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Venice is Thinking: Venice is Sinking Talks About Recording, Romance, and Hitting the Road
by The Bridge "You kind of are, yeah," Lawson remarked, a note of something like awe in his voice. Troupe giggled, girlishly. "He's just amazing." Months later, the big ed. at Athens Exchange decides the time is nigh to interview the group. "Their lives are about to change," he prophesized. "I don't know why no one's signed them yet." So I procured a copy of the new album, Sorry About the Flowers, and called Ms. Troupe to set things up. After spinning the disc a couple of times (it's a fine, lush affair, full of instantly hummable haunters), I decided Troupe's interest in Jandek must have been a case of opposites attracting. Venice's music is all melody and soft jangle, nary a victimized guitar to be found. I meet the two at the lovely Manhattan Cafe for a brief talk on a recent May evening. I brought my friend (the host of the aforementioned porch party) along with me, to ensure a smooth hello. On our way downtown, we discuss my habit of playing spot-the-serial-killer in every neighborhood I've lived in. I ask him about my latest suspect. He's a youngish loner type who lives next door and spends an inordinate amount of time gardening and never seems to actually talk. "Oh, you mean Norman Bates?" He laughs. "Yeah, he's a serial killer, for sure." "Now, why aren't I interviewing folks like him?" I wonder. "You can look up any band you like on the internet, but if you're curious about the local weirdo - that's hard to find out about. That's news." "Those kinds of people probably wouldn't ever wanna do an interview. That's the whole point of being a loner," my friend points out, ever practical. I concede that this is true. But it's still a question worth repeating, I decide. Troupe is the first to arrive at ye olde Manhattan, looking casual yet sharp in a black and white striped top and slacks. As I mentioned before, she wouldn't look out of place at a church function; she's well-mannered and crisp. Her sense of humor, however, belies the good-girl package. She mentions briefly that her new boyfriend bears a striking resemblance to herself. "Sometimes I joke that I'm dating my cousin, and people think it's disgusting," she remarks, laughing gaily. "But I think it's hilarious."  Daniel Lawson plays keyboards at Radium Recording. photo by Karolyn Troupe "So, we need to test it? That's cool," Troupe says gamely. She chatters freely and easily in her girlish, charmingly nasal lilt. Lawson, a reserved, ponderous looking fellow, takes some prodding. "Describe your drink for me," I suggest. "I'm drinking a lovely Blenheim's and Maker's Mark, with a lemon." His voice matches his manner, thougthful and undertoned. Troupe and I worry that he wouldn't pick up very well. "I think it'll be fine," he mumbles. "You're not nearly as loud as I am," Troupe says, shaking her beveled red hair. "Yeah..." I rewind and hit record again. "If you could just say one more thing..." "Um... I think it'll be fine..." he repeats, looking slightly pained. "This is freaking me out." Troupe smiles with a fond mixture of rue and resignation. "Daniel gets freaked out pretty easily." We (yes, the Royal We) will pause here to reflect on the fact that Troupe and Lawson are an ex-couple. I debated the possibility of including this little tidbit for quite a bit after the interview, throughout which I mentioned it not at all. "Do you think it's rude? Do you think it's inconsequential? Will it piss 'em off?" I agonized to my friend. "I dunno. Maybe. Push their buttons." He shrugged. I couldn't tell if he was kidding or not. It's not an article about their love lives, I decided, and kept mum on the subject. Until I began transcribing. It was just too damned obvious. I call Troupe to announce, sheepishly, my intentions of mentioning their Personal History. But first an ice-breaker - and a question I had fully intended to ask her at the Manhattan: just what, exactly, is the difference between a violin and a viola? (Troupe plays both, as well as cello.) "I'm glad you asked that," she says brightly. "A viola is lower than a violin, and a bit bigger. The strings are the same as a cello, but it's an octave lower, and it's a bigger, more mellow instrument. A viola is usually played with these really long, sweeping lines... and it's not a fiddle, she adds sternly, explaining that such confusion is a pet peeve of hers. "The viola's really my favorite. I consider it my primary instrument." Viola, check. Moving on to nosier pastures: "Daniel and I have reconciled, so I really think that's fine," she assured me. "For a while it was uncertain, and things were weird. We have talked about it to poeple, though. It's on the bio, it's not like we're keeping it this big secret. "It can be very intimate, performing, so this defintely adds a different dynamic. But I think it's a positive one." "...so I was thinking how interesting it would be to interview this potential serial killer..." This is how I kick things off, once we