Jon Roods

Paranoid Social Club: Axis II

Sam

Join the Club

Paranoid, Social, and otherwise

In their secret location, on the outskirts of Portland, among blue-collar types and rotting cars, the Paranoid Social Club conspire. Though their plans hint at world domination, for the time being they’re happy with small bits of mischief making: cold-calling studio execs and management possibilities; setting up elaborate treasure hunts whereby fans can find their first recorded effort, Axis: II the Demo buried in the ground fronting the police station, behind the counter at the Treasure Chest, or behind the bar at Platinum Plus; debating whether to play a show at UMaine/Orono for $80.

“Everybody who wants to play the show raise your hand,” says Dave Gutter, ringleader. No hands go up.

There’s an interesting dynamic at work here: The three members of this rock band (prone to industrial wash and illbient snippets) want desperately to succeed with their music — but they just don’t give a fuck.

They do a promotional gig on a local radio station prior to a show to help turnout, then drunkenly storm the station’s studios later in the week. They write their multi-tracked songs to include a DJ’s live performance, but they’ve performed with at least three different guys, one of whom is now in jail. They’re on time for the interview, but when I get back to the office there’s a message I missed asking me to bring beer.

Their history as Rustic Overtones — which would have morphed into Paranoid Social Club eventually — makes Gutter, bassist Jon Roods, and drummer Marc Boisvert aware of the cold music-biz realities and the responsibilities that come with them. But that experience has also left them profoundly jaded, insular, and a little bit crazy.

Hence the theme song.

“At the Paranoid Social Club / If you didn’t make the cut, make the grade, maybe if you’re just afraid/ At the Paranoid Social Club / Open up and discuss the pain, get it off your chest, I know sometimes you feel like there’s nothing left, but you’re not alone.” Gutter’s voice is soothing, comforting, inviting, understanding, and, well, creepy. The music is a sort of post-lounge, with a bossa-nova swing tied to a Bloodhound Gang (think 3-2-1 Contact) bass line.

It’s a far cry from the Monkees’ happy-go-lucky clubhouse tune: “We’re just tryin’ to be friendly / Come and watch us sing and play / We’re the young generation / And we’ve got something to say.”

PSC are the young generation, too. Except this one is asking you to “save me from the guns and the bombs / Or the ones I thought were friends to me now we just don’t get along.” Or try the chorus from “Save Me”: “Save me from the Policeman, from Mother Nature, from the government / Can you save me from what I have become? / Can you understand?”

Disaffected by the establishment (read: the major labels that have used them up like juice boxes), PSC turn inward. With a recording set-up provided (somewhat ironically) by ArtistDirect to Poverty (whom Gutter deserves some credit for discovering) and thus to PSC, Gutter, Roods, and Boisvert put in long days — “15, 20 hours a day,” says Boisvert, and I can’t tell if he’s kidding — crafting songs on the now-ubiquitous Pro-Tools, then figuring out how to play them live.

This leads to introspective songs like “Soul Demolition,” containing the obvious Rustic reference, “We built a house then we all moved out / We burned it down.” Locked up with each other, they seem to be exploring just where it is they’ve found themselves.

“It’s like when Jon and I had just got out of high school,” says Gutter, “and we were calling up clubs every time we needed a gig. Then we’d get one and our dads would come along and take us in their mini-vans.”

Maybe that explains the youthful exuberance tied with detached irony behind “Wasted,” which is quickly becoming the drinking game of choice amongst the college crowd. As is a Paranoid Social Club writing theme, it opens simply enough with the chorus: “We all got wasted, all fucked up and wasted.” (If you’re wondering about the game, try taking a sip every time they sing the word “wasted,” and you’ll understand the challenge.) Meanwhile, DJ Shade cuts in snippets of Beastie Boys (“It’s time to buy ale”) and Eminem (“Man, you’re wasted”). It’s not too hard to envision scantily clad spring breakers with their hands in the air.

What starts out as a party anthem, however, quickly devolves into self parody. “We all got wasted on 99 bottles of booze,” sings Gutter in his best Adam Sandler impersonation, “I only danced with your friend cuz I thought she was you / We got wasted / Cuz there was nothing to do / I must of had five drinks but I thought it was two.” As will become his trademark with PSC, Gutter’s clipped delivery is an excellent mix of hip-hop precision and rock growl on most of the disc, but here his nasal whine is mocking and cajoling. It’s fun, but it’s also quite depressing.

