The members of Rigid want to make one thing perfectly clear: “We are not metal,” drummer Rick Simmons protests. “What we are is just a rock band.”
That’s a point of contention for the three-year-old band, who this month celebrate the release of their debut CD, Wrung Out (perhaps you’ve seen the poster around town).
Not that they don’t have a soft spot for the stuff, mind you. Simmons, guitarist Scott Guion and bassist Rollo Martinez profess a sincere love for everything from Metallica, Voivod and Iron Maiden to Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne and Rush. “All that stuff is so great compared to all the weak alternative bands they play on the radio today,” Guion says. “All that old shit rocks so much harder.”
It’s a question of degree, really. Rigid’s brand of intense, anguished vocals, full-throttle guitar and shifting, staccato rhythms—heavy and metallic but not necessarily heavy metal—may rock harder and straighter than a lot of bands on the Mermaid/Checkpoint’s/Monaco Bob’s circuit, but compared to the heavy-duty hey-bra metal scene of Fat City, Rigid is decidedly more, um, sensitive.
“People that go to Mermaid have a pretty eclectic taste in music,” Guion says. “They can pretty much go and hang out there and see anything there. But in Fat City, you make the trek to Zeppelin’s and you wanna see metal. We’re still kind of the nerds of that crowd.”
“I think the thing that makes us different is we all like different music,” says Martinez, who enjoys everything from alternative rock standbys like the Smiths and Morrissey to roots rock stars like Tom Petty to avant garde metal like Voivod. “All our tastes are so varied. I like everything that they like, but they don’t like everything that I like.”
As diverse as their tastes are their musical backgrounds. Simmons has played with metal heavyweights like Paralysis, Severance and Dumpster. Guion led Oxen Thrust and was Weedeater’s second guitarist for a year, and Martinez spent three years with Beatlesque pop band Big Sun.
All things considered, Guion says that Rigid’s affection for the affected-less is probably the one characteristic that truly sets them apart. “A lot of bands wind up having a pretense, whether they mean to or not,” he says. “It sometimes comes off like a gimmick, and I get kind of turned off by that. When I go see bands, I want to see something real. That’s what sets us apart—not necessarily having a vision for this band. That’s our gimmick.
“It seems funny to me now that all these people are embracing metal when all along it was there and it was the same,” Guion continues. “But now a couple of bands came and knocked the walls down, you know—Nirvana. So now hard rock is cool.”
But Nirvana never met a 4/4 they didn’t like. Where do those asymmetrical rhythms come from? “That’s from listening to Iron Maiden and the Police,” Simmons says. “That combination sounds kind of funny, but they’re both very rhythmic bands with a lot of syncopation going on.”
Three “Best Bets” for November:
Since first firing up their vintage analog gear in 1991, Stereolab have emerged as possibly the most influential band on the (formerly) indie scene. The group, appearing at House of Blues on November 3 along with Ui and DJ Spooky, established an early reputation for dreamy Moog jams that blended the original Modern Lovers record with Claudine Longet, but their latest release, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Elektra), finds them probing the exotic world of French Europop, ’70s jazz, ’50s easy listening and German electronic music from the ’70s. As always, vocalist Laetitia Sadier intones didactic lyrics about society, democracy, history and other leftist bon mots in a somnambulist drone that makes Nico sound like Tracy Bonham.
“A lot of the stuff we recorded in Chicago using a lot of the electronic equipment from the ’60s and ’70s,” said guitarist Tim Gane. “One of the ideas for this record was to use some loops from the old jazz records of that era. I approach it with a rather simple idea like that and the songs go from there.”
More so than even Combustible Edison, Stereolab embody the exotica aesthetic, and they have the value-added plus of being loud to boot.
Words like stark and plaintive don’t even begin to describe the haunting oeuvre of Will Oldham, whether he happens to be calling his project Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, just plain Palace or—as they’ll be billed at the Mermaid Lounge on November 23—Palace Music.
Oldham—guitarist, vocalist and prime mover of Palace etc.—possesses one of the most distinctive instruments in all of music, a lonesome, fractured quaver that simultaneously calls to mind Neil Young, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a melancholy preacher and the pimply-faced teenage clerk on The Simpsons. He sings with the offhand, casual intimacy of Nick Drake, but whereas Drake evokes warmth and romance, Oldham’s world is an Appalachian winter of harsh realism and arcane poetry.
Palace’s latest, Arise Therefore (Drag City), is their quietest, most low-key yet, with tempos hovering at a slow waltz and musical accompaniment stripped to all but the most spare—nodding-off bass, piano, some guitar and a beatbox keeping a rhythm so severe it sounds like two bricks being clapped.
And finally, November 21 brings the true inventor of psychobilly, Hasil “Haze” Adkins, to the Mermaid Lounge. Calling Virginian Adkins eccentric is a little like calling Bob Dole mature. Adkins composed the vulgar rock classic “She Said,” later immortalized by the Cramps, and has influenced everyone from Southern Culture on the Skids to the Reverend Horton Heat with his manic one-man-band blend of rockabilly, swamp pop and insane rock and roll. He doesn’t like to tour much anymore, so this might be your last chance for a long while to catch a true rock and roll original.
