Halloween, Alaska
A Whiteout Is Brewing
Aug 14, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Be A Man
original version appears on Champagne Downtown
David wrote this song a few years ago. I think a few people have taken it to be cynical somehow, which it's really not. For me personally, it has made a lot more sense since I became a parent.
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Knights of Columbus
original version appears on Champagne Downtown
The substance of it is kind of a post-mortem for my grandfather. He'd been hospitalized after a long series of heart and health problems, and we went down to this V.A. hospital around Thanksgiving time with pretty clear indications that he was not gonna make it to Christmas. It was treated as a chance to say goodbye, which I did in my own way. But then he had this weird rebound and was lucid and unusually mellow for almost a year after that. It's odd to interact with someone when you've already had that kind of spiritual send-off, and then to revisit it when the person actually dies. I imagine it must have been odd for him, too. Anyway, we decided to try paring the song way down from the album version, which has a lot more synth and programming stuff.
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The Ends
original version appears on Champagne Downtown
This tune began as a sincere grasp at some '80s radio-pop stuff along the lines of Hall & Oates, but the sentiment is a little darker. On some level, I guess it's about the attempts that individuals make to be in love or to stay in love as a goal unto itself, rather than accepting that it's a very fraught and complicated process.
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A New Stain
original version appears on Too Tall To Hide
I'd been watching a lot of crime thrillers and got preoccupied with the concept of revenge and how it's pervasive in so many classic stories and films. Not being a very vengeful person myself, I tried writing a few songs based on imaginary revenge stories, two of which wound up on our second record (Too Tall To Hide). This one is from the point-of-view of a guy who turned state's evidence against his partner in a major caper-gone-wrong. The partner serves his time, gets out of jail and tracks down the rat with the intention of killing him. The song is basically the rat trying to tell the partner that, even though he stayed out of prison, his life has been completely fucked by the experience of snitching. The album version is much more electronically driven. We've had fun doing it with just guitars, bass and drums, though it took some convincing for Jake to learn that ostinato on guitar.
Perhaps the connection has no business being made, but so it goes. Halloween, Alaska, is a band from Minneapolis, Minnesota, that for the longest time before it had released its newest full-length album, "Champagne Downtown," remained a group anchored to that city, rarely playing many shows elsewhere. It's not as if it was stuck there in the Twin Cities, but all of its members had real life priorities that didn't allow for prolonged enough travel to make up a proper tour. It was chosen entrapment, but being stationary is still being stationary and with those god-awful winters of bruising and bitchy coldness it can feel even more confining. Last year, pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman (whom we achingly miss not only from Spin magazine, but from Esquire too - what gives?) released his first novel, entitled "Downtown Owl," about a fictitious town in his home state of North Dakota, set in the 80s and revolving around three sad characters who were stuck - for one reason or another - in a dinky town where everyone knew everyone else's business. There was an old man who hung out at the local diner drinking coffee all day, who was taken for all he was worth by a pseudo friend in a gambling scheme. There was a depressed high schooler who hated his coach and gym teacher and a fresh-out-of-college history teacher who knew nothing else to do at night than to hit the bars with the townies. (Spoiler alert) All of them were gobbled up by the worst snow and windstorm anyone had ever seen at the end of the book. It just ends with white, like a television set ripped of all its programming. The people were just gone, sudden ghosts and footnotes, if anything could be footnoted in its non-existence. The music that Halloween, Alaska tends to make could ably represent the eye of such a windstorm/snow gala - such a storm that could wipe out at least an entire city of life or whatever passed for life prior to the system. It's not music that bullies or overturns vehicles, knocks out all the power, shatters all glass that it comes into contact with or plunders full houses. It provides the soundtrack to what it would be like to be planted right in the middle of all the crushing actions, watching and taking pictures while remaining relatively unharmed, save for a few stray pieces of shrapnel and detritus just flying around, bound to strike something. It suggests of what's impending, what's on its way here right now. Lead singer James Diers, who takes a subtle Ben Gibbard approach, is heard singing, "This is everyone running," on repeat on the song "Un-American" and there are many instances of clamoring, chaos over the course of the record, but all formatted to fit into the calm of the storm sort of understanding. The band brings all of its dramatic spaces and signatures to life with an electronic and slo-core behavior that lets the expressions feel as if they were traumatic masterpieces that we were actually very lucky to have had a chance to be exposed to before the lights went out for good. Diers sings on "Be A Man," "My planet, my sweetheart/let me in/like a needle for your arm," and it continues with a trembling sort of glow that eases us from fear to a scared and sacred comfort, which is different in a good way. It's a gentle defense of whatever is coming - the full wipeout or some sort of recovery, as if we won't be erased and that the warnings and reports of the severity of the weather were greatly over-exaggerated.
Halloween, Alaska Official Site
