Skip to main contentI guess it's a dumb question. But it strikes me while sharing afternoon drinks with Portland instrumental outfit Talkdemonic's Kevin O'Connor and Lisa Molinaro that all the boy-girl duos I can think of are romantically involved (Mates of State), siblings (the Fiery Furnaces) or some willfully confusing amalgamation of the two (the White Stripes). Molinaro and O'Connor are none of the above. So I go ahead and ask: "What's your relationship like?" Kevin, slouched in a bar booth and looking uncharacteristically gruff with his post-beard handlebar mustache, giggles and darts his eyes toward Molinaro, who shoves him sharply, revealing the alto clef tattoo on the inside of her inner right arm. "We're pretty immune to seeing each other naked," he laughs. "Me seeing Kevin naked, let's clarify that," she retorts. Question answered: Talkdemonic may as well be a sibling band.
In 2002, Molinaro saw O'Connor playing with Sam Schauer's Modernstate, and left impressed. She approached him later at while shopping at 2nd Avenue Records, and suggested the two play music together. "She was just hitting on me," O'Connor kids with a cool grin, eliciting eye-rolling and a hearty laugh from his viola player. This doesn't seem like the kind of introduction that would lend itself to the pair's intense musical connection, but both were recent transplants—Molinaro from Florida, where she trained as a classical musician but lusted after punk and hardcore; O'Connor from Pullman, Wash., where he played in a handful of college bands. Though O'Connor originally intended Talkdemonic to be a solo project, things with Molinaro just clicked. Clicked being an understatement. Her accompaniment brought a dramatic, organic quality to O'Connor's laptop/synth/drumkit creations, while bringing her dual lives as a classically trained viola player and punk rocker into perfect harmony.
That was two albums, a 2005 WW Best New Band victory and a handful of national tours ago. Talkdemonic is now an institution in Portland and somewhat of a curiosity when opening tours with the likes of the National and the Walkmen. "That's the best," O'Connor says of his band's shocked-and-awed national audiences. And while onlookers at Talkdemonic's four-week-long headlining tour in support of Eyes at Half Mast (to be released by Arena Rock Tuesday) will be a bit more educated than previous crowds, the new record is a whole new shocker.
It has taken three Talkdemonic albums to lay the right balance of the elegant and the explosive on tape. Previous albums have utilized loops alongside live instrumentation to construct impressive scene-setting vignettes, but what the recordings (2004's Mutiny Sunshine and 2006's Beat Romantic) missed was the aggressive onstage interplay between the two players. "Over the years, it has gotten more and more intense," O'Connor says of the duo's live shows. "And the goal of the record is to try and reflect a bit more of that…to not just be what some people call mood music."
On that and every other conceivable front, Eyes at Half Mast is a success. The album has a sense of large-scale movement—supported right down to the globetrotting track titles: "A Hundred Faces in the Neon Forest," "Dust and Heat," "March Movement"—that leaves listeners crafting their own narratives for each song. A whole orchestra of Molinaros sweeps up from some prehistoric sea while O'Connor's shifting drum patterns stick and move like a prize fighter, utilizing various percussion styles to tell histories of ancient civilizations where he was once content to (however brilliantly) reinterpret rock and hip-hop beats.
If these descriptions lack comparative musical wayposts, it's because the 2 1/2 years Talkdemonic spent self-recording Eyes at Half Mast led it into uncharted waters. "Shallow Doldrums" features a one-man rhythm section so soaked with distortion that one is tempted to check the speaker wires, if only until Molinaro's crisp, dual violas flutter above all the shooting sparks. And on "Black Wood Crimson" it's the drum kit that shimmers cleanly while fuzz-mutated strings argue with classical ones. These are shocking exchanges that rarely happen outside Talkdemonic's jurisdiction. Delicate, refined arrangements aren't supposed to meet bombastic beats unless it's in a back-alley fight to the death.
The entire journey happens in less than 37 minutes, with most tracks clocking in around 2 1/2 minutes—more proof that, for all Talkdemonic's virtuosity, the tight-knit friends' sensibilities are more punk than pontifical. "If it gets too long and epic, it's post-rock," O'Connor offers, now engaged and upright. "And post-rock is boring."
WWeek 2015
