Rock ‘n’ roll Louisville descends upon the Witch Room

I remember what it was like to be 20. I didn’t have a clue. Not a fuckin’ clue. State college, you say? An institution of higher learning…yes, yes of course. I suppose I was making strides in the right direction, but for the most part I was a capricious idiot whose only real concern was attending just enough classes to float a 2.0 GPA. As for the songs I was writing at that age? Steaming piles of hot dog shit. I’m mortified beyond belief just thinking about them. So when I look at a band like White Reaper from the rarified air of Louisville, Kentucky, barely out of their teens and writing full-flight rock ‘n’ roll punk for Polyvinyl—I’m not only impressed, but humbled.

Tony Esposito plays guitar and sings. He’s one-third of White Reaper, whose take on punk rock spreads itself across the spectrum of noise pop while evoking distinct moods of the Ramones and Black Lips. The other two-thirds of White Reaper? Nick and Sam Wilkerson, who just happen to be twins.

“I met those two in fifth grade,” reminisces Esposito from his home in Louisville. “We started playing together when we were 13, 14; pretty much ripped off Minor Threat and were super into hardcore punk. I [had] played drums in a Christian church band for a while [laughs]. I definitely upgraded.”

It stands to reason that borderline pre-pubescent boys actively trying to mimic Minor Threat have at least a puncher’s chance in their musical future, and so it went. But to say that Louisville isn’t the first American city to come to mind when considering the rock ‘n’ roll landscape would be a massive understatement. In fact, call me ignorant, but up until two or so months ago when White Reaper appeared in my inbox, I’d never knowingly heard any band from Louisville, let alone one that lent itself to punk.

“In terms of the scene here, it really comes and goes. Before we had started playing shows, there wasn’t a whole lot going on, a drought of sorts,” he tells. “[But] there was never a point in time where we thought we couldn’t do it. No matter what the terrain was like. It’s really all we have; all we’ve ever had. We never really thought of doing anything else.”

Which is to our collective benefit. Because White Reaper’s six-song, self-titled debut has it going on, and then some. With production that’s both tinny and ballsy at the same time, “Cool” should be all a listener needs for an immediate and repetitive hook, as Esposito flits a descending howl into the gratifying simplicity of “She can’t even sleep at night!” Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. And while the up-tempo, two-minute material is what initially leaps out of the speakers at you, a song like “Ohh (Yeah)” is evidence that the group is more than comfortable slipping into the mid, deviating from the more traditional punk panorama. Esposito explains…

“As much as we love punk rock, we’re sick of the word. I mean, that’s all anyone’s ever said to us. ‘Look at these punk kids! Look at these 14-year-old punk kids, man!’ And we’re kind of trying to be a little bit more than a punk band. Because I feel like the word ‘punk’ kind of cheapens the music, in a weird way. Not that I don’t absolutely love it, but I think it’s a lazy word. We just wanna play rock ‘n’ roll. That’s the main goal here. That’s what everyone wants, however we can do it.”

A telling amount of youthful optimism steps forth in the way Esposito makes such a statement, and at the risk of sounding nostalgic, I’ll say it’s refreshing. Because there’s a certain attitude that comes with musicians at such an age that simply can’t be replicated 10 years down the line.

Words like “naiveté” and “innocence” are off-point because they’re backhanded and smack of jadedness. It makes more sense to plainly recognize that White Reaper’s forthcoming national tour will be their first trek to the West Coast. Hell, Esposito has never personally traveled west of Texas. And at the age of 20, with Polyvinyl backing your kick-ass, yet-to-be-released EP, why wouldn’t you be excited for this first official stint on the road?

“The rush you get waking up on a different floor or a different couch in some dude’s house somewhere,” says Esposito with a mark of whimsy, “trying to find something to eat that’s not gonna kill you; trying to stay clean. A lot of people will say they’re afraid to tour because it’s not as glamorous as it may seem, but honestly it’s the coolest fucking thing there is, in my opinion. I’m really excited to see Denver. I’m excited to see California. I’m expecting to love it.”

None of this is to say, however, that White Reaper isn’t already a seasoned live band. The material on the EP was written well over a year ago, they practice every day, and have been playing in and around their home turf with frequency since inception. Which led me to the curiosity of what hot spots might be slipping under the radar of a West Coast mind; a good portion of, if not all of the South is often skipped on your average national tour. There are of course exceptions: Athens, Georgia; Asheville, North Carolina; Nashville; Atlanta, etc. But for the most part the South will not make up the meat and potatoes of most circuits, to which Esposito can attest.

