Dr. Manhattan

Icy Acts Made Into Molotov Cocktails

Dec 23, 2008

tell your friends…

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley

It would behoove any of you contemplating it to never allow any of the members of Dr. Manhattan perform any variety of medical procedure on your body, no matter how sterile they say their tools are and no matter how many times they say they've made that incision. It's just simply not true and those tools are grotesquely soiled and/or rusted. It would lead to a poisoning of some kind - blood poisoning or a nasty infection - you can be assured of that. It's because they aren't real doctors, but like those learned men in white coats the members of the Wauconda, Ill., band do things in their work that just can't be fully understood by regular folks and they have matching shabby handwriting to boot.

These manners and actions that Dr. Manhattan toy with are the conventions that suggest that music needs structure for it to not get lost on people, for those listening to just glaze over and hear it as the white noise. There's a lengthy section in the band's song "Baton Rogue" where they give the greatest demonstration of working off the grid and off-roading. It's more than that though, it's as if they're just having the chuckles for themselves and for the chuckle's sake. It's a deviation of what should be and what needs to be in a song. For almost a minute, those four young men just blurt out some mumbling murmurs, the kinds of which should be heard coming out of the droopy mouths of phantoms and ghosts, zombies of the night set on filling the silence with the language that they know best. It's a showcase in loopiness, in getting away with it because there is no sheriff to say that something is improper.

At the tail end of the song's unsuspecting hiatus, you hear lead singer Matt Engers start jabbering about specific chords and when certain things like choruses might need to pick back up, with the full-frontal electronic attack getting revived about that same time, give or take. It's almost a comedy routine for the Marx Brothers or Tenacious D, but it feels oddly appropriate coming from these freewheeling dudes from just off the Wisconsin border. It's weird and it's almost obnoxious in a good way, in a way that feels like the only way punk rock works these days, where there's spitting, there's bemusement and there's no fear in being whatever kind of talking person you choose to be.

This is Midwestern punk rock in the way that Screaching Weasel was punk rock, just with some of the more hardassed-ness, with more of the sleeping in until one or two p.m., eating shit food and living shit accommodations lifestyle that befit the music. These are still essentially songs about girls jerking them around and stomping all over them, but as an h'ors d'oeuvere they serve out a bowl full of self-pity and some of that self-loathing that comes with feeling that many of their worst decisions were self-inflicted. Swimming through the band's self-titled Vagrant debut is an experience in danceable indie rock and roll that gets wonderfully sloppy and maintains a current of unbridled hell-raising as if there was a streaking through the dead, snowy streaks knocking off driver's side mirrors from every car they see and blowing up as many mailboxes as dared be out in those conditions. All of this because a snaky girl thought it better to hightail it to Texas than to stay in the relationship. It's something that would make anyone think about stuffing mailboxes with pipe bombs or slipping that anger into a musical number that feels like the icy act, dosing it with gasoline and newspaper strips to light it all up to the heavens.

Dr. Manhattan Official Site
Dr. Manhattan MySpace Page
Vagrant Records

tell your friends…

1. first song

   Welcome to Daytrotter
2. second song

   Baton Rogue

   

   - original version appears on Dr. ManhattanWhen I say "Baton Rouge," I don't mean a city in Louisiana. I mean a pet name for the stomach of the one you love. The song's about being unsure in a relationship in my case because it was my very first one. I didn't know when it was time to call it quits or to keep on keeping on. It's funny that I talk about this in the past tense because I'm still in this same relationship. My first one. I'm 21. Is that weird? Yes. I've been really late on a lot of things in my life. For instance: I got my braces off when I was 20. What can I say? Procrastinate later. I wrote the music for this song on an organ in a two bedroom apartment on Main Street in Wauconda, IL where I lived with a cat who hated me, my brother, sister, and mom for about two years. It was cramped but honestly those were some of the best years of my life. We lived above a coffee shop called Honey Hill. It always smelled like fresh grounds and scone glaze. But yeah, Baton is our groovy song. Our intention was to very artfully represent how much we like the Black-Eyed Peas. Plus in the middle of this version we performed a COMPLETELY PLANNED whisper break . It took 3 months to perfect. So anyhow, anywhat, anywhy, anywhere, anywho, sorry about the tangents. I hope you enjoy listening to these songs as much as we enjoyed going to Daytrotter to record them!

3. third song

   Claims Should Echo

   

   - original version appears on Dr. ManhattanThis song is one of my favorites of ours. Is that weird to say? I don't know. I don't really agree with the notion that you can't talk about your own creation in a positive way. Like that whole you can't wear your own band's t-shirt law. Why not? We write music because we want to express ourselves. Why can't we be proud of our achievements? It's not cocky, it's proud. Proud of what you've done with your little time on this tiny planet. This motion is only positive. Anyways where was I? Oh yeah. Claims Should Echo. Nick and I wrote the lyrics. It's about staying up all night with your close friends and watching one of them get fired from Starbuck's because they're always late in the morning. It was Adam. My brother. He got fired from Starbucks. Since you had to know.

4. fourth song

   Texas

   

   - unreleasedI wrote this song about my girlfriend going to Texas to visit a college in Austin. She was only gone a few days so I thought it would be funny to make a REALLY angry song yelling at her for leaving me. She thought it was pretty funny. I was FURIOUS!!!!

5. fifth song

   Breath of an Epoch

   

   - unreleasedI don't remember how we got started writing this song. I remember Nick and Andrew doing the drum intro part and having that precious feeling of That's a song right there! That's all you need! We ended up adding a bunch of other parts but nothing compared to the jungle rhythm. The rest is just filler so I can eventually listen to them play drums. Even though they do it at the beginning of the song. That doesn't make sense. Drums rule. I like drums A LOT. This is one of our songs with lyric contributions from all four of us. It's about time and how it doesn't make sense. Like when you can be really happy with a person or situation and then all of a sudden you fall out of love or get sick of your job or are suddenly enemies with your friends. Sometimes it feels like there is no transition. All you can say is What happened??? I think that's what we were talking about.