Column 143: Bemis Calling
The arts organization welcomes Coyote Bones’ David Matysiak.

The last time we spoke to Coyote Bones’ David Matysiak (here) he was yacking about how he managed to get his pals from the Saddle Creek Records stable to help record his band’s debut, Gentleman on the Rocks. Now four months later, Matysiak is moving his studio out of one basement into another — this one located beneath the hip, prestigious Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

A walking, talking ball of red-bearded energy, Matysiak begins a residency with the Bemis’ music program Oct. 1, joining the ranks of former resident musicians Tilly and the Wall, Simon Joyner and Orenda Fink. He says it’s a chance to grow creatively, while musically retooling an idea borne out of the playground. At the same time, he’ll be working on a separate project that will outlive his three-month residency.

But first, the music residency itself: I’ve been reading about it for years, but never really understood the point. Aren’t residencies designed to give starving artists a place to live — a creative domicile — while they craft artwork which may or may not be commercially viable? That’s not the case with Bemis’ music program. Tilly, Joyner, Fink and Matysiak already have a place to lay their heads in River City.

Matysiak explained it all while pushing a candy-apple green Schwinn 10-speed through the entrance of Bemis Underground — the program’s basement headquarters.

“This is a place of creation,” he said, still sweating after riding from his apartment on 40th and Harney. “Unlike an apartment or house, I can come here at four in the morning and freak out and go ripping down the hallway. When you’re wandering around at 2 a.m., you run into other artists who can’t sleep. We share ideas; we’re all in this together.”

No, living quarters aren’t provided, but the residency offers more than just a practice space. It’s a place where musicians can try ideas that are off rock ‘n’ roll’s beaten path. Their projects — all reviewed and approved by a committee — are more like research projects, with little commercial appeal. Fink, Matysiak said, worked with found sounds recorded in Haiti. Joyner collaborated with avant-garde cellist-composer Fred Lonberg-Holm. And Matysiak has his “telephone project.”

Remember that playground game where you whisper a message into your playmate’s ear, who then told another, who told another, who told another, who then told you? The returning message never resembled the original. “I’ll be trying that with music on a worldwide basis,” Matysiak said. “I’ll send a recording to someone in Japan who will do his thing, than pass it onto someone in Australia and then South America and so on until it gets back to me. The idea is to see what can happen when you collaborate with people who can’t communicate without music.”

Matysiak already has set up equipment in Bemis’ “Studio B,” a messy white-walled artist space dedicated to the music program. It’s a windowless room where bits of creative residue hang from the walls or lie stacked on the floor, including a half-finished mural painted by the Tilly kids, still waiting for someone to fill in the lines.

Bemis’ music residency isn’t a “formal program,” said Residency Program Director Cary Tobin. “It all started when Tilly and the Wall was in need of a space and we happened to have a space in the Underground available,” Tobin said. “We invited them to use the space and it seemed to balance well with the other programs we have happening here.”

Tilly’s used their residency to develop demos used for their Bottoms of Barrels album, a project with obvious commercial potential, but the Bemis isn’t interested in making money off record sales. “The BCCA is not entitled to any revenue generated by any material that is produced in the studio. We receive no money from Tilly and the Wall or Simon Joyner on any of the sales of the record or material produced,” Tobin said.

Musicians have given back to the program through benefit concerts. Matysiak will give back in a different way. Across from Studio B, in what was once a large storage closet, Matysiak is building a permanent recording studio for the Bemis program using his and his friends’ equipment. “In the mean time, I’m asking the music community to donate equipment — instruments, microphones, guitars and trumpets, functional stuff that someone could actually use that you’d feel good about donating,” he said. “If someone has a nice vintage amp in their basement that’s collecting dust, why not donate it to help start this program?”

Residents will be able to use the studio to record their projects. Matysiak said it could also become like Daytrotter — the Rock Island, Ill. studio where touring indie bands such as The Rentals, Dave Dondero, Low and David Bazan, can drop in for two-hour sessions that become available for free download from daytrotter.com. Right now, though, it’s just an empty room with a stack of egg cartons lying on the ground, waiting to be nailed to the walls.

“This will be more of a low-fi atmosphere,” Matysiak said. “If nothing else, it’s a place to write music and a place for collaboration. There are so many things you can do. That’s why I like the Bemis. They’re open-minded. They’re always looking for new ideas and trying to find a way to make them work.”

Rustic Charm
Review: Two Gallants, Two Gallants (Saddle Creek)

If there’s a knock on Two Gallants, it’s that all their music sounds the same.

