Eleven years of jamming with a bicoastal disco-punk collective whose
rotating membership usually approached double digits could make anyone
pine for a simpler stage and studio setup. So it was when lanky
sometimes-frontman John Pugh left repetitively exclamatory party
starters !!! in late 2007 to focus on his duo Free Blood with vocalist
Madeline Davy.
“There are aspects of [!!!] that I miss,” says Pugh by phone from
the Free Blood’s practice space in New York. “I like collaborating with
lots of people bringing in different ideas and influences. But I think
we, me and Maddy, kind of bounce off each other in a certain
way—it’s interesting to see what happens when you bring in just
one other element and bounce off that.”
The duo met through mutual friends shortly after Pugh moved to New
York with !!! in 2001, and while they quickly hit it off, it took some
time for them to actually get around to the business of making
music.
“We’d see each other at parties all the time,” says Pugh. “We had
the idea to have a traditional party band that would just play at
parties and not at rock venues. We talked about it for probably over a
year before we ever played a note, but eventually we started playing,
and it became more than just a party band.”
After four years of doing Free Blood on the side, Pugh’s departure
from !!! has allowed the band to become a full-time endeavor. Asked if
it’s nice to only have one band to work on now, Pugh sighs with relief:
“Ohhhhh yeah.”
Free Blood’s debut collection, The Singles—out on
DFA/Rong Music, whose proprietor Ben Cook is a recent transplant to
Seattle—gathers six original songs and five remixes (some
previously released) to make for either a generous EP or a somewhat
shifty full-length. Despite their streamlined core, Free Blood’s sound
reveals an expansive approach to the studio, where they pile on layers
of vocals and instruments, often with help from their friends. On any
given track, there are buzzing synths, live and programmed percussion,
strutting bass, liquid guitars, strings, and plenty of reverberating
room underpinning the dueling vocals.
“Never Hear Surf Music Again” finds Pugh and Davy trading lines
about mind-altering chemicals over a slow-building bass-and-drums
groove that progresses into a dazed chant, adding smeared guitars, then
screeching, then sawed cello, to conclude with Pugh’s falsetto refrain
over an almost acoustic jangle. “Quick and Painful” amps the drums up
to more manic, clipped intensities, adding synthesizer squeals that
sound genuinely painful (for the synthesizer), with the duo reciting
vaguely antagonistic commands that seem only abstractly aimed at the
dance floor. Davy can be heard chatting beneath the racket, and the
track ends with a noisy crescendo and then her laughing and asking, in
the style of a studio outtake, “Did I destroy your ears?” Almost, but
it was lovely.
“Grumpy” is the punkiest thing on the album’s punk/funk continuum,
though it again features that stately cello. First released back in
July, the track looks forward, taking it to the unhinged bridge with a
line about a “question for the president”—and here there’s a
long, pregnant pause filled only with feedback and a distorted guitar
squiggle before Pugh jumps back in, voice a cartoonish low breath (like
the sound one makes when imitating “the crowd going wild”): “Obama!”
The lyrical meaning may be a little murky, or at least not obviously
overjoyed, but given the extended !!! clan’s broadly stated politics
during the Bush years, one expects Free Blood’s diplomatic relations to
run much more smoothly under the new administration.
Nothing on The Singles comes close to rivaling !!! at their
transcendent, triumphant best (the epochal “Me and Giuliani,”
“Intensify”)—but then again, the songs Pugh sang with !!! were
always less obvious anthems and more subtly soulful numbers, sexy
rather than screaming, funky rather than frenzied, a style that carries
over well to Free Blood.
“We didn’t want it to just be drum-heavy dance music,” says Pugh.
“We wanted it to have a thread running through it with the
vocals—to think of them as a centerpiece for everything that was
happening rather than let the music kind of swallow them up.”
Live, Free Blood can be anything from Pugh and Davy singing over
largely prerecorded backing tracks to a four- or five-piece live band
with drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, and nothing more “electronic” than
a loop pedal. Either way, Pugh and Davy exude enough energy—equal
parts sexual and lysergic—to make for a fully engaging show, and
the band are committed to getting crowds loosened up.
“We want people to feel engaged, which means we engage with
them—sometimes physically—to break up that tension, and to
create other kinds of tension that are more stimulating.”
Free Blood may be a more intimate affair, but they’re still plenty
stimulating enough to inspire some exclamation points of their own.