“It’s a very weird part of the country,” he begins in a head-scratching tone. “Louisville’s fucking weird, man; Lexington—I think it’s the second biggest city in Kentucky—is also fucking weird. There’s not really a certain demographic. There’s a lot of small groups of people that are into a bunch of different shit. [But] speaking of Athens, Georgia—Athens, Ohio. We played a couple shows there, and they go fucking nuts during Halloween. There’s like five graveyards in that city that are fabled to make a pentagram shape.”

Perhaps as much as anything, White Reaper’s coming trek will benefit the trio by giving them a chance to break out of their daily routine. Having made music the A-number-1 priority in life, there seemingly isn’t a whole lot more Louisville has to offer them at this very moment. But you can bet touring the country with Young Widows under the guise of a hip label is going to offer them that much-needed change of pace and exposure.

“Oh man, I hope that we see significant changes,” says Esposito. “Not that we have super shitty lives right now—we’re just bored all the time. We don’t go to school, we don’t have jobs, we don’t do shit. We just get together every day and play music real quick. My mom teaches piano to little kids, so we gotta get in here around noon and then we just go through the set as many times as we can, as fast as we can. It’s so funny—there’s such a small window of time to practice, but then we have all this free time on our hands.”

I have a feeling, though, that things are indeed going to change for White Reaper. A band this good, this young, and motivated enough to make it via Louisville? They’re bound to make a push. So come to the show. Say you saw them the first time they came to California. I’ll be there. And I for one am glad that Sacramento is in on the ground floor.

See White Reaper live in Sacramento when they play Witch Room with Young Widows on June 26, 2014. The 18-and-over show is $10. For more info and for a full list of dates at Witch Room, go to Witchroomsac.com.

For a wide swath of the country’s electronic music lovers, Portland’s Starfucker is a bit of an anomaly. Consider first the group’s somewhat reluctant allegiance to its own name. The edginess of the Starfucker moniker had in fact started as a sort of rough experiment by primary songwriter Josh Hodges to see how far, if at all, such an abrasive handle could go. Before they could find out, the band made a publicized switch to the name Pyramid, which was soon after morphed to Pyramiddd.

Undeterred in the crossover was the project’s loyalty to deep house beats, swelling synths and clunky pop guitar lines, helmed by Hodges’ battery mates Keil Corcoran (percussion, drum machine), Patrick Morris (guitar) and Shawn Glassford (bass). For all those club-ready beats, however, appeared Hodges’ decidedly macabre fascinations with death, dreams and all things dark, providing a brooding insight to a gifted and perhaps troubled sort of modern songwriter.

The band returned to its original name of Starfucker in 2010–though they augment it arbitrarily to STRFKR depending on the phases of Jupiter’s moons (kidding)–no worse for the wear, and have finally put all that goddamn name rigmarole behind them.

Reptilians, released in 2011 on the Chicago indie label Polyvinyl, is Starfucker’s most ambitious album to date. Reptilians continued Hodges’ sweeping new wave melodramas with auditory bits of pop-rock panache, typically morbid lyrical swipes and snippets of lectures by famed British philosopher Alan Watts. The album was the first for the project that included a more collaborative approach between all of the band members, though to pinpoint at which intervals would have been difficult given Hodges’ somewhat ironclad creative grip.

A year-and-a-half removed from Reptilians, Starfucker is hitting the road again for a fall tour at the tail-end of engineering their second release for Polyvinyl–an as-yet-untitled, 15-track LP that Hodges explains is similarly dark, similarly upbeat and plain old similar to his band’s prior output. It’s a good thing, then, that said previous output is so unfairly catchy. To boot, Hodges tells Submerge that Starfucker’s new album–to be released in February 2013–is the band’s most collaborative effort to date.

Reptilians dealt with a lot of darker kind of imagery, but retained an upbeat, dance-y ambiance throughout. As a songwriter creating through a pop prism, how do you reconcile that dichotomy?
I think they go together well. Every one of our albums has been like that, but this new one is probably even darker. I just like to write about what I think about, which is death and change. The way our society is, and the way we all think about living is silly considering how people often say, “Oh I would have changed things if I’d known I was gonna die, and not cared about so much bullshit.” We all know [we’re going to die]. In one way or another that’s what the lyrics are always about. I mean, it’s still fun to dance. When I started Starfucker, I was bored of going to shows. The way that it’s interesting is if you can dance–even if you’re into the music–you can still have a good time. Or if you don’t dance, and end up at a dance-y show with your friends, the music is still songs you can listen to that are saying something and not just techno music. The songs are definitely focused on making music that’s fun to play live. I think they go together well, to talk about potentially dark things and then have music be lighter or hopeful. I’ve always liked that and like when other artists do that.

