Girls Against Boys may have written the book on "how to maintain indie cred even though you're signed to a major label" (no, it's not called "Girl Power"), but that doesn't mean they're going to turn down an invite to the post-Grammy shmooze-a-thon hosted by their new label, Geffen Records. I mean, would you--given the chance to sling back free booze and hobnob with such celebrities as Danny DeVito and that "Soy Bomb" guy? While most of the band escaped the festivities by three a.m., vocalist/guitarist Scott McCloud found himself creeping home in the not-so-wee hours of the morning after receiving a crash course in the art of bigshot tipping: "I gave a guy four quarters and he laughed in my face," he chuckles with slight indignation, "It's still a dollar!"
We are gathered in an East Village cafe, waiting for keyboardist/bassist/vocalist Eli Janney. He struggles in, looking tres incognito in a fishing hat and sunglasses--a get-up, he informs us, that is actually serving to protect an old eye injury that has acted up again. (Periodically throughout our conversation, a stray tear will spill down his cheek, which has a very endearing, trooper-ish effect.) After a few rounds of musical tables and chairs, we order coffees from the visibly annoyed waiter. McCloud, however, opts for a hair of the "big-foot" that bit him, complaining that a year is just too long a period to keep any resolution. The answer? Find a new calendar. We raise our glasses in a toast: "Happy New Year!"
The thing about the Girls is, they're nice boys. Their music is as nasty as it comes--a raucous, debaucherous frenzy of feedback, keyboard freak-outs and oil-slick lyrics, all saddling a gut-rumbling beat--but the musicians themselves are, in the words of Bust editor Michelle Karp, "the kind of boys you want to bring home to Mom." As if being in one successful rock band wasn't enough, all four members of GVSB also have active side careers: Janney is something of an in-demand producer; McCloud and bassist Johnny Temple play in the noir-lounge combo New Wet Kojak; Temple co-founded Akashic Press, whose first release, Arthur Nersesian's The Fuck Up is going into its third printing; and drummer Alexis Fleisig is Akashic's designer, as well as the designer of GVSB's album art.
High school friends who first made music together 15 years ago when McCloud and Fleisig jammed to the Who in Scott's basement, the members of GVSB made a name for themselves in the politically-minded hardcore band Soulside. Comprised of vocalist Bobby Sullivan (now of the band Sevens), McCloud, Temple, Fleisig, and Janney as their sound man, Soulside release three albums on DC's legendary Dischord Records. GVSB was built from the remains of Soulside. The first release under the "Girls Against Boys," 90s VS 80s, was a studio-only EP featuring Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, Janney, and McCloud. When Canty left the project, Temple and Fleisig joined up. Their first LP, 1992's Tropic of Scorpio, has been described as "a difficult listen," but the band believes it was a necessary step toward 93's Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby, their first for Chicago's Touch and Go label.
Produced by Ted Nicely (of Fugazi fame), Venus Lux was part of what would be called the "Nicely Trilogy." Cruise Yourself (1994) was somewhat spottier than the searing Venus Lux, but 1996's House of GVSB was the piece-de-resistance. Propelled by Temple and Janney's double bass duels and Fleisig's hammering drums, McCloud emits a caustic wash of wah-wah guitars, snarled phrases of discontent and desire, and the occasional microphone-swallowing howl. House brought GVSB's self-described "ultra rock" into many a home, and also proved where the band's heart lay: the album was released on Touch and Go after GVSB had signed to Geffen, honoring a handshake agreement they'd made with the indie label.
"That's the way it should be done," says Janney. "I think our main rule is just that you gotta treat everybody decently that you deal with. And Touch and Go treated us incredibly well. Everybody there worked their asses off for all of our records, and they're really good people, and that's why we treated them as such.
It's easy to understand how a band might feel reluctant to replace a handshake with a 50-page business contract, but in the long run GVSB knew it was the right move. They also read every word of those 50 pages. Temple, who Janney describes half-seriously as "our political mouthpiece," points out that relative to a lot of rock bands, they actually signed very late in the game, after watching a lot of friends go through it. "And a few of them made it big," Temple nods, "but by and large almost everyone who signed got all excited and then ended up sort of bitter and disillusioned with the process. Which conforms exactly to how one would predict the marriage of music and commerce.... We just tried to keep our eyes open to what the downside was--the true ugliness of the beast." He pauses and glances at his bandmates, as if he knows what's coming next. "Rrroarrr," Fleisig growls with a grin. "We sort of think of ourselves as Luke Skywalker against the Evil Empire," Janney muses mock-heroically.
Kidding aside, Janney adds, "We had to pick our fights about what was really important and what wasn't. You know, the house is gonna win--that's why the house is still there. You just try to get the odds as close as you can. But we don't wanna talk about that too much," he says, closing the subject. "We're still surviving, and we got to make this record the way we wanted to."
Written in New York and recorded at Seedy Underbelly, a new studio in Minneapolis, the dense, combustive Freak*on*ica marks a number of departures for Girls Against Boys (Rest assured--they're saving the waltzes for their next album.) Aside from the fact that this is their major label debut (which, consequently, gave them a "much, much, much" bigger recording budget), the band also worked for the first time with producer Nick Launay, perhaps best known for his work with the Birthday Party and Killing Joke, with whom GVSB is often compared.
When asked why he didn't produce the album himself, Janney says, "There's a very simple answer to that question."
"Yeah," jabs Fleisig. "He wanted to. We said no."
