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| Fine. Mid-40s probably. |
[Ed. - Full disclosure: I don't own any Gaytheist albums, so this kind of violates protocol, but I wanted to look into them, they just played PDX Pop Now! and I wanted to learn about them...I regret nothing.]
It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more or less purely local bands. Whether it’s a question of what they play or…let’s call it personal aesthetic, some bands will never grow much beyond its immediate market. When you’re a three-piece playing under the name “Gaytheist” and you’re (guessing here) pushing 50, your shot at the big time probably passed a while back.
I assume Gaytheist is pushing 50 based on the names its front-man, Jason Rivera, dropped as the bands he saw growing up in the Pacific Northwest – e.g., ““Nirvana, Mudhoney, Yankee Wuss, Hazel, Tad, The Accused, Whermacht, Hitting Birth, Sissyface, The Need, Sicko.” (Fun story: I’ve knew the latter from their time in Pullman, WA; and I’ve fucked up their guest list at least once by being over-polite.) That said, I suspect it’s what and how they play more than their age that will always keep them at the local level. To borrow the phrasing that lingered on the tip of my tongue as I listened to them last week:
“It's not quite metal, but it is heavy.”
While they have “metal” passages across multiple songs – e.g., “Let’s Get Astrophysical” is solid sludge metal, also see the boiling riffs in the middle of “The Glory of Love, Part 2” – but, regardless of what they do on the guitar sound, their rhythm components sound more punk than metal to my ear. Once you add Rivera’s fairly eclectic, and specific lyrical choices – i.e., what drew me to them in the first place on “Post-Apocalyptic Lawsuit” and “Into the Trap” – you have a band built for a certain audience, and it ain’t a huge one.
Tim Hoff (bass) and Nick Parks (drums) round out Gaytheist, and they’ve had the same lineup since they started. Of all the things I learned about this week, none of them gave a sense of who they are quite like Rivera flat-out stating in a 2013 interview with Performer Mag that he writes with Parks in mind. And, as I’ve found across multiple (scarce) interviews/reviews, Gaytheist is a band built on co-writing (this is Rivera):
It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more or less purely local bands. Whether it’s a question of what they play or…let’s call it personal aesthetic, some bands will never grow much beyond its immediate market. When you’re a three-piece playing under the name “Gaytheist” and you’re (guessing here) pushing 50, your shot at the big time probably passed a while back.
I assume Gaytheist is pushing 50 based on the names its front-man, Jason Rivera, dropped as the bands he saw growing up in the Pacific Northwest – e.g., ““Nirvana, Mudhoney, Yankee Wuss, Hazel, Tad, The Accused, Whermacht, Hitting Birth, Sissyface, The Need, Sicko.” (Fun story: I’ve knew the latter from their time in Pullman, WA; and I’ve fucked up their guest list at least once by being over-polite.) That said, I suspect it’s what and how they play more than their age that will always keep them at the local level. To borrow the phrasing that lingered on the tip of my tongue as I listened to them last week:
“It's not quite metal, but it is heavy.”
While they have “metal” passages across multiple songs – e.g., “Let’s Get Astrophysical” is solid sludge metal, also see the boiling riffs in the middle of “The Glory of Love, Part 2” – but, regardless of what they do on the guitar sound, their rhythm components sound more punk than metal to my ear. Once you add Rivera’s fairly eclectic, and specific lyrical choices – i.e., what drew me to them in the first place on “Post-Apocalyptic Lawsuit” and “Into the Trap” – you have a band built for a certain audience, and it ain’t a huge one.
Tim Hoff (bass) and Nick Parks (drums) round out Gaytheist, and they’ve had the same lineup since they started. Of all the things I learned about this week, none of them gave a sense of who they are quite like Rivera flat-out stating in a 2013 interview with Performer Mag that he writes with Parks in mind. And, as I’ve found across multiple (scarce) interviews/reviews, Gaytheist is a band built on co-writing (this is Rivera):
“I can’t read or write music, so I start with a riff and slowly form the concept of a song, and then I’ll come up with a vocal melody. Usually, before I’m done showing [Tim and Nick] a song, Tim will immediately plug in some lines, and Nick starts thinking about some drum stuff; they’ll start writing their parts and eventually we’ll have a fully worked out song.”
The even higher-level talking point about Gaytheist is the plain and simple fact that they play the kind of music they love. In Rivera’s words (different interview, still 2013): “More like I tried to leave heavy music behind. I can’t really help but play loud shit.”
Before touching on the albums, I have one last note on the band. Rivera gets asked what it’s like to play heavy music as an out gay (atheist) man. And his answer, across multiple interviews, is encouraging – i.e., while he experiences the odd homophobic freak-out, playing where he does (in the Pacific Northwest) and in the time he’s playing isolates most of the worst incidents to the odd, repressed sociopath who comes to a show and can’t help saying something. The band’s name shouldn’t be all that controversial either, not in this day and age (and it should probably alert those sociopaths to the fact they’re not the target audience), but the question of whether their chosen name held them back came up across multiple interviews as well. According to Rivera’s math, the name made one person curious enough to check them out for everyone it turned off.
