 Local music mainstays Unit 7 Drain set to release seventh studio recording
STORY BY TODD ERIC LOVATO
PHOTOS BY WES NAMAN
Something wicked this way comes. On July 19, Unit 7 Drain releases studio album number seven with LoveCraft (Socyermom Records), the most brooding, catchy and arguably daring piece of work to date from New Mexico’s darlings of avant/indie pop. Longtime fans of the band are in for a treat, albeit more tart than sweet.
“This record is the most dark and down thing we’ve ever recorded,”
singer, guitarist and chief songwriter Harry Redus-Brown said during a
recent interview with Local iQ. “It’s very aggressively experimental in
a lot of (areas). A lot of painful experiences and dark ideas found
their way onto these tracks.”
Redus-Brown and bassist/co-vocalist Ella Vader are relaxing inside
Downtown Scooter after a busy weekday at the shop — the married couple
opened the burgeoning business in 2005. Drummer and shop hand Christian
Newman joins them on the couch. It’s a cramped but vibrant scene.
Dozens of sleek scooters sporting polished chrome and retro colors like
candy apple red, slate blue and sea foam green sit idle and crammed
into the showroom like sardines. Thanks to spiking gas prices, the
scooters are selling faster than they can restock them. The shop is
furnished with a greasy salon chair (complete with a bubble hair dryer)
and decorated with an array of fitting memorabilia, including the
obligatory Quadrophenia pinup and nearly 10 years worth of Unit 7 Drain
concert posters. From the vantage of the barber chair, one gets the
sense of being tucked snugly into the hub of some kind of hipster
headquarters.
Herein lies Unit 7 Drain’s charm. The band has an uncanny ability to
make an audience, whether it be a lone reporter or a packed house of
shoegazers, feel like it’s part of an unspoken and subterranean
countertrend, a sort of pop culture coup d’etat. Band members, however,
are quick to understate the band’s charisma; but that, too, is part of
the band’s charm.
“I’d say I’m somewhat of a misanthrope, just as are much of our fans,” Redus-Brown said.
“I know it sounds cliché, but I think a lot of people are attracted to
the melancholy of our music,” bassist and singer Vader added. “I mean,
we don’t beat them over the head with it; it’s art, so they can
interpret it however they want, but I think people are attracted to it.”
The album title LoveCraft is a nod to both the macabre author H.P.
Lovecraft and the joy of the music-making process. The album was
recorded at UBIK Sound, in the Outpost Performance Space and took about
seven months to complete. Redus-Brown says the band will perform the
record in its entirety at the July 19 CD Release party at Launchpad.
When Redus-Brown described the album as being deeply rooted in pain, he
wasn’t trying to get be so “emo” about it; he means it literally. In a
kind of freak coincidence, nearly every member of the band experienced
some form of agonizing tooth pain while recording LoveCraft. Vader and
Newman developed tooth abscesses and Redus-Brown split a wisdom tooth
while working in the shop. “My cable stripping tooth,” as he described
it. Also during the recording process, longtime Unit 7 Drain guitarist
Tony Wissing discovered an abscessed tooth growing under his tongue.
Only keyboardist Little Bobby was spared any dental anguish.
Not to be wasted, the band’s dental troubles were adopted as a kind of
twisted muse and eventually found itself inside the music, says
Redus-Brown. If it’s not at first detectable in the recording, the
dental motif that runs throughout the album’s artwork will be enough to
send a chill down the spine of the listener. The front of the album
also contains a rendered rooftop image of the blaze that incinerated
Puccini’s Golden West Saloon and damaged neighboring Launchpad earlier
this year. The release party also marks Unit 7 Drain’s return to the
beloved music venue, which reopened its doors earlier this month to a
welcoming local music scene.
“Entire music scenes are nurtured and raised in the Launchpad,”
Redus-Brown explained.
“The club has been so integral in the success of
a band like ours. We’re glad it’s open again.”
LoveCraft is dedicated to Albuquerque engineer Quincy Adams, who,
shortly after beginning work on the record in December of 2007, was
forced to drop out of the project after being diagnosed with cancer.
Quincy died earlier this year.
“He went from being a really healthy, successful guy to being very sick
and eventually passing away in a very short period of time,”
Redus-Brown related. “This whole recording process was a kind of a
shocked and sad time for us.”
