The Ampeater Review

A cou­ple weeks ago I revis­ited The Mighty Boosh episode “Search­ing for the New Sound”, in which the famous Bongo Broth­ers Rudi & Spi­der enter into a psy­che­delic jour­ney through time and space to find their band’s “new sound”. As I sat there watch­ing, I knew on some level that it was hilar­i­ous, but I was nev­er­the­less par­a­lyzed by the real­iza­tion that this par­ody spoke to me on a level that it per­haps shouldn’t. My band­mate and I seem to rein­vent our sound every gig, veer­ing wildly from coun­try to elec­tronic, from rock­a­billy to black metal, and back again. And I don’t think we’re the only ones. There are hordes of rea­son­ably com­pe­tent musi­cians search­ing for their “new sound”, while going great lengths to avoid the com­mon tropes of rock and roll, like a virus that might spread to con­sume every­thing in sight, leav­ing them left with noth­ing but pen­ta­tonic scales and skinny jeans. What they fail to real­ize is that these bits of musi­cal kitsch are the prover­bial build­ing blocks of civ­i­liza­tion, and when used in inter­est­ing new ways with a bit of cre­ative enthu­si­asm are infi­nitely more com­pelling than what­ever noise we might con­jure in our attempts to eschew con­ven­tion. In other words, there’s a rea­son we love pop music–it draws on its own past suc­cesses and expands upon them while culling inspi­ra­tion from an increas­ingly large and var­ied pool of influ­ences. We rec­og­nize some­thing famil­iar and com­fort­ing in every pop song, even as it pushes the fold of our expec­ta­tions. At exactly 22 sec­onds into Santah’s mag­nif­i­cent A-Side “No Other Women,” I saw with per­fect clar­ity how decades of rock and roll can fer­ment into some­thing pow­er­ful. This shit’s 110 proof, and it blew me clean off my feet.

I don’t know much about Mid­west­ern song­smiths San­tah, but their 7-inch landed with a splash in the Ampeater sub­mis­sions box, and I’ve been entranced by its mix of hook-laden vocal lines and lay­ers of con­trolled fuzz. Stan­ton and Vivian McConnell dou­ble on gui­tar and vox, with Tommy Trafton on keys, Otto Stu­paritz on bass/vox, and Steve Plock on skins. There’s a brand of upbeat pop music break­ing through the sur­face of indie gloom, like a gen­tle hand on the shoul­der of the genre, say­ing “Hey man, it’s gonna be ok. Just dance,” and Santah’s the best of the bunch. I could write an entire review about the first 22 sec­onds of A-side “No Other Women”. It’s not so much an intro­duc­tion as a launch mech­a­nism, an entry into the song that pro­claims excel­lence and fol­lows through in bold strides. The pre­dom­i­nant sound of this sequence is an ever so slightly dis­torted gui­tar tone, sup­ported chordally by the piano and with a per­cus­sive empha­sis on each down­beat. The main melody is repeated twice, with the last note held, repeated twice more, and then held again while build­ing in prepa­ra­tion for the vocal entrance. The track kicks off with a “Whoa!” and pro­ceeds in what’s either 12/8 time, 3/4 time with 4 bar group­ings, or a very slow 4/4. Hey, it’s rock music, who the fuck really cares, but this rhyth­mic change-up ends up being the pre­dom­i­nant fea­ture of the song, and might go largely unno­ticed by most lis­ten­ers. Most really really catchy songs have a sin­gle lynch­pin deci­sion that makes them so infec­tious. It’s the dif­fer­ence between a great song and one that takes res­i­dence in your skull, bounc­ing around in short lit­tle snip­pets while you go about your busi­ness. Truth be told, I’ve had the Macarena stuck in my head for 17 years. Whether I really want to admit it or not, that’s a damn catchy song, but I digress. What car­ries “No Other Women” past the first half minute is Stan­ton McConnell’s resplen­dent voice. It’s young and vibrant in a way that eschews any accu­sa­tions of friv­o­lity and instead con­jures imagery of a life wait­ing to be lived, with open roads stretch­ing in every direc­tion, tempt­ing you to shoot away for an adven­ture, leav­ing gas bills unopened, house aban­doned, and pets unfed. I have a ten­dency to ignore lyrics in songs, half because I can never under­stand them, and half because I’d rather find my own con­text. I gen­er­ally turn to lyri­cal con­tent when I run out of musi­cal fuel, so it’s a com­pli­ment of the high­est order that I have no idea what McConnell is say­ing, and don’t par­tic­u­larly care. What inter­ests me is the impres­sion a song gives as a whole, and whether that impres­sion is but a sketch of some­thing inter­est­ing or an immer­sive world I can crawl inside for three min­utes. Songs like “No Other Women” are why iTunes added a repeat-one button–I could leave it on all day, and I actu­ally have on sev­eral occa­sions. When a song starts out with such tremen­dous momen­tum, it’s always tempt­ing to lis­ten for echoes of the open­ing in sub­se­quent sec­tions. I’m often tor­tured by songs that bust out a killer lick just once and then refuse to repeat it in any form, but San­tah kindly treats us to a refrain of the intro melody in the vocal line, includ­ing the fan­tas­tic moment of “Whoa!”, this time shouted repeat­edly and extended to “Whaowhoaoooo” and sup­ported in lush har­monies. It’s a mer­ci­ful tem­plate for a song, giv­ing us the right hooks in the right pro­por­tions, using a com­pos­ite of famil­iar recipes to make some­thing new and arguably supe­rior to any of its ingredients.

