 by Holly Day
“Adam was the one who actually thought of our name, just because he sort of liked the ring to it,” explains The Vet’s lead singer and guitarist Andy Larson. “I mean, it sounds a little bit like a messed-up take on a ‘60s garage band name, you know, like The Jets, or something like that, except that it sounds a little weird. Like, nobody would call a garage band ‘The Vets.’ I, personally, sort of like the kind of vague political context of it, but it’s not really supposed to mean anything. It’s just supposed to be like ‘veterans,’ [and not veterinarians, like I’d originally thought—h.d.] because anybody can be a veteran of pretty much anything.” He adds, “It’s meant to be slightly ambiguous. We don’t think about our name too much. That’s one of the best things about being in a band, is that once you’re named, you don’t have to think about it anymore, because the naming process sucks. You just end up the three or four people in a room tossing out ideas, and then somebody’ll get excited, and somebody else’ll be like, ‘no,’ and then you’re back to it again, and it goes on for hours. Naming bands is hard.”
Download an mp3 of the Vets' song, "Raging Scathe."
 Using
the principle of a spider calling its babies to its web by way of tapping messages
out on a tightly-wound piece of web, lonely prisoners trapped in the Bastille
would wrap sinew around the bars of their cells and pluck them, ever so gently,
until the spider, drawing on that memory of being a baby spider, would come
creeping across the wall to the familiar sound. The prisoners would name them
and draw comfort from their “pets.”
Intentional or not, the trio of Adam Burt (guitar), Andy Larson (guitar/vocals)
and Ryan Parsons (percussion) have reproduced what an electrified, highly-stylized
orchestra of these prisoners might sound like. Creepy minor notes being struck
in one speaker, heavy-handed angry chords in another and an overall ominous
drone that might be the sound of the spiders singing along—like in that
PBS special that ran a while ago about the songs spiders sing. Apparently, they
all sing in creepy, haunted house drones. One can almost see the summoned spiders
running from one end of the room to another while the band’s on stage,
perhaps stopping occasionally to puff out and flatten in some bizarre spider
dance.
While growing up in a small town is, of course, nothing like being held prisoner
in a windowless cell surrounded by a buggy French swamp (although the record
does sport a picture from the sado-masochistic French philosopher Michel Foucault’s
book Discipline & Punish), one has to wonder where the air of desolation
and unresolved anger that pervades these songs come from. As I wondered this
all weekend (or at least I think I did, because big chunks of musing and wondering
seem to have been forgotten) at the Green Man Music Festival in Duluth, I couldn’t
help but think that Moose Lake seemed like a pretty cheerful little place, especially
if you like wildflowers and fishing. Larson and Burt both came from there, and
belonged to a community so tight that Burt’s father took over the position
of band director of the high school after Larson’s grandfather retired.
“I just picked up guitar because they were around the house a lot, and
started playing,” explains Larson of his own musical beginnings. “My
parents both play guitar, and my dad makes them, too,” he elaborates.
“He’s built some pretty cool acoustic guitars over the years. I’ve
got one in my apartment that he built the neck on.”
 In
high school, Larson hooked up with Burt because “he was the only other
person in high school who was into music.” Their first band, The Early
Americans, brought them here to the Twin Cities from Moose Lake to play at the
now-extinct Foxfire with other Twin Cities’ bands, and Larson and Burt
spent time with Low’s Alan Sparhawk as two of the original members of
The Blackeyed Snakes, with Larson on drums.
“Adam and I both moved down here for school at the U,” explains
Larson on the how and why they left Moose Lake. “It just seemed like the
place to go, and I’d gotten to know a few people just through coming through
here with The Early Americans. There seemed to be all this really, really awesome,
fun music coming from kids that were our age, except that we didn’t know
anybody else from our area that was into stuff like that.”
And, despite the overall gloomy, dark nature of the album, there is a definite
feeling that this band is having fun performing—fun in the way that screaming
at an irritating younger sibling can be really good fun sometimes, or just getting
something big and noisy off your chest for the first time. The Vets yell stuff
at lots of people on this album, from the President to capitalists to people
polluting the environment to Bush’s silent majority and their unwillingness
to question the questionable.”I’d say, by and large, I’m actually
a pretty easy-going sort,” says Larson about his music. “But I think
more so than anything with this new record, it’s just channeling that
vague world-feel of what’s going on around us, especially politically
and economically in the world, and this country. We can all go about our daily
lives doing what we normally do, but there are all these things going on that
we don’t necessarily want to think about, and if we did think about it
with some consistency, we probably wouldn’t be very happy people. But
I went to school for political science, and I can’t help but watch it
a lot, and I think some of the music on the record is a reaction to what’s
been going on.” ||
The Vets perform on Sun. July 24 at the Triple Rock Social Club with Warhammer
48K, The Blind Shake and Tornado. 5 p.m. All Ages. $6. 629 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls.
612-333-7399.
Head
on over to our mp3 page to download
hundreds of tunes, including the Vets' song, "Raging
Scathe."
Find out more about The Vets on their website at MySpace.com/TheVets.
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