricism. The beat is funky, slapping with chunky bass-synths, and breaks open into a dream pop hook, replete with a robotic chorus rising above a sinewy string section. Aesop makes it clear that he is here for the sole purpose of talking shit, but of course, his brand of shit-talking is different than the standard lines of bravado that you can expect from other artists: “Ill communication aside / I’ll kick a train off a bridge, / I’ll smack a plane out the sky/ I’ll throw a car into the ocean, no one waving goodbye.”

For anyone looking for a spiritual successor to TIK, you are going to have to wait a bit longer, presumably until Aes’s next solo release. Malibu Ken is more of a worthy detour for two independent artists with successful solo careers. It feels like Tobacco and Aesop, who have been friends and infrequent collaborators for over a decade, were trying to figure out what to do over their summer vacations and landed on making some crazy songs together. This does nothing to diminish how great the album is, though. Beneath the kitschy, one-off, fun of it all lies a sound, unlike anything I’ve heard before. So give it a listen, and remember: “If a silhouetted man is seen emerging from the flames / You should probably treat him different even if he looks the same.”

Dilly Dally’s Katie Monks Talks Self-Care, Screeching, and Scaring Fans

Published on January 11, 2019January 20, 2019

Interview/Music

In 2015, Dilly Dally released its debut album, Sore, and blew the hell up. The record, a sludgy and glamorous showcase of how to make heavy rock that pops in the modern era, found its way onto multiple Best of the Year lists. The band accrued a global fan base and began touring internationally. Katie Monks, the lead singer and guitarist, with her pull-no-punches lyrics and blistery—shrieking—voice, was touted by some as the next preeminent grunge vocalist. All in all, not too shabby for a first release.

Then in 2016, after a year-long touring schedule, Monks, guitarist Liz Ball, bassist Jimmy Tony, and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz found themselves at an impasse of exhaustion, mental health issues, and a general uncertainty whether or not this was what they wanted to do. Instead of ignoring these issues and pressing on towards possible oblivion, Dilly Dally made the decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll—and infinitely more mature—decision to dissolve, reassess, and recoup with no guarantee of reforming. There was, for a time, fear that Dilly Dally would be a flash in the pan. Leaving behind a single, explosive, record that made their subsequent absence all the more salient.

You can probably guess how it all resolved, though, because here we are, with Dilly Dally back on the road and their second album, Heaven, making the rounds since its release last September. Heaven succeeds Sore with the same foundation of doomy grunge bangers. It still feels like Reinhartz is trying to give you a concussion with each kick-thump and crash of cymbals. Ball’s guitar is still distorted, psychedelic, and splendid. And I’m still very worried for Monks’ vocal chords. However, something new has sprouted up from the foundational similarities. Where once the lyrics extolled apathy and angst, they now spring words of hope and loving yourself and survival.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Monks, who was enjoying some downtime after an extended tour with FIDLAR, about screaming, the Toronto music scene, and what it was like working on the new album. Check out the interview below.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Jordan Ranft: I saw you live a few months ago in Oakland and I need to know where you learned you could screech like that, for so long, on stage.

Katie Monks: [laughs] I don’t know! You know with this new record, when people ask what’s different about it vocally, it’s that the first one was more yelling from the stomach, shouting, and on this most recent record there’s more singing and screeching. And the screeching comes more from the throat, a texture you can make with it, and not letting too much air out at one time. It’s a breathing thing, I suppose.

Do you do vocal exercises or coaching to be able to do that?

I’ve never had a vocal coach before. When I was a teenager I used to spend a lot of time in my room experimenting with my vocals. What I’ve always especially wanted to do in music is make sure that the vocals were the most important part. I’ve just always cared a lot about the delivery of the words in the song; almost more than the words in the song themselves.

It certainly makes you guys unique. Do you have to do anything between shows to keep your throat from tearing apart?

The first week of tour, yeah. I’ll need to do some basic vocal warm-ups or a bit of singing. After the first week, it’s like my instrument is all warmed up. It’s still something I have to take care of. It’s still a bit stressful sometimes, you know, wanting to take care of my voice. But to be honest, it’s never not shown up to a show. It’s always arrived.

Dependability is a rare commodity.

It’s definitely humanly possible [the screeching]. Despite the many people who come up to me after the shows and go “How do you do that? How is that possible?” Peoples’ minds are just blown that it’s even possible, and then I try to explain to them how I do it, and they get really bored and just go “Cool, can I buy a record?”

So, you just got off the road playing with FIDLAR. What was the first thing you did when you got home?

I spent about three days straight in a one-bedroom sublet and ordered fifty dollars of Indian food to the house. I realized all the weed dispensaries were closed, so that was kind of annoying. But yeah, I just ate no Mexican food, no eggs and diner food, tried to eat more healthy and lay around and was a hermit. It’s not very interesting; it’s the opposite of tour.

Did you grow up in Toronto?

I grew up in a boring suburb north of Toronto. We had, like, a mall and a bunch of parking lots.

What was the music scene like out there? Were you engaged in the local scene as Dilly Dally was coming up as a band?

