In an attempt to boost the less-than-luxuriant sales of Freak*On*Ica, Geffen put Girls Against Boys on tour with Garbage in 1998. "That tour was, uh, interesting," says McCloud. "We had done so much touring with the band, but this was very different. In some places, honestly, people had never seen anything like us before. They were literally freaking out, like, 'What the fuck is this? What is this noise fucking crap?' The biggest problem was playing in seated auditoriums, especially some of them that were kind of half full, kind of sparse in attendance. But I had a 200-foot mike cable, so I'd get down off the stage and just go fucking nuts and start jumping all over the place. People went fucking bananas. They didn't know what the fuck to do. They had never seen a person in a band come down off the stage and sit behind them in the auditorium having a cigarette. And singing while doing it! It was great."
After the letdown of Freak*On*Ica and the buyout of Geffen Records in 1999, Girls Against Boys began to get the cold shoulder from its label. "We were stuck in this weird limbo," says McCloud. "We were stuck in a contract with them, but they wouldn't let us put out another album. They dropped just about all the other bands on the label, but for some reason, they didn't drop us. Even if you have 'full creative control' in your contract, you don't really have full creative control unless you want to sue the company for it. It was a frustrating few years."
War of the sexy: Girls Against Boys.
Details
With Radio 4
8 p.m. Tuesday, September 10
Bluebird Theater, 3317 East Colfax Avenue
$10, 303-322-2308
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A reprieve was finally granted last year when Geffen let the band's contract expire without renewal.
"Basically, when we finally extricated ourselves from the situation we'd been in, our frame of mind was pretty no-nonsense," says McCloud. "We were like, 'You know, this is fucking bullshit. We can't be a band and not make stuff. We have to make a record right now. We're not going to sit around and deliberate about a lot of issues. We're just going to make music.'"
And make music they did. You Can't Fight What You Can't See, the first new record in four years, is a strong contender for the best yet. Allied with the flourishing independent label Jade Tree, the band is at a point where it has nothing to lose: this hungry desperation, along with a certain hard-knock wisdom, is the driving force behind the new album.
"We just wanted to make a more stripped-down rock record," McCloud says. "We decided to make the record with Ted Nicely, who had recorded a lot of our older stuff. We tried to be incredibly decisive. In the early years of the band, it wasn't until we were in the studio that we discovered exactly what it was that everyone else had been playing. Now we have a better idea of when to make things more linear or when to add more chaos."
Indeed, there is no fractal geometry at work on You Can't Fight What You Can't See. Arrangements are whittled down to elemental essence; hooks are chiseled out of one-chord granite blocks. One lesson that the major-label experience seems to have drilled into the players is the power of the pop song. "Basstation," the explosive opening track, rushes through the bloodstream like the Birthday Party topped with chocolate frosting. During the song's anthemic chorus, McCloud offishly observes, "In the context of no context/Everything cool is nothing new." "All the Rage," besides appropriating Tom Jones's "What's New Pussycat," also references the wrenching thrust of Fugazi's "Two Beats Off." Throughout the album, the pop components of bands like New Order, the Psychedelic Furs and even Sugar have been hardwired to GvsB's trebly, astringent, industrial attack.
"I don't think we've ever been opposed to having some pop aspect to our stuff," says McCloud. "It's really fun and liberating in a way, though in my mind, the more pop things get, the more I want the lyrics not to reflect that. The catchier a song is, the more I want to sing about something really fucked up. We just needed to have this new realm to work in, this new element. We're not going to go back and do Venus Luxure again. I mean, we wouldn't be able to. Things change."
As things change, goes the saying, so they remain the same. In the last ten years since the players in Girls Against Boys released their first EP, the innovations they pioneered in the field of punk rock have become accepted, commonplace, taken for granted. Keyboards, experimentation and overt sensuality are not only no longer verboten at a punk show, they're actually kind of cool. Hundreds of bands, among them Brainiac, Milemarker, Refused and Radio 4, have all thrived in a weird electro/post-punk territory that didn't even exist when Girls Against Boys first pounded angular hardcore through a battered Roland synth.
"After being inspired by all the music we were listening to back like ten or fifteen years ago, it's re-inspiring to see younger bands dealing with the same kinds of sonic issues and coming up with something different," says McCloud. It's kind of validating in a way. It's good to see people continuing the sonic chaos."
