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Jk far as meeting the
requirements for
*being a rock and roll
band, Wild Flag does everything
right. Even beyond the previous
projects on which the bandmem-
bers have cut their teeth—Carrie
Brownstein and Janet Weiss in
the legendary Sleater-Kinney,
Rebecca Cole in O.G. Elephant Six
act The Minders and Mary Timony
with indie-pop act Helium—the
brand-new project that is Wild
Flag stands on its own, and does
so by hitting all the marks.
The bicoastal quartet's mem
bers (three-quarters in Portland,
OR, with Timony residing in
Washington, D.C.) have been
playing in bands, on and off, for
well over 15 years. They come
from a pre-Internet indie-rock
circuit that looks markedly differ
ent from the one we exist in now,
one rooted in a punk ethos that
makes things like forever-tours,
straightahead, no-frills recording
and risk-taking creative decisions
simply part of what one does
when playing in a band.
That Cole's musical path has
crossed numerous times with Athens' own punk-informed indie
workhorses, the E6 Collective, makes perfect sense. The con
nection stems from time working and playing music in the
1990s alongside Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider. "Athens
is almost like a home away from home for me; I have so many
friends in that town," Cole says. "Me and Robert are from
Denver, and bands would come up to Denver from Athens to
record. So, before [The Minder's] ever actually played in Athens,
we met some of the people who lived there already. Olivia
Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel—Jeff [Mangum] lived in
Denver for a while as well." Before The Minders even set foot
in Athens, they had offers for accommodations. "I remember
Kevin Barnes wrote us a letter and invited us to stay with
him," Cole says. "We’d never met him before; we had a really
good time crashing with him and watching Charlie Chaplin
movies and talking about music."
When Flagpole contacts Cole, Wild Flag is in Chicago,
already one week into a six-week tour of North America. Cole's
rationale for routing such a far-reaching itinerary is tellingly
pragmatic. "Our first tour was 10 days or two weeks and West
Coast, and then we did another tour that took us about three
weeks to g n *: us from the East Coast to Texas for South by
Southwest and then back to the East Coast again. I mean, that
was five weeks combined, and we still didn't hit every city,"
she says. "We're just trying to get to as many places as we can.
It takes a while—there's just a lot of miles, a lot of cities to
hit. We're not going to Denver on this tour, if you can believe
it, in six weeks. There's whole routes we're missing. It's just a
big country! If you want to get out there and do it, it takes a
long time!"
For its debut album, Wild Flag decamped to a studio called
The Hangar in Sacramento, CA; besides being a huge space
with ample square footage for well-placed room mics, it
also boasted a half-pipe, which the band took advantage of
between takes.
"We recorded it onto 24-track, two-inch tape, which is kind
of what I'm used to working with dealing with The Minders,
who recorded everything on tape," says Cole.
Over the course of six days, the quartet recorded its instru
mental tracks almost entirely live, with so few overdubs Cole
says she could count them on one
hand. "For me, it was really fun
to work in that framework again
and not have the Pro Tools edit
ing," she says. "You don't have to
make a lot of decisions right away
when you're using Pro Tools, but
when you're using tape, you have
to decide: that is the drum track;
that's the guitar track. Not a lot
of room for punching in anything
fancy. So, I think we captured
something hopefully pretty close
to our live sound on that record,
which was our intention."
For fans of the members'
previous bands, the eponymous
album that resulted from Wild
Flag's faithful documentation of
its live show will not be disap
pointing. Rock and roll fun is the
priority. While the record features
plenty of material that hovers
around the three-minute mark,
there are also a few cuts—"Glass
Tambourine" and "Racehorse"
come to mind—that go off into
epic places. It's clear: this is the
sound of Wild Flag going into
unknown territory.
"That happened organically,"
says Cole. "We wrote the songs, and then we wanted to tour
with the songs before we recorded them, and the jammy parts,
the jams on the record"—she laughs at uttering the j-word—
"represent something that we would do live. Those aren't really
written parts, that's just how the jams sounded in the studio
that day. I don't think it was premeditated to sound epic, but
I do think it's important for all four of us to leave some space
in the music that's an exploratory space for us, that we can
push ourselves in different directions when we play the songs
live."
Jeff Tobias
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WHO: Wild Flag, Eleanor Frledberger
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, Oct 22,9 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $15
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OCTOBER 19,2011 • FLAGPOLE.COM 15