Yeah, so, how Liz and I first became friends is, on the weekends, we would take the bus down to the city and go to concerts. We’d go see Death From Above and whatever else was cool back then . . . The Rapture and shit—all that rock music in the early 2000s. We’d come down and we’d go to shows on the weekends, and go shopping for vintage T-shirts. Then we moved here when we were nineteen. We didn’t know anybody, and we would just go to bars and walk up to people who looked like bassists and drummers and ask them if they played music! We started holding try-outs for the band. We thought we were living the dream at the time, just being able to play house parties or play in our apartment with each other. We were just party girls who were obsessed with music. Then, eventually, we found this punk scene, and, I don’t know, I have a hard time talking about it because in the last campaign we really repped that Toronto scene hard, but some people in the scene felt like we were misrepresenting stuff. So attaching it to Dilly Dally’s story—it feels like there’s a lot of aspects to that scene that haven’t been showcased publicly, and we’re one of the bigger bands to come out of it. So, I have a hard time talking about it because all the punks here get fucking mad at me. [laughs]

I don’t think that’s a Toronto-specific thing. I’ve met angry punks from everywhere.

Well, you know how it is. Journalists will talk about it and it’s like, “Oh, but what about this band? And what about that band?” I’m definitely not the leader of the scene. We just have lots of super-talented friends, and there were a lot of cool DIY spaces there back in 2013. Me and Liz finally found people there who wanted to make aggressive music, and it wasn’t this indie-pop stuff, or indie-folk. We always just really liked simple songs that were moody and dark, and not over-thought or over-technical.

I think that makes it accessible in a way that draws in a lot people who might be otherwise afraid of getting into that specific genre because they feel like there’s some barrier there. So I can appreciate that.

Yeah . . . I definitely don’t feel like I get better at writing music. I was thinking about this the other day—the idea of, “Oh, well you need to work on your craft every day.” And I’m at this moment where it’s like, am I spending too much time on the visual aspects of Dilly Dally and not enough time on the music? And getting better at my craft? This feeling that it should just be about the music. But then I thought, I mean shit, so many band’s first record is their best. It’s not one of those things where you need to bang your head against the desk until you come up with something that’s better than what you’ve done before. It should be a natural process.

It’s interesting that you say that because I was thinking about it when I was writing questions. It seems pretty well covered in other interviews that you guys had some tribulations after your debut, and then a hiatus before coming back. I don’t feel the need to dig back into that, but one thing I found fascinating in relation to what you’re saying right now is that there’s a definite leap in emotional complexity and texture between projects. Heaven is so much more fleshed out. So I wonder if maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough credit in terms of developing craft. It seems like you’ve put in some kind of work, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think there’s definitely been an evolution, and, as I say, it has to happen naturally. I think in a lot of ways we needed to have that break for the band. Because it was like, “Welp, maybe we won’t keep going,” and everybody individually was able to then consciously decide “Yeah! Let’s do this again.” It just had to be a natural process. If it was assumed we would do more, then maybe that would have been dishonest. Maybe every band, after their album cycle, should stop and check in with themselves. Ask, “Why am I doing this, and do I want to continue?”

What was that first day back to work on the new album like after everyone returned on their own accord?

It didn’t really feel like the first day back. Leading up to it, Ben and I would jam, or Liz and I would jam. We jammed with a couple other bassists and tried to work on songs. I certainly was working on music a lot by myself. Then one day I called up Tony and said “If you want to come in for practice, we can play and see how it feels.” It didn’t feel like, “Oh! It’s the first day back and now we’re gonna start a new record!” It was very much one step at a time. And we really needed that. I mean there’s a song on the first album called “Green” that Liz and I wrote when we were eighteen back when we first moved to Toronto and didn’t know anybody. We’d been playing that song for seven years before Sore came out, and then we toured Sore for two years. We were ready to write new music. Not to mention the election and shit that happened in that space in time.

You guys are still touring Heaven right now, so do you think there’ll be another hiatus, then, when that’s done? Is there a third album on the horizon?

I think that this time we’re trying to take care of ourselves and take care of each other a lot more than we did before. Certainly now we want to be a bit more picky with the tours we do and how we spend our time. How we spend our energy. I don’t know, but I have faith that we can carve out creative time within this campaign to plant the seeds for the next record.

That leads into another important question. On Heaven there is this thread of self-care and a celebration of treating yourself with love within these brutal rock songs that you’re playing. I wanted to know what self-care looks like for you guys when you’re on the road now.

It’s tough. I was hanging out with a bunch of other musician friends last night and talking about tour. A friend and I were asking each other, “What’s the dynamic like in your bands? Like, who’s confrontational?” and we both agreed that the worst is when everyone is quiet and passive-aggressive. The thing is that you can be close—best—friends with someone, but the situation and reality of tour is that it’s really hard and really draining emotionally. It’s physically draining too, but emotionally it’s just so stressful. And that’s it. It completely takes over your life for however long you’re on the road, and there is something amazing about that, and beautiful, that you can leave your life behind and any problems you have back home, and you can state that. But you’re also leaving all the good things: your routines, your time alone, your creative times to write music or hang out with your friends. The situation is tough, and I think, now, we all know that. That it’s external. So whenever we butt heads with each other—or feel like we’re going a little crazy, or feeling depressed, or feeling anxious—we can recognize that that’s just what tour does to you. The positives are so amazing, though. The feeling of going onstage every night with your best friends and playing music. It’s still totally worth it. So how do you maintain yourself within that? I guess just, like in our song “Doom,” remember who you are. What’s inside you is sacred. Remember who you really are back home and never lose touch with why you’re doing this, why you’re on the road, why you’re putting yourself through this hell. It’s because you love music, and you’d rather be doing this than anything else.

