LIKE SIGUR ROS´ (), Led Zeppelin's Zoso and that one KMFDM album, the correct way of pronouncing %, the debut full-length from Brooklyn threepiece Dinowalrus, isn’t immediately obvious. It’s pronounced “percent,” guitarist and vocalist Pete Feigenbaum tells me in an interview at his band’s taxicab-sized practice space in Greenpoint, a sliver of room crammed with a drum set, sampler and keyboard setup and adorned with Christmas lights.
“The title is just about 2009,” he says in a slow, slightly drawling voice. It´s hard to tell whether Feigenbaum thinks the topic at hand is the most or least important thing on earth; his delivery has a touch of both the artist´s self-confidence and the stoner’s diffidence. It turns out that each are crucial to the Dinowalrus experience. “Percent decline, percent layoffs.Then there’s a techno-biker theme, like Mad Max a little bit”—he explains the concept of the “1 percent biker gang,” and the idea that “99 percent of biker gangs are like, law-abiding citizens, but one percent are criminal organizations that sell meth or something.”
%: It’s like joining the Hells Angels for a gut-churning ride through the postmillennial wasteland. Or not. “I thought percent had something to do with sort of postmodern genre mashing” says keyboardist and bassist Kyle Warren, who does much of the mashing. On %, the samples and synth lines fluctuate between arrhythmic fog and danceable, Joy Division grooves. As Feigenbaum explains, the album draws from a broad and exhilaratingly muddled host of influences; he names a couple dozen semi-obscure to totally-forgotten ’80s no-wave and postpunk acts, and admits a soft spot for “lesser-known hair metal bands.” And it shows, unexpectedly enough:The guitar blasts that recur throughout “Nuke Duke ‘Em” wouldn’t sound out of place on a track by The Rods, or Ratt even. And the result is that nothing ever sounds out of place in a Dinowalrus song, whether it’s the saxophone skronk on “Electric Car, Gas Guitar” or the Spaceman 3-style drone “Haze on the Mobius Strip.”
“We’re just tryin’ to blow people’s minds in a small way as opposed to writing precious songs,” Feigenbaum says, hearkening back to the mid-decade ethos of “not being worth anybody’s time” if you played something people felt they’d already heard. But: “I would say ever since the Vivian Girls came along people seem to be more tolerant of derivative uninventive music,” says Feigenbaum. “Y’know?” Bands on a crusade against derivativeness run the risk of sounding deliberately weird or self-consciously pretentious.Talk of arpeggiator soundscapes aside—Feigenbaum assures me that there’s a Tangerine Dream album that’s just “the ultimate psy chedelic arpeggiator study”—Dinowalrus’s latest sounds less like a postmodern genredump than a chance to get down. “Some bands are groove bands and others are melody bands,” says Feigenbaum. “We’re more of the groove mentality.”The album, he says, is a give-and-take between tight rhythmic density (Josh Da Costa, Dinowalrus’s drummer, is pretty much a virtuoso) and droning sonic sprawl.Which brings us back to the album’s title.
“Maybe the percentage also refers to the way that our music is very claustrophobic at times and then very wide open,” he says. A new theory of the album suddenly develops: “The claustrophobic moments are inspired by New York, and the wideopen spaces are inspired by some fantasy about America. Maybe that’s what the biker reference refers to. I guess it’s like Easy Rider, sort of a bad acid trip that happens to be a biker movie.”
Feigenbaum throws out an example of a bad acid trip that happens to be an art-rock album: Spaceman 3’s Dream Weapon, a live recording of a 45-minute sitar-and-guitar drone piece. He says that Dinowalrus could easily do something similar, and “just go into a studio and jam for like four hours and cut it down to 35 minutes.” Going by the two or three spacey, improvisational tracks on %, that would be worth listening to. But like hair metal, arpeggiators and biker gangs, jammy acid rock is only one ingredient in the teeming Dinowalrus bricolage. Besides, says Feigenbaum, “There are moments of extreme clarity and presence to what we do.” Dinowalrus proves that mindblowing music doesn’t have to come at the expense of either.
> Dinowalrus
Dec. 3, Union Pool, 484 Union Ave. (at Meeker Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-609-0484; 9, $8. Also Dec. 7 at Mercury Lounge
See, mom was a brontosaurus and dad was either Paul or Ringo.
