TOTALLY WIRED
THE GOTOBEDS DELIVER EXPLOSIVE NEW ‘MIXTAPE’-STYLE ALBUM
Because the indie rock world at large might be puzzled by a Sub Pop band from Pittsburgh calling its new album “Debt Begins at 30,” let’s get right to that.
The Gotobeds were paying homage to “Debt Begins at 20,” the indie 1980 documentary about the fledgling Pittsburgh punk scene told through the eyes of Cardboards drummer Bill Bored. It was screened at SPACE Gallery in spring 2017 as part of the exhibition “Non-Punk Pittsburgh.”
“A friend of mine got married at SPACE Gallery,” says Gotobeds singer-guitarist Eli Kasan, “and they had that exhibit up at the time. We were just talking about what an awesome [era] that was, seeing all those photos and all those bands. I just really connected with that scene and how diverse it was for the ‘80s — very arty and multi-gendered in a way that the ‘90s perhaps weren’t in Pittsburgh.”
As for the addition of 10 years, he says, “We were talking about it at practice one time and I think Gavin [Jensen], our bass player, was like, ‘20? I don’t know. I think debt begins at 30,’ and we all thought that was pretty funny. And we’re all in our 30s now, so we figured it was a good kind of like theme and lens. It had a little nod to Pittsburgh and also talked about where we are in our lives.”
Formed in 2009 with two members spinning off from local heavyweights Kim Phuc, The Gotobeds are in a good place, by indie rock standards. They are just about to release their third album and second for Sub Pop, the label that launched Nirvana and Soundgarden and now rosters such bands as Sleater-Kinney, Mudhoney, Low and Iron & Wine.
Copping their name from Wire drummer Robert Gotobed, The Gotobeds hit the scene telegraphing their British artpunk influences — Wire, The Fall, etc. — and remain true to them in noisy, rambunctious fashion on “Debt Begins at 30.”
This time, the quartet brought some friends and acquaintances along for the ride. Joe Casey, from their touring partners Protomartyr, appeared on the last record, and when Kasan suggested they enlist him again, for the new song “Slang Words,” Kasan says, “Our drummer Cary [Belbeck], he was just like, “We should just get a guest on every song like a mixtape.’ I thought it was a great idea, so we started down that path.”
Or, at least, he started down that path. “It wasn’t until I needed money for somebody to get in the studio and get their vocal down that the dudes were like, ‘Well, who’s all on the record?’ They were like, ‘Did you seriously get someone for every song?’ I was like, ‘We talked about this! This shouldn’t be a surprise!’”
Recorded at Steve Albini’s studio in Chicago with longtime Merge Records producer/engineer Matt Barnhart, “Debt Begins At 30″ has a full guest list that also includes indie notables Bob Weston (Shellac/Mission of Burma), Bob Nastanovich (Pavement), Tim Midyett (Silkworm), Tracy Wilson (Positive No) and Rob Henry (Kim Phuc), among many others.
They add their touches without intruding on the band’s core mission of creating havoc with two guitars, bass, drums and Kasan’s explosive, yelping vocals. It’s a studio replication of their cantankerous live shows, which allow plenty of room for spontaneity, particularly the guitar interplay between Kasan and Tom Payne, the most accomplished musician in the band.
“It’s haphazard, but by design,” Kasan says. “For whatever times that people have seen us and we’ve been sloppy and wild, I like that spontaneity. I look for that in a rock band. I don’t look for that in Kacey Musgraves or something.”
Kasan pauses, then admits, “I don’t even know what she sounds like. I just know that she’s popular. I just know if you watch a rock band just standing still and playing things perfectly, it’s kind of like watching people at their job. Sure, you did a good job with that, but I wasn’t moved by it.”
Kasan takes a similarly off-the-cuff approach to his fragmented lyrical style, which can be hard to grasp on record and no easier with a lyric sheet.
“I read a lot,” he says, “so phrases or certain words that stand out to me, I always keep a running list, like on my phone. Usually, when we practice, I try to improvise and see what fits the mood of the song. I’ll do that for quite some time with those placeholder words and try to be quick witted in the moment, and then I’ll have to go back and reverse engineer and actually write down what the exact phrases are.
“I write really well when I’m hungover and under pressure,” he adds. “I labor over the words, but I don’t belabor them.”
The most demanding lyrically was the title track, a squonky noise-rock song that opens like Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and has him sitting down with his stepdaughter, Atlas, with the book of that title, pondering the mess people have made of those pages.
“I thought that would be a nice little love letter to my stepdaughter about, perhaps, how all of a sudden I had a stepkid and the world seemed a lot scarier than it
had seemed before — a lot of things I had never thought about. I just thought I’d get some of those anxieties and neuroses out as if I could talk to her plainly in a way I can’t actually talk to her, because she’s 8. You don’t want to just say the world’s scary and awful, right?”
The song gets a second reading via a hidden track sung in Spanish by the fiery Victoria Ruiz of Rhode Island-based punk band Downtown Boys.
“She was the only person who essentially got like a blank check,” Kasan says, “where I gave her the inspiration for the song ‘Debt Begins at 30’ and was like, ‘Hey, you can do your own interpretation or your own version. Have at it.’ I think it came out really great. I think it’s largely the same lyrics, but she said she was going to adapt some and that’s part of the beauty of having trust. She could say anything she wanted.”
The new album was rolled out with two videos: a clever animated clip for “2:15” and one for “Twin Cities” on which the band suffered for their art by having a friend mace them while they were miming their way through the song.
Why?
“That was a long-running joke we had where we were laughing at most bands’ press photos of people trying to look tough or wear all black and look moody,” Kasan says. “TFP [Payne] said, ‘We should just mace ourselves and be crying and look miserable.’ ‘Twin Cities’ has a narration between a man and woman, me and Tracy, about two people having different experiences in the same city, and we figured we’d just give ourselves one experience and after the jump give ourselves another experience, and there it was — truly an awful experience.”
How bad?
“Oh god, it was unbearable. It was 45 minutes of blinding pain, where you’re like pouring water over your face and crying, and seven hours of like lingering irritation. Very admittedly, a terrible idea.”
A less acute struggle, but a struggle no less, is the Gotobeds and all their various guests toiling in a shrinking indie rock scene where the rewards rarely match the effort.
“It’s not particularly in line with the zeitgeist of the times,” Kasan says of the genre. “I think that’s what’s attractive about it. I didn’t get into punk and indie because I thought they were popular. You hear ‘rock is dead.’ I didn’t get into these styles of music because they were lucrative or would up my social cache somehow. I was just into the weird stuff and the stuff that moved me.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.