When I interviewed Janet Weiss in London last year, the drummer talked enthusiastically about Sleater-Kinney's experience recording their latest album, The Woods, with revered engineer Dave Fridmann. She enthused about the importance of letting go and stretching beyond self-imposed boundaries in order to capture the intensity and unpredictability of the sessions. The result was arguably the band's best album to date. It's unsurprising then that Weiss chose to experiment in a similar field with Quasi's seventh release, When the Going Gets Dark, returning to Fridmann to polish off the recordings.
"There's a lot of distortion on everything, and I think the distortion eventually becomes the entity," said Weiss of Sleater-Kinney's playing on The Woods. "It becomes the guts of the music." That embrace of fuzzed-out lows and grimy distortion-- as well as extended improvisations and looser song structures-- fizzles through the backbone of When the Going Gets Dark. Her singer/songwriter ex-husband Sam Coomes, who makes up the other half of the Portland, Ore.-based duo, ditches Quasi's signature keyboard sound in favor of emphatically tumbling piano, which is added to feedback and raucous, challenging, defiant vocal melodies. Coomes intermittently howls and screams between the Jerry Lee Lewis-style staccato riff chaos of "The Rhino", and the soprano whoops on the title track sound like a sharp blade running over the deep spread of bass and Weiss' clattering drums. The only real rub lies in the lyrics, which-- unusually for the sharp-minded Coomes-- veer between cringing and faintly ridiculous, such as, "I'm stuck in a tree, doing my thing with the chimpanzees."
It's not only the evident friction born from an extended working and personal relationship that catalyses their sound. Weiss is a remarkable, unpredictable drummer, and the pair play perfectly together, having reached the point at which improvisation becomes the result of an intuitive locking of creative minds. Standout tracks such as the mainly instrumental, knotty jazz of "Death Culture Blues" and "Presto Change-O" show how much more vitality and room to breathe the pair have when not focused on studio trickery or elaborate overdubbing. And although the song eventually collapses into a darkly syrupy shamble of good tidings, the opening bars of "Merry X-Mas"-- which feature an outbreak of edgy-yet-glitzy piano notes evaporating into a captivating solo and the pounding rhythms of Weiss's kit-- reveal that Quasi have cast their net wider and tighter with the impulse of their revived energy.
