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Late in the first year of the new millennium they emerged. A scruffy, wide-shouldered guitarist took the stage, sporting a massive coif like the Melvins' King Buzzo. A flurry of licks doubled over on themselves, walking the line between Deep Purple soul and a fitful calamity of fuzz-caked sludge. Behind him, the red-faced drummer pounded each skin as if he were beating off a horde of demons trying to steal his last gasp of life. At his side, the fair-haired bassist calmly carved out his own low-end fortress, blazing a sturdy trail through the devastation around him.
The three of them -- guitarist Jason Morales, drummer Erik Conn, and bassist Andrew Duplantis -- are Austin musical veterans. Yet this display, the first by Tia Carrera, sounded like Jimi Hendrix jamming out with Dale Crover after smoking a big, fat spleef. The first gig was a benefit for a proposed city skate park in the parking lot of the Dog & Duck Pub.
"We didn't know if the skate kids were gonna like it," recalls Morales. "The funniest thing was, I can remember playing and their parents all coming up and going, 'Yeah! These guys are playin' some of that blues music.' One guy was like, 'Yeah, man! I saw Cream, and it was just like that!'
"The skater kids ended up liking it, too."
It was the trio's first time playing together, starting a tradition of no rehearsals and onstage improvisation that lives on to this day. It wasn't long before word spread about Austin's instrumental "jam band" that eats lava for breakfast and belched fire on the shiny, happy remains of wanky bluegrass noodlers.
They were invited to join the fraternity of nether-dwellers at the Texas Psyche Fest in 2002 and soon established a Friday happy hour gig at Room 710. Each week, Tia Carrera transforms 710 Red River into their own Monterey Pop, unfurling a hefty slab of granite that never stops buzzing, droning, wailing, pounding, riffing, and shaping pockets of mind-bending agony and ecstasy out of thin air. No hippies invited -- this is for the stoners who like their rock chiseled straight from the Olympus Mons.
"It's like this huge light comes out of the sky and blasts through us," says Conn. "It's the most intense thing. I've never played like I can play with this band."
Conn, a veteran skater who combines dazzling technique with controlled ferocity, has been through the wars, beginning in his hometown of Manhattan, Kan., and later Lawrence. The post-grunge major-label feeding frenzy landed him a fat paycheck from Arista Records while with the heavy pop band Stick. A friendship with fellow Kansan Carrie Clark, of Nineties Austin phenoms Sixteen Deluxe, indirectly led him south when it came time to part ways with the Midwest.
Morales followed a similar path from his hometown of Olympia, Wash. He gigged with Nirvana and the Melvins when he was with Hell Trout, featuring Dave Foster, a "real redneck" that had drummed for Nirvana in the pre-Chad Channing days before Bleach. Morales' guitar amp even graces the cover of the immortal album. After that he began playing with Ronna Era, with whom he moved to Austin to form Starfish, a powerful riff-pop trio that caused a brief stir with two albums on Trance Syndicate before disbanding in Italy along with Era and Morales' marriage in late 1998.
Duplantis, an in-demand sideman, plays with Conn in the Dismukes, and Conn is bandmates with Morales in Migas, who ply a more concise blend of instrumental skullfuckery. The three had never played together, though, until Duplantis suggested he join them for the unveiling of the bedroom jam creation Conn and Morales had started at home on Friday nights over weed and wine.
Duplantis stays busy with Richard Buckner, Sin Pelo, and others, but he remains a pillar of Tia Carrera, though the band employs other bassists when Duplantis can't make it, most recently Dixie Witch's Curtis Christiansen.
Morales and Conn agree that while the band is still good without him, Duplantis takes the collective to a higher plane of musical synergy.
"Andrew and I are communicating constantly onstage," says Morales. "Erik looks up every once in a while."
"I just feel it," explains Conn, who delivers the Chronicle weekly to help pay the bills. "It's telepathy, man."
Audible schemes are called out at certain moments. Skeletal plans are formulated at loose meetings before gigs, only to be completely scrapped once the band gets onstage. It's like the best choose-your-own-adventure book ever written, because the plot constantly gets thicker, and there's never a lame ending.
"It's like a treasure," says Conn of the group's chemistry. "You're not looking for it, but lo and behold, you find it, and it's more beautiful than you ever imagined." -- Michael Chamy
Tia Carrera's debut, The November Session, which documents their first-ever trip into the studio, gets the record release treatment at Room 710 Friday, Nov. 7. Tia plays their regular 8pm happy hour set as well as a closing gig after special guests Scott H. Biram and Richard Buckner.
The sevenpiece local behemoth features a double-barreled drum assault and a singer who plays trombone, conjuring an expanded Scratch Acid or Jesus Lizard during their full-scale live shows, which consist of the album material played front-to-back.
