AEM047 KC Quilty

The way new music matric­u­lates into the cur­rent music scene has become this sort of precision-based, hyper-active process. The LPs, EPs and 7-inches float down the con­veyor belt of some Wonka-like mega-gadget. When they get to the end of the belt, the claw lifts them up and drops them into their respec­tive genre bins. Over here is a bin labeled “Glo-fi.” And over here is one labeled “Shit-gaze.” And right next to that, “Baroque NPR-pop.” Online music cul­ture is like the record shop on steroids—instead of just one wall being labeled “rock” and the other “alter­na­tive,” we can now fin­ger inter­minably through infi­nite cyber bins.

But what about music that falls out­side the reach of the judg­men­tal music machin­ery? That’s what KC Quilty is—a young band whose tastes fell into a time cap­sule 15 years ago, leav­ing them to sound delight­fully dis­con­nected to any­thing cur­rent. If you had to peg a genre on it, it’d be grunge. KC Quilty, a three-piece from Brook­lyn, drags its drum­beats through sludge and soaks its gui­tar tones in slacker anti-energy. Its cho­ruses swell with easy power while zephyrs of feed­back swirl in and around the mix. The drones and dis­so­nance are matched by the rock solid hooks. These are jams com­posed with mop­tops and bags under the eyes and a warm heart for 90’s rock radio.

“What we hear the most is, ‘It reminds me of high school,’” says lead singer/guitarist Sadie Dupuis. While it’s an odd thing to note con­sid­er­ing this group of early twenty-somethings and their peers would have just grad­u­ated high school in the mid-aughts, it still feels accu­rate. Their songs feel like the prod­uct of chil­dren of the 90’s pledg­ing alle­giance to their era’s alt-rock. And while it’s unabashed in its loy­alty to the decade Nir­vana dom­i­nated, it still exe­cutes enough polite nods to the can­on­ized indie-gods of the slacker move­ment to assure you of its cred­i­bil­ity. It’s as much Malk­mus as Cobain, and even more Pix­ies than Pearl Jam. “We have a ten­dency to tell peo­ple that we sound like Mata­dor in 1993,” said Dupuis, who admits her admi­ra­tion for label-greats Pave­ment, Guided By Voices and Helium.

Helium, of the afore­men­tioned three, is the com­par­i­son that requires the least effort in con­nect­ing the dots. Sadie—the band’s founder, lead singer and prin­ci­pal songwriter—is, after all, a girl. She sings sweetly but isn’t inter­ested in being cute. Lazy ears might make face-value claims of tough-girl group influ­ences like Sleater-Kinney or (the super-dated) Veruca Salt. But what’s more strik­ing in her voice is how cyn­i­cal and unam­bi­tious it is—two qual­i­ties that line up nicely with an appre­ci­a­tion for all things Malk­mus and Pol­lard. Dur­ing a dis­cus­sion of taste, Julian Fader, drum­mer and co-core mem­ber, admits that he “likes the female singers more than she does. I like the qui­eter moments and Sadie wants to get all loud.” “I like Soundgar­den,” Sadie chimes from the other side of the room.

The power of KC Quilty—a name that refers to the Clare Quilty char­ac­ter of Nabokov’s Lolita—lies in that loud/soft dynamic. Like so many of the hits that swal­lowed whole the music indus­try in the early-to-mid 90s, Dupuis/Fader and co. take the for­mula of somber, tension-build in the verse into speaker-rattling cathar­sis in the cho­rus and absolutely run with it. In their best tracks, KC Quilty con­structs its verses on lilt­ing, lazy, drunken grooves. Typ­i­cally, a Kim Deal-ian bass line (from the recently recruited Ethan Bass­ford) will serve as foun­da­tion while the gui­tar and vocals grad­u­ally drip moody atmos­phere into the ris­ing water-level of the song. The cho­rus, with its swell of power chords and power drums, is the sound of the water-level over­tak­ing the rim.

Case and point: “Super­nova,” Side A of this here dig­i­tal 7-inch. It’s a clas­sic build and release. Dupuis’s double-tracked vocals and down-tuned gui­tar crawl all over each other, thick­en­ing like a pea-soup fog fill­ing the room. In the instant before the release of the cho­rus, Fader (who actu­ally looks a bit like Dave Grohl with his stringy black hair tied behind his head) lays down a fill like he’s load­ing a canon. And then comes the squall—a dense bang that engorges just like Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” Now tell me you’ve heard any­thing more badass in the last month than when Dupuis rhymes “super­nova” with “nice to know ya.” Besides a cou­ple of over­dubs, the track was recorded live and all together, which hints toward how pow­er­ful a KC Qulity show might be.

Side B of the release, “Jack­shit,” tweaks the for­mula a bit. Instead of uti­liz­ing the dynam­ics between verse and cho­rus, it strings you along for two and three quar­ter min­utes with the increas­ing promise of some­thing huge. The lis­tener rides a groove built off a moody acoustic riff until a glitchy, Phil Selway-listening-to-DJ Shadow beat enters with a soft warning-siren of feed­back. Then, at said two-and-three-quarter-minute mark, all but the feed­back cuts out for a brief moment before the song is launched into the stratos­phere, ful­fill­ing the promise the track had offered up to now.

“Jack­shit” was recorded at a cre­ative per­form­ing arts camp for chil­dren in Connecticut—during an elec­tri­cal power out­age, no less—that Fader and Dupuis worked at as coun­selors last sum­mer. Fader made use of the tiny “sound stu­dio” where he gave his daily drum­ming lessons. “It was this 10-foot by 10-foot, bathroom-sized space,” said Fader. “It’s basi­cally a lit­tle shed with a drumkit and a cou­ple of amps.” Dupuis, who taught song­writ­ing work­shops, was assisted by one of her stu­dents for the song’s lyric—a mini-narrative about Jack and the Beanstalk. “Every day the kids would come and think of a topic and they’d have half an hour to write a song for it,” said Dupuis. “And some idiot was like, ‘BEANS will be the song­writ­ing topic of the day!”’ The sound col­lage in the outro of the song was pieced together by Fader, who car­ried around a Sal­va­tion Army tape recorder all sum­mer and cap­tured any sonic blips and bits that piqued his inter­est. One such bit included on the track is the camp’s East­ern Euro­pean kitchen staff singing while hud­dled around a piano after camp hours. “I don’t know what the hell…it’s some sort of song from home,” said Fader. “It’s either the Czech or Pol­ish national anthem.” Whichever, Fader hur­ried to his bunk to grab the recorder, fum­bling with the tape on the sprint back up the hill. “I got like 35 sec­onds of them singing this song,” said Fader. “It sounded awe­some.” Indeed.

KC Quilty, in the early stages of their exis­tence, have cre­ated a batch of songs (the band released a split 7-inch on Decem­ber 10 and will release their first full LP Clover/Coriander on Jan­u­ary 22) that man­ages to sum­ma­rize the good bits of an his­tor­i­cal period that a ton of music fans hold a fond­ness for. And instead of com­ing off as a tired retread, it feels entirely new among their auda­cious, genre-breeding con­tem­po­raries. It’s direct­ness in style-ripping is not the result of a fail­ure to birth new ideas; it’s the result of the con­fi­dence KC Quilty has in its taste and abil­i­ties. There are those who strive on craft­ing new forms of sound and those who strive on stream­lin­ing a pre-existing for­mula. The con­tem­po­rary music scene sur­vives on both. It’s just a refresh­ing breath of 15-year-old air to hear a band choose the latter.

Steve Glauber

Side A — Supernova Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Jackshit Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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