By Mark K. Anderson
When you've got nothing in the lemon and spiders on your ceiling, then you're either going out of your head or you've somehow landed in the middle of a Girls Against Boys song.
There's something distorted about Girls Against Boys -- or, as they're otherwise known, GVSB. And it's not just the directed noise and channeled distortion their guitar and two bass front line kicks out either. (Could John Lennon have realized what beast he was letting loose when he recorded that first twinge of distortion on the intro to "I Feel Fine"?) There's as much electronic overload to be found on the band's lyric sheets as there is to be heard coming out of their Marshall stacks.
For McCloud, whose dusky, serpentine vocals wrap around a song like an old pair of shades, lyrics are a thing that come in two or three-word spurts. Those linguistic nuggets may come from a novel (Henry Miller is a current favorite), a film (he admits to appropriating a line or two from John Cassavetes movies), another song, an ad or even an overheard verbal fragment that he finds apposite.
"I have notebooks on tour that are completely full of phrases and different things I find," he said. "I keep rewriting them and hoping to get to something. I'm never quite sure what it is I'm looking for, but I think it's basically some kind of juxtaposition or some sort of word play that I find has the right dark amount of humor to it."
The references to lemons and spiders in the band's 1996 showstopper single "Super-fire," for instance, come out of an interest in the oddities of proverbial speech.
"I love translation. Like 'Nothing in the lemon...' That's a French phrase for going crazy," he said. "Rien dans le citron is a catch phrase for saying there's nothing in your head. 'Spiders on your ceiling' is the same thing."
One odd lyrical appropriation, which may shed some shadowy light on GVSB's nihilistic slant, came when McCloud worked as a production assistant on a Natalie Merchant video.
"I heard her song all day long, and I had my own lyrics running through my head that weren't actually in her song," McCloud said of the words he eventually used for GVSB's "In Like Flynn." "I used what I wanted her to be saying. She sang, 'Don't you know we are blessed and lucky.' And I thought she said, 'Don't you know we are best at nothing.'"
"Disco-tortion." It's an awkward pun. But all the more reason it should come to define yet another subgenre of the increasingly balkanized world of rock 'n' roll.
McCloud and his three bandmates -- Eli Janney on keyboards, bass and vocals; Alexis Fleisig on drums and Johnny Temple on bass and keyboard -- developed this term to put words to the two distinguishing features of the GVSB sound: the bass-heavy rhythm track and danceable grooves mired in a swamp of distortion and gritty sonic textures.
They also coined the term "Freakonica" to spoof the rock press' recent hype over electronica. The latter neologism, in fact, is the title of GVSB's latest album -- their first for a major label.
When the foursome recorded Freak*On*Ica a year ago in Minneapolis, they commandeered a local club on Tuesday nights to experiment with a sideshow that they bring out whenever the house permits. The "House of GVSB" is a more free-wheeling notion of the rock concert experience -- in which the band's performance is only part of the fun.
They designed the "House" to combat the assembly line mentality of most rock shows. "I always hate that, especially with bigger shows, it's like 'File 'em in! Now play for 'em! Now file 'em out!' ... We wanted to have a GVSB event that wasn't just us playing," McCloud said of the revels that include non-musical entertainment, DJs and a party that the audience is invited to join in. "Some nights we'd get clowns. We did it for like eight weeks. It was a fun little experiment. Something we've since done on tour."
Their current tour arrangement, however, is as an opening act, so McCloud and company don't have the latitude this time around to open the "House" up for inspection.
"Doing this tour, we play a shorter set," he said. "It's cool to change things up. A different approach. We go in there, hit pretty hard and then we're out."
Anyone familiar with '80s-era British new wave acts will probably not even hear McCloud's voice when he sings.
Indeed, McCloud's vocal resemblance to The Fall's Mark E. Smith and the Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler is uncanny enough that no rock critic fudging is necessary. You'll recognize it immediately if you know either of the two bands.
"From the very beginning, I was incredibly uncomfortable with my voice and the way it sounds," McCloud said. "I guess House of GVSB was the first time I felt like it was definitely me."
The band's sonic identity, however, has a lot to do with their love of creating rough, dark sounds. It's not the sort of catalog that could easily be reproduced with a solo acoustic guitar.
"I think what we do is more textural than melodic, really. It's our tack," he said. "We don't use a distortion pedal to make things sound, you know, really rockin' or anything. It's more to add different textures and different tones to different parts of the song. It's basically playing around with the sound.
"You could sit around the campfire doing that," he joked. "But it wouldn't be much of a singalong."