Friday, December 14, 2012

My Dead Ego

Allison Martin at center stage

Photo by Ferret Rellim // My Dead Ego

Ask any musician about the hardship of a band breakup, and they’ll tell you it can, at times, be a long and painful process.

But for others, the need to play music supersedes everything else, and they find their way back sooner rather than later. The latter is certainly true for Allison Martin, the frontwoman for My Dead Ego, a new Salt Lake City band with an EP coming out this week and a full-length album on the way.

Martin was the keyboardist for one of the revitalized versions of Cavedoll, this time as a six-piece group riding high after the release of the 2008 album No Vertigo. Shortly after their performance at 2009’s South By Southwest festival, the band suffered some personal disagreements and departures, which subsequently caused the group to fracture.

“The breakup was hard, but I think sometimes people just go different directions musically, and that is OK,” Martin says. “I think I was probably a bit scared at the idea of breaking away on my own. It really made me work harder to develop a confidence I didn’t possess before.”

Rather than wallow in the breakup’s aftermath, Martin proceeded to write new instrumental material on her own. And she helped out with the soundtrack to Present Tense: A Post 337 Project. But it wasn’t until she recorded a demo for the song “Dancing Machine” that the idea of starting her own band came to mind.

“At the time, I was looking to give the first vocal song I had written away because I didn’t think I could sing,” Martin says. “The idea of being a frontperson was the last thing on my mind.”

The name My Dead Ego came from the initial planning with former Cavedoll bassist Janet Marie Chotia; the term originates from the Buddhist idea that to kill your ego is to embrace humility and detach yourself from unnecessary desires. Chotia never officially joined the band, but instead became a stylist for Martin’s performances.

After recording some demo tracks and getting a setlist together, Martin hooked up with artist and musician Patrick Munger to play select shows under the My Dead Ego name as an electronic duo. The reactions were positive, which pushed Martin to record her new tunes.

Around the same time, Martin re-joined a briefly reunited Cavedoll, recording “Dancing Machine” at that band’s Kitefishing Studio for Cavedoll’s final album. Shortly after Cavedoll retired for good, Martin joined up with The Last Look as a keyboardist, playing gigs and recording material with them while she polished off a couple of songs to complete her own EP. When Martin started looking for a backup band for live performances, she needed look no further than her current group.

The My Dead Ego EP, Fairytales of Industry, shows great promise for the upcoming full-length album. Aside from the aforementioned “Dancing Machine,” it features two new tracks showcasing Martin’s talent for composition and style. The electronica pops off her keyboard like tiny fireworks, each track laced with its own shades of happiness or drama. Even at the lowest moments lyrically, you can’t help but want to dance. The vocals are reminiscent of the club sounds of the late ’90s, with Martin delivering them with excitement and passion.

“I just really feel lucky to be doing what I am doing,” Martin says. “I just wanna make people happy, dance and feel.”

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Meat Puppets

Genre-defying sound across 3 decades

 The Meat Puppets
“Go knock the piss out of that thing!” laughs Curt Kirkwood. Turning his attention back to the phone interview, the Meat Puppets frontman says, “I’m at the music … place. Dude. Sorry.”

The Meat Puppets are doing some last-minute shopping, knocking the piss out of drum kits in Austin, before decamping on tour. The Texas capital has been the trio’s home since the late ’90s. Before that, they were the L.A.-by-way-of-Phoenix band everyone thought was from Seattle thanks to their grungy appearance and Kurt Cobain’s endorsement, via cover tunes and a guest turn on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged special. Prior to that, the Meat Puppets were a punk band when “punk” hadn’t become such a meaningless term.

Not that Kirkwood’s band ever fit that genre like a glove—it was more like a sock puppet.

In the recently released documentary History Lesson Part 1: Punk Rock in Los Angeles in 1984, director Dave Travis concerns himself with psychedelic punk rock, not “traditional” punk, as the title implies. The bands covered—Meat Puppets, the Minutemen, Redd Kross, Twisted Roots, X and other bands of the time—despite being rebellious and loud, were all more than the loaded four-letter word implied.

In the Meat Puppets’ case, they were cerebral and trippy with subtle Americana undertones that grew more prominent with each new album.

“We were never really into any ‘scene,’ ” says Kirkwood. “I mean, we were involved with punk rock because that’s where the shows were, but there were lots of different kinds of music if you looked into it. Especially in L.A.”

In mid-’80s Phoenix, he continues, punk rock was—get a load of this—“more Alice Cooper-based, the gross-out stuff.” L.A. punk consisted of hardcore and “more art rock, sort of Los Angeles Free Music Society bands like Human Hands and the Beat People, that kind of spawned Wall of Voodoo.”

