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Progressive parties
Fluttr and Specimen 37 prove prog-rock doesn’t really suck
BY BRETT MILANO

Many years ago, the Boston-by-way-of-Indiana band the Gizmos recorded a little ditty called "Progressive Rock." An underground hit in the late ’70s (lately reissued on the Gulcher CD Never Mind the Gizmos), the tune took pot shots at Yes and Rush before wrapping up with this Ramones-style chorus: "Progressive rock! Progressive rock! Really sucks, don’t it? Don’t it really suck!"

That pretty much sums up general attitude the local underground scene has had toward progressive rock for the past, oh, couple of decades. Save for a few left-field entries (like Helium’s wonderful Magic City album in 1999 on Matador), prog has been the one kind of music that Boston bands have barely touched, even while every other strain of ’70s rock was getting revived left and right. Yet prog regained its good name in 2004, as national indie bands (notably the Mars Volta and the Fiery Furnaces) proved that new and exciting things could be done with weighty themes, odd instrumentation, and epic song structures. And this past month may be the first in local history to produce striking prog-informed CDs — Fluttr’s Trithemis Festiva (Trojan Horse) and Specimen 37’s The Endless Looping Game (Chronic Pink) — from two very different local bands who both put the experimental spirit of that music into a modern context.

If any local band can make prog-rock fashionable again, it’s Fluttr, whose musical explorations are laced with lush melodies, theatrical overtones, and even sex appeal. The latter two come largely courtesy of singer Kara Trott, one of the more exotic frontwomen around. But she fronts an outfit that’s well versed in orchestral textures and tricky time signatures. The disc flows from straight-out pop songs to a mid-album instrumental suite before bringing the threads together in the cinematic finale, "Detrimentalisman." The result could appeal to fans of King Crimson and fans of the Dresden Dolls. Anyone open-minded enough to appreciate both will likely be in heaven.

"Our audience seems to fall into two categories," percussionist Vessela Stoyanova notes at the Abbey Lounge, "the middle-aged prog-rock guys and the goth kids. Those are the two distinct elements." Adds guitarist Troy Kidwell, "I’d say we’re a progressive band, but one problem I have with progressive rock is that you can be amazed by the musicianship but you don’t necessarily remember a song. We’re trying to bridge that gap. It’s not hard to get people who like progressive rock to listen to our poppier tracks. The problem is that it’s not as easy the other way around." Concludes Stoyanova, "Really, we never sat down and decided to put these elements together. It’s really just five friends playing music."

In fact, all four of Fluttr’s instrumentalists (Stoyanova, Kidwell, drummer Jason Marchionna, and cellist Valerie Thompson) came out of music schools. Both of the women are classically trained, and all but Kidwell went to Berklee. At first, the four played as a quartet, with Kidwell handling vocals and everybody finding different ways to deploy the unconventional instrumentation. (Thompson’s cello often handles the bass lines and Stoyanova plays a MIDI marimba that can take either keyboard or percussion parts.) And they leaned toward the Crimsonesque side of things. Enter Trott, an intuitive type and Jeff Buckley fan who saw Fluttr opening for Rasputina and resolved on the spot to join the band. "I saw these people playing, and I thought, well, my personal style is so absurd and colorful and out there that I thought I could kick some serious ass if I sang in this band. The sound they had, the blend of instruments — it hit my soul so hard and did so much for me. It opened up ideas that I could be a singer, or an actor or a dancer."

Part Native American, Trott says she began chanting at an early age. And though Kidwell is the group’s main songwriter, Trott says she makes a personal connection with the words, even on a song about drinking ("Flann O’Brien") when she’s the one teetotaler in the band. "I don’t drink because I live for my voice. But I can transfer the emotions and sing that one for my friends. They’re destroying their bodies, so they must have some good reason for it."

Trott’s on-stage movements may look sexy, but she says she’s got something a bit deeper in mind. "Well, sex appeal is one way to get people’s attention. But I have no intention of being sexy on stage. What I really want to do is to look right into everybody’s eyes. For instance, there was one time when I was hanging off the edge of the stage, feeling like it was the edge of a building, and thinking, ‘I just want to love all these people and want to do whatever it takes.’ So I put my hand over my eyes and jumped off the stage and, hey, it wasn’t so far after all. Now I don’t suppose everyone there got what I was doing, but maybe a few of them were on the edge of desperation with me."

Fluttr have taken a few big leaps over the past year, making it to the final of the Emergenza Festival in Germany. They also got their first taste of label life when the German branch of Sony offered them a development deal if they’d drop the eclectic sounds and restyle themselves as a goth band. Instead, they plan to get even more diverse next time around. "I can see bringing in more solo sections for the marimba or the cello, or writing some 15-minute pop song with prog leanings," Kidwell notes. "We’d love to being it all together even more."

SPECIMEN 37 are a good example of what can happen when you bring together five guys with technical chops, lots of musical experience, large record collections, and short attention spans. With its many eight-minute tracks, their album is something of a mindfuck at first listen — it keeps throwing ideas at you as electronic pulses spar with a live and very busy rhythm section, songs break into seemingly unrelated sections, and weird dissonances sneak in whenever it threatens to get too catchy. Difficult but grabbing, it sounds like a jam between the Residents and Rush.

"We haven’t heard that comparison, but we like it," says bassist Sketch Element when I sit down with him and his pseudonymous band mates at the Abbey. "I’ll admit there are a couple of Rush heads in this band, and the Residents — they’re like the evil clowns, and we can relate to that."

"I don’t know if it’s our intention to mess with people’s heads — yeah, okay, it probably is," says singer/guitarist Empathy.

"We’re being a little sneaky, doing something on the album without telling people what it is," adds singer/keyboardist Gee-Roj.

In fact, the CD was designed as a concept album with a simple theme: a week in the life of a character named Specimen. The couple of dark songs in the mix ("Blow Things Up" and "Downcast") indicate it’s a week where the character could snap and turn violent. But he doesn’t, and the week carries on, hence the title The Endless Looping Game. They make things even more conceptual by opening the album with a short collage of every track from their previous disc. "Once we had the week theme, we knew where the album was going," says drummer Mojonine. "The moments where it gets a little creepy, that’s basically us saying, ‘Wake up! Okay, just checking.’ "

It soon becomes clear that these guys are good at pulling wild ideas out of one another. Some are heavily into electronica, others like metal, and others are into developing visuals to use on stage. Rather than homogenize their ideas, they just use all of them together. "When we get into a room and start playing, we push each other," Mojonine says. "One person will look across and say, ‘I’m going to take this song over here,’ and the rest will go with it." And they’re finding the climate a little friendlier than it was when they started five years ago. "We used to get a lot of this," says Empathy, putting on a confused, straight-ahead stare. "Now we’re getting the delay: we’ll play a song, there’ll be a few seconds of dead silence and then people start applauding."

For all that, the band prefer to avoid the prog tag; they’d rather call themselves "psycho-tronic." As Sketch puts it, "There was a time when prog was cool, when you could say, ‘Hey, I’m better than everybody else because I’m up here playing in 5/4.’ But it became a geek thing, a few steps away from playing Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, we’re all doing this so we can get girls. But prog-rock? You can get beat up for doing that."

Specimen 37 appear on Tuesday January 18 upstairs at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, with A Wish for Fire; call (617) 864-EAST.


Issue Date: January 7 - 13, 2005
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