| HEAVY TRASH - ALARM: COVER/FEATURE (MAGAZINE,
US) |
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DATE: 12.NOVEMBER.2007 |
LABEL: Alarm Press |
CAT NO.: Issue #28 |
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01. Magazine Cover/Feature |
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MAGAZINE FEATURES: |
Featuring: Heavy Trash, Iron & Wine, Coalesce, Qui, Coliseum, Pinback, Danzig,
Animal Collective, Gogol Bordello, Agnostic Front, and Much More.
Music Features: Agnostic Front,Akron/Family, Alamo Race Track, Coalesce, Coliseum,
Danzig, Estradasphere, Jenny Hoyston, Les Savy Fav, Mirah, Pinback, Qui, Trencher,
Two Gallants, Art Features, Christian Nold, Roz Leibowitz, San Francisco Center
for the Book and William Fields.
Books & DVDs: The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons,
Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR, Check
The Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, Dumbo: Acts of Vandalism and Stories
of Love, Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City, My First Time:
A Collection of First Punk Show Stories and Rock The Bells DVD |
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TEXT: |
[The following text is from AlarmPress.com go
to their website for loads of extra stuff, pictures and a whole world of frightfully
entertaining business.]
"There it is in my e-mail inbox, in all caps, the crux of the matter from Jon Spencer:
"I HAVE NO SOUL AND MY HEART IS BARREN. MY WORDS ARE EMPTY AND FALSE." Spencer,
one half of Heavy Trash and the titular man of
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, is explaining
why one critic described him as a "mendacious con man."
But this answer is, of course, a con. Spencer's got soul. His heart is not barren.
His words aren't empty, although they may sometimes be false. In fact, it's his
other musical half, Matt Verta-Ray, who has the charming, fast-talking demeanor
of a con man. Spencer, in person, is almost distressingly straightforward.
Collapsed on ratty couches in their basement recording studio on the Lower East
Side, Spencer and Verta-Ray are answering a few questions in their down time. They've
finished with the recording and mixing of their sophomore album,
Going Way Out with Heavy Trash, and are trying to find time to breathe before the accompanying tour.
Seated together now, they look like two different artists' renderings of the same
basic idea: the dark-haired, lanky rockabilly dude. The Verta-Ray version is baby
faced and slick; he looks like a rockabilly Morrissey. Spencer looks a little more
frayed around the edges, but they’re both sharp-dressed men.
"There are millions of Italian silkworms toiling away in Milan and Rome," explains
Verta-Ray, "making those shimmering fabrics to be custom-sewn into suits for me
and Jon. I personally don’t have the heart to disappoint them all by wearing anything
else. I even wear sharkskin condoms. Ladies?"
Verta-Ray and Spencer are both products of the '70s, a time when mainstream rock
was tilting toward the bloated and the "prog." Their love of rockabilly was at least
in part a reaction to that climate.
"The grittiness of the delivery and the subject matter [of rockabilly] made all
of Led Zeppelin’s wailing about hobbits and Mordor and stuff seem pretty lame,"
says Verta-Ray.
So instead they mixed rockabilly with punk; the results were the crazed, revved-up
howlings of Verta-Ray’s Speedball Baby and Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion. From rockabilly,
they took the basic sound; from punk, they drew confidence and a willingness to experiment.
The big lessons [from hardcore music] were [that] you can have a band, you can make
a record, do it yourself, put it out, go out on tour. Get in the van.
"I think that hardcore taught me a lot," says Spencer. "It wasn’t my favorite kind
of music, but the big lessons were yeah, you can have a band, you can make a record,
do it yourself, put it out, go out on tour. Get in the van. At a certain point I
didn’t want to do anything else."
Eventually, moving in the same subculture of tattooed pyschobilly shows, they took
notice of one another. "We both could tell the other's influences," says Spencer.
"We knew that we shared a lot of common ground."
"We both had some down time, started writing songs and playing together, but no
one was calling it a band yet," adds Verta-Ray. "And since we have the studio, before
we knew it, there was an album. And then we named the band."
The first, self-titled Heavy Trash record came out on Yep Roc Records in 2005. (Yep
Roc, based in Chapel Hill, has become the home for the modern rockabilly/pyschobilly
scene with a roster that includes Southern Culture On The Skids, the Reverend Horton
Heat, Dexter Romweber of the Flat-Duo Jets, and the Legendary Shack Shakers.)
The rockabilly/swing subculture has waxed and waned in popularity over the years,
seeing occasional breakouts into the mainstream (The Stray Cats, Brian Setzer) and
always being available as a proudly stylish, parallel way of life — one with, in
general, a friendlier attitude than the sometimes exclusive genre of indie rock.
For both artist and audience, it’s more openly about putting on a show (as Verta-Ray
points out) than about a sense of slacker cool. Because they evoke a more innocent
era, the new rockabilly crowd is also able to toy with being sleazy. They can be
suggestive again. It's much more fun than being overt — in the same way that James
Bond movies are sexier than porn.
"I remember the rockabilly sound kind of popping out from everything else around
at the time I was first exposed to it," says Verta-Ray, "and feeling that there was
something real there that was not happening in AM radio or disco or heavy album
rock, all of which was in style then. I can kind of pick apart the feeling of rockabilly's
appeal for me and put it down to slapback delay, relatively home-made recording
techniques, tube technology, rebellious youth energy, and cool black and white pictures
of greasy hepcats.
"But at the time, I didn't even know there was a term for it and naturally just
gravitated to Luther Perkins' solo in 'Get Rhythm' or Buddy Holly's sound on 'That'll
Be The Day'."
