MODEY LEMON
MUTE BIOGRAPHY - 2005

NEVER say never. It’s a fine line between cutting your cloth to fit and ending up in a stylistic straitjacket because you lack the confidence to move on. What initially helped mark you out from the pack can – if you’re resistant to change - end up as an albatross. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Modey Lemon understand this well. Their one rule? No rules.

After trimming to a duo around five years ago and establishing themselves as idiosyncratic players in the brotherhood of mean ‘n’ moody, bass-free garage rockers, guitarist/vocalist/Moog mangler Phil Boyd and drummer Paul Quattrone later came to feel it was time to add another number to their righteously rowdy rank. To that end, around 18 months ago they recruited engineer Jason Kirker, who also plays keys, effects (notably, a customised box of tricks called a Tri-wave Peako Generator) and… bass.

Boyd tracks the decision to dynamically overhaul the band back to a tour of America’s West Coast in April 2003. It was their last tour as a duo and an awakening of sorts. “The Iraqi war broke out,” he explains, “and there was this chain of events: we’d been a two-piece for years and there were all these things we wanted to do musically; plus, being on the edge of America where the mountains and the ocean meet meant there was something about our geographical circumstances, such that we knew we wanted to embrace change and chase something bigger.”

The “something bigger” is the sound of “The Curious City”, Modey Lemon’s second, full-length UK release. It sees them not only blasting away from their retro-obsessed peers at Mach 10 speed, but also subtly shifting the shape of the psychedelic/sci-fi synth-rock that defined them with 2004’s “Thunder + Lightning”. Where abrasive guitar riffs, serrated keyboard runs and wild, textured electronic noise once dominated, there are now songs with recognisable – if wayward and wiggy – structure. Modey Lemon’s sound is no less fucked-up, of course - it’s simply been pulled into focus. As Quattrone sees it: “It was somewhat of a conscious effort to not be so garage-y. It wasn’t that we had to change who we were; we just wanted to embrace other sounds and ideas we were kind of afraid to embrace before.”

Mission accomplished on that score. “The Curious City” is recognisably Modey Lemon, but it’s a polymorphously perverse beast, shifting from ‘Bucket Of Butterflies’, which suggests The Teardrop Explodes as mauled by Nirvana, through the compulsive, motorik groove of ‘Red Lights’ to the deranged folk-metal of ‘In The Cemetery’ and sombre, Leonard Cohen-like lament ‘Countries’. In between, the Suicide take on Steppenwolf suggested by ‘Sleepwalkers’ (Boyd’s “critical view of robotic living or catatonic complacency”) swings like the devil’s own dick - and constitutes Modey Lemon’s first “pop” song.

For Boyd, “part of the purpose of Modey Lemon becoming a three-piece was moving toward making an album like this. The ideas for some of the songs pre-date the band or are from around the very time the band was starting, but they never seemed to be ideas we should follow, because of what we’d conceived ourselves as being. It was more about opening ourselves up and, when Jason joined, that happened even more. One of the things we bonded over was a shared love of synthesisers and electronic stuff.

“When we got off tour after 12 months in early June 2004, we went into the studio and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. A lot of what we were doing was just getting together and jamming off one little riff that would go for hours. A lot of the experimentation on the new album happened through that. Going into the studio every day in the summer was just the thing we did and there was a lot of repetition in the way we were rehearsing. We work in an abandoned factory that Jason once inhabited and it’s kind of fitting that it’s deteriorating around us. It’s a metaphor for Pittsburgh, which was once a real industrial force but has lost its power. It’s been left to crumble, but we were trying to get back inside it and create life out of it again.”

In Boyd’s mind, the idea behind the LP was “to take songs that featured the vocal melody more, but without compromising the attitude of the band sonically. We’re all fans of pop music, but some of the stuff that got us into music in the first place took the idea of a pop song – whether it was Sixties psychedelia or punk – and challenged the structure within that. This album was about wanting to carry on that tradition, in a way. Last summer we were listening to a lot of Fela Kuti and Kraftwerk, who play completely different styles of music, but do similar things. They both have very long, repetitive songs where the melody line recurs but the rhythm will change, or the rhythm will stay the same and the melody will change. You can get so inside that, that you lose yourself a little.”

If anything can bring on such disorientation, it’s closer ‘Trapped Rabbits’, the album’s piece de la resistance. A hypnotic exercise in controlled chaos running at 16 minutes, it lays paranoid, needling guitar notes over looped, heavy drum patterns and rumbling bass tones, building to a compulsive, Krautrockin’ crescendo of positively orgasmic intensity. Modey Lemon decided against editing it down. “It’s not like we don’t like time signature changes,” laughs Boyd of their rock raga, “but we’ve never been into listening to a guy show off what he learned in his guitar lesson for two hours. There’s a definite punk attitude to what we do and that’s what we like about Fela Kuti and Kraftwerk and Captain Beefheart. Sometimes they get mathematical, but they also create a mood.”

Modey Lemon’s prevailing mood on ‘The Curious City’ is perhaps best encapsulated in the album’s cover - the work of Apes bassist Erick Jackson. It depicts a landscape painted in lysergic-bright yellows, pinks and greens, featuring five rabbits in the foreground watching a stream of traffic beneath them disappear into a tunnel beneath a mountain, which is crowned with a hand that holds a corpse. In the distance sits the outline of Pittsburgh’s skyscrapers. Boyd’s inspiration for the image came from ‘Watership Down’, which he was reading while the band was recording. “There was this one line talking about how rabbits constantly live in fear,” he recalls, “and I saw this as a metaphor for the world now. We seem to be governed by fear. You can look at the rabbits Erick drew for the sleeve, though, and not really know what they’re up to. You don’t know whether they’re actually about to orchestrate something mischievous or whether they’re just terrified. I thought they were neat creatures, in that you can say they’re plain nervy, or else they’re crafty and that seemed to embody two main elements of the album: a comment on the general state of Americans and a symbol of the people who want to do something about it. Having Pittsburgh as part of the concept was a way of dedicating the album to one of the elements that had enabled us to make it, and which had let us be ourselves. This record overall does have its sombre moments, but it’s definitely got a bit more colour to it and we wanted to embrace that and emphasise it. We wanted to have a colourful cover because it felt like a celebration of the work we’d done.”

And that intriguing title? “I thought it was a fun title,” laughs Boyd, “because it’s a play on the word ‘curiosity’, which relates to the fact that every time anybody tries to get us to explain our music, or fit us into a certain genre, we jump it. Whatever your situation,” he adds, “there are all these things you love and hate about the space that you inhabit and that’s where our band is at its best – where it’s teetering in between those things. Most of the songs on this new album really ride that line – they’re either a celebration of life or they’re caught up in the claws of the monster we live with.” *******************************************************************