Silly, spontaneous, and infinitely catchy, Being Dead songs unfurl like a bite-sized acid trip: all the fun of the unexpected, but it ends before the weirdness overpowers.
Turns out the band writes them just as extemporaneously. Ideas flow out of the art-pop trio’s hearts, guts, or maybe their funny bones; perhaps not fully formed, but with little talking necessary.
“A lot of things come out of when we’re doing practice and someone starts doing something,” bassist Nicole Roman-Johnston offers. “That’s ‘Rock n’ Roll Hurts.’”
“Rock n’ Roll Hurts” appears on EELS, Being Dead’s sophomore album, due out Sept. 27 via Bayonet Records. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the band: singers and multi-instrumentalists Cody Dosier and Falcon Bitch (we’ve printed the latter artist’s given name in the past, but she’s since adopted Falcon as her chosen name, not just a pseudonym) harmonize the title over a minimalist Sixties garage riff, but their melodies quickly devolve into a finger-snapping breakdown where a giggling Roman-Johnston stutters, “Rock and roll will hurt your soul.”
Recalling the moment when she burst into laughter while tracking the song in front of EELS producer John Congleton (Sleater-Kinney, Mannequin Pussy), the bassist says, “[He] got really frightened, I think.”
Arriving just one year after their debut LP, When Horses Would Run, EELS skirts the “surf rock” catch-all music writers like myself have tossed Being Dead’s way. Its 16 tracks dabble in Beach Boys pop (“Godzilla Rises”), melancholy indie rock (“Van Goes”), aggro fuzz rock (“Firefighters”), and even abstract shoegaze (“Gazing at Footwear,” of course).
Lyrically, Dosier and Falcon now seem more willing to get vulnerable. In “Godzilla Rises,” they harmonize sweetly, “Just when you thought you knew someone/ Guess again because you were wrong/ You’ve been lied to all along.” In “Problems,” Falcon wallows in mounting inconveniences before admitting that the real problem is herself.
The band behind such choruses as “Her name was spelled/ Like this: M-U-R-I-E-L” isn’t putting on weirdo airs. This is just how they operate.
I ask the primary songwriters if another vulnerable track, “Dragons II,” has any ties to “Misery Lane,” an equally moody cut from When Horses Would Run. In the older song, the singers howl, “There’s no fairytale town where everybody had a good day,” and in the newer song, Dosier dispels notions of dragons and towers before Falcon, in a beautiful falsetto, sighs, “There’s no one to rely on.” But the artists shut me down.
“I wasn’t thinking about ‘Misery Lane’ in any way whenever we were writing ‘Dragons.’ It just kind of happened,” Dosier shrugs, while Falcon says she sees no similarities between the songs.
There I was, the earnest music journalist, trying to ascribe philosophical meaning to the music of Being Dead. I should’ve known better. I’d read the band’s last Chronicle interview, where Kevin Curtin was tasked with spinning a 1,500-word cover story out of fake answers and what Kevin called “54 minutes of overwhelmingly unusable interview tape.” (See “Medieval Times: Being Dead in an Era of Cruelty and Despair,” Oct. 22, 2021.)
After hanging with the group at our shared North Loop haunt Epoch Coffee and being hit with equally impenetrable (though more honest – no lies about their origin story this time around) answers, I can confirm: The band behind such choruses as “Her name was spelled/ Like this: M-U-R-I-E-L” isn’t putting on weirdo airs. This is just how they operate.
When I ask about their Sept. 27 EELS release show at Radio/East, featuring support from fellow locals Variety and Proun, Roman-Johnston perks up to reveal she’s nervous – but only because the gig falls on her birthday.
“I want everyone to be nice to me,” she says. “And there must be cake. So I’m nervous that people aren’t gonna get a good cake.”
When Falcon owns up to one similarity between “Misery Lane” and “Dragons II” – “There’s a lot of sorrow in both,” she says – an astute Dosier replies, “If you’re gonna talk about sadness, you gotta say, ‘Hey, it’s not gonna be happy.’”
Yes, it must be a more unspoken process, that practice-space alchemy.
“Which we’re about to practice after this,” Falcon says, eyebrows raised.
Roman-Johnston laughs. “Oh no! Another hit!”
Being Dead celebrates the release of EELS with a show at Radio/East Friday, Sept. 27.
This article appears in September 27 • 2024.
