Jucifer
w/Big Business, Plaster
Fri May 21, Crocodile, 9 pm, $8.
The FIrst thing you notice about a Jucifer performance are the amps stacked like a Berlin Wall of noise, barracks of distortion that place the band’s crowds on the frontlines of audio intensity. The set of 14 cabinets affects the two-piece’s guitar-and-drum drone like a gigantic steel lid slowly compressing songs into one long, distorted hum. It’s a massive brick ‘n’ mortar sound, but one that also has a very heavy-lidded and dreamy aesthetic, carried across all 67 speakers (or so singer/guitarist Amber Valentine guesses–she’s not sure of the exact count), that rattles your chest. “More sonic strangeness can happen,” says Valentine of this setup, “varied feedback and things being out of phase. It’s totally possible to be loud without nearly as much gear as I use, but the sound is a lot different to us from other loud bands we’ve heard. Plus, we get a really good workout [loading it].”
In the Athens band’s practiced hands, each guitar riff echoes into five lanes of distortion fuzz, with the noise crawling at a rush-hour standstill while the drums (played by Valentine’s husband, Edgar Livengood) kick their way through the pileup. Other times the melodies are tenuous plumes of smoke, drifting around Valentine’s soft siren voice, which carries the band forward like a ghostly pilot in an audio fog that’s equal parts Melvins, My Bloody Valentine, and Isis. Their music is a swirling take on narcotic buzz-saw cuts of psychedelic melody among a muggy metal doom. “Sometimes we relish the idea of assaulting the audience,” says Valentine. “Once in a while, when we know the crowd is expecting some soft indie girl-rock, we even feel a little guilty. But the goal is really to annihilate ourselves–to embed ourselves completely in that volume, to be lost, to negate thought.”
The nomadic act travels around the country in a Winnebago that doubles as a home. Living on the road, according to Valentine, has helped the band afford constant touring, but the arrangement has artistic advantages as well: “It has freed us in the sense that we aren’t doing a lot of social hanging out that, while we very much miss our friends, definitely can be a bad influence when you need to get things done. Traveling inspires the shit out of us. Constant touring keeps us strong and focused, and helps us keep getting better–at least we hope so. Also, it has made us appreciate everything that matters to us a hundred percent more–living with eyes open instead of kind of floating through.”
They’ve made good on that lifestyle, including taking photographs that often end up as album art. Jucifer’s latest EP, War Bird, which ends with a beautiful bluegrass original with Valentine on the banjo, is decorated with gorgeous desert scenes. It also has a center spread of red skies, a fitting metaphor for an album of songs that share the theme of our country’s hawkish foreign policy, although in some cases the connections with current events were originally coincidental. “The first week of September 2001, Edgar played the intro riff of what would become ‘Ides of Light’ and I was really struck by it,” says Valentine. “We started playing it and I was having all these images of the Roman Empire, thinking how America in its careless affluence seemed poised for a similar fate. I switched the distortion off and we had one of those inspired practice moments where the part just came together, with lyrics even. I immediately sat down and wrote the rest of the words about the new generations trampling the old, and frenzied consumption, and about a battle in which at last we fall, in the shadow of our home.” A few days later was September 11, and Valentine says the chain of events spooked them both. “I couldn’t play the song without crying for a while,” she admits. “The war made ‘Ides’ even more potent for us. And made us feel a desire and a duty to do the only thing we really know, to make music about the problem. Even being cut off from the TV coverage, enough knowledge seeps through to keep us angry and sad. We’ve never wanted to be a political band–[that’s] a bit high-handed–but if we didn’t address this we’d be closing our eyes to make the monster go away. Which a lot of us seem to do, and that is scary.”