While some bands sit on their asses
and eat fried chicken and biscuits and gravy when they should be studioing,
Louisville’s
outstanding in your face rock quintet, Speed To Roam, have released their
new CD. It kicks it in like a booted foot on a dually accelerator. I
don’t know how these determined gents got such a quaking sound
at a rural home studio but they’ve managed, oh ho, they’ve
managed.
Being a younger sibling can’t be very easy, even more so within a group of driven brothers. And when one brother is a bona fide success story, it can be downright hard. Just ask Ramon Estevez. Luckily, this doesn’t seem to be the case for the Oldham brothers, a virtual Kennedy brotherhood in underground rock and ”anti-folk”. Brother Will first held the torch aloft after entrenching himself in the burgeoning Louisville indie scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Recording under various takes on the Palace theme and later as Bonnie Prince Billy, Will made a name and a career for himself in music, even snapping the grainy cover shot on Slint’s immortal 1991 Spiderland LP. Ned, meanwhile, fronts Anomoanon, a project that brought all the brothers to Charlottesville in June, though that sort of reunion isn’t par for the course. Which leaves us with brother Paul. Hiding out in Kentucky, Paul Oldham runs Rove Studio, where he often records the music of his brothers and has, in the past, worked extensively with the noise savants of Royal Trux (formed from the ashes of Pussy Galore upon Jon Spencer’s departure). But that’s not all this unassuming brother does. Paul gets his rocks off in his own band, Louisville-based Speed To Roam. Though the band has a self-titled full-length album out on Baltimore’s Monitor Records, the same label—in cahoots with Palace Records—used by Will and Ned’s projects, Paul’s Speed To Roam is a departure from the work of his brothers. The band kicks out an intelligent brand of rock,
leaving one critic gushing Speed To Roam “rocks well, hard and long into the night
even as it keeps one hand firmly down poetry’s pants.” Which
is why it’s more than a little confusing when the band is labeled “doom/stoner
metal” as on MP3.com. If anything, Speed To Roam does draw on the
big-bottom-blues-base of the so-called “stoner rock” movement,
but thrown into the mix is a lot more of the Royal Trux noise-rock influence
with a smattering of low-fi Sebadoh. In a lot of ways, this works to
give the band a distinct sound rather than playing simple homage to Black
Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, a tactic employed by countless bands at the
moment. For clarity’s sake, if a comparison needs to be drawn,
think early Butthole Surfers or the less menacing parts of Clutch’s
self-titled 1995 album.
Speed To Roam travels comfortably on both sides of the tracks. One night, you may find the Louisville band sharing a stage with indie-rock cognoscente such as The Dirty Three, playing for a few hundred people. Wait a few nights, however, and the band will turn up in a murky Germantown basement in front of a dozen drunks, kicking glorious jams so hard that singer George Wethington busts an overhead light with his skull. And that’s only because bandmates Jason Hayden, Pete Townsend or Paul Oldham didn’t do it first. The only constancy in the two scenarios in Speed To Roam, which does
what it does and lets everyone else decide what that might be. Mostly,
that would be extremely heavy rock, verging on metal, with enough humor
and self-awareness to establish a mildly ironic distance. “I think we have an over-blown Southern gothic side to us,” he decides. “Between my accent and other stuff, there’s just something Southern about it—refined Southern punk. We definitely have some obvious metal overtones.” One thing is for sure: Speed To Roam has been a model of efficiency, despite that it has been together three years and never officially released a recording, or that it has played only around ten shows a year. But they’ve been extraordinarily high-profile shows, opening in Louisville and on the road for luminaries such as Sebadoh and the aforementioned Dirty Three. “Certain types of musicians really seem to be into us, and they’re bands so far beyond our level.” Wethington said. “I mean, we’re not known in Louisville, much less Chicago. “Louisville still has a reputation among musicians. A lot of times
I get cut slack for my abilities because I’m from Louisville. I
swear we’ll be out with a really good band and they’ll be
intimidated by the way Jason changes his strings or something. It’s
weird.” Hayden had been in several of Louisville’s more notorious bands, including long stints in Crain and The Web, while Townsend was in The Quiz? (and is by far the cutest drummer in rock). Oldham’s reputation is threefold—as a musician who has often worked with his brother, Will; as a sound engineer for Royal Trux; and as a producer and recording engineer at his own studio. Wethington is the wild card; he’s an intellectual roughneck from Lebanon Junction, 30 miles south of Louisville, with a couple of other bands on his resume. Speed To Roam began in 1997 when Townsend and Oldham got hot to start a band. They began working with Wethington, whom they knew casually as a writer and poet, and the trio worked up a few songs with Wethington reading over the music. Once Hayden joined, everything clicked. “We knew we could be a straight-ahead rock band with no gimmicks,” Wethington
said. “We could be the kind of band that people were afraid to
be, kind of accessible and fun. I’m definitely into entertaining
an audience, and sometimes I think people just want to see someone act
the fool.” “One of the things we wanted to do more than anything was to go
on the road,” Wethington said. “Sometimes it almost seemed
more important than the music. We always go over pretty good, too, especially
since no one knows who we are.”
Speed
To Roam’s set that night was fierce. The addition
of Dave Bird on second guitar has really filled out the band’s
sound. I’ve gone
on about George Wethington’s voice so many times I feel like I should
chill it on the subject, but it really is a natural wonder, and it sounded
like the whole band was out to prove something that night. It was a stunning
set. For those of you who haven’t ponied up, they’ve got some
of those art-fucked post-Slint progressions but their sound is more akin
to Pere
Ubu, Fat Wally and the Cows than Rodan or that one band from Chicago. |