 Get ready for Halloween Alaska
by Steve McPherson
Unleashing the lead track, “A New Stain,” off of Halloween, Alaska’s second album on anyone familiar with the band will probably evince a similar reaction: “This is Hallloween, Alaska?” And it’s not the kind of bewilderment that comes from a band going completely experimental, but rather from a band growing into its sound, finding the nooks and crannies only hinted at by earlier work.
Download an mp3 of Halloween, Alaska's song "Drowned."
 Whereas
2003’s self-titled debut etched out a template for the group’s sound
(electronic drums and keyboards played live, not sequenced; singer/guitarist
James Diers’ steely sentimentality; lopsided grooves framing songs about
love and loss), Too Tall to Hide both consolidates and expands that sound.
Halloween, Alaska was an altogether gauzier and more impressionistic
record that begged comparisons to electro-indie-rock experiments like the Postal
Service, but Too Tall to Hide is the sound of a part-timer going full,
a side project evolving into a full-fledged band. The synth stabs and four-on-the-floor
disco beat that greet the listener on “A New Stain” form an uneasy
backdrop for Diers’ breakup story that belies the opening line, “As
I live and breathe/ you don’t look so different to me.” The paranoia
only increases over the song’s first two minutes as the music seems to
swell up and flood all around the vocals until the pent-up energy breaks out
into the open at the two-and-a-half minute mark. Diers has always done a fine
job at observing the angles of a relationship and here he acutely nails the
unfairness felt by anyone who’s been unceremoniously left behind due to
circumstances beyond his or her control: “When you fell/ It was me who
hit the ground/ And when you spilled/ It left me empty.”
The track’s ending piano chords give way to a more familiar ground on
the second track, “Drowned.” Despite the grim title, the recurring
line in the song is “All around you is love,” a kind of mantra that
grows in conviction with repetition. Drummer David King and bassist Matt Friesen
lay down an absolutely rock-solid foundation as Diers looks in on a character
who could have been the narrator of the first track as he or she tries to get
over the suspicion engendered by bad experiences.  Again,
the two-and-a-half minute mark is the magic moment here when the song just explodes
open, pulling back 30 seconds later to the refrain “Hope won’t weigh
you down,” accompanied by one of the most seductive basslines I’ve
heard in recent memory.
The album as a whole is full of this back and forth: it’s fractal in a
way, with songs yo-yoing between hope and despair, blankets of sound and emptiness
and electronic and analog, both within the song and from song to song. The plea
for security of “Light Bulb” gives way to the appropriated swagger
of LL Cool J’s “Radio.” If there’s one must-hear track
on the disc it’s “Radio,” and it’s the one you’ll
play for the uninitiated the way you played their version of Springsteen’s
“State Trooper” from their last long-player. Which isn’t to
say it’s the best track, but simply that it displays all the charms of
this band: sentimentality tempered by a wink and masterful musicianship uncluttered
by virtuoso-style wankery. “Radio” is the marquee track, but it’s
the little touches lovingly grafted onto the songs that will keep you listening:
the Bjork-esque string-swells on “Light Bulb,” the jarring, perfect,
apparently much debated (see below) funk guitar on “You and Me Both,”
the eerie, octave-drenched bass line on the tag of “Bad News Sticks,”
the menacing, voice-of-the-deep keyboards that ride “Receiving Line”
into its coda. The list goes on and on.
This band knows how to leave space, especially on closer “Glide,”
which is mostly just Diers’ lonely voice and Olcott’s piano and
on “Forever,” which sports vast stretches of undefined space.  Taking
advantage of those warm summer nights while you still can is the theme here
(“The only deep end/ is in your stomach now/ and all of the danger/ is
pretend”), and without getting too “Peter and the Wolf” on
you, the emptiness of the track reflects the gaps between people, physical and
metaphoric, that seem so unbridgeable at the tender age of 17. It’s just
another example of Diers’ growing confidence in taking an outside perspective
on a song; no longer just the jilted lover of the Love-cars’ “Hand
Over that Rulebook,” he’s comfortable giving advice and telling
stories, while not being above getting caught up in their twists and turns.
Incidentally, for a band named after a fall holiday, they sure do have a lot
of songs about summer.
What comes across in the end is the supreme confidence and steady hand this
band has when it comes to composition and recording. They’re all veterans
and it shows. King and Diers have been playing together in Love-cars since 1998,
King played with keyboardist Ev Olcott in 12 Rods, and Olcott recorded the last
Love-cars album. Friesen contributed the artwork for that disc, and one way
or another, they’ve all known each other for 10 or so years.