Okay, those were all the heavy questions, but I got two more. When I came out to see you play in Oakland, we talked for, like, five minutes and you mentioned that with the band you opened for before touring with FIDLAR you felt like you accidentally scared the shit out of the crowds. What happened with that?

[laughs] Yeah! We opened up for Grouplove and those guys are so talented, and I was really excited that they asked us to come on tour. We’d never played venues that big before. But it definitely felt like we would go up onstage every night and people were just like, “Woah . . . weird.” Their eyes were filled with terror, and there were all these little kids who listened to the radio and came to see this pop group play. It was kind of disheartening. It was actually the last tour of that album cycle, and it was the month before and after the Trump election. It was a very weird note to leave things on. But what’s really cool about the FIDLAR tour that we just did is that those little teenagers that saw us open for Grouplove—maybe before they were fourteen? Well, now they’re sixteen or seventeen, and they’re secretly drinking before the show, and they’re wearing vintage T-shirts with stains on them, showing up, getting ready to push people around, and they’re angry and angsty. So a lot of these kids would come up to the merch table and say, “We saw you guys open for Grouplove. We liked you back then, but we really like you guys now.” It feels like we got to plant a seed. So even though we scared the shit out of all of them, I think now some of them are old enough, and angry enough, to understand where we’re coming from.

All right, last question: Could you recommend a movie and an album for people to check out?

One of my favorite movies is Stranger Than Paradise. It’s Jim Jarmusch’s first movie and there’s only, like, three characters in it, and the only song that plays is the one that goes [sings] ‘I’ve got a spell on you, cause you’re miiinnnee.’ It’s all black and white, low budget, minimal. And then for the music, I really love Sinéad O’Connor’s The Lion and The Cobra. It’s one of my favorite records. I think it’s Sinéad’s first record, and it’s so weird and so fun. There’s so many different instruments and vocally it’s insane. One of the most interesting records I’ve ever heard.”

Dilly Dally is getting ready to kick off their headlining tour through Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Buy a ticket to a show near you!

Clutch Guitarist Tim Sult Talks Tour Buses, Family, and Running a Label

Published on December 21, 2018December 21, 2018

Interview/Music

Clutch, the hard rock band out of Maryland, has been playing for over twenty-five years and has amassed a devoted following for its consistently amazing live performances; skull-cracking fusion of metal, blues, and funk; and lyrics that come straight from the unhinged fever dreams of Philip K. Dick. Made up of singer Neil Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult, drummer Jean-Paul Gaster, and bassist Dan Maines, Clutch is one of rock and roll’s most hardworking and unique bands.

Two months ago we reviewed Clutch’s newest album, The Book of Bad Decisions, and are now fortunate enough to follow that up with an interview with Tim Sult, the band’s guitarist. Tim hopped on the phone with Into the Void music writer Jordan Ranft last month before soundcheck in Philadelphia to answer questions about the band, being a family man, and the virtues of tour buses.

Jordan Ranft: So let’s go from the start. Clutch started out in Maryland in the early ‘90s, yeah?

Tim Sult: Yup, we played our first show in Washington D.C. in August of 1991.

Do you remember who else was playing that show?

Yeah! We played an outdoor show with a D.C. band called Thud, and they were like a noise rock band. Super great guys, we were good friends with them. They worked at a local club that we all went to called the 9:30 Club. Once we played that show with them, we ended up getting in with that venue and got on a lot of other shows there opening for national acts and built our fan base out in the D.C area.

How did that first show come about?

I’m pretty sure we gave a demo to the guys that worked at that venue. A cassette demo.

Any songs on that demo end up on any of the later albums?

I think one of the songs turned into “Animal Farm” off of our second album, and the song “Far Country,” which is on our first EP, was an older song from even further back. Those two are probably the only super old ones that we kept from the very beginning.

Speaking of the very beginning, you guys all met in high school?

We all went to the same high school, but I didn’t actually know JP or Neil. I only knew Dan, and I didn’t start playing with the guys until after I graduated.

When did you start playing guitar?

I was fourteen. When I was younger I lived out in Minnesota with my parents and I wanted to learn guitar, and where we lived there was absolutely no place to take lessons anywhere. So I waited it out a couple years until we moved to Maryland and, finally, there were places to take lessons like everywhere. My parents were cool enough to buy me a guitar and sign me up for classes at a local shop.

What kind of guitar did they get you?

It was either from Sears or JC Penny. It was literally out of the catalog. I had that Sears guitar and a 2-watt amp.

Cover art of ‘The Book of Bad Decisions’ by Clutch.

So you guys started playing together right after high school, but when did that transition to “Hey, let’s make this a band and try to do something with it”?

I think there was always the intention of wanting to do something with it. Pretty soon after we started getting some shows this small label based out of Delaware approached us about putting out a project. That was the first thing we ever did as far as working with a “label.” We got together with them and did four songs and put out our first 7″ called Pitchfork. The label was called Inner Journey Records. It got out there and started getting around the country and people were hearing it and reacting to it.

What was the first project you put out that got a bigger, commercial response? Because I know you guys were on the charts a couple times back in the mid-2000s.

Yeah. I mean I don’t think Clutch has ever had like a big commercial response. We’ve had a few songs that were played on the radio. Had a song called “Careful With That Mic” that got quite a bit of radio play. But none of that really translated into anything. Our shows were still the same.

Okay, but at twenty-five years I think it’s safe to say Clutch has some staying power, you know what I mean? Are you still wondering if your career as musicians will be successful, or are you pretty confident you managed to cut a path?

