AEM061 True Womanhood

True Wom­an­hood have been around for about 9 months and their debut album, Base­ment Mem­branes, was released only a few days ago.  Nev­er­the­less, the band has made a name for itself, par­tic­u­larly locally, through reg­u­lar gigs at some of DC’s most renown venues. With an impres­sive knowl­edge and appre­ci­a­tion of local indie/experimental music, they’ve man­aged to inte­grate them­selves into the scene remark­ably quickly.  More­over, although all 3 mem­bers of True Wom­an­hood are only 23 years old, they’ve known each other since mid­dle school and it shows in the com­fort with which they blend influ­ences and sup­port each oth­ers’ crazy ideas.  The chem­istry is all there.

Of A-Side “The Monk”, per­cus­sion­ist Noam Elsner remarks, “this is a song we orig­i­nally recorded for our demo and re-recorded for this release. It’s an inter­est­ing song for us because both times we recorded it it ended up chang­ing dras­ti­cally dur­ing the process. So you could say it’s been a really long song writ­ing process, even though the main struc­ture of the song hasn’t been touched since we first started play­ing.” The lat­est ver­sion was recorded at Death By Audio in DC and mixed with the help of J. Rob­bins.  “When we got into J’s stu­dio we real­ized he had all this amaz­ing equip­ment like an awe­some Char­ter Oak mike and some sweet plate reverbs that we put all over the song so we redid the vocals and put reverb and tape echo on a bunch of the sounds, we play this song with a tim­pani that has a piece of metal sit­ting on it, you could call it pre­pared tim­pani if you’re into Cage and that sort of thing, but it made the tim­pani sound all sorts of fucked up which was awe­some and we tried to bring those sorts of weirder sounds out with the reverb plate.” Tex­tu­rally, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing.  Although the skele­ton of the song is fairly con­ven­tional, it’s fleshed out provoca­tively.  The “weirder sounds” that Elsner speaks of give the song an ethe­real qual­ity which is haunt­ing in places.  Lush reverb on innu­mer­able gui­tars is off­set by vio­lent crashes on the “pre­pared timpani.”

The band rea­sons, “this is kind of a funny song because it’s one of our most straight­for­ward poppy songs which was why we wanted to tem­per some of that with some stranger sounds, so like the Phil Spec­tor break­downs in the cho­rus got that treat­ment and hope­fully we reached a happy medium between pop and exper­i­men­tal.” That they cer­tainly do.  “The Monk” exhibits traces of pop, par­tic­u­larly in its struc­ture and in the pre-chorus, where a catchy ris­ing chord pro­gres­sion builds beneath falsetto laced vocals.  “I’ll meet you halfway…” But pop isn’t a word that would come to the minds to most lis­ten­ers.  “The Monk” is a lot more acces­si­ble than, to draw on the John Cage ref­er­ence, 4 min­utes and 33 sec­onds of silence, but hon­estly I’m quite thank­ful for that.  It’s about as con­ven­tional as the kind of ‘pop’ put out by the likes of Radio­head or Bjork.

Actu­ally, True Wom­an­hood gets a lot of com­par­isons to Radio­head and also to Sonic Youth.  While the basis for such com­par­isons is fairly obvi­ous, the band is a lit­tle uncom­fort­able when­ever they’re drawn.  Dur­ing an inter­view with DCist, guitarist/vocalist Thomas Red­mond explained, “I feel that is just con­ve­nience. That’s all it is. What those two bands do is they mix crazy avant garde stuff with pop stuff.  And let’s be hon­est, that’s what we’re try­ing to do… But I think what’s really impor­tant to us is the new music that’s com­ing out now. We’d be more com­fort­able with a No Age and Beach House com­par­i­son. Or HEALTH and Beach House. Or No Age and Slow Dive…” It’s in moments like these that True Womanhood’s knowl­edge and appre­ci­a­tion of music really becomes obvi­ous.  Actu­ally, they make it clear that they’re influ­enced by just about every­thing under the sun.  Bassist Melissa Beat­tie points out, “we’ve lis­tened to a lot of hip hop lately.”And sure enough, the band’s MySpace page iron­i­cally (or not?) states, “True Wom­an­hood is the best rap­per alive.” A full text of that inter­view can be found at here.

With regard to “The Monk,” Elsner con­cludes, “It’s also prob­a­bly our hap­pi­est song, we don’t really do too much in happy moods so even when we do it still ends with the line ‘we tried and failed.’ make of that what you will.” Well, to me it’s not the ulti­mate but the penul­ti­mate line that haunts the most, “we eat our young.” Cheer­ful indeed.

Elsner describes B-Side “Shadow Peo­ple” as an enigma.  “It’s prob­a­bly the old­est song that we still play and since day one it’s been a fan favourite. It’s been around since way before we even had a demo but it wasn’t on the demo, and we got all these peo­ple ask­ing where it was.” But he mod­estly asserts that the only “solid parts” are the gui­tar riff and drum track.  Beat­tie typ­i­cally plays the drum track on the Vox Per­cus­sion King, a vin­tage drum machine that the band tells me has only ever been used on one other record­ing, Kraftwerk’s Auto­bahn.  So True Wom­an­hood has a lot to live up to.  After all, Auto­bahn shat­tered bar­ri­ers as one of the first com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful elec­tronic music record­ings.  But Beattie’s use of the Vox Per­cus­sion King is actu­ally a lot more inter­est­ing than Kraftwerk’s.  A heavy gui­tar riff holds the song together, leav­ing the drums free to wan­der out­side the lines.  Thun­der­ous crashes and hits free to fall at moments when they might not be expected.  Also, as Elsner is quick to point out, “It’s got amaz­ing sounds but it’s really old skool, you have to play all the sounds by hand with these weird pad­dle things.” Basi­cally, it’s a spectacle.

The band explains that “for such a sim­ple song, we’ve gone through a mil­lion ways of play­ing the song live, includ­ing the use of an elec­tric gui­tar bowed with an acoustic, and also an instal­la­tion we set up with a ton of organ pipes with mics fit inside which all ran into a mixer and some crazy effects.. So when we wanted to record there were so many options we sort of did not know the best way to fit them all together, and we went through many dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions before set­tling on this ver­sion. The record­ing fea­tures Thomas singing into some of the organ pipes and also I believe includes the use of every sin­gle Death by Audio pedal.” That’s right.  “Shadow Peo­ple” might be a sim­ple song but tex­tu­rally, it’s  thick as fuck.  This becomes espe­cially appar­ent at the end of the song when  the pri­mary gui­tar riff and vocals dis­solve, leav­ing a num­ber of pre­vi­ously back­ground sounds exposed.  “Wait, what was I just lis­ten­ing to?” And live, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are basi­cally end­less.  Elsner reflects, “the last time we played this song live it was an encore to some show we played in DC, and it turned into a crazy drum cir­cle on stage with like half the audi­ence and mem­bers of other bands all play­ing all the drums along with us, one of the coolest moments the band has been lucky enough to witness.”

Nate Green­berg

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