It was nearly 15 years ago that Superchunk's second single, the landmark "Slack Motherfucker," roared out of Chapel Hill, N.C. The tune more-or-less heralded that community's arrival as a buzz-worthy college-rock epicenter — the new Athens — and Chapel Hill spent half of the next decade as a hip foil to the mainstream alt-rock explosion and Seattle's overblown hype.
By the end of the '90s, the spotlight had moved on to Austin, Omaha, New York City, and other regions featuring the latest "SAVIORS OF ROCK!!!" and several of Chapel Hill's most consistently excellent bands (Archers of Loaf, Polvo) had called it a day. But the comparatively tiny Carolina town has continued to produce quality underground music, in the form of both locally based bands and releases by displaced artists on Merge Records, the label owned and run by Superchunk's Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance.
Rising psych-pop outfit The Kingsbury Manx falls firmly into the former category, but there's an element of displacement to the band's makeup as well: Clarque Blomquist, who alternates between bass and drums for the group, is a Tampa Bay native who relocated to Chapel Hill in 1998. Blomquist (who played in Mosley, Gossamer and Crankshaft, among others) and his wife, Caroline, headed up the East Coast when a desire to explore other music scenes coincided with their being evicted from their St. Pete residence.
"We thought, 'let's just go and give it a shot,'" Blomquist remembers. "We were kind of feeling like we wanted to check out someplace else to live, so we went for it."
They settled right in, with Clarque playing in several bands before the couple formed the jointly helmed Shallow By Thy Name. A mutual admiration and similar musical tastes led to Blomquist being invited to join (as a touring member) The Kingsbury Manx, already an up-and-coming act with two albums recorded for Chicago indie label Overcoat.
"I started playing with them right after they recorded [Let You Down, the second Manx album]," he says. "It started out as a touring gig, but actually now I'm part of the band."
While the quintet's first two albums are composed largely of atmospheric, understated and subtly textured dream-pop, Blomquist arrived to find a band in transition. Both of last year's releases, the EP Afternoon Owls and full-length Aztec Discipline, display a markedly increased rock quotient. Not rock as in rawk, mind you, but rather as in slightly more uptempo gritty-acid meanderings, delivered with a newly confident energy. The result nicely splits the difference between headphones and the stage, aptly showcasing a band that's gone from day-off studio tinkering to logging some serious tour-hours opening for a whole lot of fringe-rock's most iconic artists, from Elliott Smith to Stereolab to The New Pornographers to Calexico.
"They were already headed in that direction, but I think maybe I helped it along, just because I have more of a rock-band background," says Blomquist. "But they were already moving beyond the really, really mellow stuff they were doing. They've kind of wanted to rock all along."
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4856, or at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2004.