It’s hard to find a 2019 Bay area rock release more immediately gripping than the debut full-length from Clang! From the distorted guitar and manic saxophone flutter that opens “Lie” to the almost half-time slowdown on the nine-and-a-half-minute LP-closer “Gomorrah,” Whac-A-Mole grabs a hold of your consciousness, puts it in a soft chokehold and then lovingly kisses it on the forehead as it weaves together 12 tracks that clock in at a merciful 32 minutes.
The document is the culmination of a year’s work put forth by guitarist Brian Shields and his bandmates, who made a live debut last summer before releasing a 20-minute demo recorded on a four-track cassette recorder. A 14-stop, nearly three-week October 2018 tour through southern states, the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard brought three of Clang!’s members — Shields, bassist Emily Jones and drummer Andrew Goding — closer together as friends and bandmates, and Clang! arrived at its January 2019 recording session at WMNF’s live studio still tour-tight and ready to play.
“We don’t really have any bells, whistles or overdubs to add on. We just went in and knocked out the songs in about five hours of live takes,” Shields, 29, told CL of the sessions that left engineer Alastair St. Hill impressed by how prepared Clang! was.
Patrick Brady, who played bass in Tampa indie-rock export Merchandise, helped Clang! rebuild the mix using stems from those sessions before Clang! and his bandmates, including Zachary Hixon on sax, took to Shields’ home studio and Lakeland’s Hillcrest Coffee to beef Whac-A-Mole up with new vocals, synth and horns.
“After [that], we worked together to make sure each instrument stood out in just the right way without overpowering the overall mix,” Brady told CL.
For St. Hill, who’s been feeding Tampa Bay out-of-the-box sounds as host of WMNF’s Grand National Championships for the better part of a decade, Clang! represents some of the best homegrown aggressive-guitar rock.
“I love the huge fuzzy bass tone, which I think is one of the first things that catches people’s attention,” St. Hill told CL. “All the parts share the sonic spectrum and complement each other so well. They’re not playing music that’s so completely out there or inventing new genres or anything, but it’s all just executed so well. It’s messy and clean in all the right places.”
The sound comes by design for Clang! Shields’ tastes didn’t advance until he was closer to graduating high school, but he eventually landed on The Fall, Gang of Four, Wire and other late-’70s and early-’80s U.K. post-punk bands.
“Those groups all have rhythm sections that really fascinated me and inspired me to write catchy, groovy riffs that center around drum and bass,” Shields told CL, adding that he’s also really into ‘90s noise-rock acts like Jesus Lizard, Shellac and U.S. Maple. “[Those and] others that are the source of the aggression in the band.”
The fuzzy bass St. Hill mentioned comes from Jones, 21, who started playing guitar 10 years ago as she grew up simultaneously listening to “Christian punk bands” and songwriters like Jeff Beck and Neil Young. Getting acquainted with Lakeland’s D.I.Y. scene led Jones’ ears to bands like The Velvet Underground, Christina Schneider and Palm. More aggressive bands like Drive Like Jehu and Multicult have since come into her life and informed the rhythms of Clang!, which is propelled in large part by the mountain of sound Jones — who also plays in a folk-ish collaborative, experimental noise and ambient sound duo called Rover — pushed out of a Peavey 115.
Goding won’t say that he’s in a box when he plays drums in non-Clang! projects like Storymode and Laundromat, but he does a lot less coloring inside the lines for Clang!, where arrangements can be left open for interpretation.
“Once Emily and Andrew have built the rhythm section up and all of the parts come together, it's the best feeling in the world. It's the experience of hearing a song that I wrote in my room or in my head in real life,” Shields said of the songwriting process.
“Andrew's amazing drumming and Emily's precision playing on the bass all coming together. After that I add my guitar parts, some pre-written some improv. One of my favorite moments in playing music is when a band gets to this point in writing a song. When everything comes together perfectly and we settle in the pocket and have fun playing something new and exciting.”
Clang!’s improvisational spirit is most evident when Hixon, 23, appears on the tape. After growing up on bands like Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys, Hixon adopted an affection for free jazz (Peter Brotzmann, Coltrane from 1965-1967) and experimental rock acts like DNA and Throbbing Gristle.
When Shields adds a new song into the band’s Dropbox, Hixon, who plays in a loose improvisational collective called Bongus, lives with it, listens and then figures out his place in the tune by trial and error.
“I’ll learn my part in a song, whether that is to play more harmoniously with what Brian is doing guitar-wise, or just be more chaotic where I think the song needs it,” Hixon said.
Some unrelated chaos unintentionally crept into the early Clang! narrative when a few elders of the local scene seemed irked by the idea of a young band using the name of Paul Reller’s popular Tampa art-pop band Clang (without the exclamation point). CL’s email to Reller was not returned, and two calls to his number at USF, where he is Associate Professor of Music Director of the university’s SYCOM Electronic Music Studio, led to busy signals.
“Paul and I have never actually talked about it in person,” Shields told CL, reiterating that the similarity was coincidental. Plus, a punctuation mark isn’t the only thing different between his and Reller’s band. “They’re a pop-rock band from the ‘90s, so we have a completely different sound than they do. I think it’s pretty silly to put so much weight on a name. They might agree with me here, I don’t know. But there are no hard feelings either way on my end. I’m just trying to play music.”
And there’s a message buried in that music, too. When St. Hill first heard Clang!, he was reminded of other “shouty, culturally conscious bands” like Career and Permanent Makeup, and while Shields — who was raised by working-class parents in Lakeland — stops short of saying his lyrics are political, he does surrender that a large part of Clang!’s message is that regular people have to stop blaming themselves for the precarious positions that they’re in.
“I think Americans have an inclination to put individual people in a bubble, where everything that happens to them is supposedly their fault, and that they deserve it. When really, there are objective structures all around us dictating our entire lives that keep the working class in poverty,” Shields said. “As they say, ‘It’s very expensive to be poor.’”
In Clang!’s America, the only real hope is to organize before those systems and global warming do irreversible damage. On Whac-A-Mole, Shields & Co. deliver a positive message and present a path to combat the unfair distribution of the very wealth created by the working class.
“You do work hard enough, you do deserve to make more money,” Shields said of the veiled dictum in his band’s new album. “There is more than enough for everyone.”
It’s not hard to hear that loud and clear.
Clang! w/Crystallized/Apocalypse Siren/Bornite Carnation. Fri. Aug. 2, 8 p.m. Donations accepted. Mojo Books & Records, 2540 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa. clanggg.com.
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