Including bootlegs, live recordings, compilations and side projects,
the output from members of Unit 7 Drain is extensive. The band’s loyal
followers have a tendency to snap up every last note that Unit 7 Drain
leaves behind.
“We’ve sold out of most of our albums,” Vader said. “People tend to
collect the music and they want everything we’ve ever recorded. It’s
really something.”
A prolific songwriter, Redus-Brown has little problem living up to the
creative demands of the band’s insatiable fans. Since forming the band
in 1999 and releasing a self-titled debut EP in 2001, he has barely
been able to keep a lid on his musical ideas. Vader, who shares a
business and not just one, but two bands (the U7D side-project I is for
Ida), has had to live with the songwriter’s many idiosyncrasies.
“He can’t watch a movie without grabbing a pen and a pad and writing a
song at the same time,” Vader described. “It’s something that’s taken
me time to get used to, but it’s great because he’s constantly writing
music. We had to start another band (I is for Ida) because he was
constantly asking Unit 7 Drain to learn these new songs.”
In 2006, Unit 7 Drain garnered major attention for its album Lists.
Recorded with Grammy-nominated producer and engineer Tim Stroh, the
polished, pop-centric album brought the band unanimous praise from
longtime fans...
The album also widely broadened its fan base, winning the prize for
best rock album at the 2006 New Mexico Music Industry Awards.
For several years prior to Lists, the band had flirted with record
labels and the possibility of heavy touring. But following that
release, a whirlwind of hype swept in Unit 7 Drain’s direction.
Exciting at first, it was also a period of intense letdown and mixed
emotions, said Vader.
“All throughout the time we’ve been a band, there’s been a carrot
dangled out in front of us,” she said. “But there was so many times
during Lists that we’d get calls from major labels and they’d say
‘We’re gonna sign you! We’re gonna come out from L.A. this weekend and
we’re gonna sign you!’”
But when it came time to ink an agreement, or settle on the terms of a contract, the deals always seemed to falter.
“We’ve had every major record label, from Warner (Bros.) to Geffen, at
some point have us do a showcase, or a series of showcases, Redus-Brown
added. “We’ve had demo requests from the biggest indie labels — Sub
Pop, Matador. Now we’re just like, ‘If it happens, it happens.’”
If it sounds defeatist or like apathy is creeping into the band’s modus
operandi, Redus-Brown ensures the band’s fans that nothing is further
from the truth.
“We love making music so much,” he acknowledged, “It’s like a physical
need — the process of recording and the performing. We’re a really
tight-knit group. That’s what we do this for.”
If Lists can be described as a showcase of glittery indie-art pop, then
LoveCraft is a decidedly cathartic exercise in lo-fidelity. LoveCraft,
in all its sullen beauty, melodramatic goth and emotional bumps and
bruises, is a celebration of the band’s independence as artists,
Redus-Brown said. With its hissing floor noise and obscured vocal
tracks, the songs take on a foggy quality, think Brian Eno infected
with the zombie virus. Awash with whole-tone power guitar chords,
heart-tugging synth pads and Vader and Redus-Brown’s forlorn vocal
harmonies, Unit 7 Drain has created a nightmarish dreamscape that,
thanks to a dense and textured mix, bears repeated listens. Sure, it’s
the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic paranoid fantasy; sure, it’s dark
and cynical compared to Lists, but beneath the ambient electronics and
the yearning melodies, at its core, LoveCraft is a love story, one that
contains a lot of heartache and even more toothache.
“We all are kind of in love with whatever it is that we’re doing at the
moment,” Vader stated.
“We move so quickly, that right now, we’re all
in love with LoveCraft because the album really embodies the band.
“A year ago, we were all totally in love with Lists, which I think
might sound safe compared to this album. But now we know we can create
that broadly appealing stuff and we can do that really well. But we
also make this really dark, complicated, hard to swallow stuff too.
They’re both just as important.”
Unit 7 Drain
With The Oktober People, Volume Volume and Bellemah
9p, Sat., Jul. 19
Launchpad
618 Central NW, 764.8887
$5 (free CD with paid admission)
unit7drain.net
launchpadrocks.com
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