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:	post by RichHorror at 2009-07-29 12:43:35

From the fall of 2005...in the Noise Around Boston....

Presley – If You Don't Like The Effects, Don't Produce The Cause

"Classic" rock will continue to be hailed as such because of its adventurous nature and willingness to continually push the boundaries of songwriting and performance. Somewhere along the way the music lost its footing on the path carved out by bands that played the Fillmore Auditoriums in the 60s and 70s like The Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Santana, and Chicago, and started to sound like…well, the worst aspects of those bands, i.e. the parts where the players forgot about the song. Revisionist history has made improvisation a dirty word in rock 'n' roll, which has made too many bands put themselves into easily classifiable boxes. Musical freedom has become a road seldom traveled by the multitude, which is why I find myself getting antsy after five songs and/or 20 minutes of most sets. What strikes me most about Presley is that their continually shifting tempos, rhythms, dynamics, moods and textures can hold my interest while they play what seems like one song for 40 minutes. They have a similar approach to electric-era Miles Davis in that they'll take pre-arranged parts and work them together through jams that'll have them sounding psychedelic, ambient, metallic and funky at any given moment. If I were to classify them I'd say that they're a psych/stoner rock band that holds equal appeal for potheads, beer drinkers and hell raisers. Christian Campagna's heavily effected and often droning guitar lines are augmented by Aarne Victorine's melodic bass and Breaux Silcio's drumming, which ranges from subtle cymbal splashes to near blast beat pounding. To cop a line from their third and latest release, ***Elizabeth***, they're musicians with deep record collections who're "Stuck in fuckin' Providence with the Memphis blues again" somewhere between Dylan and ***Daydream Nation***, Husker Du and Hawkwind.

"I guess the fact that we generally don't use a setlist," says Campagna on what sets Presley apart, "and have been playing a good amount of shows where we just string songs together without stopping. We have a number of songs written that don't have endings for the purpose of opening them up and trying to go somewhere else completely different. My roots will always be in traditional rock concerts, but after spending a good amount of time at shows where stretching out songs and creating music through group improvisation is normal, we wanted to try to adopt that aesthetic to more of a loud rock sound than most bands improvising on stage that I go see live. My influences come from all over the place. Some of my favorite guitar players are Adrian Belew, Jerry Garcia, Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins, and Richard Thompson. I love their approach to music and probably think of them when I'm sitting around at home playing. At one point at the beginning of this band we accidentally stumbled upon stretching out songs and improvising. Certain songs started getting longer in rehearsal and we discussed trying this on stage in front of an audience and have pretty much done it at every show we've played. One goal was to never play the same set, and to have every show be completely different from the last one. This has worked great for us so far and we're happy with what we do. I guess what we've set out to do with this band is frustrating and rewarding, frustrating in the sense that we have a hard time fitting in with many bands we play with, rewarding in that we can play a show with no real idea of what is going to happen. Granted we run the risk of alienating audiences, but I think the day we get on stage and play a bunch of four-minute songs that are all written with strict beginnings and endings it won't be rewarding anymore.

"Coming from a musical family, music has always been a huge part of my life," he continues. "My dad worked for A&M in the 70s and 80s and we got to see a good amount of concerts at a pretty young age. Seeing KISS as a kid made me want to play music. Later on, my cousin Al inspired me to actually go through with it; he was a founder of Boston's SSDecontrol and his drive in that band was intense. The three of us have a great understanding of each other when it comes to playing music. When we originally got together the ideas were pretty loose and miles away from what we do now. I remember thinking it would be a great idea to sound like Sunny Day Real Estate meets My Bloody Valentine. We played together for almost a year before playing our first show. We had a second guitar player for a while who recorded our first two records with us, and our sound definitely changed when he joined, and again when he left in 2003. I don't like the first record at all. It was the first record I ever recorded where I was actually singing and the results are pretty weak in my opinion. The vocal tracks were all pretty much done in one take, as our engineer wasn't interested in having us. I think where it was our first batch of songs our sound was still developing. We do play one song off of the record still, 'Donald Fagen.' Our second record we did with Steve Austin of Today is the Day and that was one of the most amazing experiences we all have had in the band. He was great to work with, a super nice guy, and ended up playing keyboards on a good chunk of the record after coming up with some parts he thought would add some depth to the record. That experience and record are something I will always look back on with pride. The most recent one we recorded with our friend Jason is our current favorite. Jason had seen us live a number of times so he was able to capture our sound as close as anyone has. The songs are pretty straight forward and all in a normal tuning as opposed to the DADABE tuning the majority of our songs are in, yet we were able to stretch them out a little live right there and we all agreed that for improvising in the studio in most of the songs in one take came out pretty close to what we do live."

Campagna has an addictively readable Livejournal site, and this revealing entry a few years ago: "With the huge amount of jazz mp3s from the 20s, 30s, and 40s I'm loading on to my hard drive I'm bored with rock music again. I bought that Cure record last week and it's about as exciting as me getting up a few minutes ago and taking that sip of water, just boring guitar and vocals music, too wordy. How many obsessive love songs can you hear before you need to listen to someone who's dead now blowing a horn for ten minutes instead? That shit excites me. These shitty sounding recordings from 1932 with a simple little melody and a solo or two have so much more power and energy than anything anyone is going to release this year. My friends, coworkers, people I know on the net, etc. will keep eating all of this garbage up though, never looking back to see where all of this began. All of this is having an effect on writing lyrics now. I don't want to sing. I fucking hate writing lyrics. I drag my feet with this process, and the results are always awful. I can't read them, or listen to my voice singing them without wanting to go deaf and blind. I'd like to turn the band into a band that just goes on stage and improvises for an hour and leaves. We're at the point where nobody really cares anymore anyway, so why now? I don't think any of us have any ideal to impress anyone at this point. I could certainly care less about the 'rock scene' or whatever you want to call it."
To what does he attribute the marked drop-off in club attendance in recent years? "The short obnoxious answer would be because there's nothing really worth going to see, but I guess the whole world of music is different from where it was in the 80s and 90s. Back then there was no internet, and things were generally slower. You would have that one friend that would come to your house and say, 'Check out this record, this is The Wipers' – now everything is so fast and people have shorter attention spans and you can buy something on the internet and find out that 'If you like this, you'll also like this Avenged Sevenfold record or whatever…' People are so taken with celebrity now. They spend all their money to see these bigger acts and have no idea that there is this whole underground music scene going on, especially in Boston. I would think the average person going to see someone like Meatloaf or Sting wouldn't know what to do with themselves at a real rock show. I saw Eric Clapton for the first time a few years ago and it was the most boring concert I ever saw. The crowd was just sitting there listening to him plod through his hits. Galaxie 500 live was more exciting than that show. Although the scene is frowned upon in most musical circles, the jam band scene is doing a great job of keeping up the tradition of what a rock concert was like when I was younger, at least in terms of sheer energy."

(Mike Baldino)

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