Then there was X—“kinda punk rock [but really] a good rock band”—alongside the Blasters, who drew from Americana and ’50s rock, and Los Lobos, who put a Mexican twist on the same. The Meat Puppets even played a few shows with country legend Dwight Yoakam and assorted performance artists.

“So it was really a varied scene,” Kirkwood says, “and definitely hard to pigeonhole anything there. It kinda fell under ‘punk rock,’ so it was easy to just call it that.”

When Cobain started flying the Meat Puppets’ colors, they of course became, at least in the eyes of their new fans, a grunge band. “Yeah,” says Kirkwood. “Grunge was part of it, sure.” But by then, the band had logged a dozen years together and, Kirkwood says, had been lumped in with the Violent Femmes and R.E.M. as sort of neo-Americana bands.

“With grunge, it was sort of Neil Young meets Iggy Pop meets Aerosmith or somethin’. My take on it was rockers, possibly hair rockers, realized it was more fun to not get dressed up as much,” Kirkwood says, laughing at the thought.

The thing about the Meat Puppets is, they fit all those genres, at least a little. Even today, after two breakups and two reincarnations—and, most recently, a 2006 reunion of Kirkwood with his bass-playing brother Cris after an 11-year schism, along with drummer Shandon Sahm in the seat once held by Derrick Bostrom—their music retains the same loose vibe.

Their new disc, Lollipop, is rebellious and loud and pastoral and psychedelic, the perfect combination of cowboys and power chords, guitar solos, stoner-intelligent lyrics and subtle studio trickery. And it’s still impossible to classify with any easy labels.

“We’ve always had the capability to play others’ styles,” says Kirkwood, “but we’ve never been about ‘this is country’ or ‘this is metal.’ It’s just all music. And it’s cool to have a band you can do all that stuff in.”

Dirty Blonde

SLC's Dirty Blonde tap into classic sounds


Classic rock albums, a flower warehouse and a bottle of Old Crow whiskey—all are key items in understanding the gritty new Salt Lake City rock group Dirty Blonde.

Empty beer cans and broken drumsticks litter the floor of their rehearsal space. A vintage lamp sits in the middle of the room on a barstool, shedding light on a scene characteristic of any band that’s had a slight taste of early success. The boys are all casually lounging across their “flowery old lady couch” that came with their new practice space in Positively Fourth Street. No one would ever guess that just two years earlier, the group was rehearsing in a humid and ancient flower warehouse, playing what they now call “sub-par rock & roll.”

All the members of Dirty Blonde—Spencer Flowers (vocals and rhythm guitar), Tony Cale Montrone (drums), Justin Green (lead guitar) and Aaron Jacobson (bass)—are Utah-grown musicians with early roots in music. At 22, the blonde, long-haired Flowers is the youngest in the group.

“I found out I could sing when I got the lead in a musical in high school,” Flowers says. “It was called Thoroughly Modern Millie, and I played the character Jimmy, who was the pimp and womanizer of the play,” a role not far removed from the one he plays as lead singer.

Flowers may not have discovered his pipes until high school, but he picked up a guitar years earlier, in middle school. In fact, all of the members seemed to have found their callings around seventh grade. Montrone took one year of percussion in junior high. Green took lessons and studied classical and jazz before finally drifting to rock & roll. Jacobson is the only member with any formal training. He attended The Conservatory for the Recording Arts and Sciences in Tempe, Arizona, in addition to playing bass and piano casually throughout his adolescence. “I remember I first picked up a bass on a whim to learn how to play the Eagles’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ ” he says, “and it was all uphill from there.”

The band members knew each other before forming Dirty Blonde, and a few had even collaborated together. All of the band members have similar influences—including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and The Cars—and there was never a question of what they wanted their sound to be: “hard-ass bluesy rock & roll.”

“We just started jamming, and that’s what came out,” Flowers recalls of their first jams together in that flower warehouse. “It was so hot in that warehouse. We had those electric swamp coolers. We’d play one song, and we’d sweat like we were in a sauna. That’s when we realized if we were going to be a real band that maybe we should have a real practice space.”

From there, it was only a matter of picking a band name, which is where the bottle of whiskey comes in.

“We were at a show, and Spencer was drinking his favorite, Old Crow whiskey, and suggested we name the band Dirty Bird,” Montrone says. The name didn’t go over so well, so he suggested the variation of Dirty Blonde. “I just liked it, because people could interpret it the way they want—whether it be hair color or state of mind, and it sounded rock & roll,” Montrone says.

