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Interview: Lodro

Born of fragments from two individually successful Brooklyn indie bands (Royal Baths and Friends), LODRO is the dark brainchild of Lesley Hann, Jeremy Willie Cox, and Jigmae Baer. Their music is an amalgam of piercing buzz, squelching guitar, wispy vocals, and thumping percussion. While their approach may appear outwardly minimalist – they’re a total of three musicians playing an instrument apiece – they offer up a satisfyingly full and abrasive sound, one that’s more cavernous and menacing than you might expect. But while LODRO’s gruff exterior remains uncompromising, their vibe is never once uninviting. They like you. They want you to come inside, turn the lights off, and feel your way around with them. They want you to revel in gritty uncertainty and fall in love with the way your voice echoes before it drones. They want you to embrace your anxiety because they know, sometimes, you can’t conquer it.

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lesley and Jeremy in our Brooklyn office to get the skinny on their origins and how they do (and don’t) define the parameters of this new project. After a quick trip to the liquor store for some unfortunately high-priced whiskey, we began traveling down the rabbit hole.

Let me start off by saying I read your interview with Our Vinyl

Lesley: I think that might have been the first interview I did for this project. If we’re talking about the same one. Anyhow…

And it said that you guys met when your two former bands – Royal Baths and Friends – used the same warehouse in Bushwick. Is that correct?

Lesley: Mmhmm.

When was it that you three first came together to jam? How did that happen?

Lesley: Well… that’s complicated for me to answer, because when I met them, I was in Friends. I met them at this warehouse, and they were in Royal Baths and didn’t have a drummer at the time. And so I actually played drums for them for a few shows until they got a permanent drummer, all while I was still in Friends. Besides that, we didn’t play music together, really, we were just hanging out. Then Royal Baths was touring internationally, and Friends was touring internationally, for like the next year. So we sort of met one another, had a couple of months to become close, and then were just sort of shot all over the world for a year. Almost exactly a year after we all met, I quit Friends. And that’s when I started playing with them legitimately.

 

 

As drummer?

Lesley: As a singer and bass player.

Jeremy: We had a drummer by that time [laughter].

Lesley: This is like a year after I filled in on drums for them.

Jeremy: Just to clarify, Royal Baths went through a lot of bassists and drummers.

Lesley: So joining Royal Baths involved me sitting down with Jeremy and Jigmae a lot. Learning the songs. And we had a lot of songs with Jigmae singing lead vocals, but then I was going to sing lead vocals instead. And after a couple of months of that – say that started in September of last year – we went through CMJ as Royal Baths and decided afterwards that we should start a new project. And I think the first thing we really did was, this one night, we were all sitting around this warehouse, the same one I’ve been talking about, where we initially met each other and have just been displaced from, Jigmae was listening to Townes Van Zandt’s “Snake Song” and we decided that it would be a good exercise to try to cover it in our own style. And we stayed up all night figuring out how to do that, recording it on a Tascam 246 4 track cassette recorder that we had at the time. That actually went on to be the first LODRO recording.

Is that on your SoundCloud right now?

Lesley: It is. There’s the demo version on our SoundCloud, and that’s the recording from that night.

Oh, that’s awesome.

Lesley: And then there’s a newer recording of it that we recorded on a Tascam 388, which is an 8 track that records to 1/4 inch tape, and that’s going to be the B-side to the 7” we’re releasing.

Would you say that night and that recording were when you knew you guys wanted to focus on LODRO?

Lesley: The notion of starting a new thing was there, we had talked about it before, but I would say that that night, hanging out and recording that cover, was sort of the jump off point.

How did you guys end up at Market Hotel?

Lesley: When I first moved to New York, I was like 19. I’m 25 now, but back then, I was living in that neighborhood, off the Myrtle Ave. / Broadway JMZ, and I would go to shows there. I saw Japanther there and went to some parties. The venue part got shut down by the cops, finally, but it stayed open as a place where artists and musicians lived. It has this cavernous, gigantic main space that’s used for band practices, recordings, photo shoots, video shoots, whatever. Friends was just starting out in I guess September 2010, and the lead singer – Samantha – had moved in since a room opened up. So Friends started practicing and hanging out there. We shot the first two Friends music videos there, and by the time we shot the second one, the video for “I’m His Girl,” Samantha had moved out, and Jeremy and Jigmae had just moved in, having just arrived to New York from San Francisco. And that’s the night I met them. That’s how everything intersected.

How long were you guys at the Market Hotel, living and practicing and operating out of there?

Lesley: To span all three of the bands we’re talking about, I’d say on and off since September 2010. Until maybe three months ago. Then it was everyone out.

Gotcha. To go back to what I was talking about before, how would say your writing process has evolved or stayed the same since that first recording?

Jeremy: This project is very collaborative. Everyone playing is involved in the writing process. As far as changing, where we live affects our style of writing, our method.

And you were coming over from the West Coast.

Jeremy: Yeah, I don’t know how much the coastal change has affected my attitude… I feel like I’ve always had a shitty attitude, so it didn’t change that much [laughter].  But during the span of LODRO, we’ve been moving around, from warehouse to warehouse to basement studio. We just tailor our writing time and process to those surroundings.

Lesley: And I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a pattern that always happens. Sometimes the first thing there is is a guitar riff, sometimes a vocal line. How it gets built is different every time.

But environment always plays a part?

Jeremy: It’s live rock and roll, so we can’t escape into headphones while we’re writing, and that forces us to be affected by the environment in which we play.

Lesley: An example of a writing situation would be us sitting around in the Market Hotel, all night, with no heat, bundled up and having to take breaks to stand near space heaters because our fingers are freezing. And then just repeating ideas over and over again until more come along.

