Skeletons
Getting Spun Senseless My The Pursuit Of The Almighty Coin
Jun 6, 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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Stepper aka Work
original version appears on Money
These two were birthed at the same time but ended up wildly different from each other. We called them RIPPER and STEPPER for so long that we had to keep the literal half titles - otherwise we didn't know what songs we were talking about... They're both the kind of thing that just spills out and it's ready. With STEPPER we wanted to make a song you could step to. RIPPER one that sliced off your brain wig... and over the course of a few tours it gets fiercer and fiercer, sometimes verging on train-wreck stylings... My Mom wrote a review of our record on her blog which is totally unheard of! It's probably one of the best reviews we've ever gotten, though not glowing praise really... This is what she says about these songs: As I attempt to interpret that in my "motherly" manner, I perceive the "blackest of the berries" to be the best and the juiciest ones. These end up on the ground and the rest of the berries land on top of them. The line "THEY'RE USING YOU!" makes me think that the song refers to being good, either good in your soul, or good at what you do, and having others use you for their own benefit. The "bees" that fly around and annoy and scare you...These "bees" could be little small annoyances that can get you down, scare you, but really don't do you any harm. It's the other berries you need to watch out for! I'm not sure that I have it right, but it is an interesting thought.One other song on this new album is worth mentioning as well. I think of it as a "HOPE" song. I am a big fan of hope. I always find something to be hopeful about... So he's going to keep moving forward, working hard, getting by, I just hope he doesn't lose sight of the joys of the here and now."
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Ripper aka The Pillows
original version appears on Money
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The Things
original version appears on Money
This song went through probably a dozen variations before arriving where it is. There's a snippet of the original "Jon's Tune" (which was the name of this song for forever) - which was this great drum machine/synth track Jon made while home in Hawaii a while back - on side 4 of the Money vinyl... We took half the main lick of that tune and ruined it in as many ways as possible till a song came through. I sometimes wish we could play the ending for 20 minutes... Someday we will I think...
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Grandma
unreleased
This song is brand, brand new, one of the PEOPLE songs. It's about cartoons and grandparents and parents and love and wrinkles and dry cleaning and life plans and maybe the government? For all the heads, it's just a compound meter... This is the only song we got to hear after recording these at Daytrotter, I remember feeling like my voice is really loud... and I think I got too excited and flubbed the very first line... But it was a while ago now, maybe I could listen to it again.
I don't know about anyone else, but this is what I've always wanted Dave Matthews to sound like - not just so that he didn't sound the way he currently does and always has, but because he and his crack squad of musicians are good enough to pull something this freaky off and they could have single-handedly changed the face of American popular music for the better. That's if everything else would have happened exactly the same way and at the exact same time. It gives me shivers just thinking about how much better it would have been watching the Today Show this morning and instead of hearing them play a litany of their most dead-horse-beaten songs of varying degrees of throw up sappiness, along with the requisite new single, there would have been Matthews playing the kind of hungry and charismatic music that New York band Skeletons make. Lead singer Matt Mehlan has a combo sounding voice that really does bring to mind Matthews and Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, flooring you with its wiliness and with its writhing fluctuations and gyrations and when mixed with real graphic and intense ruminations about capitalism and talking heads, that's when he's taking you out into leftfield, tying a blindfold around your eyes and then spinning you senseless. It's an exhilarating sort of clobbering that doesn't really sting at all. It doesn't leave a mark or a scar, just a bit of a strong impression - of a man who might actually believe that the government's spying on you through all of those digital television converter boxes (why else would they give you a coupon to get one basically for free, he might ask) and who is definitely not paying his federal income taxes anytime soon. It's not that simple to pinpoint the cause of the concern that stretches itself out in these ambitious, jangly, sonic weird-outs of implied stratagem. Money is the root (they don't say "of all evil" but it might as well go without saying) and this is an album that exposes that root and giving it the characteristics of a root canal - the drilling and the tunneling out every last hair of a root that there may be left inside, all done without any pain medication so that the bottoms of the teeth feel as if they're flashing yellow lights. Skeletons lock into grooves and then tickle them into different oddly shaped ripples - then locking them into their own grooves. The lyrics are engrossing riddles and logic bites that keep giving and giving, turning your head into taffy and fireworks. Mehlan sings in "Stepper aka Work," "I grow a mustache for a filter so I never have to know when I'm gonna have to keep moving," and this line is just accepted for what it's worth as he extrapolates more upon the age-old dilemma of the cursed job but the need for that paycheck at the end of the month to survive. Later on in the set, during the unreleased song "Grandma," he sings, "I tried to replace that cartoon in my face, but it's not easy," and that might just be the little devil that's always in our ears laughing at our slumped shoulders and the curvature in our spine, who cackles big barks at all of our struggles to keep up with the rat race and that need for more money and more acceptance by those with even more money.
Skeletons Official Site
Tomlab Records