An early highlight for the young band will be a Halloween performance on Canal Street at the New Orleans Media Event festival tonight (Friday), where they will be joined by N.O. drum troupe the 9th Ward marching band in a move sure to bring out the full booty. Morales, for his part, bemoans the time and dedication required of Gorch Fock as opposed to the freewheeling Tia Carrera, but of course the good captain wouldn't have it any other way. -- Michael Chamy
Appreciating the hardscrabble flatlands of West Texas requires a mind-set that finds promise in panoramic, wind-whipped desolation. Anyone can marvel at the Grand Canyon, but it takes a stout brand of introspection to squeeze transcendence out of Lubbock.
From Monahans to the Mojave, Milton Mapes utilizes lonely geography to convey the psychological landscape of an emotional vagabond on their just-released second album, Westernaire.
"There's something different about the landscape, the weather, and the sky," says Greg Vanderpool, who formed Milton Mapes with drummer/guitarist Roberto Sanchez in 1999. "I've always been fascinated with the geography of the Southwest. Those kind of things carry a certain feeling or mood that we've always tried to capture in the music."
Songs like "Palo Duro" and "A Thousand Songs About California" evoke a sense of longing to escape from broken relationships, dead-end towns, and failed beliefs without succumbing to apathetic resignation. Milton Mapes' warm, Neil Young-influenced mix of twang and fuzz offers the same sort of aural refuge small-town AM radio stations used to provide to solo travelers passing through on an all-night run. Even the album's title sounds like the name of a neon-lit motor court somewhere in New Mexico.
"I'm not exactly sure where the word 'Westernaire' came from, but it just seems to describe the point of view from which a lot of the songs are written," explains Vanderpool. "It's kind of about not knowing what's next, but taking comfort in the fact that you don't know what's around the corner. A lot of the songs come from that perspective of trying to figure out what's beyond the horizon. What's exciting in life sometimes is not having all the answers, but trusting that there's something else out there that keeps you going."
Vanderpool and Sanchez grew up next door to each other in Dallas and wound up playing together in the Plebeians. In 1999, they moved to Nashville and began Milton Mapes, naming the project for Vanderpool's grandfather. The duo arrived in Austin in 2001, releasing their debut EP, The State Line, later that year. Recorded in Texas and Tennessee, the EP alternates between the elegiac sweetness of "Used to Be Enough" and the faraway den of distortion that haunts "Lubbock."
"The State Line was kind of a patchwork of musicians and a lot of things going on at once," says Vanderpool. "It was kind of chaotic, which was the idea."
By contrast, Westernaire was recorded in one place with a less transient group of musicians, which allowed a more cohesive approach to the songs. Despite having also developed a formidable live presence, Vanderpool's reserved stage manner correctly suggests he's more comfortable writing than performing.
"I've never thought of us as entertainers," he admits. "It's more about creating a mood in the room and taking everyone else along with us."
Together with the preponderance of Lone Star locales mentioned in their songs, Milton Mapes' amalgam of roots rock and alt.country might seem to brand them a "Texas music" act, a notion at which Vanderpool bristles.
"I'd like to think of us as a Texas music band, but now that's sort of just an industry term," he says. "I mean, we have more in common with Pedro the Lion than we do with Pat Green."
However Milton Mapes is classified, Westernaire has garnered plenty of fortuitous feedback since its January completion. After initially getting rejected for a SXSW showcase earlier this year, Vanderpool nonchalantly left copies of the album at the SXSW offices.
"A week later, they called us and said we got in," he laughs.
On the strength of their showcase, Milton Mapes was invited to contribute "The Only Sound That Matters" to the latest Starbucks-distributed Hear Music compilation, which also features tracks from Gillian Welch and the Jayhawks. Then, the newly formed music arm of Aspyr Media took interest, releasing Westernaire and reissuing The State Line with bonus tracks.
As a booze-and-spirituality-fueled examination of why some people are inexorably drawn to music even as it draws them away from the so-called good life, "The Only Sound That Matters" is a poignant centerpiece for Westernaire's mind-set of not knowing what comes next.
"Hopefully," Vanderpool offers, "there'll be more redemption on the next album." -- Greg Beets
According to unconfirmed statistics, only two in 237,000 musical obsessives are aware of, let alone ecstatic about, Rhino Handmade's Internet-only pressing of the Stalk-Forrest Group's unreleased Elektra debut from 1970.
"Dude!" exclaims the Primordial Undermind himself, Eric Arn, guitarist, founder, and sole group constant, and Ph.D. in molecular biology/biochemistry. "Are you kidding!? I worship that album! I'm only allowed to play it around the house every so often."
Arn's wife and bandmate, Vanessa, reclining in the living room of that same Hyde Park rental, gives him a look. It was the 37-year-old rocker scientist who misplaced the disc.
"I think I hid it before she could," admits Arn sheepishly. "Now we can't find it."
It's probably just as well: No one appreciates the Blue Öyster Cult anyway, née Soft White Underbelly before the future "Reaper" clan changed their moniker, though not their original, post-Grateful Dead jam band m.o.
"It's a shame," laments Arn. "They're one of the best bands ever. They got short shrift in history because they continued well past the time they were making good music. That's unfortunate. The first four albums they made, in my opinion, are untouchable in the rock & roll canon. The combination of intellectual weirdness and this fascination with evil, and the wordplay -- having people like Richard Meltzer and Patti Smith write the lyrics ...