It’s an easy, lazy statement to make. It’s also easy to prove. Take someone who’s never heard the band before and play a typical track from The Throes, their 2004 debut on Alive Records. Follow that with a song from Where the Toll Tells, their 2006 Saddle Creek Records debut, and one from this, their new eponymously titled follow-up. Now ask your test subject how the three vary musically and lyrically. First, they’ll assume they all came from the same album; next they’ll ask (eagerly) if all their songs sound like this. The answer, of course, is yes.

Like I said, it’s an easy knock, and it’s not fair, really. Two Gallants, the San Francisco duo of singer/guitarist Adam Stephens and drummer Tyson Vogel, have crafted a unique sound that feels like a cross between ’60s blues-rock, “The House of the Rising Sun” and modern-day pirate songs. Stephens’ craggy voice and rolling, picking’ electric guitar bend the music over Vogel’s bright, almost militaristic syncopated marching-band percussion. The result is a slice of turn-of-the-(20th)-Century Americana merged with Delta blues and indie rock.

At the center of it all is Stephens’ travelin’ I-miss-my-woman lyrics that sound just as comfortable sung on the Slowdown stage as on the deck of a storm-battered clipper or behind the reigns of a covered wagon. A typical verse from opener “The Deader” sums it up nicely:

Oh now the raging sea she laps upon my door
I’ll round a thousand horns just to drown upon her shore
Blood red roses go down Moses oh billowing sails
Those so weak-willed guts all sea-filled throw them o’er the rails

Aye, matey! Their style hasn’t budged from day one, but that said, of the three albums, this is the one to own. Gone are the 8- and 9-minute ballads heard on early releases that seemed to go on forever. None of these nine tracks reach the 6-minute mark. That effort to economize, and the shift from rousing ballads to dark, ominous death tales, like “Fly Low Carrion Crow,” make this the most varied and sonically broad record of their career. Within one song, the closer “My Baby’s Gone,” the music travels from deep, underwater, slow motion to emerge with a strut on dry land, Stephens testifying, “I go where cold winds don’t blow / I go where nobody goes,” before pulling back down to elegy pace for a repeated, pained whisper of “My baby’s gone,” that turns into an inspiring battle cry.

So maybe they have been singing the same song for years. I guess that would be a problem if that song weren’t so damn good.

Rating: Yes

Beautiful Loser
Review: The Good Life, Help Wanted Nights (Saddle Creek)

Forget the fact that this is supposed to be the soundtrack to a film penned by singer/songwriter renaissance frontman Tim Kasher. You and I haven’t seen the movie, which may or may not ever get made.

The fact is, all of The Good Life’s music is theatrical at its very core. Their last record, 2004’s Album of the Year, could have been used in a moody, off-off-Broadway musical, each song telling a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl story of love and betrayal, all with a single broken heart. In Kasher’s world, the loser protagonist always is well-written and clearly defined. It’s the antagonist (presumably a composite of every woman who Kasher ever slept with) that could use a little more character development. They can’t all be heartless bitches, can they Tim? Maybe they can.

Help Wanted Nights tells that same lonely story all over again, but simpler, easier and with more clarity. Our hero once again is the slouching, insecure, slightly damaged loser we’ve all come to love — the antithesis of every horny fuck-and-run cocksman you remember from your favorite ’80s hair-band.

Kasher’s men are rarely in control in any relationship, having either just been dumped or are about to be, but never destined for happiness except for that short-lived moment of a one-night stand that precedes a cold-light-of-day reality that it won’t be anything more than that. In Kasher’s world, it’s the women who are the cocksman, always in a hurry to leave that familiar so-so gigolo the next morning.

Take the soft-shoe opener, where Kasher pines, “Either you love me or you leave me but don’t you leave me on this picket fence,” or the bouncy, bass-driven “Heartbroke,” where our hero suffers Joe Jackson-inspired frustration when he realizes his ex is already getting some. “I see you’ve found a way to pass the time,” he says. Her reply: “I like him, he’s a lot like you.” Ouch.

Musically, Kasher and Co. take the simpler-is-better route, stripping songs to the very basics of melody, counter-melody and rhythm (with a guitar solo thrown in for good measure). Each shortish tune ends simply, concisely, without any over-the-top flourishes. Good thing, too, because too much drama would have pushed these lyrics into rather maudlin territory.

Taken as a whole, the CD is the least cluttered of anything Kasher has ever recorded, either with this band or Cursive, revealing a level of song craft that all-too-often can get lost in the din. Its very simplicity is a lesson that his pal and label mate Conor Oberst could benefit from.

In some ways, the collection is a throwback to simpler, better times, when songs were three minutes or less and recorded to be heard on your FM radio instead of a computer. All of them, that is, except for the 10-minute-plus closer, where Kasher asks yet another potential lover, “What are you really after? / What are you hoping to gain?” Chances are, it’s not you, pal, or your droning feedback that buzzes for three minutes after the last organ tones fade, presumably to allow for all the end credits to scroll across the screen.