[laughs] I’m pretty sure it’s way too late to stop doing this and start anything else. We’ve already gone too far.

Right! I guess what I’m trying to get at is when was the point where you were like, “Oh shit! We’re secure in being able to do this for the rest of our lives”?

Quite honestly, not until we started putting out our own material. Not until 2008 when we started our own label.

Weathermaker?

Correct. That’s really when things started to fall into place business-wise.

Are there other acts besides Clutch on the label?

Not really. We’ve put out some side projects here and there, and one album by a Maryland band called Lionize. But that’s all. We’re probably not going to bring anyone else on in the near future.

So you started Weathermaker to get control of the business side of the music. You guys have autonomy over that now?

Absolutely. The four Clutch members and our manager are equally involved.

Can you give me some specific history of how the label formed?

We started experimenting with releasing our material early on. For a while, we were doing our own label called River Road Records that originally put out Clutch’s Jam Room album. we also put out a Bakerton Group EP, which is our instrumental side-project. It was late-90s/early 2000s and we were attempting to take care of mail orders on our own. Like, we were directly selling and sending CDs to people, and it got to be too much. So we backed away from it for a while and started working with other labels again. Then we got a little older and figured out things a little better. When 2008 came around we had decided to stop working with the last label we were on and it just made perfect sense to cut out the middlemen and start doing it on our own again.

What are some lessons you’ve learned running both the music and business sides of this thing over the past ten years?

I mean, everything has run pretty smoothly business-wise so far. It’s probably because we have a great label manager, this guy Stefan Koster. He used to be with Roadrunner records back in the day, and he’s been an absolute blessing to have in our lives. He really keeps things going. Makes sure all the bows are tied with releases.

You’re twelve albums in. Are there still nerves leading up to a release?

Yeah, it’s definitely super exciting. With these last few albums, we’ve had a longer buildup time. We recorded this album and then waited quite a while before we put it out. It’s fun to see our fans get excited when we put new music out. It’s honestly the most rewarding thing for me. That there are still people out there that are interested in hearing our new stuff.

Okay, I know I’m jumping around with this question, but how did Clutch get involved with Bam Margera?

He and his brother were Clutch fans, simple as that.

And he just hit you up asking to do a video for you?

Pretty much. He had us on his show, Viva La Bam. We played at a ski resort. It was kind of a weird one. And Bam and Ryan Dunn did the video for “The Mob Goes Wild.”

Do you still talk with Bam or anyone from that crew?

Yeah, Margera was the most recent one. We’ve seen Bam in the past couple of years. I have no memory of where it was, but he’s come out to some shows.

So because you guys are a band, I feel like I should jump into asking about the actual music. Before I do, though . . . dang . . . a quarter of a century. There aren’t a lot of bands out there twelve albums in with the same core members. What’s the secret recipe for you for? You seem super committed to sticking together.

Yeah, you know, when people ask me this I can’t really point to any one thing, in particular, that would make four guys want to be in a band together for twenty-five years. But I feel like an aspect of it is that we remain creative and we’re always trying to move forward and write new songs. That’s really what it’s all about. If we didn’t get together and write new songs, we probably wouldn’t be here.

Does everybody still get along?

Absolutely. We have to live on a tour bus together! We’re kind of forced to get along.

Have the amenities changed at all for you guys on the road?

We went from touring in a van to touring on a bus. Touring on a bus is always easier than a van. It’s truly a whole different world. When you’re in a van, you’re lucky to get any kind of real sleep. But when you’re on a bus, you can sleep in your bunk for twenty-three hours a day if you wanted to. It really is a total opposite lifestyle.

Was there a lot of partying in the early days after shows?

Sometimes.

Is that still going on? You guys strike me as a very professional outfit.

[laughs] There are a lot more good night’s sleep going on these days than there were back in the ’90s, that’s for sure.

Getting to the music, I feel like I can turn on any Clutch song from any album and know within the first ten seconds that it’s a Clutch song. Do you have a name for your particular sound?

Not really, we just call it hard rock.

In terms of the band’s evolution, is there any formula for how the sound or theme will change from album to album?

I feel like, to me at least, it’s the production that changes more than the songwriting itself. Because when I listen to super old Clutch compared to our newest album, honestly the only difference I can personally hear is that our arrangements are better than they were back then. We didn’t really put our songs into normal arrangements at first. When we are on stage, though, and we play older songs along with our newer ones, they still all fit together perfectly.

Okay, but a song like “Electric Worry” has a big bluesy twang to it, right? And you look at that compared to songs off of an album like Earth Rocker and those are way more driving. Do you bring different influences into specific albums?

Well, “Electric Worry” is pretty much half a blues cover. I think Earth Rocker and Psychic Warfare definitely drive a bit harder, and there’s maybe a bit less of a blues influence on those two albums.

And for this new one, you guys took a trip on down to Nashville for recording. How was that?

That was super fun. We’ve never recorded down there before so it was a new experience.

How was working with the new producer?

Working with Vance was really easy and really fun. He and his assistant had a ton of vintage amps that I had never gotten to play on before so it was great getting to record with all of these different setups and doing our thing in a different environment.

What do you play on live? Is there a go-to guitar you bring onstage?

Ahh you know, I pretty much hate all of my guitars. I switch it up quite a bit. Lately, I’ve been playing on a lot of SGs, but the day after tomorrow that all might change.

Fair enough.

I prefer the sound of Les Pauls, but I have so much more fun at a show if I play an SG. I kinda just bounce between the two.

