Japanther’s Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly grew up during the time when punk rock first “died” and was born again(st) in cities and towns across the U.S. as ’80s hardcore. The do-it-yourself ethic replaced the rock-star/fan paradigm that punk’s first wave had left intact during its assault on rock ‘n’ roll. This new movement was less concerned with the image of rebellion and more concerned with the business of establishing a real alternative culture—a loose network of participatory local scenes connected by DIY mail order, zines, labels, bands, and venues.
That’s how it seems now, anyway. I wasn’t reading Maximum Rock’n’Roll as a kid, but Vanek may have been. His older brother Josh has been running the Wantage USA label since the mid-’90s, and it’s likely that he passed some punk artifacts and ideas down to his younger sibling.
In 2000, after relocating to New York from his native Yakima, the younger Vanek and his art-school buddy Reilly began playing music together and recording four-track tapes in a Brooklyn apartment. From those tapes, the pair summoned up Japanther, a chimera of ’80s DIY hardcore, pop punk, metal, and battered hiphop.
“We came up with the name while laughing late at night,” says Vanek. “It was just a sound we liked, a motion, colors, designs, a spirit animal. It was just what we needed to go on tour that summer.”
Since that summer, the band has hardly stopped touring, crisscrossing the states at least once or twice a year. They’ve played in Seattle at least five times in as many years.
“We travel a lot because it keeps us alive,” Vanek explains. “New York is a city with lots of pressures, so leaving to make music every two months is healthy.”
The relentless tour schedule also reflects their belief that Japanther are best enjoyed live, and their records back that up. The band is constantly recording and rerecording live takes, four-track sessions, and occasional studio versions of their songs. Their records (released on their own Tapes Records label, as well as on others) function as rough documents rather than polished product (from the song “Midtown,” an ode to dropping out of the working world: “We know where we’ve been, ’cause we made a record”).
“Performance is more important than recording,” says Vanek. “So oftentimes our records may seem unfinished to some people. We love home recording. Fidelity or a finished product is not important. Soul gets top billing.”
And their live shows are soulful, almost spiritual, experiences. Standing on his drum kit, shirtless, sweating, with a modified pay phone for a microphone, Vanek looks like an overgrown teenager, but he has the intimidating presence of a religious fanatic. Reilly, meanwhile, plays his fast, fuzzed-out bass and sings along with a kind of trancelike calm totally at odds with the thrash going on around him. Fans of Lightning Bolt will be familiar with this dynamic, but Japanther add monumentally catchy hooks and huge, sing-along “whoa-oh” choruses to the bass/drum racket. Turns out, pop punk and noise metal taste great together.
Their unique sonic energy has made Japanther darlings of both the Brooklyn art/punk world and Vice magazine. In the last year, they’ve performed as part of two puppet shows and a water ballet.
“[Dan Graham’s] Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty was a huge marionette production that we wrote five songs for. Dump the Body in Rikki Lake was an oversized-puppet-gangsta-rap-opera we did in 2005 at a gallery space in Chelsea. Dangerous When Wet was a water ballet we did with Aquadoom, a synchronized swim team from New York University. That shit was ‘off the chain’ or ‘Alice in Chains’ for those in Seattle.”
But Japanther’s artful racket isn’t for everybody. The band recently performed at an antiwar benefit where one speaker decried their brand of noise-punk as inherently violent and “the kind of music they play in the tanks.”
“I was astonished,” recalls Vanek. “I shouted, ‘That’s fucked, lady! I support our troops!’ This created a sickly pause in an already polarized room. So I took the opportunity to cuss her out and son her on a couple of things.”
At a time when punk rock has been largely sanitized for suburban food-court consumption, Japanther are making it loud, messy, and confrontational again. They’re not tank music; they just crush a lot.