Somewhere on the border of Cleveland and Lakewood, between a car wash and a gay bar on West 117 Street, the four members of Coffinberry are making lush, lo-fi records. Drummer and singer Tony Cross gives a tour of the house they share, retreating to the basement studios where he navigates amps, guitars and drums to pull the blanket off the black Tascam 488 Cassette Portastudio they used to record their brand new acoustic-roots album, simply titled Coffinberry.
“It wasn’t necessarily the aesthetic of the recording format,” says
Cross of the sound of the new album. “It was what was present at the
time. We kind of set out to make a rock record with [2007’s] God Dam
Dogs. With this one, we wanted to try something new. Plus, we write
on acoustic guitars so much, it just made sense to go downstairs.”
For more than a year, the quartet has escaped to its cellar studios
to write, record and rework somewhere between 40 and 50 new songs,
resulting in the 14 tracks on Coffinberry. The set is a
fascinating bunch of roots-rockers, blue-collar folk stories and
fuck-you love ballads, filtered and distorted to morph from acid folk
into classic rock. Each song is a loutish and lonely character, voiced
by one of the two Cross brothers, whose gravely vocals sound somewhere
between Ian Brown and Bon Scott, trading smokes and scotch.
“Live, I do most of the singing,” says Nick Cross. “On the records,
it’s split between us. But we probably only do about half of these
songs live. When we play live, we concentrate on rock.”
The new album has a rawer, rootsier sound than the band’s
rustbelt-rock debut God Dam Dogs, whose sheen was perfected at
Waterloo Studios by Todd Tobias, the guy who recorded the last three
Guided by Voices albums. “But I think for an eight-track cassette
recording, it sounds amazingly polished,” says bassist Patrick
O’Conner.
The album also captures more of the band’s warm personality. The set
is full of soulful and melodic tracks that incorporate piano,
harmonica, violin and acoustic six-strings. Hardly anything is over
three minutes long. The album barely clocks in at 37 minutes, which is
reminiscent of their notoriously short live sets.
“We try to play as fast as we can, and we try to get off as fast as
we can,” says guitarist Tony Janicek. “If you liked it, you’ll want
more, and if you didn’t like it, well, it was only 20 minutes
anyway.”
Since 2002, Coffinberry have opened up for acts like the French
Kicks, the Rogers Sisters and the Walkmen. Now, the band is on Mike
Uva’s Cleveland-based Collectible Escalators label, home to Machine Go
Boom, Good Morning Valentine and Short Hand. When the new album is
released this weekend, it will be available in an inexpensive $10 vinyl
format with a digital download.
If they’re not making retro-style home masterpieces, the band is
typically fiddling around in its shanty mansion filled with old
instruments, piles of books, newspapers and an impressive vinyl record
collection, all distractions until they record their next song in the
sanctuary of their makeshift studio.
“I think we want to get back to playing more rocking stuff,” says
Tony Cross. “The next record will probably be more of a live thing. We
really only did that with [our EP] From Now on Now. Everything
else has been kind of layered. We want to write songs with just four
instruments. We’ll clear all this shit out and hopefully have a much
nicer piece of equipment to record on. We’ve spent two years basically
layering and building songs. It’ll be nice to do one take, and, hey
— now we’re done.”
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2009.