Jucifer

War Report: Rock nomads Jucifer return with Throned in Blood.

There are other sludge-metal bands, even other loud two-piece husband-wife duos, but then there is Jucifer. The name is enough to strike terror into shuddering eardrums. The two-member onslaught of Gazelle Amber Valentine (vocals, guitar) and Edgar Livengood (drums—what bitchin’ rock star names!) formed in 1993, releasing one album after another, juggernauts of sheer sound tempered with moments of poppy insolence, brash punk and banjo breakdowns. After their last album, the massive double-set L’Autrichienne, a theme album about the French Revolution, they are set to release Throned in Blood, a deceptively brief yet dense-as-dark-matter disc about war.

That in itself isn’t so remarkable, human conflict being heavy metal’s stock in trade. But an album by them makes you feel like you’ve lived—no, endured—the subject matter. A song like “Work Will Make Us Free” from Throned In Blood is uncomfortable with its bleak, trudging rhythms that feel like feet leading to the concentration camps that bore the German version of that inscription above their gates. You might think the music was the product of intense research, but Valentine says it’s less pedantic: “We both read all the time and watch educational shows when we get a chance. If you’re interested in stuff like history and human nature, it’s fascinating.”

But it’s not a scholastic exercise. She notes, “Music is really emotional for us, and when we learn about something that touches us, we kind of exorcise those feelings by putting them into songs.”

Jucifer isn’t just a band to the pair—it’s a lifestyle, living in an RV in between shows, as nomadic as ancient warriors. She calls it an “edge lifestyle.” One of the few things they do share with other bands is the two-piece configuration. “It used to be annoying when we were treated as weirdos for being a two-piece. Now it’s annoying when someone thinks we’re jumping on a trend, since in the last few years a bunch of loud, heavy two-piece bands have come out, and some of them have copied a lot about our show.”

“We’ve always approached our records like movie soundtracks,” she adds of their cinematic quality. “We like to feel that a record takes you somewhere. But before L’Autrichienne, we never made the concepts we were building albums around clear. We used to think it was better to be subtle. But we learned that subtlety can mean the story getting overlooked, which is pretty tragic when you’ve put so much thought into mapping it out.”

This album is yet another departure for the band, whose past few releases have been on Relapse Records, as they’ve started their own label, Nomadic Fortress. Like everything they do, it’s by sheer design. “Everything in our lives points us toward wanting autonomy and a streamlined existence,” Valentine says. “To focus and be and do purely what we believe. As part of expressing what we want to express in the most pure way possible, we’ve always wanted to have our own label, and before now, we just didn’t feel that we were ready to take it on. Now we are. And we’re really happy about being able to license the vinyl to Alternative Tentacles. Jello Biafra being a fan of ours still totally blows our minds.“

Here barely six months ago, Valentine notes that they don’t get to Salt Lake City much, but this is a “quickie” before they depart for Europe in April. You can expect them to hit Burt’s like a beachhead.

“Burt’s is awesome, especially now that they’ve expanded. We played it the first time years ago when it was just the tiny bar. Our equipment took up so much of the standing room that people had to push Edgar’s ride cymbal out of the way to get to the bathrooms!”

Music | Grade A: The Meat Puppets stay relevant.

  "I want to come off as pathetic, grasping yet gratified on every level. That’s the kind person I want to come across as.” n

For all intents and purposes, bassist Cris Kirkwood’s parting words over a telephone conversation should be taken with a heavy heart, seeing how his band The Meat Puppets are the reason shows like Behind the Music exist. Back in the ’80s, the seminal genre-bending band gained fans among the underground music elite, most notably Kurt Cobain, who invited the Kirkwood brothers (Cris and Kurt) to play along during three Meat Puppets songs on Nirvana’s Unplugged album. nAfter the modest hit albums Too High to Die and No Joke!, Kirkwood began a well-publicized descent into drugs; his wife overdosed and he became estranged from his brother, who continued to write music as a solo artist.
nYet, Kirkwood remains optimistic. “I fucking hurt myself pretty bad. The tragedy was unnecessary, avoidable, and I’ll never get over it. But I’m not going to let it control me or make me who I am. Now, it’s just a fucking blast for Kurt and I to be back together again,” he says.
nAfter nearly seven years of separation, Cris and Kurt got back together for the 2007 release Rise to Your Knees, an album full of tenderness and sensibility. Whereas most of their peers had either faded into obscurity or were recording the same dated ’90s-music, Rise to Your Knees had shown that the two had matured and that the Meat Puppets could remain relevant in the ’00s.
n“I don’t think we make a conscious effort to remain relevant; we were careful to not paint ourselves into a corner, but that’s more incidental in the fact that it’s the art that we like to make,” Kirkwood says. “Music today is more genre-specific: Punk-rock scene, alt scene, etc. Where we were coming from artistically, that’s the way that we want to play music.”
nThe band continues their foray into reluctant maturity by playing songs from the forthcoming Sewn Up, due in late March
n“Using music as an art-form,” Kirkwood continues, “it’s going to be affected by whatever period of age that you’re at, relationship with yourself, or the instrument you use—you grow with it. Kurt and I aren’t cut out to do anything else than this.”

Felix Cartal

Popular Mechanics: Felix Cartal sticks with the program.