"At the same time, they rocked. They rocked their asses off. They also had an aspect that people forget: Sixties psychedelia."
Most of those attributes, with the notable exception of Meltzer and Smith, can be cataloged in Arn's long-term pre- and post-doctoral project: Primordial Undermind. Also absent from the band's recent CD release set at Room 710 was "Telling Psychopaths," PU's cover of BÖC's "Flaming Telepaths."
In the smoky gloom of the Red River psych ward, against a projected backdrop of earth and sky, the local fivepiece droned like a plague of locusts. With cloaked saxophonist/clarinetist Otis Cleveland skronking out front like a mallard on acid, rhythm duo John MacCollum and Joe Volpe in full lockdown, Arn soloed thick and electric. The Centurian death lament of "There Is a Time," saluted by Arn's spearing riffs, flashbacked à la Pink Floyd in Pompeii.
From jet-propelled "Akaknow" to the free-jazz squall of "Kinky Sex (Makes the World Go Round)," PU's fifth and latest full-length, Thin Shells of Revolution, is as Meddle-some as "There Is a Time." The Middle and Far Eastern incense of "Theme From Serpent," with horndog Cleveland summoning the ancient reptile while Arn spells out the consequences on his axe, echoes opium-den dwellers from the band's previous disc, 2000's similarly spaced Beings of Game P-U. 1999's Universe I've Got swirls more sand-blown psychedelia throughout, albeit in a rawer form.
"That's something that took us a long time to learn as a band -- to let things breathe," says Arn, who formed the revolving-door band back east in 1989 and has had at least two incarnations here in Austin since his arrival in '99 for a post-doc position at UT. "It's important to let ideas develop and not be, 'Do this 12 times and switch to that' -- to not be rigid. It's important to give things space and time to do what they need to do. Breathe."
Breathe. Breathe in the air. Don't be afraid to care.
"There's one over-arching idea, which is to make music that communicates ideas, states of mind, that are not particularly verbal. That's why, a lot of times our music is labeled psychedelic: It's related to those experiences that people call psychedelic."
For Arn, who Austin could lose as soon as next year to an assistant professorship, his time in the dwelling place of psychedelic progenitor Roky Erickson has already been a dream come true. He unearthed Texas psych footnotes Golden Dawn, was a major catalyst in pulling off last year's Texas Psych Fest, and has been an active leader of the local psych scene. As if to confirm Arn's credentials, Charalambides warlord Tom Carter, who lives a couple of doors down from the Arns, saunters in just as our interview is ending.
"We move a lot, so we see a lot of new places, and wherever we go, there's people doing interesting music," says Arn, "but yeah, for people that are into 'adventurous music,' there's quite a scene here." -- Raoul Hernandez
You wouldn't know it to look at them, or to hear their new album, but we've caught Subset at an awkward moment. It's not our fault. Their long-awaited second album, Dueling Devotions, finds the local pop trio at a major career intersection.
"It's kind of weird timing," confesses vocalist/guitarist/Chronicle webmaster Lindsey Simon, "because we added a new member when we're supposed to be out promoting a new CD."
The new member is Simon's Chronicle co-worker Mark Fagan sitting behind the drum kit. Fagan's clearly become a part of the band's indie pop catalog, yet Subset appears to be chomping at the bit to write some new songs. Meanwhile, they hold out hope that their next album won't be as troubling to create as Dueling Devotions.
"We recorded a whole batch of songs two years ago," shares singer/bassist Nathan Fish.
They were produced by college rock mastermind John Croslin (Guided by Voices, Spoon) after Subset found his e-mail address and requested some assistance. The band wound up killing half of those tunes, despite the fact that they cost a lot of money.
"We went into the studio prematurely," concedes Fish.
"We didn't have time to explore," Simon interjects.
"We had no support, we were paying for it ourselves," continues Fish, "so we ended up with half an album."
A quick call to producer/friend Greg Smelley helped revitalize the project, and the second half of Dueling Devotions was completed. The problems behind the scenes are virtually impossible to detect, as the final 13 tracks are pop condolences perfect for getting over the ones that get away. It's rock music about being frustrated, without the dullness that bogs down hundreds of other musical peers.
"They don't write songs when they're sitting at home, watching the baseball game," says Fagan regarding the group's tendency to be both emotional and practical. Subset's balancing act between downcast and bright helps them connect with fans better than many like-minded Austin acts.
Then there's the band's ripe sense of humor; at their recent CD release party at Gallery Lombardi, Fish performed 50 Cent's "Many Men (Wish Death)." It only registered with one-tenth of the crowd, but the band uncovered the tune's melody in a way that made everyone's mop-top bob along. An Austin band covering a hip-hop hit may be nothing new thanks to the Gourds and Dynamite Hack, but that may be all Subset shares with other local acts.
"I don't think we've ever fit in very well," says Fish of the local music scene.
"We're not wishing we were in New York right now," Simon is quick to point out. "We're all pretty comfortable playing here, writing songs here."
So who has time to move? -- Matt Dentler
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