“Welcoming that loss of control feels good” Stephen Malkmus is just a guy in a band in The Hard Quartet
Stephen Malkmus and Matt Sweeney are talking about KISS. They’ve been talking about KISS for almost nine minutes. They’ve talked about how Loosey, the group Sweeney is working with in New York, like to say they sound like early KISS if all the members of KISS liked to have a good time. They’ve talked about finding remastered KISS shows online.
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They’ve talked about Ace Frehley’s speech to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They’ve talked about how beautiful Paul Stanley was in the 1970s. They have not talked about their new band, the Hard Quartet, at all.
Except, Sweeney says, that’s all they’ve been doing. “It occurred to me the other day that the reason we can so easily talk about KISS is because they’re just a band – it’s four guys,” he observes. “All the jokes we make about KISS are about this thing, because we’re four guys.”
Yeah, kind of. It’s true that the Hard Quartet is four guys. But they’re not just four guys. One of the reasons they’re so keen to be seen as a band and not a project is because, in Malkmus’s words, they’re four guys who are “known for other things and have established identities.”
In his case, he’s one of the most influential American indie-rock musicians of the past 30 years thanks to his tenure with Pavement and Silver Jews, plus solo works under his own name and with the Jicks. Meanwhile, Sweeney’s playing – at once thrillingly noisy and gracefully melodic – has underpinned everything from the terminally underrated post-hardcore band Chavez to records by Johnny Cash and Run The Jewels. There’s also the small matter of Guitar Moves – the hugely popular guitarist-on-guitarist video series he used to host on Vice, and has recently revived as an independent entity.
The other guitarist is the quietly cool Emmett Kelly, of the Cairo Gang, Ty Segall’s band and regular goes-around with Will Oldham and Sweeney, with whom he riffs in Superwolves. The drummer is Jim White, a complete wildcard whose freeform approach has pushed rock structures employed by the Dirty Three, Bill Callahan and others into esoteric realms.
Band On The Run
Image: Atiba Jefferson
“The four of us could easily have made a really cool record, played a couple of shows, and that would be that,” Sweeney says. “But we all like being in bands. Pavement’s one of the shining examples of what a band is. Lately it seems people are interested in bands. What happens between a band who really like each other’s playing, and really care about what each other has to say, is that everybody’s listening to something that’s in the middle of them. That was pretty evident from the second that we played.”
On their recently released self-titled debut, the Hard Quartet’s music is a noisy, loose, feisty, melodic mash of rock sounds its members grew up on and helped to popularise. You can hear Sweeney’s love of the Velvet Underground just as keenly as you can grab hold of the melodic character of Kelly’s writing, which transfers over wholesale from the Cairo Gang on cuts such as the gently overdriven jangle-pop of Our Hometown Boy.
Malkmus floats among it all as a sardonic presence and (Sweeney’s words) “ripping ass” guitar player. They all sit in on bass. There’s this ease, this fizz, to it all that’s very appealing. “The myth of the auteur maybe isn’t what it was,” Sweeney says.
“I like that,” Malkmus agrees. “It kind of goes with the political climate of today – there’s some big boss man or some boy genius who’s doing everything. It comes out in the wash. In the social history of a band, the bass player was super important to the sound, even if you could barely hear them. There are kinetic energies blowing around and through people. Going for that and welcoming that loss of control feels good.”
Folk Festival
Image: Malcolm Donaldson
The roots of all this can be traced back to Malkmus’s foray into folk on 2020’s Traditional Techniques, a leap he took in the company of Sweeney, who jumped at an invitation to add his two cents to what remains a fascinating stylistic switcheroo in Malkmus’s discography. “That was some pre, pre, pre-production in a way,” Malkmus observes. There was zero friction: Sweeney had spent years watching Malkmus play and quickly found a way to lock in. That sent cogs whirring. If he fitted here, in one space, and Malkmus was over there, then what could slot alongside them? “We did establish a trust thing, that we sound good together,” Sweeney continues. “The feeling I had playing guitar with Steve made me think we should also play with Jim and Emmett.”
