The Mint Chicks, Monday August 11

[August 6th, 2008]

The Mint Chicks, like many other members of Portland’s thriving music scene, have origins outside Portland. Way outside—about 7,000 miles away in beautiful Auckland, New Zealand. But unlike most other bands in this fair city, the Mint Chicks came to Portland to escape success.

The band’s 2007 release, Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!—a tricked-out schizo-pop epic that’s one part Blood Brothers, one part Unicorns—was a national success for the Chicks. The band—all dudes: brothers Ruban (guitar, vocals) and Kody Nielson (keyboards, vocals), with Paul Roper on the drums—cleaned up at last year’s New Zealand Music Awards, winning Album of the Year, Best Group, Video, Rock Album and Album Cover (Ruban does all the group’s artwork). For a DIY-minded electro-punk band that had already accomplished its only real goal (the Chicks signed to legendary N.Z. punk label Flying Nun Records back in 2002), the swelling crowds and national celebrity status seemed a bit much.

“I guess we kind of knew when things started happening that it wasn’t really going to suit us,” Ruban Nielson says of the band’s New Zealand success. The Mint Chicks announced their plans to leave the island for America while still on the New Zealand Music Awards’ red carpet. “We’re not going [to the U.S.] to make it big,” Ruban told an interviewer. “Making it big is—who cares?”

The Nielsons—dual citizens thanks to their Hawaiian-born mother—visited family in Portland while on tour in 2007 and “didn’t want to leave,” making PDX the band’s natural option for a new home. “We didn’t realize that it was kind of a thing—that bands were moving to Portland,” Ruban says with a trace of guilt. He says he tries not to talk Stumptown up when the New Zealand press asks about the Chicks’ new home. “I don’t want to be part of the problem. I want to contribute something positive.”

Given the Mint Chicks’ DIY aesthetic (the band is recording its new album, Screens, and accompanying animated videos/album art at its new Southeast Portland home) and slightly scary live antics (the Chicks once snuck a chainsaw into a festival gig and used it to chop a corporate sponsor’s sign in half; another time they wore masks and opened for themselves as “Pussy Glitch”), it’s kind of hard to imagine these Kiwis being a problem.

Ruban says the band is too popular to play basement shows back home, and it’s one of the things the band looks forward to delving into here. If anything, it’s New Zealanders who have a problem with the Chicks leaving for the States. “People are quite negative about America in New Zealand at the moment,” Ruban says. “I don’t think people over there really understand the scope of this country.” But Nielson, who cites Portland punk legends the Wipers as a personal obsession, laughs off the criticism. “Even if America descended into a totally fascist state, I’d still be into the place where all the music I love comes from.”