Playing guitar is a hefty position in a band. What are you trying to bring into the mix when making a song?

I try to play something I’ve never played before. Throw out some kind of idea that doesn’t sound like something I’ve done already. I try not to repeat myself too often. I know I do, but guitar-wise that’s the direction I try to go in.

You guys are the only band I know that combines really down to earth rock music with crazy science fiction references at every turn. When and how did that start?

Neil started early on. I think on the second album is where a lot of the science fiction started creeping into the lyrics.

What was your response when he sang the chorus of a song in binary code?

It’s great. It’s hilarious. I love it.

They’re all compulsively listenable live songs, but if you pay attention to the lyrics, you guys really like to dig into paranoia and strangeness. There’s something almost sinister about it. How do you think the lyrics impact or change the sound you’re coming with?

I think as far as lyrics, that’s what people hear first and gravitate towards. That, and the sound of Neil’s voice. Honestly, I’m just happy there’s someone in the band who writes all the lyrics, and that every time I hear the lyrics I’m totally blown away. I’m as big a fan of Neil’s lyrics as the average clutch fan.

Do you do a lot of reading? In my head, I like to think of you guys as a bunch of wily scholars, reading crazy books on the bus.

I haven’t read anything except books to my kids for the past eight years. I’ve been reading children’s books. Neil’s well-read. He went to college. He’s got his English Degree. So he’s always been a very literary person, and I’m lucky to have someone so well-read and intelligent in the band.

Are all you guys family men at this point?

Yep, we’re all married.

How does that affect making records and touring?

I wouldn’t say it’s hugely different. I’ve been with my wife for a long time. She’s been out on tour with us back in the ’90s. She knows what it’s like to be on road. We traveled together a lot, and then I turned forty years old and the next thing you know I had four kids. So now I’m rapidly approaching fifty and my personal life is definitely different than what it was ten or twenty years ago, but the approach that Clutch takes and the way I feel about the band is the same as it was when we met up and wrote our first song together.

It seems like you guys can play with any band. You’ve opened for Motorhead and Lamb of God, and then you’ve headlined your own tours. How’d you end up in the position of being able to open for whoever?

It’s a matter of willingness. We’ll play with whoever. After that Lamb of God tour, we went around opening for Primus. Where do you live?

I’m out in Oakland?

Okay, we played at the Greek Theater with Primus and that was actually the first time Les Claypool came onstage with us. He’s played “Earth Rocker” a bunch of times.

Okay, last question. I guess the most important one. Twenty-five years in, would you say you’re happy with where you’re at?

Without a doubt. We’re playing a 2,500-seat venue in Philadelphia tonight. I have absolutely no complaints about anything.

Clutch is currently wrapping up a European tour and will be back stateside to close out 2018 with shows on the East Coast and in the Midwest.

The Offspring’s “Americana” Is Twenty Years Old—How Has It Aged?

Published on November 30, 2018November 30, 2018

Music

The Offspring covered a lot of firsts. They were the first band I listened to that my dad hated. Conspiracy of One was the first CD I ever bought. “Why Don’t You Get a Job” was the first song I ever heard use the word “bitch.” And at the risk of sounding overwrought, listening to them was my first messy step towards cultivating a taste in music beyond what my parents played in the car. For better and for worse The Offspring stands like a holy temple, longboards strewn about the steps and fountains gushing with Mountain Dew, in the acne-riddled history of my adolescence.

And at the center of this legacy sits Americana. It arguably isn’t The Offspring’s best album, but it has the most memorable singles, and it’s the one I return to when thinking about the landscape of my youth. It also turns twenty this month and I’ve been dying for an excuse to write about it as an artifact of the ’90s and a product of the fraught times right before the internet fully took hold and changed everything. So here we go.

Beyond the thrashy guitar riffs, fast-paced bass lines, and distorted effects that have been codified to the genre, Americana is not a punk album, and by extension was the moment The Offspring dropped any pretense about being a punk band. The B-sides that ape a punkish sound fall short and the big singles don’t try to be anything other than pop. With this album, the band fully committed itself to widespread appeal. Shirking the frayed indie sound of their previous effort, Ixnay The Hombrey, they began churning out frat-rock bangers that fit seamlessly into the soundtracks of “coming of age” movies where a group of college-age friends try to steal their hot professor’s underpants, or whatever. It was the logical conclusion of course for a band that, a few years earlier, helped forge a path for punk to mainstream syndication. In fact, an argument could be made that this record, along with acts like Blink-182, set the mold for the influx of radio-friendly emo, pop-punk, and punk adjacent acts that dominated most of the 2000s.

This isn’t an indictment of pop-punk, emo, or the litany of genre offshoots that unfurled over the start of the millennium. It isn’t even an indictment of The Offspring. The songs on Americana are listenable to a fault and they’ve been manufactured for easy digestion. I like challenging and complex music, but easier listenings shouldn’t be written off due to some weird perceived sense of integrity. As much fun as it is to put a quasi-academic lens on everything, music is an innately visceral experience, and, postulations aside, is primarily valued on whether or not you enjoy listening to it. That being said, what’s not to enjoy? The instruments are bright and energetic, seasoned with just the right amount of distortion. Dexter Holland’s voice blares like sugar mixed with battery acid, sweet and caustic. And the sound is predominantly accompanied by a buoyant, albeit mean-spirited, sense of humor. It was the perfect formula to gain widespread appeal in the late ’90s and resulted in songs like “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” and “Why Don’t You Get a Job” receiving inescapable amounts of radio play. When something climbs to a high enough level of popularity it becomes a touchpoint for understanding the tastes and demeanor of a specific period of time, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another record that did that for white, suburban America in 1998 like Americana. And what this snapshot reveals is that America in 1998 sucked real hard for anyone who wasn’t white and from the suburbs.