When I’m met with an A-side that blows me away, I imme­di­ately assume the B-side will tem­per my wildly pos­i­tive expec­ta­tions and prove the artist in ques­tion to have lit­tle or no depth of tal­ent. I begin for­mu­lat­ing para­graphs as to how I might excuse the odd­ball B-side in light of the A-side’s mar­velous qual­i­ties. So, when the B-side turns out to be ter­rific, I have to step back and revise my game plan. Santah’s B-side “Neigh­bors & Cousins” is one such shin­ing exam­ple. The song unfolds into a vamp at walk­ing speed, pow­ered by a fuzzed gui­tar strum­ming eighth notes and an almost trop­i­cal bass line set high in the mix. I’m try­ing to avoid using the word “sunny” to describe this song, as it’s plas­tered all over Santah’s press mate­r­ial, but there’s some­thing about it that’s inarguably…sigh…“sunny”. Whether it’s the bass hook or the vibrato in the lead gui­tar tone, some­thing about this song invokes a beach weather men­tal­ity that gives this 7-inch a par­tic­u­larly uplift­ing qual­ity. It’s also refresh­ing to hear a real (or close fac­sim­ile of a real) piano tone. In a world in which most any­body can play a few chords on syn­the­sizer and loop it in Able­ton, it’s nice to hear the per­cus­sive thump of piano keys being used to good effect. I feel like I’ve maybe harped a bit on how con­ven­tional and sunny Santah’s music might seem, but there’s weird­ness here too, which is what sep­a­rates their intel­li­gent song craft from (and ele­vates it above) the unin­spired masses. Take a lis­ten to the break­down at about 3 min­utes in–it’s a pretty ballsy move to inter­rupt a song with so much momen­tum to intro­duce a spo­ken word sec­tion over bass, drums, and a dis­so­nant lit­tle piano fig­ure. But it works, and instead of killing the song’s metic­u­lously crafted vibe, it builds ten­sion lead­ing into the coda and snaps the lis­tener back into the song as it builds to its grand con­clu­sion. I don’t mean to infer that this was some care­ful for­mula, mapped out on paper long before the song even existed, and that’s the dan­ger of writ­ing about music–it’s so easy to strip a song down to its bones, and by the time you’re done impos­ing method­olo­gies you’ve killed what­ever magic once existed. I’m sure the ori­gin of the end­ing tag to “Neigh­bors & Cousins” sounded more like “Bro, bro, lis­ten, let’s just like, do the thing we do ear­lier, but kinda cra­zier here, bro” and less like Adorno dis­sect­ing Mozart, but my edi­tors only allow me to say “bro” six times per arti­cle, and I’d prob­a­bly exceed my quota if I went this route. In any case, my point is that it’s easy to kill good pop music with crit­i­cism. It’s some­thing that’s fun­da­men­tally meant to be felt and under­stood with­out the need to artic­u­late its var­i­ous nuances. If it had to be explained, it wouldn’t be pop­u­lar, now would it? Need­less to say, this 7-inch requires no expli­ca­tion for max­i­mal enjoy­ment, so you might want to skip all this dri­vel, crank your speak­ers, and hit play on Santah’s won­der­ful 7-inch.