If you're presently on a musical diet of hyper-literate singer/songwriters, electronic
noise-shapers, and remixes of remixes, it can be jarring to listen to the first notes
of Going Way Out. It's a primitive, forgotten pleasure. This music has been at the
base of most pop for the past fifty years; it’s so fundamental that it’s hard to
imagine anyone actually creating it. The music is so straightforward that you can
easily think, "I could do this." A little ringing guitar, a little echo, some hiccupping-Hank
Williams vocals, and you've got a song. But simplicity is not always easy.
"It's kind of like haiku," says Spencer. It's a testament to
Heavy Trash that they
make good rockabilly sound effortless. There are plenty of bands working in this
area, but there are very few that create albums as good as Going Way Out. It’s easy
to write haiku; what's hard is writing good haiku.
In fact, if you dig back through catalogs of classic rockabilly, there isn't much
that will have this same shiny appeal. Heavy Trash
is rockabilly as a fan re-imagines
it, not so much as it actually was. It's to their advantage that they're too musically
restless to be purists.
Rather than making a meek echo of classic music, they've used a love of rockabilly
to fuel their own uniquely modern songs. Just because they're playing rockabilly-inspired
music doesn’t mean they don't exist in today's world. Spencer worked with such non-rockabilly
types as Martina Topley-Bird and DJ Shadow on
The Blues Explosion's 2004 album, Damage.
Their love for an old style gives their songs more space and dynamism than many
often dense and overproduced modern efforts, but they've also got more thump and
muscle than old rockabilly. Heavy Trash have fifty years' worth of music to draw
on that wasn't available to Carl Perkins. Rockabilly couldn’t have been like this
until now, and it couldn't be like this even now without terrific songwriters.
The album title Going Way Out, besides evoking the hepcat albums of the fifties and
sixties, seems like a declaration of intention: they will go all the way out with
this style, pushing the twang, the reverb, and the stylized vocals as far as possible.
Their sound has gathered focus and depth since their debut; Going Way Out launches
with a confident line of surf guitar and holds you in a weird, glittering rockabilly
netherworld for forty-one minutes.
The album includes dramatic rockers with shuffling, stop-start rhythms, one loping,
dreamy number ("Crying Tramp"), an homage to "Summertime Blues" ("Crazy Pritty Baby"),
and a long, trippy groove to close it out ("You Can’t Win"). Crackling, sparse,
and dangerous, this music would seem right at home in a Sergio Leone film.
This brings up a difference between Heavy Trash's
debut and Going Way
Out that,
at first, is difficult to identify. The debut — simply titled Heavy Trash — showcased
their skill and imagination, but didn't quite come fully to life. This could be
partly because although both men were veteran performers, the duo Heavy Trash
at
that time had never played live.
After the release of Heavy Trash, they began to play shows, and they've barely stopped
since. They've even developed backing bands on both sides of the Atlantic, playing
with the Sadies
here and touring Europe with Danish bands Powersolo and Tremolo
Beer Gut
(respective band mottos: "Like a swift kick in the balls and a crack pipe
in the morning" and "Here to put the URF! Back in surf"). Trying to grab hold of
an audience night after night may be what gave Heavy Trash the sense of timing and
drama that’s so evident on Going Way Out.
Performance, in other words, brings the best out of Heavy
Trash — not surprising,
since Spencer has always put on a good show. That "con man" rep is mostly due to
Spencer's stage antics, as Verta-Ray explains: "One of the really cool things the
Blues Explosion did was to re-embrace the James Brown show-band sense of theater
and spectacle at a time when musicians were pretending to be so humble they had
no style or attitude.
"It's like when Dylan started wearing eyeliner and hanging out with Nico. Well,
Phil Ochs got pissed. Daring to be a performer and to accept the difference between
the person in the spotlight and the audience member is really what everyone in that
situation wants after all, isn't it? And if one can do it and have fun, let the
audience in on the humor of it and let 'em go home feeling they've been elegantly
conned, well, who's going to be mad about that?"
On stage, Spencer is transformed into a creature that's part carnival barker, part
Elvis, and part Screaming Jay Hawkins. He throws his scarecrow frame into deep knee
bends, forms a series of implausible angles with the microphone stand, and hiccups
bizarre asides into the mic. Beside him, Verta Ray is the picture of guitar cool.
(Through the magic of YouTube, you can watch their activities of June and July,
as various low-ceilinged clubs across Europe seethe with the contagious energy of
Heavy Trash. All the videos were shot from dance floor POV, so the frame is packed
with frenzied fans. About thirty seconds into each song, Heavy Trash often disappear
into the jostle.)
The album closer on Going Way Out is a strange song worthy of Captain Beefheart.
The vocals fade in and out, swirl around, layer on top of each other, speed up and
slow down, and are all set to a crawling groove that never quite lets go.
Spencer growls out a beat-poet style rant that becomes an ode to the rockabilly
scene: "I remember when these crying tramps were king, when wild gyrations ruled,
pumped so full of reverberation, treble, so high on the slapback, drunk on pomade,
lemonade, lime rickey, cherry wine, and Pepsi-Cola."
None of this ever really quite existed, or, when it did, it wasn't as magical as
Heavy Trash make it sound. They've re-imagined a bygone era and made it better.
- Story by Tom Vale" |
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DETAILS: |
ARTWORK: [unknown]
BARCODE: [unknown]
MATRIX/RUN-OUT GROOVE ENGRAVING: n/a |
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RELATED LINKS: |
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heavytrash.net / yeproc.com
/ alarmpress.com |
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