Being Dead
Eels have burrowed into my brain. Or more accurately, Eels, the latest album from Austin, Texas, rock outfit Being Dead, has burrowed deep, deep into my noggin. Built around the principal notions that singing with friends is fun as hell and more reverb makes things more fun, Eels is a slippery listen, taking the audience into some deep, dark rock formations while maintaining a calm and shimmering surface. Voices slide in and out, stack up and break down as rhythms turn inside-out and melodies twist. All this while Being Dead’s trio — consisting of Falcon Bitch, Shmoofy (fka Gumball) and, uh, Nicole Roman-Johnston — taps into classic tones to make something very au courant, which they’ll bring to the show they’re co-headlining Halloween night with Omni at The Blue Room at Third Man Records.
“We just took off a few hours ago,” says Falcon Bitch, who shares vocal, guitar and drum duties equally with Shmoofy while Roman-Johnston holds down the bass line. “And we’re walking to — oh, it’s much quieter over here. And there’s a nice tree. We just want to be under this nice tree.”
The Scene is catching up by phone with the band “somewhere in Texas” at their very first pit stop of the tour, and it’s the best sort of chaos. Over the years, we have done a lot of phoners with bands as they’re trying to make it from Point A to Point B, cramming in questions between bathroom breaks — but never have we encountered this kind of energy. Not unlike on the record, the band members’ voices ebb and flow into each other, jokes zip past, and the noise of the environment — a rumbling fuel tanker, a poorly maintained muffler, crazy wind — all gets funneled into the act. We quickly cross the line from publicity interview to musique concrète buddy comedy. This sort of descent into disorganization would usually be a portent of doom, but with Being Dead it just feels right.
“Any minute [the album] should hit platinum,” Falcon deadpans against the backdrop of highway traffic. “We’re just kind of waiting with bated breath here. We’re trying not to jump the gun, but we do have Champagne on rocks in the van.”
“We’re just waiting on the team to get back to us,” Shmoofy pipes up, extending the joke. The whole group laughs, and the wind picks up as if it’s laughing along with them.
Being Dead
Eels is scrappy and clever, taking some time-tested rock ’n’ roll tropes and making them feel shiny and new and ready to live rent-free in your brain. A big part of Eels’ success comes from the way the trio uses classic garage and punk musical ideas but without being hypercitational. Sure, this writer might describe it as something like “The Feminine Complex by way of Factory Records,” but your mileage may vary, and that’s the beautiful part. The minimal elements — voice, guitar, drums, bass, occasional synths or weird percussion, and reverb (and more reverb, and then some more reverb) — afford a lot of places for their hooks to latch onto your brain. The end result is a record that permeates your subconscious with minimum effort.
“[Recording] all went pretty well,” Shmoofy continues. “There was a second … right before we went to the studio where I think that we were like ‘uh-oh.’ But then it all came together, so it was all pretty smooth.”
On the stage, that smoothness translates to a set that is both high-energy and really chill. They are masters of crowd work, interacting with the crowd in a way that feels like old friends shooting the shit over late-night drinks. Seconds later, they jump back into choruses that remind you that the best part of underground music is singing your heart out with sweaty strangers.
