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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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U.S. Maple
Wednesday 22 January @ 12:36:34 |
 The “best live band in Chicago” returns with their high-stakes brand of old school showmanship
by Tim Carnahan
U.S. Maple vocalist Al Johnson vividly remembers an instance when the band simply could not rescue their music. Headlining a late 1990s student festival at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, the band worked its way through its elusive musical maze before an unresponsive crowd.
“What we were doing was just not translating,” Johnson said. “Which surprised us because the school focused on science and we play this really complex music.”
As the last tonal gasp hung over the silent crowd a few dogs climbed up onto the stage. “And it was weird because it was like these mongrels joined us on stage,” Johnson said. “And we were mongrels, outsiders, like dogs at the wrong place at the wrong time. I guess we’ve always felt like outsiders.”
In many ways U.S. Maple are the mongrels of rock. They play complex songs designed to not only challenge the listeners’ sensibilities, but the band’s abilities as well. They perform with a sense of narrative and drama, but shun the omnipresent power so common in the hard-rock persona. Instead they base their music and performance on mastering the art of the possible flub, the impending breakdown, the lab explosion.
The band formed in Chicago in 1995 when vocalist Al Johnson, guitarists Todd Rittmann and Mark Shippy, and then-drummer Pat Samson (Samson left the band in 2001 following Acre Thrills and was replaced by Edith Frost alum Adam Vida) converged to distill rock music into a set of specific elements that recalled their roots as serious 1970s hard rock fans.
“I remember seeing Judas Priest and ACDC and it was frightening to see a show, and it was scary, and it was exciting, and you left a bit unsettled,” Al Johnson said. “It’s those qualities that we want to keep.”
Eight years and four albums later ,U.S. Maple are preparing to record their new album, Purple On Time. And while U.S. Maple certainly owe a debt to their hard-rock past, their musical allusions to Judas Priest are not easily recognizable. In fact, U.S. Maple worked to redefine their rock and roll experiences through a diligent and almost puritanical devotion to their own conception of song structure and performance.
U.S. Maple’s most recent album, 2001’s Acre Thrills, continued to refine their plan to reintegrate fear and horror and uneasiness into rock. The U.S. Maple world is populated by slang-talking threads of sound that snake and twist. The music is not quite Math rock in the classic Polvo or Slint sense of the term, because while U.S. Maple’s rhythmic structures are equally complex and academic, the music avoids sharp angular precision.
Instead, U.S. Maple is a slow menace, the study of spreading bruises. The lack of studio trickery and absence of guitar effects render the music stark. Like a microscope slide of a back-alley sample, U.S. Maple’s music is the science of dirt.
Their intentionally clumsy and unruly rhythms led rock critics to quickly brand U.S. Maple the obvious heirs to Captain Beefheart’s disordered legacy, a comparison Al Johnson finds puzzling. “Until rock writers started mentioning Captain Beefheart, I had none of his records,” Johnson said. “Never at any time did we sit down with a Captain Beefheart album and try to do that.”
U.S. Maple’s live shows have a tendency to divide audience opinion. “When you see U.S. Maple play every show is different because we can’t possibly play it verbatim every night,” Johnson said. “The way the songs are written they’re meant to be stretched or soured or rescued and sometimes they fail.” The unusual musical style, combined with their gawky, yet surprisingly elegant, stage theatrics can polarize the audience.
“Usually even the people who hate the band will stay and I think there are some elements to what we do live that cause people to just hang around to see if we’re going to implode,” Johnson said. “From an audience perspective I think they see us trying to go after what we’ve written and sometimes we make it and sometimes we don’t but on both sides I think it’s exciting. It’s really in the moment.”
The possibility that U.S. Maple may actually fail to perform their songs seems at odds with the attention they pay to writing them. But, U.S. Maple are playing very difficult songs that slither and weave through multiple time signatures, often without a steady beat, often seemingly anchored only by the presence of sound, but somehow always rooted in the vocabulary of hard rock.
“I just hope people know that we’re writing songs, that we’re not just up there improvising,” Johnson said. “That’s not schtick up there. It’s four people communicating, constantly trying to get from the beginning of the set to the end of the set in a fashion that’s not a car crash. And sometimes it is. Every night it’s like a different story is being told. It’s the struggle of presenting and performing and rescuing these songs that make the live shows the most important.”
U.S. Maple will be engaging in a rescue mission on January 24 at the 7th St. Entry. With special guests Exercise. 8 p.m. $8/door. 21+. 701 1st Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.
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