Indie rockers Host Skull plan own ‘Destruction’
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Along with having traces of Steely Dan in their sound, Pittsburgh indie rock band Host Skull bears some resemblance to the Dan in their middle years.
Mainly, they’re not actually a “band,” per se.
Host Skull is the duo of Pittsburgh-based singer-guitarist David Bernabo, a former member of the esteemed indie band Boxstep, and drummer Will Dyar, a New Yorker from the band Oakley Hall, who lived here for a while before moving to Santa Fe, N.M., in 2007.
Host Skull debuted in 2011 with “Totally Fatalist,” a long-distance tape-trading project and then spent a week in Santa Fe recording the 2013 follow-up “Black Mark.” For the third effort, “Host Skull’s Destruction,” Mr. Bernabo was back in Santa Fe, this time for a longer stretch.
“On this album we made sure that we could spend enough time in Santa Fe to work out the songs, record basic tracks and finish the vocals,” he says. “Previous records relied more on overdubbing in our respective cities. We focused on getting a natural groove with these tunes while showing restraint and patience with the arrangements.”
They used an outside engineer for the first time, and then back in Pittsburgh, Mr. Bernabo and guitarist Erik Cirelli “experimented with crafting guitar solos line by line, doubling or harmonizing each line as we went.”
Those guitars have some real bite on “Host Skull’s Destruction,” an atmospheric indie rock gem filled with angular melodies and intricate playing that brings to mind latter-day Wilco, Spoon, Pavement and Steely Dan.
“Wilco and Steely Dan have seeped into my consciousness and I don’t think I have much control over how their influence impacts what making a song means to me,” Mr. Bernabo says. “Steely Dan has such great control on how they construct a harmonic range for a song. If Host Skull had a through line, it’s an interest in expanding the harmonic range of pop songs.”
Lyrically, he drew inspiration from Joni Mitchell,Paul Simon and Gnosticism, which, according to the Gnosis Archive, “hold[s] When: Admission: that the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner” and teaches of “knowledge of transcendence arrived at by wayof interior, intuitive means.”
“Each of our records could act as snapshots in our lives,” he says, “but on this record, I was researching a number of religions and myths — mainly Gnosticism. You know, for kicks. So, themes of creation and destruction run through the album — abstractions of what happens when control is lost. We started the recording in 2013, but those themes seem more urgent now.”
To bring the songs to life on stage, the guitarist is turning to How Things Are Made, his improvisational trio with Brian Riordan and Matt Aelmore that has recorded 14 records,without ever playing live.
“Playing the Host Skull material will actually be our first show. So maybe we are doing it backwards, but it seems to work for us. The fourpiece Host Skull live act dissolved earlier this year, so instead of playing a solo set or crafting a band for the release show, I thought it would be interesting to see how this trip would interpret these songs.”
By extending song structures, creating different textures and using drone music, the idea, he says, “is a way to deconstruct or, to be a bit on the nose, destroy the Host Skull music.”
Just to add another layer of complexity to the story, Host Skull is a part of the Golden Magnet Collective formed last year with Delicious Pastries, Mariage Blanc, Sleep Experiments and Side Eye.
“We are five bands working to cross promote each other’s work and, ideally, push each other creatively. We formed this collective in August 2016 and have collectively released a fair number of records. It’s an interesting experiment and we are still working out what the collective can doand what we want to pursue.”