Willy-Nilly Psychobilly. Tiger Army article by Hartford Courant.
Willy-Nilly Psychobilly
Tiger Army's Fractured Battle Cry For The Marginalized:
Today, rock 'n' roll heroes from the 1950s couldn't be more harmless or universally accepted. Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, even Elvis have been reduced to goofy Halloween costumes and grinning life-size cardboard cutouts in party-supply superstores. In their day, though, they were an edgy bunch: marrying cousins, dabbling in booze and amphetamines, struggling to reconcile God's love with the devil's music.
This link between early rock culture and genuine outsider-ness has been kept alive by the proponents of psychobilly, a musical genre of British origin that adds punk-rock danger and horror-flick mischief to the echo and twang of oldies rockabilly.
Tiger Army, opening tonight for punk pioneers Social Distortion at the Webster Theater in Hartford, is a California band that takes psychobilly's twisted sensibilities and turns them inward, writing spooky confessionals that sound like Edgar Allan Poe jamming with the Stray Cats.
Should Tiger Army play its anthem "Nocturnal," the band will demonstrate in two simple lines the maturity and introspectiveness that set it apart from its moon-baying psychobilly peers: "We came from nowhere/ But we're not nothing!"
On the phone from Los Angeles, singer-guitarist Nick 13 explains the story behind his band's battle cry for the marginalized.
"Some of the inspirations for that song were actually biological," the tattooed singer says. "When I was in school, I came across this article in National Geographic about an ecosystem in Eastern Europe in some underground cave with these insects - basically like spiders. These underground caves filled with water and were blocked off from the surface very slowly over a period of thousands of years, and these insects actually evolved to breathe poison gas that would kill their counterparts outside of the ecosystem.
"Basically, it inspired the idea that if you're pushed out of something, in this case mainstream society, you can evolve beyond that and in fact become a different form, maybe even a superior form, from what inhabits society."
In three albums, Tiger Army, like the aforementioned spiders, has evolved, moving increasingly further from typical shock-by-numbers psychobilly sounds. Incorporating elements of hard-core punk and gothic New Wave, the band has as much business sharing a stage with Rancid as it does covering songs by the king of diary-rock, Morrissey, as it did with "The Loop" on a recent EP. It would sound just as natural taking on Depeche Mode or the Cure.
"If you look at the guitar playing of someone like [the Cure's] Robert Smith, that's more of an influence on me than someone who's the shredding soloist," Nick 13 responds when asked why his compositions lack the gymnastic guitar solos many psychobilly bands often focus on in lieu of writing meaningful lyrics.
"My style definitely grew out of punk, and I always appreciated the simplicity and directness of punk," he says. "As I grow older, I still kind of favor a similar approach, but for different reasons. I think the most important thing is the song, and anything that's there playing-wise on guitar, or any other instrument, should be there to serve the song. I think that's definitely something that gets lost by a lot of players."
Indeed, Tiger Army's music, whether characterized by echoing guitars and mercilessly flogged upright bass or the occasional lick of country-noir pedal steel, only strengthens the eerie moods driving each song, never overshadowing their intensity. With titles like "Swift Silent Deadly," and "Rose of the Devil's Garden," couldn't Nick 13 stand to lose a little intensity, though?
"A lot of it is from my life, and a lot of it mixes elements of reality and fantasy," he says of his often dark lyrical content. "The song `Santa Carla Twilight' is a good example of that. In a way, it's inspired by the movie `The Lost Boys,' but that's just kind of a springboard for it. There's also imagery and elements of my own life and experiences in the song."
Judging from the experimentations with tempo and texture on the band's latest album, the stunningly original "III: Ghost Tigers Rise," it would seem Nick 13 might be eager to lead the Army even further into uncharted territories. For the time being, though, he says he'll stay faithful to the genre that's shaped his life.
"I think if the music ever reached the point where it had no link to [psychobilly], I'd want to call [the band] something else. But, you know, psychobilly music is something I've been listening to and playing for a long time, and the thing I love about it is that it's not restrictive. There's so much freedom there to incorporate so many different elements and go so many different ways with it. It's not a confining or constraining thing in the way that something like punk can be."
By KENNETH PARTRIDGE, Special To The Courant
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