Coma Summer

After speaking with them in their practice space in July, we waved the flag on San Francisco’s own Weekend as a band to seriously keep your eyes on. There’s a lot of shoe-gaze making the rounds these days, but Weekend brings some of most charged elements of punk and post-rock to keep it pressing and renewed. When you’re touring with A Place to Bury Strangers, you’re going to need some ear-bursting, bleeding-red energy. And with their first full-length, Sports, Weekend provides just that. Having served us with two fantastic singles ahead of the album this year (“End Times,” a track taken from their split with the Young Prisms, is one of our favorites from earlier this year), Sports was shaping to be quite a ride, most likely a fast, hazy and spirited one. So let’s get these windows down! Wait wait wait… can you unlock my window?

Sports rockets into play on “Coma Summer,” with hot pace and a youthful attitude. The bass and drums give the music a distinctly punk base layer, while the often blistering, at times droning, and at others clanging guitar work of Kevin Johnson grab you by the neck and throw you through alleys of rupturing texture. In the spirit of Kevin Shields and Ira Kaplan, Johnson throws a diverse set of distorted tantrums through his pickups.  Overlaid all of this chaos are the vocals of Shaun Durkan, which serve more as an instrumental compliment to Kevin’s fretwork than as the vehicle of a story teller. They’re predominantly indistinguishable, at times sounding almost inhuman amongst the storm clouds of fuzzed-out distortion. Yet, on tracks like “Coma Summer” Durkan leans heavily on captivating melodies, getting downright anthemic.

Though the more immediately memorable tracks come rather fueled, there’s a lot of diversity to the pace and vibe of the record. It’s noisy, that’s for damn sure. And was probably loud as hell to record (and meant to be played that way). But there’s a lot of trade off between how that noise is shaped. For instance, “Monday Morning” exchanges offense for slow, swelling waves of distortion and drifty vocals, while the cruising bass line keeps complete eruption imminent (which eventually comes at the beginning of “Monongah, WV.”) It’s rarely busy; Sports is mostly minimalistic, as the cover art my suggest. And while the tour-mates might suggest a bleaker feel, Sports lends itself to plenty of triumph.

In every sense, this is city music. It’s disorienting, aggressive, and overwhelming, with moments of unity, release and a damn good fight in it. Kids in Manchester are going piss themselves over it. And for good reason; it challenges where its influences like Joy Division left off with a modern attack and renewed vigor. It’s a hell of a record and well worth the ear damage.

- matthew hunt

End Times

Deep in the SOMA district of San Francisco there exists a room that resonates with some seriously charged shoegaze about 7 nights a week. Its the practice space shared by Weekend, The Young Prisms and Leagues. Residents within a 5 block radius should be issued ear plugs by district government mandate. The ratty white canvas on the back wall spray-painted “Punx Not Dead” should begin to paint a picture of the environment and influence in the room. If your sense of smell is stronger, the scent of burning plastic permeated the room from a blown out PA speaker. Elsewhere, the floor is littered with pedals, guitars, speakers, recording equipment, and three drum sets. Needless to say, it’s a busy room. But it’s not all about aggression and topped out amps in this grungy practice space. I spoke with Kevin and Shaun of San Francisco’s own Weekend, who gave me a rather cerebral run down on why their upcoming record is anything but lo-fi, the reason they turned from punk to something more aesthetic, and why their music is like a kamikaze jet.

