Fidelity Claws

For many years, the Intelligence have been one of this city’s
greatest bands. And yet, a decade into their existence, they’re still
playing tiny venues like the Comet, the Funhouse, and the Wildrose.
What the hell? The group’s leader, guitarist/vocalist Lars Finberg,
says the Intelligence can sell out a 500-capacity club in Paris, while
places like Macedonia, as well as Oklahoma and North Dakota, prove more
resistant to the band’s considerable charms—as does Seattle,
mysteriously.

“[Seattle’s] radar is jammed up with too many bands or something,”
Finberg muses. “I’ve seen so many great bands play to five people. I
would imagine if Suicide re-formed, they’d play the Funhouse for us and
the Coconut Coolouts.” (Finberg plans to move with fiancée and
bandmate Susanna Welbourne to her home base of New Orleans next
year.)

No matter the paltry hometown fan base, the Intelligence—with
ex–A Frames drummer Finberg as the lone constant in a revolving
lineup—have been creating some of the catchiest noise pop of this
decade. Their songs merge primal, danceable beats with caustic guitar
squalls, head-bobbing bass lines, and serpentine keyboard motifs. Over
that foundation, Finberg declaims like a Northwestern Nikki Sudden, his
reverbed voice a font of discontent and snide, humorous observations in
the mix’s middle distance. Trace elements of Suicide’s insistent
pulsations, Swell Maps’ tuneful discord, and the Fall’s hypnotic
repetition and knack for noncloying hooks coalesce in the
Intelligence’s five albums, making for a catalog teeming with concise,
memorable gems (they’ve never issued a song over four minutes long).
Two of those full-lengths, Fake Surfers and Crepuscule with
Pacman, have come out this year, solidifying the Intelligence’s
standing as one of the finest and most prolific current progenitors of
fidelity-challenged rock.

Although lo-fi has been enjoying another resurgence in popularity
over the last couple of years, the Intelligence—whose rotating
membership currently includes bassist/keyboardist Welbourne, drummer
Beren Ekine Huett, and guitarist Matt Rafferty—were taking this
approach from the start. Even their so-called “slick” album,
Deuteronomy, won’t remind anyone of a TV on the Radio disc. In
fact, Finberg’s favorite gear is his “cassette seven-track (one’s
busted). I love the way it sounds and the tape saturation of cassette.
I can’t stand recording on computers.” Perhaps the Intelligence will
reap some of the benefit from this renewed interest in dirtily recorded
rock.

“Some of the bands spearheading this ‘trend’ are great,” Finberg
acknowledges. “But I think it’s going to spawn a lot of trebly horror.
I’m glad we went into the studio and recorded cleanly and expensively
when the wave was swelling. I don’t want to be on the Now That’s
What I Call Music Engineered by the Garbage Pail Kids, Vol. 7.
Watch when all of those bands get rich, we’ll put on our tombstone, ‘We
were there first, but we left :(.’

“On Fake Surfers, I wanted to start it off with a
low-fidelity home recording and have the record progressively get
clearer and bigger and sort of fluctuate between the two. We caught
flak for our last record [Deuteronomy] being too clean! So I
wanted to find a balance for us between both, since I listen to music
like that myself. I like to listen to Swell Maps or Eat Skull, and then
Bill Callahan or Fleetwood Mac to cleanse the midrange.”

Despite appearances, the Intelligence essentially are a dance band.
“Completely,” he agrees. “I don’t think we have one song that doesn’t
have a remixable club banger hidden in the beat. Most of our songs are
written from the beat, and if that’s not catchy, none of the rest of
it’s going to work.”

While some of Finberg’s melodies have the potential to be hits, the
production values—the “in the red” nature of them, to allude to
the Intelligence’s U.S. label—subvert that possibility.

“Some of the hooks we use, I’d feel like a cheeseball if we recorded
like Maroon 5,” Finberg says. “Or you know how a concert is great in
person and seems small and ridiculous and cheap when you watch the same
one on YouTube? I think what bugs me about being called ‘lo-fi’ is that
the blow-out tape sound [we have] is actually from being even higher
fidelity than hi-fi can stand!”

Unsurprisingly, the Intelligence favor analog technology. They cut
their last two albums at the Distillery in Costa Mesa, California.
Finberg enthuses, “It’s all analog tape (not one computer in the
place!) with tons of old ribbon microphones and vintage gear, and the
owner/engineer Mike McHugh is a huge Luddite in terms of recording, so
to me the records sound more real and honest. It’s just drums in a room
with natural reverb put on two-inch tape without a lot of compression
or sounding like a hugely compressed modern radio song. The space gets
in there; it sounds old without sounding phony.”

Throughout the Intelligence’s career, there is a refinement of
sound, a relieving of the vein-bulging tension that marks their early
classics, 2004’s Boredom and Terror and 2005’s Icky Baby.
But then Crepuscule with Pacman came along, striking a balance
between early and later Intelligence. What were the circumstances
surrounding the creation of Pacman that made it diverge from
Fake Surfers?

“It’s funny because I can barely muster any pride for praise of
[Pacman], because it was so utterly careless in its execution,”
Finberg admits. “I had spent so much time on Fake Surfers and
was so proud of it, I was kind of spent. The Parisian label Born Bad
contacted me about doing an LP and offered me some money, and I just
couldn’t say no. I felt like such a creep starting work on it! But
there were no expectations on it, and after I came to terms with doing
it for money [Finberg credits singer Brad Eberhard of L.A. band Wounded
Lion for encouragement], and after working kinda meticulously on
Fake Surfers in a studio, it felt nice to be working alone at
home with no idea how it would shape up. I just recorded constantly for
a couple of weeks, and it was done.

“So I sold out, it was easy, and some people think it’s our best, so
maybe that’s why I almost block it out! Fake Surfers is more
like the baby you plan to have with your wife, and Pacman is the
estranged druggie stepdaughter who shows up at age 14 one Christmas
Eve. Pacman wasn’t planned, and that’s probably why it
works.”

Finberg works within narrow parameters, yet he’s found multiple ways
to extract winning tunes from that limited palette. When the approach
sounds so fulfilling, why mess with it? Finberg doesn’t mind repeating
himself, and for good reason: He seems incapable of penning a dull
track.

“I’ve always wanted our band to chart more of a slow course building
off of the last thing and not be afraid to repeat yourself (they call
that ‘returning to your roots,’ anyway—I like our roots),”
Finberg reasons. “It’s funny, I remember Everett True, who wrote for
your paper, said, ‘Every good band has one good idea.’ I always
liked that. It’s when Lil Wayne starts playing guitar that you wanna
check out.”