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[Cellars]

Getting a leg up
Mistle Thrush and the 360’s
BY BRETT MILANO

"You have great legs. Do you work out?"

This ridiculous question, as posed to lead singer Valerie Forgione, proved an important turning point for Mistle Thrush. It caught the band at a loaded point in their career: about three years ago, when they were secretly aligned to a major label (their last album, Super Refraction, came out on Egg, a "ghost indie" imprint that was quietly financed by Elektra). At that point new metal hadn’t taken over the radio yet, and there was still hope that a cerebral/ethereal pop band — especially one whose frontwoman has great legs — might cross over to the big time. Executives were sniffing around the band, and hints were dropped about moving them, or at least Forgione, up to Elektra proper and giving the big push. The turning point came when they played a showcase gig in New York and a high-powered manager, whose name they swear they’ve forgotten, greeted Forgione with the deadly utterance.

"I just walked away from him," she recalls over lunch at Allston’s Sunset Grill. Thus ended Mistle Thrush’s major-label career, along with any thoughts of Forgione’s dropping the band and going for the brass ring. "I came to realize that they were trying to sell me off [as a soloist] and make a boatload of money. But we all make choices in life, and I choose to work with these guys." She means drummer Todd Demma across the table and guitarist Scott Patalano and bassist Matt Klain in absentia. "Maybe there’s a certain insecurity on my part: going on stage is too much like getting naked, and I couldn’t do it without them to back me up. But I’m also one of those pretentious people who looks at music as an art and feels it should be honest and not prefabricated. I don’t need anyone to tell me how to act and how to dress."

"I do enough of that already," Demma adds.

In a perfect world, Forgione’s walking-away gesture would be the start of a glorious future for Mistle Thrush: they’d come back to Boston, make a fine album, and succeed on their own terms. In reality, things were a bit more complicated. They were still under contract to Egg — which they say let their last album die on the vine — for another four releases and had to spend everything they’d gotten from a recent publishing deal to buy their way out. "It destroyed us, financially and emotionally," Forgione explains. Two band members quit in frustration, leaving Patalano as the sole guitarist and making the bass slot a revolving-door position before Klain stepped in (during December 1998 at T.T. the Bear’s Place, three bassists — including Forgione, who freely admits she can’t play bass — switched off during one show). Meanwhile the band gigged so infrequently that many fans thought they’d broken up; Forgione was more visible for playing Mary Magdalene — a nicely understated performance at that — in Boston Rock Opera’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

But now they’re back full-time, and they did make the fine album: Drunk with You, which is just out on Ecstatic. The record-release party — an outstanding bill with the Pills, Buttergirls 8, and Sheila Divine singer Aaron Perrino — takes place this Friday (the 18th) at the Middle East. And now comes success on their own terms. Well, maybe.

"I’m scared to death," Forgione confesses. "I don’t know what the heck people are going to think of this record. When you change direction as drastically as we have, you hope that your audience is going to grow along with you. But I’m worried about disappointing anybody." Demma adds, "Everybody has preconceived ideas of what we sound like, and I think this album is really going to challenge that."

In fact, it’s more of a logical next step than a drastic about-face. In their early days Mistle Thrush were something of a goth band — a distinction they always fought, but now they’ll admit that the shoe fit. "We never thought of ourselves as being ultra-ethereal," Forgione says. "But if you go back and listen, we totally were." Their pop leanings started to emerge on the Egg disc, and on Drunk with You they come out in earnest. They’ve toned down the reverb, tightened up the songwriting, and focused on what works: airy vocals and loud guitars. Now that they’re down to one guitarist, they’ve wound up making their most guitar-heavy album. But as long as Forgione’s up front, the usual beauty and mystery are still going to be present.

Forgione doesn’t mind if her lyrics tend to the oblique, or if a tune called "Neil Diamond" makes you wonder what it has to do with him. "When you listen to something, you want to personalize it. I want people to get whatever they need out of the songs — the ones that really hit me are the ones that said whatever I was feeling at the time. I think leaving the words ambiguous is more conducive to that." But she does reveal that the latter tune is "about going to the moon with Neil Diamond" and that it’s patterned after his early hits — check that heavy acoustic guitar — rather than the big ballads he did later.

Forgione’s overdubbed harmonies have also become a band trademark. On the new disc, there’s at least two of her on every song, a maneuver that reinforces their ties to classic pop. On that subject, Demma brings up a review I did of Mistle Thrush’s first EP in which I noted an Abba influence. "We thought that sounded really weird. But now I realize, who were we fooling? We really love the gratuitous rock moments and we like the big dance moments. But we also embrace Abba, and I’ve been waiting six years to say that."

THE 360’S RETURN. "This is surreal," noted singer Audrey Clark as she surveyed the audience at Bill’s Bar last Friday night, when her band the 360’s were about to take the stage for the first time since 1995. "I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s been seven years. For a while I thought I wasn’t ever getting on stage again."

The band didn’t break up so much as disappear. They had a strong following in the early ’90s, starting off with a loud-pop approach before going psychedelic/metallic on their last and best album, Strawberry Stone (on RCA). It proved a bit too weird for mass consumption (especially since the single "When I’m High" was an unapologetic drug song), but its acid-dressed sound made it distinctive in a year when everything in town seemed to be either pop or grunge. Clark later did a few acoustic gigs with her sister Lori in the Pendulum Floors (one of whose songs got recorded by Jeff Buckley after a friend they had in common played it for him), then disappeared some more. "Lots of emotional reasons, some of which had to do with raising my son," she explained at Bill’s. "And a lot of record-label shit that I wanted to get away from. You’ve got to wait until the mood is right, and it just took this long before I started feeling it again."

"Plus, it took them this long to find me," added the band’s newest member, bassist Linda Bean — whose last group, Orbit, had conveniently broken up just two weeks earlier. Guitarist Eric Russell and drummer Johnny Grady, both looking straighter and shorter-haired nowadays, remain from the old line-up.

Their set at Bill’s proved just different enough and just familiar enough to add up to a proper comeback. The opening "Texas" found Russell drawing some nasty noises from the wah-wah while Clark made with her trademark vocal sneers, looking even more like Patti Smith than she used to. And they had a pair of aces up their sleeve with their two local hits, "Illuminated" and "When I’m High," both saved for set’s end. But they were brave enough to play a half-dozen new songs in the first half, and those boded well for the band’s return. They sound brighter and hookier than they did in the Strawberry Stone era, with "Blue Velvet Cords" now ranking as one of their most obvious singles, Ramonesy guitar lick and all. Bean has given them something they’ve never had before — vocal harmonies — and added to something they’ve had all along — on-stage hair shaking.

Working with Sean Slade at Fort Apache, the new 360’s are about halfway through a new album, and a two-song demo is now making the rounds. They don’t plan to gig as frequently as they did in the old days, but Clark swears it won’t be seven years before they turn up again.

Issue Date: January 17 - 24, 2002
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