There was a stray comment in one interview I read about the dream of going national and living on the proceeds of their art died a quiet death sometime after 2013. That felt like their annus mirabilis, their high-water mark as a musical act. They played PDX Pop Now! that year, and they did it again in 2019, but the buzz doesn't look the same, at least not online. That’s not a knock on the band, or their quality; it keeps them in smaller venues, and that suits me just fine. In a better world, it'd do better for them too.
To move on to albums, I had a complaint about Gaytheist, but it got more complicated as the week wore on. As I’ve argued before (on a now-dead site), playing fast and loud is a lot like driving fast; the rush of excitement dies down if you do it long enough, or if we all yelled every day, yelling would lose its impact, etc. After spending most of last week believing that too many of their songs sounded the same, that just didn’t hold up when I picked through Gaytheist’s catalog to finalize the playlist. They stay ahead of that, as it turns out (Rivera, again):
“We’ll have things where I’ll be, ‘You know, this is kinda the same tempo as another song…’ and before I know it, Nick will write a new drum part for it to make it sound unique. He saves me a lot from having songs that sound the same."
That makes for a good opening to the albums – and I focused on three of them, Gaytheist’s 2012 debut LP, Stealth Beats, 2013’s Hold Me…But Not So Tight (the soundtrack for their hey-day?), and 2017’s Let’s Jam Again Soon. At most, I can argue they used to do better with variety in tone and tempo on Hold Me and Stealth Beats – e.g., “Hand Holder” and “Can’t Go to Mecca,” both from Stealth Beats, top my list of favorite Gaytheist songs (after “Post-Apocalyptic” and “Into the Trap”; the former is on Stealth Beats). If I had to pick a best overall, most ambitious song, I’d go with “Spread ‘Em,” which I see as them at the peak of their powers; that one, along with “The Restoration” and “Wisdom of the Asshole,” wrap up the songs that made the playlist from Hold Me. As hinted at a little throughout, I didn’t cotton to Let’s Jam Again Soon, but people who like their music heavy and who don’t require breaks (me) might get the most out of Let’s Jam Again Soon – which I where you’ll find “Avenged Seven-Minute Abs” and “It’s Just Everything."
Careful listeners might hear some similarities between all those songs – e.g., better use of dead air and a lot of passages built on a leading instrument. The more I pay attention to the details of the songs I like, the more I understand what I like in a song. And that’s a great segue to the rest of the playlist. There are some nice groupings down below, for instance.
HELP, a Portland-based “super-group” comes closest to matching Gaytheist’s volume and intensity. As you’ll hear on “Pennies on the Ground” (great concept) and “Devil Is a Snake” (of which, crap, I cannot find that one), they feature rawer vocals and tilt more into punk.
B.R.U.C.E. rides the same ragged edge, but with what strikes me (without investigation, so ignore this because it sounds like a short-cut) as riot grrrl spirit on “Coachella Kidz.” (Oh, geez, the limits of adding super recent, regional acts is showing; no video there either.)
Cry Babe follows up that vibe with “Soft Honk” (again, um...), an observational piece in the same spirit, but different tradition as TLC’s “Scrubs.” To round out the (mostly) indie sounds you’ll hear on the playlist, there’s Plastic Cactus’ twang-echo-heavy take on (probably?) folk with “Nothing” and “Mum’s the Word.” Peace Object’s aggressively lo-fi (borderline atonal, in the anti-rock tradition) “I’m Going Back” rounds out the indie-rock/folk portion of the playlist.
The rest of the stuff I got out of this year’s PDX Pop Now! lineup came from hip hop, or something adjacent to. To get the big one out of the way, I will be doing a post on Stevo the Weirdo once he has enough work behind him to talk about. At this point in time, he’s got 2+ years of singles behind him, some of them pretty goddamn good – e.g., “Oxygen” (ft. Sean Brown), “The Routine,” and (personal favorite), “Whateva.” I’ll give what that guy puts out until he gives me a reason not to.
The same goes for ePP (“Even? When?”), whose sampling choices I like even better, and Danny Sky (“Highway” ft. Zakee El (can't find that one) and “Lotta Love”), who brings the liveliness to rap that I’ve missed in the more mainstream I’ve heard for the past 2-3 years; melodies > Xanax Rap in my world, a personal preference, but a strong one. Not all (roughly) modern rap/hip hop turns me off, and that’s how the Cory O/Raquel Divar collaboration, “Runner’s Anthem” made the list. That one’s got drive, y’know?
That leaves only a couple outliers, Sharlet Crooks’ country-blues(?) “Maybe Love” (this is the same school as Plastic Cactus, for what it’s worth, while sounding like it has different primary influences), and, the most challenging of the group, Adebisi. I know a genre called “bedroom rock,” so I guess I’d call this “bedroom R&B.” Both “Why” (dammit!) and “Here It Comes” became early, irremovable fixtures on this playlist, and not because these are perfect songs by the perfect artist (e.g., I could nit-pick the vocals). They’re just well-built little tunes, and easy on the ears.
Right, that’s all for this one. I’ll be back with another one in a week, give or take a day.
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