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The family plan (continued)


That’s not to say that the guitars on Floorboards are uninteresting. Among stretches of roaring chords and rhythmic palm muting, Vera and Shanahan lay big, shimmering open chords over one another and bounce melodic phrases back and forth, laying a shifting foundation for Shanahan’s bellowed melodies, which he sings with blood vessel-busting intensity. His earnest delivery is buoyed by the optimistic tenor of his lyrics. "I don’t like just complaining," he explains. "I have to say, ‘This sucks,’ but then move on from there. How are you going to make it better if there’s any way to do it? Sometimes it’s just hope that it will be better. Sometimes it’s an actual solution."

If you find yourself in the lobby of Kenmore Square’s Hotel Buckminster and you think you hear the low din of rumbling power chords coming from general direction of the elevator, you’re not crazy. Down in the bowels of the Buck, there’s a room that still houses the hotel’s old, unused elevator ropes and gears, in between the elevator shafts, and it’s now Lock and Key’s second home. Shanahan works at the hotel part-time between tours, and when his boss found out that the band were paying $250 a month to share a rehearsal space with another group, she offered them this basement space. "I was like, ‘No, we can’t play in the basement. It’s gonna be too loud. You’ll hear it upstairs.’ But when we came back from tour, she was like, ‘You should go see that room in the basement.’ " The hotel’s maintenance staff had built a wooden platform that they covered with stained carpet from hotel rooms to solve the problem of the room’s uneven floor, and they’d cleared the room of all the miscellaneous junk. The band have practiced there ever since, and complaints have been few.

It’s here that Lock and Key have been road-readying their current set for a tour that will take them down the East Coast to Florida and then back up through West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. At the T.T.’s kickoff show, the band were in top form, and Shanahan wouldn’t have it any other way. "Most of my day is bullshit, and if we play for a half an hour somewhere, why not put everything you have into it? You get more out of it. Sometimes you end up so drained, but it’s a good feeling. It’s kind of like people that love to go to the gym. It feels really good to be full on and all out when we play. It really does."

CHRIS AMARAL, who also hails from Watertown and who now lives with Shanahan and Vera in their Lower Allston apartment, is the singer of the Call Up, the band who played second to last at the T.T.’s show. He, drummer Mark Sarno, guitarist Mike Shepherd, and bassist Johnny Lattuca are all very much part of the community the members of Lock and Key talk about like family. And he echoes Shanahan’s philosophy when we meet up at T.T.’s: "I think if you’re not putting everything into it when you play, then go fuck yourself. You feel disappointed if you can’t get to that point."

Amaral didn’t seem to have much trouble getting to that point at T.T.’s, beating the strings of his guitar as mercilessly as he later beat Sarno’s cymbals with that same guitar and screaming as though it were the last night he’d have a voice. Yet the songs — many of which will be on their forthcoming debut full-length, tentatively titled Cheap Novelty and due out in a couple months on Lonesome Recordings — remained melodic. The Call Up combine the fast, loud-and-pissed-off intensity of hardcore punks like Black Flag and Minor Threat with the more melodic, anthemic post-punk associated with the Replacements, and the desperation and angst of post-punk with the epic sensibility of Bruce Springsteen. Throughout the forthcoming album, Amaral renders his own apathy contemptible by disgustedly sneering at it. On "Gaslight," he laments what he’s doing with his life as a "passing phase, a child’s game . . . another cheap novelty, another way to murder all the time," only to chalk it to up to "a case of the spoiled-white-boy blues."

"I was really kind of bummed out, and life was pointless, and all I was doing was hanging out in Allston and drinking myself to oblivion," is how he accounts for those emotions. "But I’ve had all the opportunities in the world." As he puts it in the song, borrowing part of a line from the Replacements’ "Bastards of Young," he could have been "picking cotton and feeling the crack of the whip upon my back."

page 2 

Issue Date: March 11 - 17, 2005
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