Last week, Nic and I watched Oranssi Pazuzu play the Bluebird Theatre. As always, I also watched the crowd.
Oranssi Pazuzu play a nasty, noisy form of experimental black metal. They basically do late-era Swans by way of Ulver, in that its members play hardware synths as often as stringed instruments. And, holy hell, do they kick up a racket. Nic said it was the loudest concert he had seen.
In front of us, a 30-something man in the modern generic metalhead outfit – black t-shirt, jeans, shoulder-length hair, beard – rocked the devil horns and headbanged as Pazuzu closed their set with a dirge of cascading sheets of rhythmless, atonal, industrial noise. Standing next to him, the woman I assume was his girlfriend or wife – who, I should point out, was not wearing the modern generic metalhead outfit (or its more revealing goth equivalent, which you see on many of the fairer sex at metal shows) – watched with crossed arms. After the stage lights popped on, she tapped him on the shoulder, and they left the concert before the band played their encore.
I felt for her. Why did homie even invite her to this shit? Pazuzu aren’t Guns ‘N’ Roses. They’re pretty far off the beaten path. They don’t write songs so much as soundscapes, they don’t groove so much as they pummel, and they don’t sing so much as their throats make noises..
Have you ever shown an extreme horror film (something like Martyrs or Man Bites Dog) to a normal person? They don’t see it as an aesthetic adventure so much as a punishment for knowing you. I felt for the girl, and wouldn’t be surprised if, on the drive back home, she asked him, “Why did you do that to me?”
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During our last go-’round with Part Time Ghost, Nic and I began assessing our audience. The people who seemed to be into the music were dudes who looked at our hands as we played.
You can do okay with that type of band. Hell, half the bands I know play almost exclusively to dudes who look at their hands. But it is a limited audience, for it’s only an audience of other musicians. Besides, it can be tough to get all your musician friends out to your gigs when they have gigs and practices of their own. I know I don’t get out to see their jazz fusion, tech metal, or math rock bands as much as they would like.
“What if we got a lead singer?” Nic said, when discussing the formation of the band that would become Heck Reckoners.
Now, at the time, I thought, “I write the lyrics. I play the guitar. I should sing the songs.” But I tamped down my ego enough to realize that of those three things, it’s the one that I’m the worst at, and the one I like doing the least. “Yeah,” I said to him, “There’s an idea.”
Besides, it gave us an opportunity. Maybe our next band didn’t have to be so dude-centric. Maybe we could reach out to a larger audience that wasn’t interested in what our hands were doing or what pedals we had on our pedalboards. Maybe we could reach out to audiences who listened to music instead of just analyzing it. Maybe – gasp! – we could try to appeal to…uh…women.
So we prioritized finding a femme lead singer.
I’m very satisfied with the music we made, the shows we played, and the new audiences we appealed to with Heck Reckoners.
Going forward, I’m always going to consider now just how our music relates not just to our hand-watching bros, but the entire prospective audience writ large. That’s not to say that we’re never going to bro-down (I think the industrial stuff I’m working on with Brent is pretty much boys only), but we’re always going to be aware of the potential audience.
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Today’s record is Queens of the Stone Age’s best album, their third, 2002’s Songs for the Deaf.
As far as I’m concerned, Queens of the Stone Age are this generation’s (or maybe last generation’s) Led Zeppelin, in that they’re beloved by hard rock bros and their girlfriends alike.
Josh Homme, Queen’s red-headed, hulking, combative, gear-philic majordomo is no one’s idea of a feminine ideal, but he does a lot to undercut his offputting machismo.
Like Robert Plant before him, Homme realized that if you want to bring typical girls (AKA, not the gothic leather girls getting down to Oranssi Pazuzu) to your shows, you can’t scream in their ears the entire time. So although he has a commanding punk rock bark, he only employs it on special occasions, preferring instead a slithery croon, or, most winningly, a silky falsetto.
He’s also not afraid to make fuck noises. Homme’s moans and groans are all over Queen’s discography, from the background “ahhs” of “The Sky is Fallin’” to the “oooh woo ooohoooooh” hook on “Go with the Flow.” Unlike most hard rockers, he’s not afraid of vocalizing like a soul singer.
Homme’s voice tempers his band’s distorted guitars, pounding drums, and the occasional dumb idea (the fake radio interstitials are the stoner joke on Songs for the Deaf, but you get them on all of his releases). It repackages all the band’s “dude shit,” making it more palatable for people who wouldn’t otherwise listen to a band whose contemporaries include Monster Magnet, Clutch, Fu Manchu, and Neurosis.
Homme knew intrinsically that he wanted his band to appeal to women as much as men, saying that the reason he didn’t name the band Kings of the Stone Age: “Rock should be heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls. That way everyone’s happy and it’s more of a party. Kings of the Stone Age is too lopsided.”
Besides, if you get the girls out to your shows, the guys will want to come too, because that’s where the girls are.
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