All You Can Eat

There’s really no such thing as a dinner mint,” says Peter Carnovale, drummer of the Denver band the Dinnermints. “There’s an after-dinner mint. What we’re saying is you can have your mint for dinner. Skip the after-dinner mint and just go straight to the dinner mint.”

As aficionados of sugar-frosted entrees well know, there’s nothing inherently sinful about indulging in the occasional dessert for dinner. The Dinnermints — composed of Carnovale, guitarist/vocalist Sara Mesmer and Doo Crowder on bass — speckle edgy, hook-driven punk rock with sweet spots, ending up with the audio analogue of a sugar-encrusted lemon wedge. Equally accessible and aggressive, the trio’s sound neatly interlocks guitar crunches and driving rhythms with lively vocals and elusive lyrics; the result is a product that’s strong enough to be a meal in itself.

The Dinnermints’ brand of honey-dipped punk emerged from what could be classified as its antithesis: the decidedly difficult duo the Twins. Musically remote from rock, Carnovale initially envisioned the Twins as “conceptual artists working in the medium of sound.” Comprising Carnovale and Mesmer, the Twins’ music — unlike that of the Dinnermints — was never geared toward everyday consumption.

“Basically, the idea behind the Twins was unavailability, inaccessibility and invisibility,” Mesmer explains. To this end, the Twins’ first show, on St. Patrick’s Day 2000, simultaneously bewildered and broadened the cultural horizons of a house-party audience feasting on corned beef, cabbage and intoxicants. Encased in a translucent fabric corral as a means of perpetuating the duo’s tenet of invisibility, Mesmer and Carnovale melded samples from records with dead copyrights, abstract devil-and-angel costumes, and Kabuki-influenced chanting into a production that was anything but pop. The reaction was favorable, albeit a bit confused. After the show was over, “people were asking, ‘When is the curtain going to open?'” Carnovale says, laughing.

“We try to do Twins performances seasonally, one per season,” says Mesmer. Thus, following the Twins’ St. Patty’s debut, Carnovale and Mesmer organized a June show at the multicolored amphitheater in Boulder’s Central Park. “After the first [Twins show], we decided we needed a joke opening act, which would be us playing punk rock,” Mesmer recalls. “So that’s when the Dinnermints were born.”

While the Twins provided the spark that got the Dinnermints going, don’t look for a repeat of last June’s double bill anytime soon. “We had to haul so much equipment…it was insane,” says Mesmer. “We were so sore afterward. Never again will the Twins and the Dinnermints play together.” Because of those aches and pains (and the favorable audience reaction to their sugary, “one-chord” rock), the band “became its own entity,” free from the Twins’ anti-pop ethos.

Described on their first flyer as “pop trash,” the Dinnermints’ sound evolved from a melting pot of far-flung influences: obsession over a half-century-old Kabuki record, Carnovale’s early-’90s mini-stint in a Pittsburgh hardcore band, and Mesmer’s former profession as a licensed tarot card reader in New Orleans, to name a few. Says Carnovale of studying the rhythms of the Kabuki record in question, “That’s how I got started with the drums, because I didn’t play.” Didn’t play, that is, with the exception of the aforementioned experience with an outfit called Slag. After a dormitory inferno rendered him homeless while attending the University of Pittsburgh in 1992, Carnovale received an intriguing offer. “I had really long hair, and these skinhead guys said, ‘Hey, if you don’t cut your hair, you can live here and be the drummer in our band.’ There was a guy in the band named Handcuffs. That’s the only time I played drums [before the Dinnermints].”

Mesmer hails from the same small town in Pennsylvania — Warren — as Carnovale, where the longtime friends “both had bad reputations” as teenagers in the late ’80s. (At that time, their parents were desperate to keep the black-garbed, Smiths-obsessed duo apart. “We were forbidden to speak to each other,” Mesmer recalls, “but we were friends anyway.”) Prior to Y2K, Mesmer’s musical resumé consisted of a decade studying classical cello (“I was never that into it, because I don’t like playing by myself,” she notes) and a more recent hobby — the acoustic guitar. She brings a bright-eyed, mischief-spiked charisma to her role as frontwoman, a style perhaps enhanced by her days hawking prophecy to tourists in the French Quarter in the early ’90s.

Following their Boulder-bandshell birth as a musical duo, the Dinnermints gigged as a two-piece for several months, drawing the occasional “Where’s your bass player?” heckle. Early on, however, they set their sights on bassist Crowder. After seeing him play a solo set at an open stage at the Mercury Cafe last July, Mesmer and Carnovale approached Crowder to anchor the Dinnermints’ underbelly, but he “didn’t get with us right away,” Mesmer notes.

“I remember seeing you guys that night. Your faces were all lit up,” says Crowder, who has honed his musical chops as both a singer-songwriter and a member of several bands over the past decade. “It was awesome, because it’s just a good feeling when someone is into what you’re doing at an open mike instead of talking.” Regardless of their interest, the Dinnermints remained a duo for four more months, because, says Crowder, “I was more into doing my own thing.” It didn’t help that they lost Crowder’s phone number, only luring him into the fold last October after they bumped into him buying underwear at Kmart. “We got Doo when he was at rock bottom,” jokes Mesmer.