Ben Heller

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

The Monks, The Gories, and The Detroit Cobras are sta­ples in the litany of hip influ­ences on mod­ern music. For those of you who keep copies of this list in trip­li­cate on your desks, just go right ahead and add Boston’s Thick Shakes to the top. Though they cruise on a road paved with dis­carded Nuggets com­pi­la­tions, they approach the mess of Amer­i­can garage rock with a remark­ably refined aes­thetic that brings a mea­sure of con­trol and san­ity to a style of music that oth­er­wise tends to run com­pletely off the rails. At their core, these are songs made for dingy base­ment clubs, by dudes who don’t own cases for their instru­ments and drum­mers who make do with two bro­ken floor toms and a cym­bal made from soup cans and duct tape. The stan­dard of musi­cian­ship is tra­di­tion­ally low, dom­i­nated by repet­i­tive four chord riffs, half-sung/half-shouted uni­son vocal lines, and end­less moments of dis­jointed slop. But that’s more a per­sonal impres­sion than a real assess­ment, and each band has its own par­tic­u­lar swag­ger. The Monks tend to be on the exper­i­men­tal side, The Gories on the punk/slop side, and The Detroit Cobras on the motown/soul side. That said, the Venn dia­gram of their respec­tive approaches to music is almost all over­lap, and Thick Shakes are right smack dab in the mid­dle. To any­one who’s spent weeks in their under­wear lis­ten­ing to the Nuggets and Peb­bles discs on repeat: Thick Shakes will be your new favorite band.

There’s some­thing about organ (and I mean real organ, not this silly synth shit), that gets me off my ass in an instant. It’s like an invis­i­ble call to arms, a post-hypnotic sug­ges­tion that I must imme­di­ately rock the fuck out. Com­bined with dri­ving snare hits on 2+4, some seri­ously blown-out gui­tar, and infal­li­bly punchy vocals, this is music to dance to, to sweat to, to take amphet­a­mines and freak out to. As Thick Shakes gui­tarist Tim Scholl explains, it’s “Amer­i­can R&B and blues, fil­tered through young British kids back into young Amer­i­cans.” Gen­er­a­tions of dis­af­fected youth chan­nel­ing each oth­ers’ music across the pond and claim­ing it as their own. To that I’d add that it’s also been fil­tered up a gen­er­a­tion, to musi­cians who have var­ied tastes in (and unre­stricted access to) the full spec­trum of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music, from folk and coun­try to blues and soul. But this panoramic view of musi­cal his­tory doesn’t always pro­duce the best bands. There’s a ten­dency to reach for the stars and try some­thing “new”, which almost inevitably results in some­thing “ter­ri­ble”. When the Rolling Stones set out to make music, their only goal was to be the best blues band in town. They didn’t see Exile on Main Street com­ing down the road, not even close, but as we all know, they even­tu­ally grew into some­thing much more than an Amer­i­can blues cover band. It’s because that growth hap­pened nat­u­rally that they made such a phe­nom­e­nal con­tri­bu­tion to rock and roll.

