12Rods: Rock Out of Bounds
Wednesday 09 October @ 11:16:21 |
 by P.J. Morel
These are dark days for the word “progressive,” no less in music than in politics. Granted, “prog” rock has been about as cool as Dungeons and Dragons for about as long, but the current crop of garage rock revivalists have sent the stock of even modestly complex rock bands plummeting. Skill is out, production is out—even pop auteurism is getting the cold shoulder from the indie kids wearing vintage denim. In this deeply suspicious musical climate, 12Rods is releasing its highly anticipated third album, Lost Time, like a baby in the bull rushes. There’s no telling where this little fella might go: it’s got an awful lot of starch and character, but heaven knows it won’t be getting an easy start in the world.
To be sure, the “prog” tag has never suited 12Rods particularly well. Yeah they’re complex, and yeah they like to challenge the listener; but prog bands like to write 10-minute dirges about orks and wood sprites, whereas Ryan Olcott tends to write 4-minute pop anthems about his %@!#$&ed-up sex life. Still, the specter of prog haunts 12Rods like the disembodied spirit of so many lifeless music journalists. Ryan sees the association as almost inevitable now. “There’s no other way to categorize us. Everyone always asks, and they gotta say something now, so, you can’t say ‘post new wave’ or anything. I dunno.” That’s what the Foundation magazine is calling the band this month, by the way—“post new-wave.” It’s clunky, but not altogether off-the-mark given the band’s bright, synth’n’chorus pedal sound.
It’s fitting, too, in that the Twin Cities have a strong new wave tradition. New wave melded the originality and vigor of punk with the slick, get-with-the-ladies style of R&B to create an eclectic hybrid genre. Ev, the band’s keyboardist/guitarist and production guru, admits that he was lured to Minneapolis fresh out of the Peabody School of Recording Arts and Sciences by dreams of one day working with Prince and other masters of the “Minneapolis sound.” You can hear that sound at work on “Purple Rain,” and you can hear it in a 12Rods song like “Fake Magic 8-Ball,” from the new album: sinuous synth lines snake in and out of crashing guitars, while a smoove bass line stays locked to a dance-floor-tight mid-tempo beat.
Of course, 12Rods doesn’t tend to be known as a danceable band, at least in part because few of its songs hold a groove for more than a verse. But the R&B sound is there in the tight production and rock-solid performances, and it often contrasts deliciously with the hyped-up whine of Ryan’s vocals, and the squirm-inducing subject matter of the lyrics. Nothing on Lost Time comes close to the brilliant discomfort of Split Personalities’ “I Wish You Were a Girl,” but the spirit is still there in lines like, “The only thing I know / Is my chocolate-covered loop hole,” from “24 hours.” Your chocolate-covered what? Is that supposed to be taken in a sexual way? Can it not be? Ryan doesn’t like to be clear about things in his lyrics, but they often suggest major romantic dysfunction.
That tendency comes to a head in what is, for me, the stuttering, fire-spitting high point of Lost Time, “Terrible Hands.” I don’t know what “Terrible Hands” is about, but I know it’s about something going very wrong: “You’re a girlfriend—No!—a punching bag. / You’re a puppet in a masquerade.” Olcott delivers the words in a continuous, focused scream, with the precise rhythmic flow of a battle rapper. The verse rips along on a riff that sounds like a demented variation on “I Want Candy”—a riff so bouncy, so infectious that it would drive you crazy if it weren’t for the sweet, soaring relief of the chorus, which lifts you up on a golden cloud of la-la-las. The two things, verse and chorus, shouldn’t go together; but they do, and their contrast keeps the whole song taught with dynamic tension.
Other high points are the angular groove of “One Thing Does Not Belong,” and the perky juvelnalia of “The Time is Right (To Be Wrong).” The closer, “Telephone Holiday,” chugs along on what sounds like a Reggatta de Blanc-era Police riff chopped up and recycled by Amon Tobin.
Lost Time is not a perfect album. The minimal intro song, “Universal Time,” is exceedingly slight. Few albums (Van Halen’s 1984 being a notable exception) carry off the “intro song” with any aplomb, and I don’t see its usefulness here. “Boy in the Woods” sounds like the “experiment” that the band members say it started out as: interesting, but not altogether coherent.
Still, the rest of the songs are thoroughly engaging, and that’s quite an achievement given the great variety in the songwriting. The tunes stand up to repeated listens, as you eventually notice how a keyboard part will echo a vocal line a few beats later, a drum fill will imitate a break beat. The songs on Lost Time are often bombastic, but they’re also quite nuanced in the details.
Those details constitute the biggest difference between this album and the last. Produced in L.A. by Todd Rungren, 2000’s Separation Anxieties was every bit as complex as the current offering, but sometimes felt a bit lifeless, less well-thought-out. It’s a phenomenon that Ryan attributes to the band being out of its element and following the record company procedure. “We gotta clear everybody else out of the room and do the engineering ourselves,” he explains. “We used that [experience] as the basis to say, ‘You know what?, we are very qualified to do this ourselves.’”
Not only did they act as their own producers, but, after being dropped by the major label V2, they’re putting the album out by themselves as well. “The bottom line is that there isn’t a label out there—internationally, nationally, or even locally—who would touch us with a 10-foot pole.” But it’s a fact that—so far—the band is taking in stride. “We can only be who we are,” says Ev. “We can’t be expected to be marketable all the time.”
And here’s the real beauty of 12Rods: the fact that their razor-sharp sense of style has nothing to do with what’s hip. 12Rods has seen the upside of having a highly original sound, and they know there’s a downside too.
“The one thing that really keeps me motivated as a song writer is that I honestly believe that we make the best music in the world,” says Ryan, not sounding the least bit cocky. “Through the ups and downs of everything, I just really feel like we kick ass. There’s a lot of bull%@!#$& that goes on with the industry and people not really getting it and a lot of our stuff falling on deaf ears completely, and I take all of it with a grain of salt and move forward.”
Or, as his older brother Ev puts it, “I think that we’re the only ones in the world that can make a 12Rods record.”
12Rods plays the First Avenue mainroom on Tues., Oct. 15, with Manplanet and Halloween Alaska. 5 p.m. 21+. $8/$8. 701 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.
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