Did you grow up listening to electronic pop bands that had that more cerebral, thematic motif?
I didn’t really. I didn’t like electronic music when I was growing up. I just got some keyboards and thought, “Oh this is actually really cool.” I think I always liked darker music. I think with Starfucker, a big part of it is listening to it at home and reading the lyrics, but then a lot of it is emphasis on the live show, and on living right now and getting a break from the boring stresses in life. It’s nice to go to a show and forget things for a minute, especially if dancing is your thing.

Have you had conversations with fans of the band, where they were into that same contrast? Like maybe they weren’t exactly privy to the darker lyrics, but more reeled in by the dance-y music?
Yeah, definitely. That’s one of my favorite things about having this project is talking with people who come out. I always hang out after shows and talk to people at the merch table or write to them on Facebook. I’ve met some really cool people and have had some really cool conversations with people about that. Also, just the little bits of Alan Watts on the album that’s started some really good conversations with people. I’ve had fans come up and say they’d never heard of him, and then they started getting into him. It’s cool to expose someone to something new like that. And it’s cool to have cool conversations with people about it [laughs].

I would imagine on tour, any time the conversation errs outside of “how’s the tour going?” must be refreshing.
Yeah, totally. It’s super refreshing.

What new fascinations or themes have you been focused on since Reptilians’ release that you may explore on your next album?
It’s a lot of the same stuff, just a different take on it. It’s a bit darker, but still really playful. There’s a lot of dream references in it, too. I had dreams where I was dying and laying on my death bed that seemed real. Patrick has really crazy dreams, too. I guess death and dreaming…

Is it a scenario where those themes are driving the direction of the music in any way?
Yeah, maybe. It’s still upbeat; it’s still happy. But there’s just a little darker stuff on this one than the other albums. It’s longer than the other albums, too. There’s more diversity. More than half of the album has more organic instruments on it, and not as much synth.

I wondered if you’d explore that more. On Reptilians, songs like “Born,” “Astoria” and the title track had a starker, avant-rock kind of sound. Is that a direction you can see Starfucker going toward more as a project in the future?
Yeah, I mean the first half of the new album I wrote a lot of the songs on guitar, so it has that kind of vibe. We’re adding stuff to it now. And I wanted to make part of the album have this super happy feel–we were calling it The Drunk Album for a while. It has a lot of really weird bendy guitars and stuff.

So there’s no reticence on your part to stray too far musically from the project’s primary roots in dance and pop?
Well, I still wanna keep it with the same basic idea, which is a happy, positive vibe. I wouldn’t wanna go too far away. I am a little bit hesitant. I think all of the songs on here are either dark and dance-y, or fun, but maybe not as dance-y. They all still have that playful vibe that I think is important.

For the last album, you allowed additional help from the rest of the band members to round things out musically on record. Are you taking that approach on this new record?
Yeah. This is definitely the most collaborative album we’ve ever done, and it’s been really fun. There are even two songs on the album–one Keil started and one that Patrick started. It’s really awesome. It’s still mostly songs that I wrote and then we fleshed out together, but even Shawn helped me finish words. It’s actually what I always wanted this to be: more of a band, and not just my project.

Are you finding that liberating, to allow this thing that was once mostly yours to become collaborative?
Yeah, it’s like being a parent. It’s nice to have more than one parent to raise the kids [laughs]. It’s nice that we’re all working together; I like that communal feel. We feel like family.

Can that more organic approach for the new album you were talking about before be attributed to that collaboration?
No, I have to fight for that. Keil hates anything not electronic. But I’m still going to do what I want if I have a song I really like. But we pretty much agree on everything at this point. The less electronic stuff, Keil just doesn’t get. He knows it though, and is like, “Well if you guys all like it…” It’s still pretty democratic. If someone really likes a song and fights for it, I’ll give in.

Get your gloomy dance on at Harlow’s Oct. 17, 2012 when Starfucker makes a stop in Sacramento. The show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are just $15. Go to http://harlows.com/ for more info or to purchase tickets.