Although its title might suggest otherwise, Americana was starkly apolitical. And why wouldn’t it be? 1998 was late-stage Clinton era “post-racial” America. The economy was up, and little white boys like me were more interested in rallying against our parents than ideas like fascism and oppression. Information and perspective were as insulated as they ever would be, with the internet and its power to decentralize viewpoints looming on the horizon. Political charge wasn’t selling. What was in high demand was overcoming male impotence and the anxiety over preserving the neo-puritan sensibilities of the conservative, white, middle class (If you don’t believe me on this just remember that people were apoplectic over a show like South Park and also that in 1999 a movie about Kevin Spacey regaining his vitality by wanting to fuck an underage cheerleader won the Oscar for Best Picture. Also, Fight Club). The consensus was, paradoxically, that suburban living was tougher than it seemed, but also anything that threatened its manicured veneer of respectability was dangerous. The Offspring capitalized off of this zeitgeist by dropping an album that maintained an edge of persecution but turned its critical sites on things that laid outside the norms of this status quo. Often times the album’s ire was directed at societal elements that were symptomatic of the system that it refused to address directly. Viewed in a broader context we start to see that to do anything different would be to undermine the conservative “bootstrap” philosophy that runs throughout the record, and once we understand this we also can make an educated guess as to which limited viewpoint (based on class, race, and gender) The Offspring were speaking from.

Out of all the songs on Americana, “She’s Got Issues” has aged the worst. The song ostensibly tells the tale of a dysfunctional relationship between Holland and an unknown woman, but ultimately is about how much of a drag her mental health issues are for him. With a chorus that repeats “Oh, man she’s got issues / and I’m gonna pay,” I’m honestly surprised there wasn’t a verse in which Holland attempts to surgically remove the woman’s uterus in order to temper her hysteria. If this song came out today it would either be completely ignored by everyone or ignite a firestorm on the same level as “Blurred Lines.” That’s not to say that this song wouldn’t make the cut in 2018 because of our culture’s increased sense of outrage, but more that we are finally moving away from narratives in which men play the role of victims when dealing with “dramatic” women. The fact that it was billed as a single, licensed for film placements, and didn’t stir the pot in any memorable way is a pretty glaring indictment of attitudes towards women and mental health at the time. The Offspring’s brand is to be slightly off-color, so it isn’t shocking to see this track in their catalog, but it does force us to consider the culture in which it was fostered.

According to Holland, the album is a series of short stories that examine the darker elements of American life. “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” the biggest single off the album, introduces us to a young, white poseur unsuccessfully emulating black culture, or his reductive understanding of it as informed by the burgeoning hip-hop genre. With our modern lexicon of socially conscious terms, this is a story about cultural appropriation and has aged the best out of every memorable cut on the record. It’s easy to replace the proto-meme whiteboy, who tries to buy an Ice Cube record but ends up with Vanilla Ice, with his modern, face-tattooed, SoundCloud rapper counterpart. It is bitingly sarcastic and peppered with the postmodern absurdity that would become dominant in the coming internet age (the song opens randomly with a Def Leppard sample and then has a second intro of someone counting to five in Spanish. What?).

As a standalone piece, we can appreciate “Pretty Fly” for examining the hollowness that comes with appropriating the most visible aspects of a culture without having any understanding of the significance of the culture itself. However, I would argue that the song became as popular is it did due to the anxiety white America had about hip-hop, by which I mean blackness, at the time. It might be hard to imagine now with hip-hop being the chart-topping juggernaut that it is, but in 1998 the genre was still regulated as niche “urban” music, and it would be another two years before Eminem showed up to kick down the gates of suburban households with his manic serial killer persona and cosign from Dr. Dre. Hip-hop had a home on MTV and dedicated radio stations and, while there was a young white audience for it, the only mainstream representation of a white fans was that of the wigger. I can’t help but wonder if the song was so successful because of its critique of wannabes or because the dominant mindset of the time thought that hip-hop was beneath white consumerism, and anyone who listened to it was, therefore, debasing themselves.

The tracklist goes on in this fashion with the exception of songs like “Have You Ever” and “Freeway” which serve as general thesis statements for the sense of dislocation and isolation that come from modern American life. In “Walla Walla” Holland makes fun of an acquaintance for going to prison: “Goodbye, my friend, you’ve messed up again / You’re going to prison, you’re off to the pen / You’ve gotten off easy so many times / I guess no one told you how to get a life.” There is glee in his voice as he chastises the future inmate, a revelry almost, with no mention of how predatory or unjust the prison industrial complex is known to be. “The Kids Aren’t Alright” is an elegy for the youth of Generation X who grew up to be junkies, burnouts, or casualties, but again there is an odd sense of finger-pointing, “Chances thrown, nothing’s free / Longing for what used to be.” While the characters are portrayed in a tragic light it bothers me that Holland chalks up their fates to chances that they’ve thrown away. In The Offspring’s America, if you are a criminal, crazy woman, walking punchline, or drug addict, the important thing to remember is that it’s all your fault.

