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The constantly evolving Violent Green turns trip-hop, releases a second album and finally goes on a national tour.
BY ALYSSA ISENSTEIN, 243-2122 EXT. 329
It took them six years and two albums, but the members of Violent Green are on their first national tour. From a pay phone in Greensboro, N.C., bassist Wayne Flower details the group's progression from straightforward Seattle rock trio to a more experimental band informed by dub and trip-hop. "We started off as a little more folksy and weird," he says. "It's still pretty much a rock band, but we're doing the samples live now, and it's all going to evolve; that's just the way we are. We like to grow in as many different directions as we can, and the difference between the two records is pretty evident." To guitarist and vocalist Jennifer Olay, the transformation was organic and similar to the changing role of women in rock. "I'm for redefining, for being a woman and defining that on your own terms and not defining it by what language is already there," she says. "That's what I consider to be so powerful about women--the definitions they have of things are so internal and untapped." Olay emerged as a leader on Eros, Violent Green's first album of tightly wound songs that traversed the traditional rock framework with guitar, bass, drums and Olay's eruptive, dark vocals. From the first notes on the recently released follow-up, FromCycles of Heat (Up Records), it's evident that Violent Green has undergone a sea change. The album's hypnotic blend of sampled beats and rock structure announces clearly and calmly the band's new modus operandi. In "Saltwater Spray," for example, Olay sounds like she's trapped in a well. Flower credits drummer Drew Quinlan for creating the underlying, often murky rhythms on Cycles, which he says helped inform Olay's more abstract songwriting. "That's what Drew does--he sits around in his room with a 4-track and makes beats," Flower explains. "And Jenny started to have her slant on it. She has a weirder style. It's more obscure and ambient." Despite the noticeably different sound between Violent Green's two albums, Seattle producer Steve Fisk sat behind the boards for both. Fisk is a stylistic explorer; he's a member of the indie-rock band the Halo Benders, the instrumental rock act Pell Mell and, more recently, the electronic outfit Pigeonhed. "He's the perfect producer for us, because he is an artist as well as a producer," Flower says. "He's like our fourth member when we go into the studio. He's going to produce all our stuff because he adds a lot to it. Especially with the beats, he really textured a lot of it. We're sort of emotional and weird when we get in the studio, and he's good at keeping us focused. He has a good understanding of where we're coming from." Like Fisk, the members of Violent Green took a circuitous route to their modernistic musical homestead. Olay and Flower got their start in two of the Northwest's seminal rock bands: Some Velvet Sidewalk and Treepeople, respectively. Then their interests gradually led them to explore a type of music more similar to that of England's Massive Attack and Portishead than something from the Northwest. "It's not like we're jumping on the hip-hop bandwagon or anything like that, which is how some people might see it," Flower explains. "It's just as sincere as the rock stuff--it's part of who we are." Because Olay's singing and guitar style aren't what you'd call pretty, polished or traditionally "girlie," many reviews of the first album compared Violent Green to the down 'n' dirty Boston blues-rock band Come. The two are more similar in spirit than in sound, but they share an intensity that listeners have picked up on. "Thalia [Zedek, lead singer/guitarist of Come] is the closest representation of the gruff-voiced woman playing rock, but if you listen to a Come record and then a Violent Green record, you'll hear no similarities," Flower says. What Olay does in Violent Green is release her demons--blood, guts and all. Until recently, this sort of tough routine was reserved for boys, but thanks to women like Zedek and Polly Jean Harvey, Olay can feel more comfortable pulling it off. "It doesn't affect me anymore," she says, "but it was really hard in the beginning." |
