FELT & FUR KEEPS ELECTRO-GOTH SPIRIT ALIVE
It doesn’t get a lot of mention, but Texas used to be one of the major hubs of electro-goth acts. In the late ’90s/early ’00s, bands such as Asmodeus X, Flowers and Machines, and CTRL helped build scenes from Houston to Dallas that made the cities stops for the big-name acts from North America and Europe.
These days that legacy is more vestigial that enduring, but you sure can’t tell from listening to Felt & Fur. The Denton act bills itself as “doom disco,” and that is not inaccurate. The threesome has a droning dance approach to its music that sounds like it would have kept spooky kids on the floor at Numbers for a good seven minutes. Even the video for “Pulling a Thread” — an excellent cut from sophomore album “Held,” released last year on Triptych Records — looks like it came right out of the video work done by the late Numbers owner Robert “Robot” Burtenshaw. The group’s music is a blast from the past and a celebration of the Texas goth underground sound that is so missed.
“We’ve been really fortunate, especially in the North Texas music scene,” says Randall Minick, who plays keyboards, percussion and synthesizers. “There’s a huge kind of collision of just your normal electronic music mixed with a really large and interesting experimental music scene, and a lot of people stop here on their way to Austin and Houston. I think that’s kind of rubbed off on us. Instead of having normal influences, we’ve kind of been able to meld noise and drone and experimental.”
Along with Minick, the band is Jarrod Estes on synths/percussion and Alizsha Pennington on guitar/ vocals. She originally was recruited as an electric-ukulele player but has grown into an explosive presence after a somewhat shy start. Vocally, she is a siren in the vein of Houston singers Michelle Miears or Elizabeth Salazar of Bang Bangz. Pennington has a devilish grasp of audio effects, though, making her voice something otherworldly.
That’s not even getting into her guitar work. She has the same approach Robert Smith of the Cure always had in that her “solos” give very little but say so much. In songs including “Pulling a Thread,” the guitars appear out of nowhere with no apology, driving the tune along in a dynamic scream.
“She’s come a long way,” Minick says. “Whether it’s her vocals being pushed all the way to the limit or the feedback on her guitar, she’s really kind of a driving force in what’s going on. Especially over whatever nonsense Jarrod and I are doing at the time.”
Though Felt & Fur has been to Houston a couple of times since its founding five years ago, its members are looking forward to including the city on their first minitour of five dates. With a couple of albums under their belts now, they’re hoping to expand to Europe soon. In the meantime, they are one of the few bands returning a long-missed kind of dark noise to the stage in H-Town.
“You’ve got a lot of interesting kind of darker bands down there going on, like Tearful Moon and a few others,” Minick says. “They seem to be holding down there. And we’ve had other friends in the DFW area come down there and have good experiences. We’ve heard a lot of good things.”