Is there a story behind the name?

Lesley: I can’t say.

You can’t divulge?

Lesley: No [laughter].

 

So, you guys have defined LODRO as “neo-noir punk.” Can you us tell how this genre label came to be?

Lesley: I think that genre has become an annoying, silly thing over the past few years. People just throw out the most ridiculous things, and I feel like genre has, unfortunately, stopped being accurate. You can’t ask somebody, “What kind of music do you play?”, and have them give you three words that make you go, “Oh, I know exactly what that sounds like.” That just doesn’t happen. So I think that it’s smarter to give people words that give them a feeling or an aesthetic, because rock means… fucking anything. So “neo-noir punk” is an aesthetic, it’s an attitude, it’s a feeling. It invokes images to me of what we might sound like more than if I said “psychedelic dark rock band.”

Can you think of any core elements that are part of your aesthetic? Things you make priorities or things you like to explore?

Lesley: I don’t think we make anything a priority. I think that we came up with [neo-noir punk] as a description for what we’re naturally like. It’s more of the reverse. We are dark, weird people, sometimes mysterious. It just fits in with our attitude and our feelings and I think that description is what should naturally radiate through our music because it’s what we’re like.

Would you say it’s both accurate and satirical at the same time?

Lesley: Yeah [laughter].

Do you think this genre label is more for you guys or for your audience?

Lesley: Both, and simultaneously it’s a preventive measure. Because if you don’t put something there, for genre, that you’re comfortable with from the get-go, and I know this from bad experiences in the past, somebody else will come up with one for you, and it will get used over and over and over again. And if you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter, you’re stuck with it. So, I think it makes more sense to feed people something that you’re comfortable with rather than let somebody else who doesn’t understand you.

Do you know any bands of the top of your head who could potentially share this genre with you?

Jeremy: No.

Lesley: No.

Jeremy: If they ask nicely [laughter].

To reference back to your interview with Our Vinyl, you guys said that watching noir and neo-noir films was a nice escape for when you needed a break from writing. I wanted to ask if you could tell us some of the films or character that most intrigued you and how they influenced your work.

Lesley: We were definitely on a kick that winter, when we started this band. There’d be nights when everyone in the house would get together in the main space, where there was a bunch of old car seats and shitty couches and stuff, and we just sort of corralled around them in there. There was this one big wall that we kept free of graffiti that we would use as the screen, and we would watch movies a couple nights a week like that. Right now I am super stuck, obsessed with There Will Be Blood. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movie.

Heard of it but haven’t seen it.

Lesley: You should watch it.

It’s based on oil?

Lesley: Yeah, and it’s definitely neo-noir, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. He has a tendency to create characters that are really hard to like but, at the same time, you identify with them. I feel like you walk away from his movies really uncomfortable, because you’ve managed to relate to this character that’s a horrible person.

[laughter] Do you have a specific character in mind?

Lesley: I can’t remember the character’s name in the movie, but the character that Daniel Day Lewis plays [Daniel Plainview] in There Will Be Blood is the epitome of what I’m talking about. I think I really identify with him and other characters like him, or sometimes I think I’m jealous of them.

How so?

Lesley: Because, you know, I’m a really anxious person. I think too much, and I worry all of the time. A lot of shit bothers me, but Anderson manages to create these characters that have all of these problems but just don’t care. They’re fine with not worrying about anything, just being assholes and being comfortable with that. I’m jealous of their ability to not give a shit.

Jeremy: Or how they can be upset and anxious in a graceful manner.

Lesley: Yeah, to be okay with that.

Cool. And you guys have 7” coming out at the end of the month called If Life Was Like A Movie. Can you tell me more about this release? How did you come to sign and work with Tracer Sounds?  Why did you decide to release a two-song 7” instead of something longer?

Lesley: I don’t like it when things take a long time, and I wanted to put out something as soon as possible. I think we’ll probably be able to put out an LP around the same time that we would have been able to anyway, but I wanted to do something now, I wanted to do something sooner. I don’t like waiting. I’m impatient. I wanted to give people something physical now. And Tracer Sounds is a new label, so we’ll be their first release. We’re excited to be working with a label that’s just forming because there’s no precedent. We’re not part of an already curated thing…. So many labels, you know, you look at the label and you look at the roster, and that’s defining on some level in some people’s eyes, of what a band is like. It gives people an opportunity to judge a band by what label they’re on. So it’s exciting for us to be free of that and be part of the shaping of something new.

Jeremy: It allows us to remain autonomous.

Lesley: And, also, it’s definitely important to us to have total creative control and total creative freedom. The state of affairs at this point in the record industry has gotten to where you don’t even have to be on a major label to have people telling you what you can or can’t do. And I don’t want to go there. The conversations that we had that lead us to decide to work with Mehrad Talaie involved us feeling like he wanted us to have control.

How did you meet him?

Jeremy: He came to our shows [laughter].

So when do you anticipate releasing an LP?

Lesley: I think in the spring.

Would it involve any of the songs you have online already?

Lesley: I can’t say, we don’t know yet. There’s a possibility of some of them being memorialized, maybe not. We haven’t figured it out yet.

And will there be any sort of release party for the 7” we should be aware of?

Lesley: Yeah, but we don’t have all of the details just yet. We’ll keep you posted.

What about after that? What’s next?

Jeremy: We’re probably going to hibernate this winter and record and freak out… we’ll have a lot of problems and then when spring comes around there will be a bunch of songs.

Lesley: That’s our rough plan.

 

Buy If Life Was Like A Movie here.

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Interview by Justin Davis. Follow him on Twitter at @yeahjustindavis.

Photos by Jenny Regan / Fashion by StyledByPhil



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