Help Wanted Nights is a thinking man’s (and woman’s) pop album, a collection of tragic love stories where the hero doesn’t get the girl because, well, he’s just no damn good, and in Tim Kasher’s world, there are no happy endings. But I could be wrong. After all, I haven’t seen the movie.

Rating: Yes

Column 142: For Against Again
The seminal Lincoln band is reborn.

There’s a lot of For Against information to get to, but I don’t want to bury the most important piece of data, which is that the seminal Lincoln band will be playing at The Waiting Room this Saturday night — their first Omaha performance in over a decade.

It dawned on me while as I was driving to Lincoln Sunday afternoon to interview the two core members of the band — singer and chief songwriter Jeff Runnings and guitarist/keyboardist Harry Dingman III — that most people who read this column may not be familiar with For Against. After all, their (first) heyday was back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And even then, For Against didn’t exactly fit into a Lincoln scene that included bands like Mercy Rule and Sideshow.

“I don’t think For Against in the ’80s felt like a part of the Lincoln scene at all,” Dingman said. “We played benefit shows and shows with other bands, but we did our own thing and had our own audience, and they had their audiences.”

The separation makes sense considering that while SST-style punk was all the rage in Omaha and Lincoln, For Against was making 4AD/Factory Records-style Euro-pop that bordered on today’s version of electronic dance music. Their sound was directly influenced by ’80s and ’90s-era European post-punk from bands like Durutti Column, Joy Division, Gang of Four and Kitchens of Distinction. The trio, which included drummer Gregory Hill, combined droning, chiming guitars, buzzing synths, and machine-precise percussion with Runnings’ hollow, ghostly voice. The result was both bleak and intensely danceable, and can be heard echoed in modern bands like Interpol, Editors and The Faint (who, if they ever get their new album recorded, would be wise to bring them along on tour).

A brief history: The trio began performing in Lincoln in 1985. After self-releasing a 7-inch, the band signed with Independent Projects Records (IPR) and released its debut full-length, Echelons, in 1987. They went on a brief US tour, then recorded their follow-up, December, in 1988, and afterward, unceremoniously broke up, just as things were getting interesting.

“Capitol was interested in the band,” Dingman said. “I started thinking that maybe something could happen. I wasn’t planning on leaving. Greg had already left, and I wasn’t sure of my role in the band, and really… I don’t know.” He paused for a moment. “It’s hard to say why people do what they do. That was almost 20 years ago.”

Dingman went on to join The Millions with Hill before he and his wife eventually moved to Ft. Collins, Colorado. Runnings continued For Against with new personnel, releasing four more records before the project petered out in 2002.

Then in 2003, Dingman and his wife returned to Lincoln. “I called Jeff a couple of times and he didn’t return my calls. We hadn’t said more than ‘Hi’ to each other in 16 years.”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it again,” Runnings said.

“And Jeff probably felt burned,” Dingman added.

Runnings nodded his head. “We were young, back then,” he said, reflecting on the break-up. “Harry and I had ideas and I was being very headstrong. So was Greg.” Eventually, Dingman found himself in Runnings’ living room, and the two decided that For Against should live again.

“I think we both realized we had grown up,” Runnings said.

But a funny thing happened in their absence. For Against had quietly become big… in Europe. “We have this song called ‘Amen Yves’ that only came out on vinyl, but that DJs throughout Europe have been playing for years,” Dingman said. “We thought the Internet was fueling the resurgence in our popularity, but it was actually coming from the dance clubs.”

Since reforming, both Echelons and December have been reissued by Minneapolis-based indie label Words on Music, who also just rereleased In the Marshes, a recording originally released as a 10-inch by IPR in 1990 that includes that dance hit, “Amen Yves.” And, early next year, Words on Music will release Shade Side, Sunny Side, For Against’s 7th studio album, and the first one to feature Dingman since December.

Until then, the band will continue touring. They’ve already toured Greece last spring, and are headed to Spain for the Tanned Tin Festival in Castelló this November, thanks in part to Spanish label Acuarela Discos, who will be releasing a new For Against EP next year. A full European tour is slated for early ’08. “Europe is simply where our fan base is,” Runnings said. “We’ve had offers to play in Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, Athens and all points in between.”

The U.S., it seems, will have to wait. Fortunately, both have lives that bend easily to tour schedules. Runnings works at Lincoln’s Homer’s, while Dingman stays home with his 18-month-old daughter and teaches guitar. At 45 and 43 respectively, Runnings and Dingman aren’t letting their age slow them down.

“I don’t see being older as being an issue,” Runnings said. “You look at a lot of groups our age right now, and they don’t seem to be getting shit heaped on them. Bands like REM and Guided by Voices, even though they’re older, they’re still relevant. That’s all that matters.”