They’re also all married, two with children, so it’s a rock band
with its head unusually and steadily on its shoulders. I got to sit down with
them on a Devil’s Night of sorts (traditionally, it’s the night
before Halloween, and here we are, a few weeks before Halloween, Alaska’s
second disc is set to hit), at Friesen’s house, complete with dog and
toys strewn about the lawn. As the band arrived, they greeted each other with
the kind of warmth you don’t often get from bands, and I kicked it off
with the traditional origin question.
Pulse: “How did the project come together?”
 David
King: “I remember we started staying late at Love-cars rehearsals.
It was one of those things where he [Diers] would start doing something and
everyone would be packing up, and I would be like, ‘What is that?’
And we’d been talking about mellower, or a different sonority than Love-cars
was doing, and it started putting in my head some other project involving James
and I still having this songwriting partnership. And I had this sort of idea
of mixing these two [Matt Friesen and Ev Olcott]. Everyone was totally into
the idea: Matt was really big into the Love-cars, and Love-cars had done our
last record with Ev. So all the roads were there and instantly, we were writing
together. It was the easiest thing we had ever done. We had three or four pieces
of skeletal music worked out immediately and it already had this sound.”
Pulse: “So did you have any goals for it other than let’s
get together and see what happens?”
Friesen: “Well, there was the goal of world domination.”
Pulse: “Well, that’s automatic for any band I think.”
King: “There was a goal that we weren’t going to be a rock
band and so we were eschewing the loud guitars and that lasted at least two
years [laughs]. We will always have the [dynamic] arcs but this band
is a lot softer. I came in with the idea of trying to play live electronic drums
that weren’t these kind of cheesy big pads. And we’ve stayed true
to that, on record and live. [We had] the idea that everything would be played—no
sequences. So the idea was that we were going to try to organically create electronic
music but songwriting was going to be the big thing.”
Pulse: “How do you feel that the sound has evolved over time?”
 Diers:
“Just speaking for myself, I know so much more what everybody’s
capable of. I feel more confident when writing that we can push things; that
things could have a more heavy section or a really loosely structured section.
And just to go back for a second, to when you were asking what the goals were,
I think what you were getting at, was like, recording-wise. And we all didn’t
even have any goals that way. We didn’t even necessarily set out to make
a record.”
Pulse: “Sometimes that seems like the best way, though; there
seems to be a certain vibe to bands that were started off-the-cuff without goals,
like Broken Social Scene or the Hopefuls. I think not having that end goal in
mind can keep things loose.”
Diers: “It’s nice to have that reassurance that you don’t
have to be careerist; that you can just enjoy making music together.“
King: “There’s this real innate understanding of where we’re
headed and everyone relies on everyone else’s strengths; everyone else
is aware of weaknesses, so things can be handed over to each other so easily.
The way we volley things—like Ev can take the music and construct all
these things around it that months later I hear and go, ‘That’s
the shit!’ What I’ve noticed in the year or two since our first
record is that it’s even stronger, the channels are that [much] clearer.”
Pulse: “I’ve listened to the record a bunch of times now,
and on tracks like “Forever,” where there are those long stretches
of mostly empty space, you can feel that confidence in the group.”
King: “Well, live there’s a rap in there [everyone laughs].
But seriously, [everyone] just nailed that shit. It’s either that or it
takes me two hours to convince everyone. Take everyone aside and like, ‘No,
this large open section with nothing there: We can do this! We can win!’
And I’m wrong, usually, but I still take the time to convince them for
two hours. You know, just to get that one-on-one face time. The sale is very
important [laughter].”
 Pulse:
“How did you come up with the idea to do the LL Cool J cover and do you
have other covers you want to do?”
Diers: “I was always aware of that [‘My Radio’] as
a really kind of emblematic track that’s saying, ‘This is my fucking
radio and fuck everybody’ and then, the music came from just fucking around
at the end of rehearsals—”
King: “It was right before the show we played at the Kitty Cat
Klub downstairs and Matt didn’t know it and he was packing up while we
played it—”
Friesen: “Because I told you not to play it [laughter].”
Diers: “But the concept behind doing the song—the concept
of the song itself is super-dated, especially with iPod fervor. and there’s
all this super-individualized sort of listening and you’re creating this
library that’s for you and it’s for you only—so that whole
idea [the radio as public broadcast] is of a bygone era. It’s not some
sort of social commentary, it’s more like the idea of the ghost of this
b-boy, a tribute to that idea.”
Pulse: “How do you feel this album is different from the last?”
