It could be so easy for me to begin this article with lots of nautical-related puns-how June of 44 take the visual aesthetic of seagoing and incorporate it into their music (you know-the riffs rise and crash upon the shore with more force than a tidal wave). But it's corny and overused. Besides, they're sick of all that anyway... "It's awful," vocalist and guitarist Jeff Mueller laughs. "It's one of the most depressing things in the world, but I think it's so funny.
"A lot of people will end up writing about the artwork before they write about the music, because they don't really listen to the whole record. So they'll have some nautical thematic, visually, that they can expound on. It's an easy thing."
Easy indeed, especially with June of 44 record titles like "Engine Takes To Water", "Tropics and Meridians", and "The Anatomy of Sharks". And Jeff agrees. "I think we kind of set ourselves up for it with our first three records having boats all over them and having some of the lyrics be about boats. That was mainly due to visual art and trying to incorporate things I do on my own.
"That's what is so great about our latest release ["Four Great Points"], that there are no nautical references at all...The things that people have said to me about it or the things I've read about it, they either say 'June of 44 evading the nautical theme finally' or they don't even talk about the visual nature of the record at all which is kind of nice. Maybe we'll have a picture disc with a huge ship on it for the next record."
"NO!," he pleads emphatically.
Let's move on to the music then, shall we? Without any indication of a doubt,
"Four Great Points," is by far, the band's strongest effort to date.
They've infused new elements into their already dynamic rock
sound-they've incorporated a dub-like feel into the mix and have
experimented too, utilizing a typewriter's working keys to play the
role of an instrument in "Air #17", the album's closer. "When the
song was composed," Jeff explains, "Doug [Scharin, drummer] was like,
'It'd be really cool if there was a typewriter in there.' ... It wasn't a very composed thing, it was like,
'Okay, play the typewriter tape. Okay, mix it into the
music."
It sounds like June of 44 work very democratically. "A lot of strange things like that happen and we end up recording them because no one tries to control the mood or the energy of the recording. We just let things happen. So, if somebody has an idea, we try to work it."
I suppose it would be difficult to maintain a domineering environment when the bandmembers are scattered across the eastern half of the US. Sean Meadows, guitarist and vocalist, resides in Baltimore, Fred Erskine, bassist/trumpeter, lives in DC, and Scharin recently relocated to Chicago from New York. And Jeff himself is planning on transplanting to Philadelphia. "For the longest time I, not in a controlling way, was the one calling people the most... As things have gone on and we've worked more and more together, everybody's got responsibilities now and everybody's working hard to try and make, in terms of schedules and the distances between us, everybody's trying to make sure we understand and have a full acknowledgment of what are plans are." But surely it must be difficult working in two bands then?
"I don't really, in terms of myself,
work with that many people. I work with June of 44 and I work with
Shipping News. Jason [Noble, bassist and Rodan bandmate] and Kyle
[Crabtree, drummer] both live in Louisville and Doug lives in Chicago
now. In terms of the physical geography, it's getting smaller and
smaller...[But] it's not that complicated. It's just a matter of
calling someone and saying, 'Okay, we've all agreed, we'll meet here
on this day." And everyone shows up there and that's what they do for
three weeks or three months."
Mueller should feel lucky that he's found an assortment of very
cooperative band mates. "It's strange. It's one of the luckiest
things I think I have right now, how fortunate I am to get along as
well as I do with the people I work with. Just based on June of 44,
in terms of four people, Doug, Fred, and Sean didn't know each other
at all until we started practicing. And now we're really good
friends. But at first, I was the single common thread between those
kids. And now it's this family kind of thing and everybody's just
getting along with each other really well. And with Shipping News,
[Jason and I] didn't really know Kyle so well. We just started
playing music together and it's good."
For Shipping News, Jason and Jeff originally reconvened to score some music for NPR's "This American Life." After the demise of Rodan, "Jason and I hung out constantly, but we didn't pick up guitars or basses or drums or anything with each other until this thing happened last March. So that was the precursor." And the collaboration between Jeff and Jason has prompted reminiscences about the underground heroes known as Rodan. "There's two different types of talk about it. There's talk that's reverent and that's strange to me. But the talk that's 'I like all your other projects as well' is what's nice. Some people I'll talk to really can't stand June of 44 or Shipping News or Rachel's or anything that's spawned from Rodan. They set up this weird expectational thing, like they expected great things from us and we're not about that at all....So when people talk about Rodan to me sometimes it's kind of sad, it's like 'Come on, get over it, this is what we're doing.'
"To me, I didn't really have any expectations. I never set up expectations for anything I do. I just really enjoy the process of working with other people and seeing what happens. So it's always really strange to me when a record happens, and someone buys a record, and someone likes the record they bought that you made. It still seems strange to me."
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