have the tape recorder situation settled. Troupe is enthused by the idea. "You should go up to him and interview him, defintely," she nods. "But he probably wouldn't like it." "Well, you'd just have to have some sort of goal: 'I'm doing a story on people who do a lot of gardening...'" Good idea. But aren't interviews weird? (What I'm doing here is called a segue. Isn't it clever?) Troupe recalls an interview last year with a certain reporter from a certain publication, both of which will remain unnamed, to protect the innocent (assuming that Venice is Innocent). "[He] interviewed us a long time ago and that was kind of... lame..." She pulls a kid-caught-with-the-cookie-jar face and lets out a nervy peal of laughter. "I shouldn't say anymore," she grins. "I think it's better in person," says Lawson. "Phone ones can be kinda weird, and email-" "I prefer email," Troupe interjects. "-they're kind of nice, because you can prepare, write out exactly what you're going to say - but then you get almost too thorough, say too much..." No matter how it's done, Lawson doesn't seem anywherer near as comfortable as Troupe is with discussing the band. Despite this, he is the one that sets up most of the shows, while Troupe handles the bookkeeping end of things. "I kind of have to force myself to be a different person," he sighs. "I don't really like talking to club owners, and trying to get money-" "He's gotten really good at it," Troupe says, looking at him. "You've gotten really, really good at it." Lawson makes the sort of face one might make if one were told they had become particularly adept at sticking sharp objects in their eye. This is about when James Sewell, the keyboardist (he replaced original member Alex Thibadoux last summer, after Thibadoux heeded the call of the Big Apple) ambles up to the patio. "Introducing James Sewell," Troupe murmurs, as Sewell climbs carefully through the crowded space to a seat. He's a pony-tailed, bespectacled dude whose quiet manner seems to stem more from an abundance of amiability than timidity. Sewell has been playing the current album's songs with the band for the past year (this album has been in the works for a year and a half), although the keys on the album are done by Thibadoux. "With Alex - he was really good at what he did, but he was never trained," Lawson extrapolates. "He didn't want to write his parts, which was sort of nice, because I had all these songs at home, and I could just add melodies, parts, on top of them... but with James, I can't do that." "It's more interesting for me now, too," says Sewell. "At first, I was told exactly what to play. I had three by five cards with cues on them that I still have to use, sometimes, to tip me off with the older songs. But with the newer songs..." These days, ithe band is writing tunes in a more familial, roundabout fashoin, with everyone putting their two cents in. "It's defintely easier for me that way," Sewell says. "It's my own thought that way, my own emotion..." he looks a little embarassed. "Too take it to a deeper level," he adds, gently self-mocking. I'm leaving out a lot here. I am compelled to admit this, and even to admit that I'm doing it in part because I'm lazy. It's hard to transcribe a conversation with so much overlap. During the discussion of Venice's songwriting evolution, for instance, Lawson and Troupe are almost constantly talking - not over each other, and not quite in unison, either. They seem to cover the same thought a half-step ahead or behind or to the side of one another almost all the time. It's reminiscent of the way they sing together - no one drowns anyone out, but the story is always being told twice, generally simultaneously. It's quite endearing, actually. Here is a pair who has been there, done that, put it on the shelf, and poked around for something else to eat. "How about some platonic tortillas and musical inspiration bean dip?" says one. "I am bit peckish," says the other. And Venice is Sinking stays afloat. They have been floating for three years, give or take. The band formed in October of oh-three, when Lawson, Troupe, and Thibadoux started - here Troupe employs the ever-popular "rabbit ear" finger quotations - "jamming," occasionally with Lucas Jensen at the drums. "Reading? Remember that band?" Lawson asks, almost rhetorically. "They eventually asked us to open for them. That was our first show, in December-" "December seventeenth, two thousand and three," Troupe chirps. I glance up from my scribbles. "Good memory." "It was Alex's birthday - or the day after it, something like that. And we played a show exactly one year later. That's why I remember the date." Lawson is still recollecting the intial show. "-and that sort of threw us into shape, but Steve [Miller, the bassist] wasn't in the band yet -afterwards, though, he gave in: 'All right, I'll be in the band.' Before that he kept saying he had to much going on." Everyone in Venice, it seems, could say them same. "I play with anyone who wants me to fill in some viola on something," says Troupe. "I was in four bands, but