"You use a cassette recorder? That is awesome!"
Thus the most telling moment of my interview with Javelin is the very first—props start gushing from the Brooklyn lo-fi found-sound enthusiasts the moment my Radioshack handheld emerges from my bag. By the time I've finally rewound an old 90-minute XL II Maxell and gotten to press record, we're discussing the magic of working analog.
“In the recording world, tape has crazy properties,” explains Tom Van Buskirk, sitting with his cousin and bandmate George Langford just after a scruffy, mostly sample-and-drum-pad-based set at DIY Williamsburg basement Monster Island. “We record a lot to cassette,” Langford explains.
It's easy to tell if you spin the pair's first labeled release: a self-titled, 12”, five-track EP on Thrill Jockey. “Soda Popinski,” named after a classic NES Punch-Out villain, is driven by its pixelatedly militant 8-bit core. “It's a kung fu game,” says Buskirk of the looped snippet. “You know those guys on the street that sell the console with hundreds of games on it? A friend brought one home. I hooked the sampler to the TV. He had to play this level boss and not get hit.”
The cut had sounded like a grade school dance anthem earlier, Langford triggering live percussion samples with two drumsticks while dancing in place, Buskirk dropping distorted verses to an attentive, feet-shuffling crowd that ranged from stone groovin' model-gorgeous hipster gals in chunky jewelry to braces-and-bowl-cut high schoolers doing the robo-swivel.
The dollar bin collagists had, over the course of their 45-minute set, something for them all: live cowbell licks, vocal interpolations of the complicated horn groove from Outkast's “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” and micro-nods to Salt-N-Pepa jam “Push It."
If all that sounds like it might just be for kicks, keep your expectations reigned in, at least a little bit. There's no denying the comedic flourishes of Javelin—the EP kicks off with the sunshiny bounce of mission statement “Lindsey Brohan”—but humor's just one corner of a broader, consignment-pastiche landscape.
“Radio,” for instance, is lyrical personalization of a medium more often associated with mass transmission: “And you can say anything that you want on the radio,” sings Buskirk. “And it doesn't matter if you sing off-key on the radio.” In Javelin's world it doesn't, anyway. Until they were recently stolen, in fact, one of Javs' live signatures was a wall of boom boxes, the performance transmitted through the airwaves to achieve a warm, static-coated anti-gloss. “Maybe that phase is over for us,” they shrug in unison, unwilling to dwell on it.
Based on reports, Javelin didn't seem to need the ghetto blasters on a recent tour jaunt, its most significant to date. “Oakland was fucking craaaaazy,” Langford explains of a gig opening for Lucky Dragons. “Rowdy, beautiful, sold out shows. A couple hundred people.” His cousin chimes in: “Everybody was dancing. They would not let us stop playing. We did like three encores.”
Which is no thing when you've been making music together for so long. “Every set varies depending on the room. It's like football,” offers Buskirk. “You start calling plays.” Langford smiles and adds, “We can play something we made yesterday,” noting that the pair uses the same equipment for recording that they do in performance, so there's always a song to cue up.
With so many tracks to select from, many of the cuts the boys had dropped at Monster Island an hour prior to our chat were unreleased, including violin-dream “Mossy Woodland,” an arguable show highlight despite its half-way uptown ambitions, lyrical lamentations (“wash me out of your heart”) and under-two-minute run-time.
Meaning: expect a proper full length, to be released on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, overstuffed with goodies in early 2010. These tight relatives (“it's brotherhood without the bullshit” they say of cousinhood), who actually moved to New York but a year ago from Providence, RI, don't play anything up too much. “Not a lot of ambition,” Langford admits, noting they came here just so girlfriends could go to grad school and the like.
“I was kind of in the dark about it,” says Buskirk when I suggest that might have deliberately moved to the nation's indie rock capital to get noticed. “I was talking to my friend like: 'maybe we'll find a label,'” he remembers. “And she looked at me like I was an idiot: 'that's where labels are. You're gonna find a label, or one's gonna find you.'”
>Javelin
Dec. 11, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $15. Also, Dec. 17 at Death by Audio.
