Stiff Middle Fingers finds its own voice

From the nominal kitchen area of Topeka’s Rundown Studios, you can hear Stiff Middle Fingers recording a track for its upcoming album, Songs About Sucking. The Lawrence punk quartet is attempting to get a take for a new song, written this morning. The band runs through it four times. That takes about 10 minutes.

Songs About Sucking, out September 23, marks an evolutionary leap for Stiff Middle Fingers. When the band started, four years ago, it played covers of classic punk songs. Over time, though, the group has gone from playing songs by the Damned to just being a damned good punk band. But skill and ambition have long been evident to anyone at a Stiff Middle Fingers gig, where Travis Arey, tethered by the Midwest’s longest microphone cable, is likely to spend half the set all but embedded in the audience as he leads finger-pointing sing-alongs.

“Travis and I worked at Subway together, and we kept talking about music and stuff, and we realized we both liked a bunch of old punk stuff,” guitarist Cameron Hawk says. “I made this comp with a lot of ’70s punk stuff, like CBGB’s stuff, and we listened to that, and eventually we were like, ‘Let’s just start a band and play these songs.'”

Hawk, who plays guitar in another Lawrence band, the pop-rock group the Dead Girls, was relieved to find an outlet for a genre that he’d been dying to explore. Performing as a punk cover band, he says, gave him a chance to get accustomed to the hallmarks of another musical style and learn the ropes without the pressure of producing brand-new material. “I always thought it would just be fun to do the straight-up cover thing,” Hawk says, “but after a while, you discover that there’s a way that these [classic songs] are all just put together.”

Figuring out the common thread in those benchmark tracks unlocked the songwriter part of Hawk’s brain. As Stiff Middle Fingers began to cultivate original material, the band slipped new pieces into sets — sometimes with little thought to whether a song was finished. “Psycho Bitch” — about “everyone’s significant other,” as Arey has introduced it onstage — was the first of these.

“I had the riff in my head and the first verse,” Hawk says. “It was right there. We wrote it really quick one night and started playing it right away. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, we have an original now!” We just started throwing them in there.”

That gentle testing of the waters proved crucial as Stiff Middle Fingers transitioned from covers to originals and refined its voice. However much archetypal punk influenced the band, these musicians weren’t about to start grafting Ramones riffs onto Television bass lines.

“We’re definitely influenced by those bands,” Hawk says. “But the whole point of it is having fun and playing stuff that you enjoy. That’s the thing — it’s not so much a genre as it is a way of thought.”

“There’s not a whole lot of other things you can do,” Arey says, “where you jump around and scream and stuff. I have a lot of fond memories of all the shows I went to in high school. They were so revolutionary. When I started going to a wide variety of shows, it was an influential experience. I feel like there’s only a certain level or a certain amount you can consume before you just have to produce something.”

Hawk describes Songs About Sucking as a compilation of every original thing the band has done so far, including cuts from its 2012 Enemies With Benefits EP, which was recorded in a basement practice space.

“From the basement to the studio — it’s a good progression,” Arey says with a laugh. He’s also quick to explain that Songs About Sucking features “brand, brand-new” songs that the band has been working on while at Rundown — including the song I heard it slash through half an hour ago.

“We just finished it today,” Arey tells me, pride evident in his voice. He’s starting to feel at home in the studio, pleased with the work he and his band are doing. It’s the work of a band that has started something.