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Interview with Whatever Brains on Dirty Pop

Take a powerful hook, drench it in some distortion and effects, and you can come up with something that’s as catchy as it is powerful.

Don’t believe it? Meet Raleigh’s Whatever Brains. Melding a well crafted wall of fuzz to traditionally sweeter structures, the Brains have a striking sound.

Saturday you’ll have the chance to see for yourself as the band plays Chapel Hill’s Nightlight. Diversions Editor Jordan Lawrence caught the band for a quick chat about what it takes to dirty up a good pop song.

SEE THE SHOW


Time: 10 p.m. Saturday
Location: Nightlight
405 W. Rosemary St.
Info: nightlightclub.com

 

Diversions: How did you guys get together?

Evan Williams (drums): Me and Rich (Ivey, vocals/guitar) had bands going on at the time. We got together and started doing some demos, messing around, having fun.

William Evans (vocals/guitar): What was the name of that band?

EW: (Laughs) Tight Dogs From The Future.

RI: It was a metal band. Two-piece.

EW: Then we started doing Whatever Brains stuff. Will was moving back from Pittsburgh, and we got him to start playing with us. Both of me and Rich’s bands dissolved.

Dive: Having only been around for a little over year, you guys have made a pretty good margin success. How has that been?

RI: I don’t know if I’d say success.

Dive: If you’ve only been together for a year, and Pitchfork.com has mentioned your name, that’s pretty successful.

RI: We just wanted to be active. We’ve been in enough bands that d--ked around and didn’t really do much, so we just wanted to actually be in a band that played a lot and recorded and actually put out records. That was kind of one of the main goals, was just like, “Alright, get these songs down, record them as soon as we can, and put them out.”

Dive: What effect do you think that quick mentality has on the music?

RI: It’s kind of the old school approach of get together, write some songs and put out some 7-inches before you bother to take on the huge task of recording an LP. I think we felt like we’d be more active, and we would sort of keep momentum going if we just sort of started just releasing 7-inches and tapes and a CD-R.

WE: Yeah, because those are definitely achievable goals.

Also, just from a recording standpoint, each 7-inch has come out different. If we did twelve songs at once then all those twelve songs would sound the same, but if we can do baby steps then we can tweak stuff as we go along and reflect our revolving sound. Or whatever.

Matt Watson (bass): (Laughs) Like a journal.

Dive: When you guys were first introduced to me, you were sold as a hardcore band, but that doesn’t really cover it. What is it you guys are trying to do?

RI: Writing rock songs and trying to make the new ones better than the last, have them vary enough from song to song.

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EW: Do interesting things and not a rut.

WE: I think if the tones were different and the volumes were different, they could all come off as straight pop songs. There’s pop songs and structures, and there are hooks and melodies and stuff. But then we do our best to sort of dirty them up and make them awesome. Make them psych or punk or loud or nasty. Make them interesting and not like polished commodity stuff.

Dive: Where does the desire to ‘dirty them up’ come from?

RI: We like dirty music.

WE: We all started in a punk setting as teenagers.

RI: We’re not good enough to be clean all the way. (Laughs) We can hide our amateurism in noise and reverb.

EW: Although I hit it pretty head on.

Dive: Put another way, what do you think that ‘dirty’ aspect brings to the songs?

WE: Sonically, there’s a lot of texture you can slide in. From an engineering standpoint you can slip a lot more things into a song if it’s not just clean and obvious what’s going on.

RI: If you lube it up. (Laughs)

MW: And if it’s not good, you can pull it out.

WE: And no one knows. It’s a secret, something you can hide.

Contact the Diversions Editor

at dive@unc.edu.

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