two of 'em merged into the Stops, this Weezerish rock band," Sewell says. "And then I'm in Funkle Esther." "Oh, and I play in Big Gray, which is Lucas' band," Lawson remarks, as an afterthought. "You play drums for that, don't you?" Sewell asks. "Yeah, drums. So I guess pretty much everyone is in something else." Miller is in high demand as well, doing duty in Ceramic Dvck, Ginger Envelope, and Garbage Island. Is all of this extra-curricular stuff a problem? Everyone chuckles for a moment. "No..." "No, it's cool..." "There have been a few times," Troupe allows, "When, like, Steve calls the day before a show and says, 'I can't do it', and I'm like-" her eyes widen. "'That's not acceptable'-" "But it's fine now," Lawson puts in. "But there's that thing, that wedding I have to play..." she reminds him, "and that same day we have to do a video..." And so it goes. They're a busy bunch. So busy that, in Miller's case, we had to do one of those weird phone interviews. It's relatively painless, with Miller being the epitome of easygoing. With his roosterish mowhawk, lanky frame, and u-fucking-biquitous presence on the Athens music scene, Miller is a striking figure on any stage, and he's been on plenty. His gigs with Venice and Ginger Envelope are strong departures from the music that he seems to know the most about, although he has quite a catalog of knowledge. "There's always heavy metal in my head - I can't turn it off!" This is part of the reason that he's a member of such a dreamy, lush band, he speculates. Not that he doesn't genuinely enjoy the music. "I'd probably buy Venice is Sinking's stuff if I wasn't in the band. I'd at least copy it." "You, uh, advocate burning copies of albums?" Scandal! Miller chuckles and reconsiders his answer. "Okay - I'd pay for it... I like all the extra production on the new record. It's over the top, you know, but I think it came out really well. Now we'll be more open to experiment with things in the studio." Even though this album was over a year in the making, the whole gang seems eager to whip out another one. The sentence "We have a lot of new songs" is uttered more than once, by more than one member. The saga of the current album will wrap up on June twentieth, which is when the album will see a national release through One Per Cent Records, a friend's label whom Troupe calls "perfect" for the band's current needs: "It's low key. There isn't any huge obligation; we didn't sign anything." "Low key" doesn't sound like a band that's trying to shoot the moon. Are there grand master plans for Venice, I wonder? "We were working so hard at getting this record out for so long," Lawson says. "Over a year," says Troupe. "We would go in, every other weekend, occasionally-"  Lucas Jensen lays down drum tracks at Radium Recording. photo by Karolyn Troupe Chris Bishop helped the band produce the album. Perhaps a little more than some would have liked, it seems. "[He] basically hijacked the record temporarily. Did some tweaking on his own, which turned out fine," Troupe says, with a hint of strained charity. "But it kind of has a Phil Spector sound to it, lo-fi but really full-" I had noticed that there is barely an inch of space in any of the songs; all the parts seemingly tracked at the same level, nothing on the edge of audibility. "Is that what you mean," I ask, "That whole 'wall of sound' thing?" "Exactly." says Troupe. "The wall of sound. It's too-" Lawson interrupts quickly. "But a lot of that was kind of my intention and my idea." "Really? I always thought-" "Chris wasn't pushing for overdubs. He was never like that." Lawson looks a little stern on this point. "I know," Troupe demures. "I just always thought that you wanted more dynamics and stuff..." she trails off, then shrugs. "Anyway, through the whole process there was a lot of complaining, and - you know, it was rough." This is a moment that could be uncomfortable - there is an obvoius tension here. Any album whose recording process spans one and a half years, plus a break-up and various quibbles about overdubs and who knows what else cannot have been a day at the beach. But it's not, really, and it's hard to say why. "It's defintely a record that was a point in time for the band," Lawson says softly. "And that's kind of over now. And I do think it's good. But-" "We're past that now." Troupe concludes firmly. "And we have a lot of new songs." The new songs will be loosed on various spots between here and somewhere out in the midwest when Venice is Touring, which will happen in a month or so. Up until now, they have mostly done brief, weekend jaunts to the ATL, or somewhere in the Carolinas. This eleven day jaunt will be something of a test for the young band. "It's going to be a failure," Troupe giggles nervously. Sewell, sitting next to her, shoots her an alarmed look. "At least I expect it..." "It'll be fun," Lawson mumbles, looking hopeful. "...so if I get two dollars, it'll be great." "Oh, I get it," Sewell says, relieved. "You mean a financial failure. I thought you meant we're gonna suck." Venice is Not Sucking. Whether