"Being in a band is a collaborative process," continues Janney, "but being a producer is not."
Although they initially felt a little (There's a weird break in the article here) wasn't familiar with their material, the band found Launay's "archivist pack rat" tendencies to be totally in sync with their own desire to push the limits of every song. "In the past," notes Temple, "we would get some of the basic sounds for each instrument set up and then stick with them for the course of the whole album. Like for me playing bass of House of GVSB, the sound is fairly uniform throughout the whole thing, and that's not because we weren't being experimental, it was just 'cause we didn't really have that much time. Whereas with this album we were able to take every song and say, 'Okay, what sound do we want on the bass? What do we want on the drum? The guitar...? I think there's a much wider sonic range on this album."
Like the very first Girls Against Boys album recording, Freak*on*ica was approached primarily as a studio project, with little regard for whether the songs could be recreated live. Many of them incoporate multiple samples and labor-intensive effects such as imitating that perfect "mini-cassette distortion sound." In fact, most of the songs fill up all 24 tracks, plus an additional eight that were digitally synced up from a second studio where band members could basically go wild in-between takes. "We got much more into ideas," asserts Janney, who has all but traded in his bass on this record for keyboards and sythns. "We were not concerned at all with whether or not we needed another keyboard player or somebody else to play the part, but whether it sounded cool, you know? Whether it really drove the song. Is it gonna be cool for the song, does it sound really freaky? Let's fuckin' do it. Who cares if we can play it live."
Of course, this raises the question: how are they gonna play it live? McCloud points out that when they're writing they work on all the arrangements as a live band, "So even thought there's lots of different sounds that might be added later, generally once we're done recording we can still play it, give or take a few sounds." Adds Temple, "There is a vibe difference between us live and us in the studio. There's more of a frantic, chaotic sonic urgency to the live show, and the recordings are much more sculpted. When we were making this album we were worried--these songs sound so different, will they fit well with the other songs--but when we play them live all of our songs work together because there is a uniformity of sound." The bottom line is, Girls Against Boys are one of the best live rock bands around, and the Freak*on*ica tour is sure to leave fans sweaty and satisfied.
The opening track, "Park Avenue," sets the tone: "This is no apocalypse, just burn like you don't exist." Tribal, thundering drums and a loose, rumbling bass collide with an amphetamine keyboard nightmare in "Pleasurized," in which McCloud leers, sounding very much like Richard Butler of the Psychadelic Furs, "pleasure's everything." "Roxy" writhes with a sinewy stripper's strut, while "Speedway burrows into a menacing industrial groove: "Can you do it like a machine, do it better than a machine?" The only track on which Janney plays bass, "Exile," opens like a slo-mo pinball machine, stretched-out guitar licks ricocheting through space and light as a voice echoes "Pop! Pop!" And the layers build from there: an insistent, fuzzed-out bassline, gunshot drumbeats, and then McCloud rasps, "Turn the fame on/ Come on, hit me yeaaahhh," and the whole thing cracks open.
Where GVSB's other albums conjured the occasional glimpse of the apocalypse, this record stares the four horsemen straight in the eye--and finds that they look an awful lot like Disney characters. Written and rehearsed in Times Square during the beginning of the gentrification/sterilization process, Freak*on*ica addresses the subject directly in songs like "One Firecracker," where McCloud taunts "Disneyland, NYC" over and over. From "American Black Hole" to the salacious intonations of "Vogue Thing" ("the look by Trash, eyes by Heaven/ the look by Trash, ass by Armani") most of the lyrics vibrate with the lurid glow of a culture seeped in commercialism. "Actually," McCloud quipes, "they're all advertisements. If you look closely on a given day in New York you'll see every word."
Although Freak*on*ica contains McCloud's most politicized lyrics yet, it still resonates with personal turmoil. "I feel like everybody's walking around with a lot of good things in their head and also a lot of vile, evil shit," he states plainly. "There's always that war going on in your head, and I get a weird kick out of touching something that I might not even wanna act on--something darker--maybe a desire or an attraction that's ambiguous, even in its sexual nature or orientation. I like that to play that out in my mind and have fun with it."
Not for nothin' does the word "sex" frequently come up in conversations about Girls Against Boys. Temple observes, "In his lyrics, Scott doesn't come out and say things in their pure form. He doesn't come out and say hugely shocking things, but the suggestion is always there, the vibe is there. And I think that translates in our music."
In the culture of alternative music, which has prided itself more on the PC "sensitive guy" values than explorations of twisted erotic impulse, this vibe is sure to register strongly. "There's just a lot of music that doesn't really lend itself to being sexy," Janney says. "One of the things that we've always incorporated into our music is a lot of dance rhythms--not like house music--but go-go or R&B, or something of a hip-hop nature, which has a very sexual rhythm to it. And we bring in those elements.
Carrying on a tradition that was born in Minneapolis, the band has been throwing monthly dance parties that turn their favorite East Village bar into the "House of GVSB" This vibester's paradise allows them to "draw out the funk and the groove without embarrassing ourselves trying to mimic it or imitate it," says Temple, who insists, "we are not a funk band." They may dig Earth, Wind, and Fire, but they find as much "groove" in fellow barkers like the Jesus Lizard.
"Even with a band like Killing Joke," notes McCloud, "the guitars sound almost incidental on a lot of the songs, it's like a cool riff..."
"It's more of the pepper and the spice than what's driving it," Temple finishes. "So we let Alexis drive," smiles McCloud, "and we all hang on for dear life."