Thick Shakes has a sim­i­lar approach to music-making, and it’s what dis­tin­guishes them from the mass of psy­che­del­i­cally inclined proto-punk garage bands that never quite made it. I get the sense that Thick Shakes isn’t try­ing to do any­thing spe­cial, but that’s exactly the atti­tude that makes them such a trea­sure. In his thoughts on Thick Shakes, Scholl went on to explain that “‘Musi­cians’ (his quotes) have a ten­dency to add this and that to songs, which can make them inter­est­ing, but a lot of times just sort of amounts to wankery. We write the songs, and then work on the pro­fi­ciency of play­ing what we’ve writ­ten. We aren’t a ‘jam band’ (again, his quotes)”. I love that quote. Back when radio hits and 78RPM records demanded a crisp 2:30 per track, con­ci­sion was a valu­able asset in song­writ­ing. We’ve since con­quered the tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions that once con­strained pop­u­lar song form, and with an ever-expanding sub­set of artists who indulge in end­less wankery, it’s refresh­ing to hear a band that says what it needs to say and gets the fuck out.

Lind­say Crudele, Tim Scholl, Matt Mafera, and Jerry Mac­Don­ald are the brains, voices, and fuzz behind Thick Shakes. Mac­Don­ald pretty much summed up the band dynamic with one word: fun. “It’s fun to get together and do what we want. It’s fun to do that in front of peo­ple. It’s fun when peo­ple like it. Ulti­mately we were going to have fun any­way.” Crudele cor­rob­o­rates, “Our dynamic feels easy for me because I feel close to the oth­ers, inso­far as I’m mar­ry­ing one of them (Tim) and the oth­ers are close friends. Learn­ing to play and sing, and do it in front of peo­ple all seemed like an insur­mount­able mys­tery, so to be able to pull it off to what­ever degree is a lot of fun, and then to do it with peo­ple I enjoy. The songs are like the inter­sec­tion of non­sense party music with a bunch of vex­a­tion.” As much as I appre­ci­ate the barely-of-this-world-tortured-artist, I’m infi­nitely more impressed when seem­ingly sta­ble, func­tion­ing human beings enjoy life so fully that their cup spills over and floods their music with a gen­uine passion.

As a native Boston­ian liv­ing in enemy ter­ri­tory, I’m nat­u­rally fond of songs that shit on Boston’s numer­ous detrac­tors. A-Side “Go Back to New York” is a play­ful jab at trans­plant Bosto­ni­ans who bitch about America’s finest city. Sure, the bars close at 1am when the trains stop run­ning, the win­ters are cold and bit­ter, cars aim to kill pedes­tri­ans rather than avoid them, and the entire city pos­sesses an almost cultish enthu­si­asm for the Red Sox (so sue me, I bought a Sox license plate), but Thick Shakes make a good point: You live here, right? Stop com­plain­ing, or leave. Go back to New York, asshole.

The musi­cal recipe is sim­ple to describe but tough to fol­low:
1) Find a hook
2) Build a song around the hook
3) Pick an uncom­pli­cated topic or sit­u­a­tion, and describe it
4) Make music

Of course, there are other essen­tial ingre­di­ents to this mix (I already men­tioned the ass-thumping organ), and the first that comes to mind is the phe­nom­e­nal voice of Lind­say Crudele. Fans of Erika Wen­ner­strom and the Heart­less Bas­tards or Rachel Nagy and The Detroit Cobras will feel right at home with Crudele’s assertive alto. Maybe it’s that I’m some­what used to hear­ing female lead singers, but it didn’t even occur to me until I spoke with Crudele that there are more Mick Jag­gers in the world than Poly Styrenes, and that rock music isn’t exactly an encour­aged career path for tal­ented young women. Crudele recalls, “I went to shows all the time through­out high school and col­lege in addi­tion to dab­bling in instru­ments. After I grad­u­ated, my coworker in radio, an engi­neer and musi­cian named Bob C., asked me why I didn’t play in a band myself, told me that I should and that I could, and I didn’t have a good answer. I felt like there was a wall between the stage and me, I thought play­ing in a band was some mag­i­cal priv­i­lege and it didn’t occur to me to try it for myself. I also didn’t see very many female faces up there or at shows in gen­eral, where I was used to watch­ing from the back of the club because the front was too vio­lent. In 2011, I don’t think much has changed. At a recent show, the only time I got up to the front was when I was per­form­ing onstage. A sound guy recently tried to show me how to turn on my own amp. I spoke up about how a lot of my music scene peers were sup­port­ing some really misog­y­nis­tic music and I was told to get a sense of humor. We played a show where I was the only woman onstage all night and Tim pointed out that wasn’t entirely true — there were naked women painted on the drum kit. Any­one can start a band but it took a while to open my eyes to that I think in part due to the cli­mate. A few years later, I emailed Bob our record­ings and was like, ‘This is your fault!’ That kind of encour­age­ment should not be understated.”