TheBloodBeat: Alright, maybe you could take me from the beginning, we can cover some of the stock shit first. How’d you guys get to playing together?
Shaun: Ha! Alright, I get the stock shit. Well I’ve been playing music with Taylor, our drummer, since fourth grade. We’ve been in various bands off and on. We’ve known each for 15 years or so. We knew Kevin since middle school as well. He moved to Truckee for a bit, and we were both doing our own musical things for a while, but we’ve kept in contact. We’ve always wanted to collaborate, and finally got the chance. We moved to SF from Santa Cruz, we started something for a little, but it sort of fizzled out because I was into other things besides music at that point. Then a year or two later we met up again and we got way more adamant about starting something up. So we started a band again, and wanted to make it something serious.
Kevin: I moved up here to go to school. That was around 2005. And we tried to start the band but there was just too much shit going on. I ended up dropping out of school and picking it up again in another place, so the music was put on the back-burner until a year and a half ago. I moved back up here, we got this practice space and got Taylor in on it.
BB: How long have you guys been in this space here?
K: A little over a year I think. Maybe a year and a half.
BB: And that was around the time you started playing full time together?
S: Yea we went through a month of, sort of a teething period first. Taylor officially joined in October 2008 I think? We started writing our first real songs in 2009 though.
K: It’s been a project in development for many years. It’s been an idea for a long time.
BB: Tell me a little bit about how you got started with your labels. Seems like you’ve worked with a few different guys now. The split was on Transparent. You did the 10” with Mexican Summer..
S: Yea, and then the full length is going to be on Slumberland. I guess when we first started we didn’t have a recording budget or anything like that. I did some rough demos on my computer at home, sort of like placeholders of how we wanted things to sound in the future, sketches of how we wanted things to sound. Keith from Mexican Summer contacted us looking for some recordings and we were really into their philosophy of making music tactile again and really pushing vinyl again. Then we saw the roster and were really into a lot of the bands on there.
K: They were the first label to contact us. We were pretty clueless really…
BB: You were lucky to fall in with such a good group. Those guys have great taste.
S: Yea Keith has been great. He just heard the demos, asked for some recordings, and it just so happened that day we got out of the recording studio to clean up the demos so we sent those along and he said great, lets put something out. And then Transparent was one of the first blogs to put out one of our original demos. They were the first ones to write about us and give any recognition.
BB: And they are in the UK right?
S: Yea they’re in London. They’re great, we met up with them at South By South West.
K: They were just such a small operation back then. They seemed like some cool guys in the UK, back before they even put out the Washed Out 7”.
S: We were really into them because they actually took a lot of time to listen to our music and write about it, not just some circular blogging atmosphere. They do something that’s actually original which is great.
BB: So did Keith see you at a show or something? How’d he find out about you?
S: No, no, I don’t even think we’d played any shows at that point. Maybe a couple I guess. I think it was truly just a myspace find.
BB: So he just saw some of your friends, heard your stuff, and said cool I should talk to these guys?
K: Yea pretty much. I think added Captured Tracks to our friends at one point and maybe Keith saw us then.
BB: Great. So where did you do your recordings?
S: We’ve recorded all of stuff at Function 8 studios. A friend of ours does all of the engineering there. Ruminator Audio is his production company. He’s actually an old family friend of mine. He used to play in a band with my dad in the 80s, so it’s a pretty funny connection. We’re stoked to have him on board because he truly understands what we want to do, and has the technological know-how to get there.
BB: And originally you did a couple of the demos on your computer at home?
S: Yea, just on GarageBand, slapped together a few things. It’s great if you’re going for that lucent, sloppy aesthetic. There is a certain charm to the haphazardness.
BB: That lo-fi, DIY sound. Totally. Going along that direction, you obviously listen to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth type of music. Do you all have a similar taste? Or is there a dynamic where somebody is really influenced by a certain style and that meets the other interests in the middle? Or is it more collective? Help me break all that apart.
K: I think Shaun and I are really closely related musically. We both grew up listening to a lot of the same stuff. We’ve experienced a lot of the same musical discoveries together. We’ve analyzed and interpreted a lot of those things together. The interesting thing is bringing Taylor into it because he’s just incredibly eclectic and digs on all the stuff we like. But he also comes from this super deep history of grind core and metal, so he kind of gives it all a new spin.
S: We all grew up listening to hardcore, metal, punk and whatever. I’d like to think all of that is still alive in our music, and Taylor certainly brings that out of the songs.
BB: So, when you think about noise and feedback… A lot of the lyrics seem to be going for that incoherent, drifty style. Reverb obviously seems to be a big piece of it as well. Could you talk me through how you think about all that, how you approach it?
K: For me getting into shoegaze music was a very punk rock thing. To me it was a very punk idea to make your guitar so noisy and inaudible. I stopped listening to punk because to me the music got uninteresting. It wasn’t punk anymore. So for me I think the draw to shoegaze music was that punk rock aesthetic. Something that’s just totally weird, and new, and fucked up. I think a lot of people make shoegaze to be personal and pretty. But I think there’s also another side to it that’s really punk. We saw My Bloody Valentine play and it was just insane. It was the loudest, most aggressive, intense show I’ve ever been to.
BB: They had a reputation for that.
K: Yea but when you listen to their records you just think: lost in translation.
S: I guess for me I still really favor the shoegaze stuff that’s really aggressive. I’m not particularly into that dreamy, ethereal stuff. My favorite shoegaze record is  Isn’t Anything, the first My Bloody Valentine record, just because it still has that aggression in tact while they were messing around with textures, noise, and you’re not just totally floating there.
