WORDS Brian Carroll
This month, MADE highlights a few of Montgomery's own distinguished, sorely under-served rock bands. While our city lacks agreeable turf for physical music distribution and consignment, these bands have set a name for themselves anyway - based purely upon the strength of their live shows and personalities.
Eleven Year Old
Prattville's Eleven Year Old plays bad ass garage-tinged surf music. By hitting two of the three or four or ten eternally cool 1950's and '60's guitar styles, their music projects the requisite dedication and focus respected in bands who attempt mining in such rich, classic veins. The youngest band on the list, these guys may look to be just out of high school, but are quietly serious about the music they make and never fail to impress. What sets them apart from last-gen Alabama surf acts like Daikaiju and Man or Astroman? is a welcome lack of kitsch in their presentation. Solid beyond their years, Eleven Year Old is a must-see band, unburdened with caricature, who fire up crowds with a driving and crucially likable sound.
The Hard Gospel
Another great band from Prattville, this doomy three piece is comprised of veterans of the Montgomery hard rock scene, and sounds a bit like Queens of the Stone Age had a baby with Motorhead. Elements of punk and wicked, sinewy guitar leads provide punctuation to the band's concept: dark, loud, moral ambiguity. The Hard Gospel, as an idea, straddles lines between heaven and hell, and as a band, between classic '70's metal and the modern vestiges of commercial rock. Due to each member's experience working in related styles, they sound remarkably polished for a new band. Having just released their hi-fi debut album, “The Commandments of Morality,” directly on bandcamp to excited local buzz (in The Gump, that means a few bands liking each other's Facebook posts), The Hard Gospel is a band of musician's musicians, but they don't overdo it; The rarity of their live shows makes each one subconsciously feel like a guarded secret of the well-informed, and it works.
V-8 Death Car
A new, eager to play, good-natured band out in Dothan, V-8 Death Car spends a lot of time in the city of Montgomery, delivering old fashioned major chord rock and roll, nostalgic drive-in movie era branding, and a slight classic punk vibe, which, all combined, has the odd but understandable effect of landing them in '70s power pop territory. Figuring out which direction they will veer, musically, is one of the best things about discovering new bands, but personally I'm hoping that they give in to this "Teenage Kicks"vibe at which their music hints. V-8 Death Car holds the distinction of being the band most likely to appreciate press given to them, having worked hard in the last few months to get our city's deserved attention. We hope to see more recordings from the band in the future, but they're working on it. For now, you can sample their wares on YouTube.
Reverse Engineer and the Pinebox Sound Label
Ed Kemper Trio veteran Kenny Johnson runs a local record label called Pinebox Sound that hosts several related bands worth checking out including Black Racers, El Chupa Cabras, and Reverse Engineer. Fans of the EK3 will not be surprised by the overarching, maniacal, Brainiac-esque hard-rock style evident on some of these projects, however, Montgomery has a lot of hard rock bands (probably too many) and it's unclear specifically why, other than that our people are angry, which has become obvious nearly to the point of dismissal on the grounds of false dramatics being no less wearing than the false realities against which they rail. That's why its great that the most recent work on Pinebox's Soundcloud page, particularly with Reverse Engineer, show that Johnson has taken a natural, introspective leap to more avant-garde instrumental compositions, ever pushing artistic boundaries. An expansive, nervous, multi-textured improv collaboration featuring diverse local players, Reverse Engineer is crisply recorded and acid-jazzy, the sort of band that would sound perfect between Bitches Brew and Sun Ra listening sessions.
Jeff McLeod and No
An article on Montgomery music would be incomplete without highlighting the prolific Jeff McLeod, who over the course of his career as a musician in this city has put together numerous bands and albums with intelligent, unique, high concepts. These days McLeod pulls double duty as lead singer and guitarist for local hard rock band “No,” while his solo recordings find him pulling a free-handed humanity out of the freshest experimental gear as part of a wizard-like, chaotic, esoteric attack on convention. His albums feature a wide variety of instruments put to use exploring ambient and noise in mostly-instrumental music, and are sometimes augmented by electronics that act as an antithesis to the canned or metronomic sound the word typically conjures. Six of his numerous solo releases can be heard at jeffmcleod.bandcamp.com, and the terrific and terrifying pure essence of negativity manifested as a genius rock trio "No" can be seen playing live, often misunderstood, wherever the loudest local music is to be found. ...And the Lawyers Guitarist Jason Fifield fronts a local favorite: A two-piece indie rock band named ...And the Lawyers. With a signature funky afrobeat guitar sound that favors intriguing jazz chords and uptempo, progressive rhythms, ...And the Lawyers puts on a wonderfully diverse set, some songs highlighting Fifield's acerbic, playful spoken vocals, full of non-sequiturs and humor, others going in a more instrumental, bombastic or pastoral direction, with immaculate clean-channel guitar noodling and a big drum sound. Not to be confused with smooth jazz Tuscaloosa band “The Doctors and the Lawyers,” Fifield's band brings a much-needed homespun weirdness and occasionally comic mischief to the Montgomery scene.