Felix Cartal is a mystery man in plain sight. The DJ/producer is on all the social networks—Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr. His nuanced, Technicolor house music is online in abundance at the aforementioned services, as well as on track and album-share blogs and various MP3 retailers. Naturally, he has FelixCartal.com staked out and active to the point that he shares the nitty-gritty technical details of his creative process. Try to draw a bead on Cartal the person, though, and you’ll find little more than his real name (Taelor Deitcher) and city (Vancouver). He lacks even a Wikipedia entry, which even the most inconsequential musicians seem to boast lately. “I don’t think there’s an intentional idea behind it,” Felix says in a mellow drone, but “at first, it was fun to toy with [anonymity].” At least, it is until Cartal gets associated on Google—via a common spelling error—with the notorious Arellano-Felix drug cartel. “I’ve never tried to associate myself with that, by any means; that’s actually sort of an unfair coincidence for me.” Another unfair association would be to juxtapose Felix with earthy 1980s cock rockers Tesla. It’s not because of their stylistic divergence, but rather the band’s well-documented “No Machines” stance toward the use of keyboards and computers in musical performance. Tesla’s position was ironic (their namesake is mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla), but so is Cartal’s. One might expect him to be reflexively defensive of his craft, but he’s eye-to-eye with Tesla on the musicianship count. “I hate the term ‘live’ for DJing,” he told Monday Magazine in December, “because it’s not really live, no matter what you do. I manipulate recorded sounds.” In the week that his debut album Popular Music gets a digital release, Cartal stands by his words. While dance music entails technique and artistry, it is mechanical or, at least, automated. As bass player and vocalist in the indie-rock band Orange Orange, he knows what he’s talking about. “When you’re playing live, the charm behind it is that you can make mistakes. You can hit a wrong note, or my drummer could be late on the two or the four.” With programmed music, these goofs don’t happen. “You press ‘play’ … and it’s not ever going to fuck up.” The other aspect of Tesla’s and others’ gripes was that machines drain the emotion from music. Cartal agrees that, generally speaking, dance music is rather a one- or two-note genre, always happyhappyhappy or trippy-mellow—but that’s the point. “In the simplest terms, it’s a party. You can’t overthink it.” Dance music is about letting go, not navel-gazing. That’s probably why Cartal doesn’t bog down his Websites with solipsism. Instead, he opens up through his music, although rarely via direct lyrical expression. Mostly, he’s subtle, like in the video-game humor of “World Class Driver” or the sublime tones of “Something Nice.” And when Cartal is straightforward, like when he blogs about the track “Montreal Dreams” (Skeleton, 2009), he shares only so much. The track, writte

er). He lacks even a Wikipedia entry, which even the most inconsequential musicians seem to boast lately.

“I don’t think there’s an intentional idea behind it,” Felix says in a mellow drone, but “at first, it was fun to toy with [anonymity].” At least, it is until Cartal gets associated on Google—via a common spelling error—with the notorious Arellano-Felix drug cartel. “I’ve never tried to associate myself with that, by any means; that’s actually sort of an unfair coincidence for me.”

Another unfair association would be to juxtapose Felix with earthy 1980s cock rockers Tesla. It’s not because of their stylistic divergence, but rather the band’s well-documented “No Machines” stance toward the use of keyboards and computers in musical performance. Tesla’s position was ironic (their namesake is mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla), but so is Cartal’s. One might expect him to be reflexively defensive of his craft, but he’s eye-to-eye with Tesla on the musicianship count. “I hate the term ‘live’ for DJing,” he told Monday Magazine in December, “because it’s not really live, no matter what you do. I manipulate recorded sounds.”

In the week that his debut album Popular Music gets a digital release, Cartal stands by his words. While dance music entails technique and artistry, it is mechanical or, at least, automated. As bass player and vocalist in the indie-rock band Orange Orange, he knows what he’s talking about. “When you’re playing live, the charm behind it is that you can make mistakes. You can hit a wrong note, or my drummer could be late on the two or the four.” With programmed music, these goofs don’t happen. “You press ‘play’ … and it’s not ever going to fuck up.”

The other aspect of Tesla’s and others’ gripes was that machines drain the emotion from music. Cartal agrees that, generally speaking, dance music is rather a one- or two-note genre, always happyhappyhappy or trippy-mellow—but that’s the point. “In the simplest terms, it’s a party. You can’t overthink it.”

Dance music is about letting go, not navel-gazing. That’s probably why Cartal doesn’t bog down his Websites with solipsism. Instead, he opens up through his music, although rarely via direct lyrical expression. Mostly, he’s subtle, like in the video-game humor of “World Class Driver” or the sublime tones of “Something Nice.” And when Cartal is straightforward, like when he blogs about the track “Montreal Dreams” (Skeleton, 2009), he shares only so much. The track, written in Glasgow as afterglow from his first show in Montreal, is a “personal favorite,” and the city is “one of my favorite cities to visit and DJ in,” he writes, before commencing a lengthy breakdown of the track’s technical ecstasy.

Emotions have their place in music, Cartal says, but “there has to be a balance” between that and the diversion artists represent. “I feel like a lot of rock bands, when they [get deeper] into their careers, they lose the idea that people just want to have fun when they go to concerts.” He doesn’t need to be a celebrity, and won’t inflate his music or his story with so much hot air.

Even when he’s given a chance to give big ups to Salt Lake City when asked about the inspiration for his track “Salty Lake” (also from Skeleton), he keeps it real. Sometimes a song isn’t about anything; it gets its identity from where Cartal was at—geographically—when he wrote it. “It’s as simple as that,” he says, and he’s quite content to let the songs be his identity. “The more music I put out, the more I put myself out there.”