BB: [points to the A Place to Bury Strangers record on the wall] Those guys are pretty aggressive, speaking of all that.
K: Oh yea, we played with them. It was amazing. Their live show was just…
BB: Full throttle?
K: It was full throttle. But still in such an intense, controlled, wonderful sounding way. I was totally blown away. I hope we get to play with them more.
BB: You guys listen to that band Suicide? That’s a band I think you are hearing a lot more of shoegaze today. Its a more beat centric and all that.
K: Yea. That’s a band that could write something totally weird and fucked up, but still groovey. That’s the other side of it I guess. Is not wanting to write something totally atonal and textural because that’s not the world we live in. There are still other people in it and other melodies. There’s a lot happening outside of that dissonant noise.
BB: That’s a great point. I’ve never really thought about it that way. Shifting gears a bit, you have the full length coming out in September?
S: September or October.
BB: Cool, so how many songs is that going to be? Is it continuing on a similar trajectory? Are there many surprises?
S: Yea I think there are going to be a lot of surprises.
BB: Haha alright good, well don’t give the whole thing away.
S: I think the releases we’ve had so far have been written knowing that they’d be released in that matter. We knew we had a 7” coming out so we wrote a song for a 7” so it was a little more concise and pop centric. The 10” even that was pretty tight. On the full length there is a lot more space in the songs. I think there is a larger emphasis on the atmosphere.
K: We had the time and space to really develop ideas. We hopefully have pulled a lot of tracks together into this larger thing and don’t have to convey the whole message in one or two tracks. So that gave us some liberty to do some new stuff.
BB: And is it entirely just the three of you?
S: Stef from The Young Prisms sings on the track that’s on our 7”. So that track is on this as well.
BB: Oh wow, I didn’t realize she was on that track.
K: She sang back up. She was on the “ooh la-las.”
BB: And then after the record comes out are you hitting the road to do some touring?
S: We’re in the process of figuring that out now. We’ve been working on this album for over a year or so, so we want to make sure we do it right when it comes out.
BB: And you guys have day time gigs for the time being?
S: I just graduated from school so I work at a bike shop and a graphic design studio right now.
K: I work for the city doing urban planning for bicycle infrastructure for the city of San Francisco. I kind of just fell into it. I studied art in college but during that time I was really involved in the bicycle community. So I decided I wanted to be involved helping to make San Francisco more like Europe: a lot more bikes, a lot better facilities.
BB: So, sorry back to touring, you made it down to play SXSW this year?
S: We shared a van with The Young Prisms. There were 8 of us… 9 of us? 8 of us. That was intense. Along the way we made it out to Denver, we played in Oklahoma, Arkansas. We got into some strange stuff out there.
BB: I think I saw the single most racist piece of anything I’ll ever see in my entire life in a bathroom stall in Oklahoma.
S: Haha, wow. I think we played one of our best shows ever in Arkansas. It was insane. We played at this house that some college kids owned. This nice, huge suburban house on this corner. They packed us, Young Prisms and Woodsman into there. A bunch of kids showed up and we decided to do a round robin set. Each band played one song and the next band played a song and the next band played a song, and all of the kids were just in the middle swirling. At the end we all played together for 20 minutes or so.
K: And all of the amps were blocking the exits. You can imagine it right? Young Prisms have some pretty big amps and lots of gear. We have big amps and lots of gear. Woodsman are pretty loud as well. All three of us playing for twenty minutes was just total white noise. Crowd surfing inside the living room, the floor was just wilting underneath the pressure of all these kids…
BB: A couple of grandma’s urns got broken…
K: Ash just flying everywhere!
S: There was actually a sorority on the other side of the street. They didn’t show up though…
BB: You also played on Day Trotter recently?
S: It’s funny, we recorded that back in I think January? Whenever Noise Pop was. A long time ago. It even says it just came out. I think it said “Recorded June 25th, 2010,” when it was recorded like five months ago. They came to town for Noise Pop. They took over this studio downtown, Studio Paradiso. They contacted us out of nowhere and said, hey do you want to come down? We put our amps in a taxi and went down. The whole thing was one take, no re-dos, no mixing.
K: It has a certain energy too it.
BB: It sounds really pure.
S: Live recordings usually just sound really bad but it has this charming energy that you can’t really recreate. We actually did a lot of tracks on the full length live with all of us in one room and just separated some stuff, maybe did some overdubs. We realized it was a) much faster to do everything at once and b) really hard for us to recreate that live energy sitting alone in a room with headphones on.
BB: And your type of music is well-suited for that recording style too.
K: Sure. We didn’t really cut any corners though. We had this opportunity to work in this really professional studio and we didn’t want to half-ass it. We tried to make the record as interesting and high fidelity as possible.
S: It’s anything but a lo-fi record.
K: Some people are really scared of the studio and having all of that potential to make their music sound polished. I think some of the most interesting records actually take advantage of all that equipment and those really interesting sounds you can get if you try. Just pumping shit out of a loud speaker into a cannon and recording that, but also doing that with a clean guitar track with a $4,000 ribbon mic or something and using all the sounds together. Not just sticking to some really plain aesthetic.
S: And not just throwing it into a mixer tape.
BB: There’s enough of that around.
S: It’s just dumbing it down.
BB: Last question, hypothetical: if you were to assign your style of music to a single mode of transportation, what would it be?
K: Bicycle!
S: Kamikaze jet!
K: Is that really a mode of transportation?
S: Transportation to hell!

Catch Weekend live  at their upcoming show at Milk Bar on 7/15 with Ty Segall, Terry Malts and Whirl. And be sure to keep an eye out for their LP on Slumberland this fall.

- Matthew Hunt, photo by Lorna Pacheco