And you can’t go anywhere from rock bottom but up, which seems to be the case here. The Dinnermints are riding a nice trajectory, playing with increasing frequency and developing visible chemistry as a trio. The hook-laden songs, underpinned by lyrics that are at once cryptic and animated, have taken on fresh layers of personality and musical depth since the Dinnermints completed the cycle that ran from concept-art wisecrack to real band.

The original songwriting push was that well-worn punk-rock approach: Pen songs that are easy to play. “I started writing these punk-rock songs, very simple, two or three chords, which was the idea, because we figured one chord was one too many,” says Mesmer. (“We don’t go by that anymore,” interjects Crowder with a smirk. “I had to put an end to that. We’re using more than one chord.”)

In this context, simple is not necessarily synonymous with generic. Despite the Dinnermints’ uncomplicated beginnings, it’s not so easy to pin down their sound, which has elicited comparisons to acts as disparate as the Kinks and Bongwater. Like the latter’s Ann Magnuson, Mesmer often uses her dreams as a songwriting springboard, jotting down notes in a bedside journal while half awake.

“All of the songs are vague enough that you can read between the lines. I don’t think we really commit to any one thing with the songs,” says Carnovale, highlighting one common lyrical thread.

Take “Ride Designer,” for instance. Inspired by a trip to Lakeside Amusement Park, the song subjectively wavers between the literal and the figurative: “You said you knew the ride designer/Avoid the coaster, try the winder/Jump through a burning ring of fire/Race you in a bumper car to the wire.”

Hammering home Carnovale’s point about ambiguity, Crowder ponders the song’s conception. “To me, [‘Ride Designer’] is a love song: She fell in love with this guy, she associated love with him, like he was somehow involved in the ride of love itself,” he says. Crowder’s interpretation draws snickers from both Carnovale and Mesmer. It’s best, perhaps, to not take these songs too earnestly.

Not every Dinnermints song was born in dreamland or Lakeside, however. “‘Superdiva,'” says Mesmer, is “about the ’80s. It’s about Madonna in black lace, jelly bracelets.” “Star Pats (Miss Radio)” was inspired by Mesmer’s six-year-old daughter Saskia’s chirping of a line from a Shirley Temple movie (“Saskia basically wrote it,” says Carnovale). Their only cover, ’60s chanteuse Vikki Carr’s “Lazy Day,” converts lounge shmaltz into barroom punk, while “Earth So Dark” is an ode to despair that comes off as much less depressing than its dark lyrics should allow. “If [songs] were slow or sad, we didn’t want them in our set,” says Mesmer. “We want an upbeat set.”

“I think our sound picked us as much as we picked it,” she adds. “We didn’t have intentions.”

Intentionally or not, Mesmer’s baby-doll voice meshes nicely with her bear-trap guitar licks, Crowder’s fluid bass lines and Carnovale’s fierce rhythms; the result falls somewhere in between hooky punk and anthem pop. “I think the pop element sort of came from me,” says Carnovale. “We wrote about fifteen songs that we absolutely couldn’t do,” simply because they were too lightweight to mesh with Mesmer’s cynicism.

“When I sing a pop song, I sing it with a satirical attitude,” she says, “instead of just being like, ‘I’m playing ’60s music…I’m brainwashed.'” Looking to free herself from the sarcasm that took hold of her larynx when she sang pure fluff, Mesmer “just kept writing punk-rock songs. I don’t even think we try to balance [punk and pop]. People started booking us with punk lineups, and we were like, ‘I guess we’re playing punk.'”

“She’s the punk rocker and I’m just the punk,” says Carnovale. “Somebody said that once.” And where, then, does Crowder fit in? “I’m a loser,” he jokes. “I’m the bass player.” Losers and punks aside, says Mesmer, “Doo’s so good, we like to rely on him now.” Trumping the “Where’s your bass?” hecklers, Crowder’s fluid style has helped crack the shackles that initially bound the two-piece Dinnermints. While he’s found himself a good niche in the band, he continues to tighten his acoustic solo act, which he sees as a more personal outlet. “I don’t want to sing confessional love songs with these guys,” he says.

As for that other Dinnermints-related side project, Mesmer and Carnovale’s Twins, the “unavailability, inaccessibility and invisibility” platform continues to reign. Their forthcoming seasonal performances may well be private — meaning only Carnovale and Mesmer will be in attendance. They might also involve video installations at local art galleries, following the pattern established by the two Twins engagements staged since last June. An album was also produced last year, but, per the duo’s performance ideology, it is unavailable to the public.

On the flip side philosophically, the Dinnermints have in-the-works recording projects that will be available to the public: The band hit the studio in early January to record its half of a single — another local punk trio, the Otter Pops, contributes the second half — that it plans to release as soon as possible. They are also aiming to put together a circus-themed EP, Carnival, in the coming months.

Encouraged by their progress and a local rock landscape that they view as fertile and friendly, the Dinnermints appear rather pleased with their inertia upon entering 2001. Explains Carnovale: “We keep moving in the right direction: forward.”