When the Pacific Northwest's underground punk music became the Western world's mainstream rock, one of the few bands to dig deeper into its bunker was Kicking Giant. The duo--guitarist/vocalist Tae Won Yu and drummer/vocalist Rachel Carns--became cult favorites in this region, playing raw, raucous live shows at venues like the X-Ray Cafe in Portland and the Capitol Theater in its hometown, Olympia, throughout the early '90s. After the release of 1994's Alien i.D., the two performed a few times and called it quits. The band's last show appears as a lengthy bonus track on Yu's first solo record, the recently released Nature Morte (Fortune4), his first new album in three years. Though Nature Morte carries the subtitle "Kicking Giant Is Dead," Yu explains, from his home in Olympia, that it's simply signaling a new chapter rather than the demise of an old band. "It means the beginning of something different," he says. Although Yu says he misses playing with Carns, who has gone on to form another punk-pop duo, the Need, he says the split worked out for the best. "It's totally obvious," he says, "because of how great the Need is, and because I'm very happy with what I'm doing. I don't think I could have played the songs [on Nature Morte] as Kicking Giant." Though the KG is Yu's solo project, he gets help from a few friends on the album, including Carns and his former benefactor at K Records, Calvin Johnson. Don't look for their names on the CD, however; the only information that Nature Morte concedes is the title of the album and the "band" name. No song titles. No production credits. No thank-you's. "This was sort of an experiment," Yu says of the album. "I didn't think it would be good enough. I didn't want to have any commitments attached to it or any promises. I'm not really concerned about pushing it on anybody, and to me this is making something available to whoever is curious. If they don't want it, that is too bad, but it's also fine." Yu's laid-back attitude extends to the way he recorded the album. The nine songs, put to tape in the bedroom of his Olympia home, weren't intended for release. Yet Nature Morte shows off Yu's growth as a musician beyond the punky sounds of Kicking Giant. On a number of songs--remember, there are no song titles--Yu invokes funky blasts of guitar and bass, and makes forays into minimalist techno. He's clearly pleased by the way Nature Morte turned out."I'm most happy with this one because the nature of how it was produced was so casual," he says. "I spent no money on it, and most of those tracks were recorded during practice sessions." Ramshackle late-'80s indie-band influences like Beat Happening and Galaxie 500 pop up in Yu's early work, but his newer stuff displays a wider sphere of influence. He says he rarely goes out to see bands anymore, and his latest source of inspiration is the bread and butter of AM radio: top-10 hits from the '50s, '60s and '70s. "It's that thing about getting old," he says. "Sometimes you have to go backwards to discover something new." From the very beginning, Yu says, his style and basic attitude about life have been informed by punk rock--the type of punk rock that says you don't have to play by the rules. The punk rock that encourages a willingness to do something original and, as he puts it, "dare to suck." Now 29 and working at Evergreen College, Yu has found that his definition of punk rock doesn't match that of his younger colleagues at the school. "It took me a while to learn that when they were saying 'punk rock,' we were speaking different languages," he says. "They think I'm some guy who after work puts on his leather jacket with studs and goes to the mall and sneers, 'Fuck the queen!'" |