King: “It’s really representative of what we’ve been
doing live since we started. We’ve never been this downtempo ballad-band
live; we’ve always stretched and pushed. I think the difference is we’ve
played a bunch of gigs over the past two years, whereas with the first record
we were just making a record and playing local shows.”
Olcott: “And I got an amp.”
Diers: “That was huge.”
Pulse: “It seems less concept-y, in that the first one was more
like: Dave King plays electronic drums. But this one seems more like: Whatever’s
right for the song, that’s what we do. Like that little funk guitar part
on ‘You and Me Both.’”
King: “A-ha!”[everyone laughs]
Olcott: “Boy, we had to fight that one—”
Diers: “It was just getting myself to do it.”
 King:
“He fought me.”
Diers: “I did not fight you.”
King: “The whole way. Did he not fight me?”
Olcott: “I fought you too!”
Diers: “That was the two-hour sale.”
King: “And Steve loves it!”
Friesen: “It took 35 takes.”
King: “I like what you said, though; that’s a perfect way
to describe it, actually. Each tune was taken as its own thing. There were no
limitations.”
Olcott: “The songs make us do what we do.”
King: “All the downtempo stuff we love doing is in there, but
there’s also this grittier, darker thing, too. For this record, we had
the idea that we could take a piece of music and let it go anywhere. Almost
David Lynchian, where there doesn’t need to be this solid ending. The
endings of this record are very cool because a lot of them are ending in instrumental
bridges.”
The discussion of creating the tracks quickly devolves into a rapid back-and-forth
about Olcott’s ability to deal with all of everyone’s ideas so quickly.
A rather ironic and indicative situation, apparently.
Olcott: “Creativity is flowing so fast, and I don’t want
to say, ‘Everyone stop for a second.’ That’s the last thing
I want to do. I just have to funnel everything in and make sure that I get everything
before I play it back. You’ve got to be quick.”
 King:
“If you want to see some shit, watch him in the studio. Ev Olcott in the
studio is not possible. Literally sound-designing keyboards. Not taking patches.”
Diers: “And from the visual wavelength rather than the sound.”
King: “And at the same time being yelled at by me like, ‘And
then distort this triangle!’”
Diers: “Like, ‘You’re putting a recorder in a beer
can, but it’s a king can. You know those king cans? And you cut off the
top with a serrated knife, you know? So it’s got edges on it? And the
guy playing it is like a Latino guy, about 6'2"? A funky guy, brawny, but
you know, he’s a construction worker?’”
King: “And he’s listening to you like, ‘Yup, yup,
yup, yup, yup.’”
Pulse: “So, lastly, what have your kids gone as for Halloween?”
King: “Well, I can brag about one thing, and you [Diers] saw this:
My daughter’s first real dress-up Halloween (she would have been 1 and
a month or something), we made a costume of her being a bag of donuts. We just
made it like this old ‘40s thing with ‘Donuts’ across the
front. It was a brown paper bag, and we just glued fake donuts on it. And we
took her to her grandpa’s work, they were having a costume contest, because
we believe in getting the competition vibe going early on in the family, and
I was like, ‘You’re gonna win!’ So she went as the bag of
donuts.”
Friesen: “I don’t know if Henry doesn’t get the concept
of trick or treating, but last year, he didn’t wear a costume, but we
went from house to house giving candy away to the people in the houses. That’s
what he thought he was supposed to do. And he gave all my good candy away.”
 King:
“This year, my son will be a year old at Halloween—this is gonna
be a stretch—he’s going to go as a fat, white person that shits
himself and eats constantly and that can’t talk. So that’s what
he’s thinking about for a costume this year. Like a ball of fat that goes
like this [flicks tongue in and out] when he wants to eat.”
Shockingly, for a band that prides itself on ending songs on bridges and other
odd places, the interview tape runs out at exactly that moment. Not mid-sentence,
not in the middle of an earnest discussion of recording techniques. There’s
more discussion of Halloween costumes and some photos get taken, and then it’s
backslaps and hugs between the members of the band. David King is headed for
Tokyo with the Bad Plus, everyone dispersing in a way that might make younger
bands nervous about band unity, but this is a group that’s been around
the block—and now that they’re about to release their second disc,
twice in every speed they’ve got. ||
Halloween, Alaska play the CD release show for Too Tall to Hide on
Sat., Sept. 10 at First Avenue with Haley Bonar and Fitzgerald. 6 p.m.$8 adv./
$10 door. All Ages. 701 First Ave. N, Mpls. 612-338-8388.
For more information on Halloween, Alaska, visit their
website at HalloweenAlaska.com.
Head on over to our mp3 page to download hundreds of
tunes, including Halloween, Alaska's song "Drowned."
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