Casio

Satellite Lot: Sleepwalk in a Burning Building

Sam

Keep rotating

Satellite Lot return with Sleepwalk in a Burning Building

No fair naming names, but not long after my list of the top local albums of 2005 was released with Satellite Lot’s Second Summer at the top I got an email from a band whose album I’d sort of panned: “Hey, I just picked up Second Summer … this album fucking ROCKS. Good choice, definitely number one. I’ve never heard anything this good out of Portland. Are there any other bands you would recommend in the area making music this good?”

Well, sure, I wrote back, there’s Cult Maze, An Evening With, Phantom Buffalo, Diamond Sharp, the Enchantments – and those are just the bands making great music in Portland within the same genre. But that debut record was certainly remarkable in part because it was so unexpected. Though they’d been playing in Portland in various forms for a good five years, no one would have told you in 2005 that Satellite Lot were one of the biggest draws, that’s for sure, nor a favorite to put out the best album of the year.

Two years later, the band remain something of an enigma—incredibly well respected, yet unable to keep a stable lineup in place, only rarely playing out in Portland, and about to release a follow-up record, Dec. 14 at SPACE [this originally ran in 2007], that would seem to have come out of the blue. And the album they’re delivering was recorded entirely in their practice space, mixed and mastered by guitarist and more Casey McCurry, without any professional studio intervention.

“It still sounds like clown shoes,” McCurry offers. “Everybody tells me it sounds really good, but it never sounds even close enough to a real record for us.” So why not record with a local studio? “With the process we use to write songs,” McCurry says, “we wouldn’t be able to go into a studio until we grow up or something.”

Judging by the results found on Sleepwalk in a Burning Building, the tradeoff is worth it. Yes, the instruments can sound mushy at times, and the vocals are buried on some tracks, making good lyrics hard to parse, but the songwriting is terrific—organic, original, dense and slippery. Slightly tighter focused than Second Summer, Satellite Lot here trade in some Jersey rock for the dance pop of bands like the Call, the Alarm, and Duran Duran, trading heavily on synthesizers and electronically enhanced beats.

“Never Again” leans more toward the rock, driven by Ben Landry’s heavy snare and finishing grandly with a reverb-laden guitar hook. In the middle, Aaron Hautala delivers the unrequited love song that became his stock in trade on Second Summer: “Tell me one thing/ It’s just killing me/ How long, how long did you know/ That the life you’d grown to love would end in misery/ Explode in my face?”

Yet the following “Liberation Front” is a change of pace on nearly every front. It opens dance-floor amped, with pulsing digital beats from the synths and a main melody line like something off Like a Virgin, before calming down with a horn section featuring Brian Graham (Sly Chi), Mark Tipton, and Dave Noyes (Seekonk/Rustic Overtones). It’s futuristic like something off the soundtrack to Flash Gordon and downright utopist: “They showed me visions of a future I’m in love with/ I found another way.” For the present, however, “You can just open your eyes and see/ All that suffering/ Open your heart and feel/ All that you’re meant to feel.”

Nor do the band live entirely in the past with their references. “Werewolf Wolf” is alive with Killers guitars and Minus the Bear vocals. “Devil’s Details,” featuring anesthetized lead vocals from the now-departed Sydney Bourke, has guitar bursts like Tegan and Sara. Some of the more morbid lyrics (“Brick Tiger”: “Timing is everything/ They’ll find me, with a rope around my neck”) even have a contemporary touchpoint with Hautala’s dad, horror writer Rick Hautala (how I missed that connection last time around, I have no idea).

With tracks that start at 3:30 and run as long as 6:00, 6:45, and 7:15 on a 12-track disc, there is grist for the pop lover here, as well as the prog sensible. There’s melody and rhythm enough in often many-layered tracks to deconstruct, pull apart, and reassemble. While the instant singalong might be harder to find than on Second Summer, persevere. The album improves with every listen and is damn hard to get out of your player of choice.

