Deleted Scenes
The Studio @ Wesbter Hall, 4.18.09
While preparing to write about Deleted Scene’s excellent performance at The Studio at Webster Hall on Saturday, I came across a press release with the band’s own guide to how to write about Deleted Scenes:
It’s Easy To Write About Deleted Scenes
1. A DIY bootstraps story. Band (Deleted Scenes) from a town (Washington, DC) that made DIY into a religion begins booking its own national tours, and sets off in a shitty van to play one sparsely attended show at a time. Months after releasing their debut album to little fanfare and no press campaign, a lucky Pitchfork review (“brave and ferocious,” 8.0) suddenly makes people listen. Band does it the hard way, develops as a live force over three years, and is said to deserve every kind word. Yards of local column inches tell the story of a band “doing it right,” in the words of Washington Post music editor David Malitz.
2. An experimental pop odyssey. Band draws from disparate sources (Radiohead’s restlessness, Dischord’s angst, Morrissey’s sadness, Modest Mouse’s not-mere cleverness) to produce something heart-crushingly fun. Preparing to record its first CD (Birdseed Shirt), band discovers an obscure album of monster songs (The Rude Staircase’s Sookie Jump) and is compelled to hunt down its mysterious creator-the ingenious, first-nameless L. Skell-to recruit him as producer. After recording basic tracks with DC icon J. Robbins, the band holes up for nine painstaking months in a bedroom studio with the socially abhorrent Skell, hacking and screwing together this beast-a thing made less of chords and rhythms than of hair, wire, and skin. They release it on Skell’s own tiny What Delicate Recordings label-a record company run more like an art gallery, with Skell and Andrew Becker (Dischord Records) as its curators.
3. An existential coming of age. A former creative writing student quits fiction, and starts singing what he knows-spiritual despair, hope, disgust, and manic-depression. He goes on to create a confessional coming-of-age work that defies easy summary. Suffused with sadness, humor, self-loathing and post-post-modern self-dismissal, his lyrics are notable for contradictions that transcend simple irony. Lines like “I don’t mind you lying to me / If you think you’re right, you must be” (“Fake IDs”) and “you can fake whatever it takes” (“Get Your Shit Together For The Holidays”) offer problematic solutions-the only kind he can begin to accept. Other songs explore moral hypocrisy, romantic disappointment, and loss of faith with statements that double over on themselves: “If the water should rise, I’m going on a vacation” (“Mortal Sin”); “If you were counting on ideals or a dream / Stay awake, she will steal them in your sleep” (“One Long Country Song”); “Got God, got boring/ Lost God, stayed boring, got drunk” (“Got God”).
4. A band of bros. Four high-school friends put funk-rock on hold, part ways for college and/or shitty jobs, and reconvene, a few years older and more adventurous, to start Deleted Scenes. The musical rapport they developed as kids comes back as naturally as if it had never left, and the band is a unit. It plays like one, garnering one fawning live review after another. Songwriting pair Dan Scheuerman (guitar/vocals) and Matt Dowling (bass/keys/vibes/flexotone) explores a tendentious partnership-Dowling a dynamic rhythmic thinker and Scheuerman a quirky melodic one-and develop into a symbiotic unit, contributing equally to each song. Thoughtful and powerful drumming by Brian Hospital, and polyrhythm-heavy guitar playing by Chris Scheffey complete the Deleted Scenes sound.
From the looks of the crowd at The Studio, it’s surprising that this is a band recently praised by Pitchfork. Usually that sort of indie cred will pack a room, but the crowd was mainly there for The Life & Times. Kansas City natives, The Life & Times put on a really solid performance, but it was Deleted Scenes who stole the show. Their blend of indie pop rock sounded fresh, with enough variety in the songs to make each song memorable.
It’s surprising that their name isn’t already all over the place, but in due time it will happen.
They’ll be back in town on May 18, for a show at Pianos.