or not you dig the band, you have to admit that the tunes are catchy and the musicianship admirable. While they don't seem as confident as they could be, they are putting themselvels out there a good bit these days. Their drummer, Lucas Jensen, also works for local music promoters Team Clermont. (There are many interesting day jobs in the band. Lawson is a landscape architect; Troupe, a biochemist.) They are making the most of this connection, albeit with some trepidation. "Yeah, we were hesitant at first. Or, I was," Lawson amends himself. "He was never not fine with it. I was just kind of a little... worried... I mean, he's not the only publicist working on it. John Polk, also, is doing a lot of it." Jensen is, as Troupe says, very much in the business. "He knows so much stuff about bands..." "Lucas knows everything." Lawson nods. In a discussion about influences, it is agreed that Jensen, by virtue of his day job, if nothing else, has just about heard it all. "We're all pretty diverse, in terms of what we like," Sewell says. "I listen to a lot of electronica - what would you call it, I don't know - intelligent dance music? Aphex Twin, some ambient stuff..." "I'll listen to anything - stuff off the Top Forty, even, God forbid-" Here I interrupt Troupe and remind her of her old affinity for Jandek. "Oh, Jandek," she says, a mite wistful. "I was really touched by Jandek. But I don't really listen to him anymore, because he will drive me to insanity." Venice is Not Crazy. They have a precision approach to shoegazer pop. Perhaps it's that professional sheen that, in the past, led to recurrent comparisons to the Cranberries. "That was really surprising to me," Troupe says, "and not that it's an insult-" "Lawson shakes his head. "I liked their first album." "-I just hadn't thought of it. Thinking back, maybe we did sound a little like them. But we get compared, now, to any band with dual vocals - Belle and Sebastian, Yo La Tengo-" I ask her about a house show I saw the band play, not too long after their inception, in which they played a Cure cover. "That was a whiskey party that we had at the 666 Pulaski Street house," Troupe recalls. "That was an insane party. We had the equivalent of three kegs of whiskey. It was in January of oh-four, and it had just iced over." House shows do not appear to be on Troupe's to-do list for the band anymore. "I just don't think we're the right band for house shows anymore," she says. "I like house shows," Lawson says, agreeably disagreeing. "It's nice when you're on tour, you know you have a place to crash." "But we're just not that kind of band. Our approach is too soft-" "No covers," says Sewell. "Right. Well, we do have covers, obviously, now..." she says, laughing. Venice is Covering a number of artists at their CD release party at the 40 Watt this Friday. "It's random," says Lawson. "Totally random. The Ramones, Glenn Frey..." Glenn Frey? Troupe laughs. "Glenn Frey," she exclaims, jubilant. "It's gonna be awesome." There will be a set of originals, as well. And there will be another album as soon as they can do it - everyone I talked to was adamant about the itch to get back to the studio, even as they acknowledged the trials of the last time. As for the band's future, things seem vague yet inevitable. "We'll definitely all always have to play," says Lawson, and Sewell and Troupe chorus their uh-huh's and yeahs. "It would be great to call up James when we're old: 'James, come lay down some lick!'" Troupe guffaws, deepening her voice in apparent approximation of agedness. "This band, we're really pushing to put something good out there," Sewell says, and that is the clearest game plan I hear from any of them, but it's a heartfelt one, and you can feel it. These kids are enthused, and if they aren't sure what they are enthused about specifically, no matter. It's a "whatever happens, happens," attitude, but somehow minus the "whatever" vibe. There is tentative optimism, and tentative doubt, and it comes out in the way they talk and the way they sing. It is more believable and more compelling than outright confidence or apathy. No Cranberries covers on Friday, though. At least, they didn't mention it. Earlier tonight (it's Thursday) I walked by Little Kings, where the band played an abbreviated set. The windows were open, and music wafted out, a tenuously sad strain of ahhh-ahhh vocals that sounded, for a moment, like a bit of personal nostalgia, an old lullaby my mother sang, or something. I paused for a moment, trying to place it. The flyer on the door reminded me: listening party. It was a track off their new album. Perhaps deja vu is one of the best descriptions I can come up with for their music. It's a little eerie, but only because it's so familiar. A little sad, but only because it's so sweet. Venice is Worthwhile, I have decided. Give them half a chance and you're apt to agree. Comments [post a comment]Comments are closed |
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Wednesday, February 08, 2012
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