Sweeney perhaps recognised this spark so quickly because he had already experienced it with Kelly, notably during a fight-or-flight run of Superwolves shows. “It was a big idea I’d wanted to do for a long time – a band that was just two electric guitars and songs with a lot of singing,” he elaborates. “Similar to Traditional Techniques, that established a trust. We opened up for fuckin’ Sleep, which is a fairly intense crowd, with no drums, two guitars and harmonies. I can’t imagine doing that with anyone else, right? So I felt really great about how I sounded with Steve. And I felt really great about how I sounded with Emmett. And then there’s Jim White.”
White’s searching playing forced Malkmus, Sweeney and Kelly to think about what they were doing more closely. Take the loose-limbed snare rolls and rumbling toms of the opener Chrome Eater, for example. Once White gets his teeth into it, all of a sudden the surging proto-metal leads take on an air of late ‘70s New York punk, appearing more Tom Verlaine than Tony Iommi even as they grind and stomp with fuzzed-out weight. “It’s gonna sound like art or something if he’s on there,” Malkmus admits. “It’s gonna sound like something that’s experimental, even when it’s a pop song.”
Slick Rick
Following an initial burst of activity in New York – a few days of kicking riffs back and forth as a proof of concept – the band moved in together for a time while working at Shangri-La, Rick Rubin’s studio in Malibu, California. Famously, it’s a nice spot. Also famously, it’s a treasure trove of gear that’s characterful, available and in varying states of repair. “They do have this vault,” Malkmus says. “There’s some vintage gear back there. It’s not fussily maintained. Some of it’s thrashed, you know? It’s just how I like it to be. It’s meant to be used.”
“So, I was never good in the studio,” Sweeney chimes in. “And then in my early 30s Rick asked me to start playing guitar on his records, which was very surprising to me. I didn’t know what to do but my decision was that I wasn’t going to bring anything with me. It’s Rick Rubin’s studio – he’s going to have all this amazing stuff. That improvisational aspect is really fun. If you know they have good guitars, and you’re up for it, then just don’t bring your shit.”
At Shangri-La, Malkmus glommed a few Fredric pedals from Kelly (“He’s like, ‘That one sounds terrible, you should use that one,” he says with a cackle) while picking up a 1959 Fender Jazzmaster, a 1965 Hofner Verithin and a 1958 Martin 000-18 from the studio’s collection. He brought one thing with him – a vintage Guild Polara. “It’s a guitar I feel comfortable with,” he says. Otherwise, the standout was a beat-to-hell Gibson Firebird that he played on the wonky riff-fest Action For Military Boys and during the solos on the spacey indie-doo-wop of Thug Dynasty. “It elevated the tune,” he says. “I have some reverb on there, but that guitar actually affected the vibe.”
Flat Write
Image: Atiba Jefferson
Sweeney’s penchant for flatwound strings carried over to the ‘58 Martin, while he also made use of another Martin, a 1970 dreadnought, from Shangri-La. Like Malkmus, though, he opted this time to bring a couple of pals out to the coast: his Austen Hooks amp, which is made from an old Bell and Howell film projector, and the 1976 Gibson ES-335TD that has been his main guitar for years.
“I used that a stupid amount — it had mixed strings on it, one penny coloured string, one silver string, and it was acting weird, but it was fine,” he says. But, with a 1967 Gibson ES-330 and a mid-’50s Gretsch Duo Jet also circulating, Sweeney thinks the record’s secret weapon was a 1957 Esquire. “On Heel Highway that’s the main guitar,” he says. “Emmett’s playing it. The big guitar solo on Six Deaf Rats is that, too. It’s fucked up how good it sounds.”
It probably says something that the instrument Sweeney wants to point out as vital to the record’s sound was used primarily by one of his bandmates, not him. Fundamentally, the Hard Quartet is about the whole. Out in California they cooked meals, messed around with things and generally had fun making a low-stakes thing with their buds. The fact the resulting songs are texturally rich, melodically engaging, funny and often oddly profound is essentially gravy. “Someone complimented Jim on a take,” Sweeney recalls. “And he said: “Oh, you like that knockin’ about?’”
The Hard Quartet is out now through Matador.
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