Dirty Blonde’s debut six-song, self-titled EP will be released in July. They recorded it with Matt Hepworth at Studio Mu. Flowers describes it as “an auditory montage of all of our adventures over the last year.”
“I think the album shows our true sound and what we represent,” Green says. “We play what we’d listen to, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. We are here to play raw rock & roll and have a good time doing it.” 

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Glitch Mob

Electro-dance crew at The Complex Friday


Imagine a post-apocalyptic world where the last remaining humans battle against artificial intelligence for survival. After the smoke clears, on a heaping mound of junked robots, stands a trio armed merely with speakers.

That trio is the Los Angeles-based electronic dance crew The Glitch Mob, and that image is easily conjured when listening to their latest release, Drink the Sea.

More literally, the band of Ed Ma, Justin Boreta and Josh Mayer has mastered their robots—electronic mediums for music creation—in ways that haven’t been done before.

The first minute of album opener “Animus Vox” sounds like it could have been The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’s main theme if the movie had been set in 2200. The unrelentingly exuberant songs that follow create a cohesive collection. “We didn’t want just a bunch of dance-floor singles—that’s the world we come from,” says Justin Boreta.

They wrote each song with a particular emotion in mind—like, say, triumph—and the sonic details followed.

“[The album] started as a literal story, but in the end, it became ambiguous, and we were attracted to that idea,” Boreta says. The track list, however, retains a distinctive arc, crescendoing through songs like “We Swarm,” “Drive It Like You Stole It” and “Fortune Days”—titles that only seem to further enhance that post-apocalyptic image.

Each song was titled only after it was completed, to allow the music to grow organically from the original concept. An elaborate process was used to precisely nail each one. “We would put the song on repeat and, while listening to it over and over, we’d make this collage of random words, artwork titles, lines from poems and we’d browse around online,” Boreta says. “We started with sometimes, like, 100 words, and kept cutting it down until it was perfect.”

This meticulous culling also gives insight into how the band creates their sound and the engineering feat of their live shows.

To backtrack a bit, the three members cut their teeth in Los Angeles’ jungle and hip-hop DJ scene. Promoters continuously booked them on the same bill, and at one party, they decided to overthrow conventional mores and combine efforts. This was back when laptops had begun to replace record players and digital music leveled the DJ playing field—having a rare “Weapon X” in the record collection didn’t mean much anymore.

In Los Angeles, there’s a community vibe among DJs and producers, Boreta says; everyone is helping one another.

“If anyone can get better, we all get better,” says Boreta, adding that they share software plug-ins with their friends, reputable L.A.-area producers like Nosaj Thing, Flying Lotus and Bassnectar. However, The Glitch Mob’s sound differs from their peers.

They infuse breakbeat and golden era hip-hop with elements of jazz, indie rock and experimental music. “When you listen to [Drink the Sea], it’s soft for electronic music these days,” says Boreta, making comparisons to Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and The White Stripes.

The Glitch Mob created this intricate music by cultivating unique sounds individually through layering processes. “We are equally audio and engineering geeks. In a sense, engineering is where our real talent lies,” Boreta says.

Before their engineering became so complex, live shows were simple: three guys, one laptop and some MIDI players. “Now, the set-up is super-complicated, where, for instance, we have 18 channels coming out of one sound card,” Boreta says. They use two MacBook Pros to connect their gaggle of MIDI players and keyboards, along with a guitar and bass, all of it situated at three different stations, which the trio rotates through during a set, or even on any given song.

At the forefront of their rig sit three Lemur pads. The Lemur, which looks like an iPad, has an open framework, so they programed the interface to allow the band members to tap on them to trigger different sounds. In concert, they are tilted so the audience can see them in use.

“At first, people wonder why we are up there doing stuff. They’re just used to seeing the laptop thing,” Boreta says. “We spent a lot of time on this system. Being able to actually play the music is really important.”

And they are reworking the electronic-band paradigm. “No one has done this before,” he says. “There’s not a template for being what we want to be. It’s a fun process.”

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Early Portion: Ladyfest

Local Female Musicians get recognition

 Ladyfest SLC organizer Engrid Ohlson

There is a big girly show coming up Sunday, July 10, and it’s cheaper than Lilith Fair and closer than any female-based concert in Olympia, Wash. It’s called Ladyfest, and it was founded by musician Engrid Ohlson (aka Swedish-Ish Fish). Intrigued, I asked Ohlson some questions regarding this summer chick-fest.

Portia Early: I hear that Ladyfest is inspired by the Olympia Ladyfests of yore. Describe that Olympia scene and what we can expect on July 10.