As is much of the rest of their demo. “Headphones,” led by Roods’s sinister bass, details most of the kids you see strolling down the street, staring at their feet, cut off literally and metaphorically from the world at-large. “Evolution” references heroýs gone, like Kurt Cobain, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and John Lennon. “I always thought that when I grew up, I’d be just like you,” Gutter wails, “Just like rock ’n’ roll / Just like evolution,” as Boisvert desperately keeps time by the bell of the ride cymbal.

Like the best kind of first date, the pretty face of PSC’s layered sounds belie a deep and tortured soul worth working to discover. “You kind of have to be bitter and jaded after what we’ve done for the past 10 years,” admits Gutter. “But if we were really jaded, we wouldn’t be playing anymore. We’ve got something good going here and we’re appreciative.”

Maybe that’s why they only sell these demo discs at shows: The fans who care about the music, “who have some kind of attachment to the band,” can get their PSC fix. (“And we tell people with no money to just go download it off the Web site,” says Roods.) Or maybe it’s because they’re savvy enough to know that sound-scanning a couple hundred discs at local music stores can actually work against them in their quest for a “deal.”

It’s hard to tell with these guys. They’re paranoid.

Rustic Overtones: Let’s Start a Cult

Sam

Cult of personalities

Rustic Overtones want you on their side

What’s the go-to motivational tactic used by every coach of an underdog team or demagogue looking to gain followers in a hurry? It’s us against them. Us against the world.

With Rustic Overtones’ eighth release, released in 2012, you’re either with them or against them. They don’t really care which. Let’s Start a Cult is everything their previous release, 2009’s New Way Out, wasn’t: All those string parts? Gone. The big and symphonic works that added up to an hour of music? This time they’ve stripped down to eight tunes and three minutes shy of a half hour. The guest players and revolving line up? With the addition of Gary Gemitti on drums and Mike Taylor on keyboards, they’re back to being the line-up you know and love: three horns, guitar, bass, drums, keyboard.

That doesn’t mean they’re back to hitting up-stroke ska songs and fire-breathing anthems, though. For this release, at least, they’ve gone much more organic, almost Edward Sharpe in their pop construction at times, and with a touch of lo-fi aesthetic that feels raw in a way they haven’t felt since before they were in the studio with Bowie.

It’s no mistake. “I like it gross,” Dave Gutter slinks on the devious “I Like it Low,” “I like the smell of cigarettes inside my clothes,” and there’s a baritone sax from Jason Ward that slithers through the weeds before being picked up by Ryan Zoidis’s tenor sax and a gritty trombone from Dave Noyes. The horns as a whole feel more part of this album than anything since before the hiatus – that you don’t really notice them is perhaps the best compliment I can pay to the arranging. They are wholly of the songs, rather than being ornaments.

“If there’s something you’re feeling inside, you should let yourself go.”

Oh, they’re tempting all right. “Let’s Start a Cult, Pt. 1” gets you right from the open with a poppy little flute line and digital hand claps and an “ooooh-oooh” bridge: “They can’t stop us all / How can they stop us all? / If we’re together.” They’ve embraced some new-school digital production here, too, integrating it so they manage to be space-age and ‘60s pop at the same time.

Just like they can combine old-time bluesy ballads with ‘80s sax lines in “Say Yes,” where Gutter knows how easy it can be to just join crowd: “It was hard to resist / They were pumping their fist / They were raising their flag in the distance.” His flittering guitar ain’t bad here either.

Gutter’s turned out some of his best lyrics in a while, too. The indie/big band “Solid” has this gem: “That’s not a halo, that’s a hole in your head / It’s not cold in the place that you go when you’re dead.” Ouch. It’s as mean as the low down Jon Roods bass that fuels the verse of “We’ll Get Right In” before it launched into melancholy pop for the chorus.

Remember? You’re with them, or you’re against them. And if you’re not with them? Well,  as the ultra-dynamic album closer says, “fuck it / Let’s go out with a bang.”