I didn’t expect this to be the retrospective I would write when I started thinking about Americana. My original idea was to sing its praises over eight hundred words and enjoy the nostalgia of revisiting this aspect of my childhood. The tricky thing about nostalgia, though, is that it requires you to cross its threshold wearing rose-tinted glasses, and given the state of the world right now I am having a harder and harder time agreeing to those terms. I still like The Offspring and I can’t really hold this album at fault for being a product of its time, but I also can’t approach it as an insulated entity that is above criticism because of its ridiculousness. The album sought to expose the dark underbelly of America and, if you ask me, it indirectly succeeded. Not in the subject matter of its songs, but in giving voice and instrumental backing to the angry, judgmental isolationist lurking in the homes of the American middle class on the cusp of a new era.

Clutch’s ‘Book of Bad Decisions’ Is a Great Album for Weird Times

Published on October 8, 2018October 11, 2018

Music/Music Review

Listening to Clutch is like taking mushrooms with your gruff, but wise, uncle. For nearly twenty-five years frontman Neil Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult, bassist Dan Maines, and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster have embodied a humble, salt-of-the-earth attitude towards making music, while also flying off into big-concept esotericism at every opportunity. They play accessible, rowdy rock with blues and funk influences while singing about Henry Ford, cosmic revelations, and robot overlords. It’s a difficult line to walk for a quarter-century and remain compelling. And while they haven’t reached widespread stardom, they have maintained a respectable notoriety over the years, giving their refusal to alter course a twinge of nobility. I can’t call their music “timeless,” but I will assert it exists in a space outside of the rapid-cycling generational trends us normal folks are caught in. Clutch is an anchor in an otherwise untethered industry, a stubbornly reliable sound. The gold-standard for psychedelic, scruffy, dude-metal. (Granted, I’m not sure how many other bands could be categorized in this genre, but any hypothetical contenders are playing in these guys’ shadows.)

Book of Bad Decisions is Clutch’s twelfth studio album and marks its first time working with Nashville producer, Vance Powell. The shift in production hasn’t wildly altered Clutch’s sound, but there is more of a country/soul twang on this album than previous endeavors, which improves the listening experience. The addition of a horn section, bright and brash, elevates the straightforward guitar riff into something closer to a big-band anthem on “In Walks Barbarella.” A piano, keys being beaten out in honkey-tonk staccato, gives “Vision Quest” foot-stomping rowdiness as Fallon sings and shouts about going on a bender with the grim reaper: “Oh Pale Rider, you need a hella talking to / Why don’t you leave me be, I got things to do.” Powell’s touch lurks on the fringes adding a new dimension to the music and a thematic tie to the American heartland, which functions as a catalyst for the anxiety and anger that runs through the album.

Clutch has never been a band that puts concept ahead of the music, but many of its albums are loosely held together by a theme. Psychic Warfare was an homage to Philip K. Dick and delved into a world of psychedelic paranoia, mind control, and X-ray vision. Robot Hive/Exodus was, in part, a treatise against the encroaching omnipresence of technology—giving us the awesome experience of hearing a chorus sung in binary code—which has roots in Dick as well. Looking at it from a wider lens, a more appropriate way to put it is that Clutch is thematically informed by slipstream narratives and a distrust for technology, religion, and government. Book of Bad Decisions takes this and turns its attention towards the sociopolitical disaster that is 2018.

Rather than judge or proselytize, the album is content to observe and record the strangeness and tension of the moment, pointing a finger at its surroundings and shouting, “Shit is getting pretty crazy, huh?” This sentiment is most overt in “Weird Times,” on the chorus of which Fallon sings only, in his gravelly impassioned manner, “Weird times / Maximum full blown / Weird times / Destination unknown.” It’s so hammer-meets-nail you can’t help but laugh a little and join in.

We get another wry offering with “How to Shake Hands,” which puts Fallon on the campaign trail for the office of the President of the United States. His winning platform includes putting Jimmy Hendrix on the twenty-dollar bill and publicly disclosing all information relating to UFOs. The lyrics are fun and wild but pack an added punch when you realize that we live in a reality in which anyone can be president.

My personal favorite on the record is also the weirdest. “Ghoul Wrangler” is a raucous song that rides big fuzzy guitar strums and a crashing drumline as it tells the story of a simple farmer whose property has become infested by lawyers: “Thirteen bloody litigators feasting on the hog / My God, Mabel, we got lawyers in the barn.” It is completely ridiculous and delivered with utter seriousness. Fallon bellows with the frenzy of a Pentecostal preacher, and even though we are in on the joke, we are transported to a world where lawyers in the barn are no laughing matter. It ends with the pests being dispatched without mercy and Fallon declaring, “We got different laws down on the farm.” There’s enough of a remove from reality for the track not to ring as an indictment, but, given the failures of the judicial system to protect the people it serves, it’s timely enough to mean more than its saying.

The fact that Fallon hasn’t gotten more recognition as a songwriter is baffling. While Clutch is known for playing solid rock music, the lyrics consistently take its albums from good to great. Book of Bad Decisions is no exception. The writing is explosive, complex, compelling and Fallon delivers it like a man seized by the spirit. Lines like, “Despite the violence, sometimes I look back / a nostalgia begins to take hold / Wisdom of sorts is found in due course/ in the rows of silver and gold” could be parsed apart in a literary seminar. It’s exciting to know that there is a band that isn’t pulling punches.