Engrid Ohlson: Olympia is the heart of the riot-grrl scene, DIY culture and home to the best indie labels in the country, in my opinion. It is a town full of musicians, artists and writers who have a deep sense of community, politics and expression. The majority of bands at the original Ladyfest in 2000 were from Olympia and other Northwest towns.

Ladyfest Salt Lake City 2011 will feature local bands. There are so many female musicians here that are not getting the recognition they deserve. I figure, let’s start out by building our own community first, and then we can bring in bands from other places, which we will do next year. I want all of the ladies here to become more recognized and have a bigger fan base.

PE: Who are the Ladyfest 2011 artists?

EO: The Vision, My Dead Ego, Libbie Linton, Yours Truly, ESX, Dances With Wolves, Swedish-Ish Fish, The Relief Society, SLFM and Kelly Green from the Teen Tragedies. We will also have Kate Wolsey showing some of her films, a few artists showing and selling their work, a women’s self-defense demo, vendors and other workshops.

PE: Would you compare Ladyfest to Lilith Fair?

EO: Ladyfest is more “underground,” DIY, feminist, political, grassroots, queer-friendly and “indie” than Lilith Fair. The music is more varied, ranging from folk to punk rock and metal. It definitely has a more rebellious air to it. Lilith Fair is cool, too, but … if someone said I could either play Ladyfest or Lilith Fair, I would choose to play Ladyfest every time.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Maus Haus

SF band can't control creativity

 Maus Haus

Interviewing three members of Maus Haus at the same time has much in common with listening to a Maus Haus song.

The band is always freely lobbing idea after idea out there—material that clearly originates from several perspectives and occasionally creates some conflicting, muddled results—and things can get confusing, at times. Still, once everything’s wrapped up, the conversation (or, in the other case, the track) still manages to maintain a strange sense of cohesion. In both scenarios, when Maus Haus are really on, they’re prone to saying something insightful and peculiar.

When the San Francisco-based act first came together in 2007 with a different lineup, they championed an incredibly open-ended M.O.—an ideology that, when they discuss it now, comes off as both implausible and pretentious.

“The band could have gone any direction,” says Sean Mabry, one of the four members of the shape-shifting, all-multi-instrumentalist act.

“I don’t know that we had any preconceived notions, other than maybe a shared love of certain music that we all knew we enjoyed and [knowing] that we all wanted it to be unique,” Jason Kick adds. Joe Genden is a bit clearer: “Basically, we talked a lot about what we didn’t like—the kind of music we didn’t want to play.”

At the outset, this approach meant a total absence of electric guitar. There were more than enough instruments on board instead, including bass, drums and various keyboards and synths, and if you pay attention to Lark Marvels, their debut full-length, it wouldn’t even cross your mind that something was missing.

Released in October 2008, the album’s a topsy-turvy head trip cobbled out of distorted voices, lyricism that happily indulges in mumbo jumbo, synths that jangle rhythmically at points and awkwardly at others, freaked-out pedal effects and an unpredictable vim. Improvised moments and unpolished experiments are cool in Maus Haus’ world; a couple of Lark Marvels tracks contain recorded snippets from their first or second time playing together.

This is the sort of band that’s simultaneously into weightier things like prog-rock and Captain Beefheart (two things that other writers have justifiably likened Maus Haus to) as well as “normal people stuff” like the Beach Boys and Depeche Mode.

“The way I look at it is there’s about 40 years of popular music that is post-Beatles or whatever. All of my friends love music from decades of all sorts. I see it as making a lot of sense but not really having a particular kinship with one particular band in the past or present or future,” says Kick. “It seems like everybody’s iPod is full of all kinds of stuff now, so it sort of makes sense that you just absorb all that and come up with something new.”

He (or one of the others—it’s hard to tell) adds: “There are moments or two [when writing] where you’ll hear something and you say, ‘Oh, that sounds too much like the Pixies or something,’ and you don’t want to directly rip off your favorite music. Sometimes, it feels more comfortable when you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s like Michael Jackson,’ and then you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy. We can do something perverted to it.’ If it feels like outside the arguable realm of iconoclastic worship, then it sort of feels more up for grabs for messing around with it.”
Though they’re young, Maus Haus already sound determined to consistently screw with their own direction. Someone mentions wanting to incorporate drum machines, Genden is interested in both minimalism and striving toward pop songs and they’re now adding guitars into the mix (Mabry even jokes about making something that’s nothing but guitar). “We’re basically always revolting against our prior ideas. We’ll probably do this synth project, but then after that, maybe want to do something totally different,” explains Genden. “That’s the nature of creativity that you can’t really control.”