Thick Shakes strike a care­ful bal­ance between a full­ness of sound and a min­i­mal­is­tic approach to music mak­ing. The nat­ural dis­tor­tion in the record­ings on this 7-inch is the result of metic­u­lous plan­ning — both tracks were recorded with vin­tage mics and pre­amps to 16 track tape with hot lev­els and some tape delay and reverb added to the mix. It’s an ana­log approach to record­ing that we’re send­ing to shit with a dig­i­tal 7-inch, so do your­selves a favor and pick up the real thing at Aurora7. It’s just $6 and goes to sup­port some great music. B-side “Neighbor’s Goods” has the per­cus­sive groove of The Monks’ “Boys are Boys” but with the tempo set to stun. Musi­cally, every­thing slots in per­fectly here–memorable hooks and clean fills that don’t seek to impress but instead focus on keep­ing every­thing rock solid as the song moves for­ward. The suc­cess of Thick Shakes is in the clar­ity of exe­cu­tion, and the dis­tinc­tion of indi­vid­ual sounds. The vocals, bass, gui­tar, drums, and organ each inhabit their own space, and have a well defined role within the group dynamic. Some­times the organ and gui­tar blend together as a sin­gle sound, some­times the bass and organ do the same, but I get the impres­sion that the group sound at a given moment isn’t the result of some happy acci­dent, but rather a rehearsed deci­sion with an effect on lis­ten­ers that’s known and under­stood by every mem­ber of the band. In other words, these guys are really, really tight, and in that respect, they’re a world apart from most other bands with a sim­i­lar sound. More­over, there’s some­thing pejo­ra­tive about the label of “Nuggets redux” that’s oh so tempt­ing to slap on Thick Shakes. Nuggets or Peb­bles or what­ever implies that the artist in ques­tion is some­how a shin­ing musi­cal bea­con amongst a sea of dread­ful schlock. But it’s the other way around, really. Blues, punk, rock, and Amer­i­cana are lost influ­ences these days. It’s rare to find a band that’s will­ing to embrace a raw aes­thetic and make music that’s authen­tic to their own expe­ri­ences. So much is lost when cre­ation becomes this dis­tant and cere­bral process, but Thick Shakes keep it real. I noticed that almost every mem­ber of the band is eager to dis­miss his or her own musi­cal tal­ent and training:

Lind­say: I’m not under any illu­sion that our band is a means to a liv­ing. Music isn’t about busi­ness for us.

Tim: I’ve been involved in music one way or another since child­hood. If not play­ing or writ­ing, then actively lis­ten­ing, always. I’ve never played gui­tar, or really writ­ten songs before.

Matt: I grew up play­ing per­cus­sion in school bands, I taught myself to play a kit in junior high. I never took either very seri­ously. Thick Shakes is my first band, and I’m not really sure I would have joined a band under many other cir­cum­stances, it was the right mix of good friends with sim­i­lar abilities.

There are no delu­sions of grandeur here, no life­long aspi­ra­tions to play Shea Sta­dium, just some folks who love music, can play a few instru­ments, and decided to give it a go. Con­sider that none of it would have hap­pened if Bob (remem­ber Bob?) hadn’t given Lind­say just a lit­tle push towards the stage, and it becomes kind of a heart­warm­ing story. And so, we have Bob to thank for the sounds of Thick Shakes, and Thick Shakes to thank for the sounds on this 7-inch. Give it a lis­ten, but you might want to stretch before­hand, as danc­ing is required.

Ben Heller

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]