Taken as a complete package, Book of Bad Decisions sees Clutch traversing a warped facsimile of America, stopping occasionally to drink with Death or speak to Emily Dickenson (which happens on the aptly titled “Emily Dickenson”). It’s a hell of a ride, a gut-busting rock album by one of the most consistently great bands still playing. For those looking for a pointed political statement, you won’t find it here, but if you’re interested in something that captures the emotional texture of this moment—the bewilderment, anxiety, and preposterousness of it all—and rocks out while it does so, then look no further.

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Life is Painful and Worth Celebrating on Fantastic Negrito’s “Please Don’t Be Dead”

Published on August 13, 2018August 25, 2018

Music/Music Review

The cover art for Please Don’t Be Dead is a picture of Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, otherwise known as Fantastic Negrito, recovering from a near-fatal auto collision in 1999. The accident put him in a coma for three weeks, and upon awakening left him with considerable, lasting, nerve damage in one of his hands. This would be bad news for anyone but is especially heartbreaking for a career musician. Around this time Dphrepaulezz was also locked in a contract with Interscope records that wasn’t going anywhere and was feeling stifled and exploited. This in many ways was an era of near-death experiences for the artist: professionally, creatively, and literally. Almost twenty years after this snapshot, Fantastic Negrito has risen like a phoenix from the medical tubes and disheveled sheets of that hospital bed. In 2015 he won the first NPR Tiny Desk Contest, in 2016 he won a Grammy for his first album, The Last Days Of Oakland, and this year he released a record that transubstantiates all of that past suffering into something raw, soulful, and ferociously alive.

Please Don’t Be Dead sits somewhere between rock, soul, and funk and on top of a sturdy foundation of blues and roots. There is a lot of overlap with these genres in general, but the songs flit between distinctive tropes of each. “Plastic Hamburgers,” the album’s opener, kicks the door with its feet firmly planted in rock, sounding like if Lenny Kravitz and Rage against the machine somehow fused into one entity, with gutsy, driving guitar and politically charged lyrics about bringing down the political hegemony. The chorus repeats itself, chant-like, “Let’s break out these chains, let’s burn it down.” The next song, “Bad Guy Necessity,” quickly shifts us into a bluesy ballad with Dphrepaulezz singing with a sardonic twang as guitars warble and whine and an organ harmonizes in the background. The album continues on like this, with every song switching its dominant influence, but never sounding derivative. Every track feels original, lived-in by the people performing them, and, despite their distinctiveness, are made cohesive by an undercurrent of blues that flows warmly through all of them.

As much as this album is a victory lap for Dphrepaulezz, there is a concurrent charge of radical political and social commentary throughout it as well. Keeping with blues tradition, Fantastic Negrito sings and rages for the downtrodden, skewering the institutions that reinforce racism and systemic poverty with anger and a sly sense of humor. “Plastic Hamburgers” is the most brazenly overt example of politically charged rhetoric. “Americans pills will wreck and kill / American pills will wreck and kill / Automatic weapon in a twitching hand / The 50-foot wall of addiction, man / Do you, do you understand?” The song slaps, succeeding as an anthemic cry for change, but is pretty straight-forward as far as socially conscientious rock songs go. I found myself most fascinated by the lyrics and approach in “Transgender Biscuits,” which gives a long list of reasons why someone was fired from a job, most of which pertaining to identity. The vocals are distorted, as if they were sung through a coffee can; a syncopated kick drum staggers along, punctuated by dusty snare claps on the upbeats; chords on a piano are quickly tapped out as Dphrepaulezz sings, “I got fired because I’m a woman / I got fired because I’m black /I got fired because I’m a white man / I got fired because I’m fat / I got fired because I’m an asshole / I got fired because I’m gay / I got fired because I’m a Muslim / I got fired for bein’ late.” It’s a creative flip on the standard blues song, in which the singer talks about how he or she lost their job, by incorporating a varied range of identities which depersonalizes the narrative and makes it more porous, promoting inclusivity in the song and the commentary on oppression that backs it. Dphrepaulezz finds strength in this prospect of coming together. He explicitly offers unity up as an answer to fear in the song “Letter to Fear.” “I got friends, and they got friends too / We will carry you / You keep tryin’ to shut us down/We will carry you.”

Let there be no confusion that this album is an unapologetic celebration of being alive. While Fantastic Negrito sings the blues standards of defeat, loss, and oppression in both the personal and general sphere, Dphrepaulezz is answering the plea of the album’s title with a righteous and fiery indignation. Soulful and world-weary, made jagged in a way only a lifetime of adversity could do, his voice breaks and snarls over the whine of guitar and organ in every song. It is the perfect vehicle for a dangerous passion that gushes from every song like arterial blood. Nothing feels fabricated, every ounce of pain and joy has been wholly earned in equal measure. This is not the sort of joy that comes pristine and wrapped in the glossy veneer of pop-sensibility that we have become used to in the mainstream. It is the kind that wakes up in a hospital bed after spending three weeks in a coma, banged up but alive. It is the kind that exists in 2018, bearing witness to the imbalances of power that keep wide swaths of people down and singing in fierce opposition.

It is impossible to listen to Please Don’t Be Dead and not feel painfully alive yourself, and the album begs you to lean into that pain as an antidote to the terrible alternative of numbness or death. Because as long as we are alive we have the chance to overcome, to come together, and to listen to great music. It’s perhaps summed up best in the refrain of the last song on the album, “Bullshit Anthem,” which skews the blues and roots in favor of a funky romp straight out of the disco era with a slapping bass grove, and Fantastic Negrito singing, “Take that bullshit / Turn it into good shit.”

Jordan Ranft

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