KGFREEZE: VOLUNTEER

Sam

Sign me up

KGFREEZE returns with plenty of hand raisers

Because Kyle Gervais is constitutionally unable to be in a band, we are left with his solo project, KGFREEZE. While that may be frustrating for fans (and members) of great bands like Cosades and Grand Hotel, it isn’t bad consolation for those interested in hearing truly interesting and exploratory music.

And because Gervais has decided the classic “band” music-making structure is not for him, it’s even easier for him to pivot with his songwriting whims. On his first KGFREEZE album, Sociopath, that meant he played all the instruments himself and created a grimy, inward-looking piece, as the name would imply. Similarly, on the brand-new VOLUNTEER (I’m just going with capitalization thing – AP Style be damned) he has enlisted a Brady Bunch of collaborators, who share songwriting credits and contribute vocals, musicianship and production.

The results are among the best in an already-impressive resume of recorded works. The album is dynamic, engaging, and thought-provoking – even at times a whole lot of fun.

“Better Falsetto” is the highlight, which you know already if you’ve seen the video charging about social media. It is Gervais aping Justin Timberlake, a recalcitrant crooner who doesn’t have to worry about what the radio edit might sound like, with Jared Burst filling in for Jay-Z in the rapped bridge. Almost as a throwaway, it has a hook like Seal’s “Kissed by a Rose” (I had forgotten the Batman connection to that song) that will have you belting out the chorus in random places before you know you’re doing it.

Burst, too, does great work. He merges with the verse in a half-time slur, then slaps you out of your reverie: “Who gives a fuck about whatever his name is?” And Sean Morin (Daro, Cambiata, etc.) sets the mood with a works of synths and beats.

This rival is often a topic of conversation. In “Talk About Love,” Gervais wonders, “How would he feel if he knew what I was doing to you.” But then he changes the pronouns, turns the song on its head, makes the finish of the six-and-a-half-minute piece into an entreaty: “Let’s talk about love … whatever that means.” And the last minute-plus is a distorted fade-out, like being forcibly dragged, with teases at speeding back up that ultimately sputter out in Derek Gierhan’s drums.

In the strutting and spare “Top Secret,” we get the other side of the story, in the form of Sara Hallie Richardson’s dark evanescence, peppered with laughter and chatting: “I’ve met you many times before/ You give nothing and keep asking for more … Gotta make sure that you meet your needs before you meet mine/ I can’t begin to explain to you, how useless you are.”

And, yet, you get the sense they’re sleeping together. (The couple in the song. Not Gervais and Richardson.)

Gervais and company love contradictions – changes of tempo, of mood and setting. The opening and title track is nothing but moody synths, slightly industrial, with muted vocals that mimic the lyrics, “I don’t really care.” And then, after three minutes, it gets awesome, with guitar melody and chords in opposing channels and downright danceable.

Suddenly, that extended, all-instrumental jam crashes into “Power + Status,” declaring immediately that, “I still get fucked up on week nights / With people I don’t know / When you’re not around” in traditional guitar/bass/drums structure. This is the Gervais you know best, full-throated and doubled delivery: “I talk a lotta shit people about / People I shouldn’t talk shit about.”

And he’s right. No one cares about that. Especially if he can combine with the likes of Miek Rodrigue to elicit pointed guitar solos and Jacob Battick’s alter-ego AFRAID to create the Moby-like “Good Times Roll,” a repeating and cycling mash-up of early rock and contemporary digitization. The piano is like a skipping CD in the open, pounding and insistent, but AFRAID is warm and inviting, careful in his delivery, not unlike Damon Albarn in “Tender,” which similarly rolled the same words around to see how they sounded.

Then we get a deep bass, a flute-like lilt, and some snare. Like the 7:18-long “Song 9,” it’s the kind of work you can listen to on repeat for hours if need be, though “Song 9” is more like something off the Sixteen Candles Soundtrack, with Pretenders licks and a Men Without Hats” keyboard line. Plus lines like, “I just want to hold you / Sometimes / I think I’d like to get to know you.”

Is that you, Ducky?

The whole thing is just ducky by me, I’ll say that. KGFREEZE doesn’t make easy pop fare, but you can see the wheels turning behind every track and you can listen to them for days on end.