Cathartic Release

It’s always the quiet ones you need to keep an eye on.

You know how it is — the cops nab some maniac for chopping up a few coeds, and when the local news trots out the befuddled neighbors, they always say something like, “He just kept to himself. He was so dang quiet! Ain’t that right, Marge?”

The same goes for the positive contributors to humanity. Al Einstein didn’t utter so much as a single word until he was 3 (his parents thought he was learning-disabled), pretty much kept his mouth shut for the rest of his 76 years and still formulated the kind of crazy-ass (yet apparently valid) physics theories the rest of us know-it-all blabbermouths couldn’t cook up with a Kalashnikov pointed at our foreheads.

Falling somewhere between twisted serial killer and civilization-enriching supergenius on the human food chain is 22-year-old Brian Standeford, frontman for the Seattle garage-punk quartet the Catheters. For about 23 hours a day, he can be as reticent as a seventh-grader at his first dance.

“I’m a really shy, nervous, self-conscious person by nature,” the singer-guitarist confirms by phone from a tour stop in Southern California. “I even have a hard time talking face-to-face with people I don’t know. So it’s really weird that I would even do this.”

“This” is the spectacle that occurs for the hour or so it takes the Catheters to tear through a set. And Standeford is the living embodiment of the David Banner-slash-Incredible Hulk mythology. He is known to transform into one of the craziest frontmen this side of vintage Iggy Pop, hurling himself into the crowd, into the gear, into his bandmates or onto his knees, all the while writhing, twitching, contorting, sweating, spitting and generally freaking the fuck out. And then there’s his voice — a throat-shredding primal shriek that rivals that of any disemboweled victim in a B-grade splatter flick.

It’s hard to take your eyes off the guy, but he’s not the only one generating the Catheters’ stormy, earsplitting, Stooges-meets-Stones-meets-MC5 monstrosity. Guitarist Derek Mason, bassist Leo Gebhardt and drummer Davey Brozowski — all in their early twenties as well — match Standeford’s intensity, pushing each song to the brink of cacophonic collapse before yanking them back to something reminiscent of melody and structure.

“I guess to a point I’m really nervous, but when it comes time to play, I just shut it out,” Standeford says. “I just try to get into the music. It’s a good chance to let loose and get all your emotions out. Not many people have that opportunity to go WAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH and fuckin’ lose it like that. And I’m lucky. I mean, I’ve been doing it since I was a freshman in high school.”

Indeed, the Catheters’ story goes back to 1995, when Standeford, Mason and a couple of instrumentally challenged pals headed into Mason’s garage to bash out some noise inspired by Black Flag and the early wave of Seattle grunge bands. By 1999, the group had put out a self-titled debut album and — after touring with such heroes as Mudhoney and the Murder City Devils — signed to Sub Pop.

The band underwent some personnel changes before releasing Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days in 2002. More tours followed, including jaunts overseas, before the Catheters hunkered down with Northwest superproducer John Goodmanson to record its latest disc, Howling … It Grows and Grows!!! Although it’s always a daunting task to capture the frenzy of a live show in the confines of a recording studio, the Catheters did a pretty bang-up job, and without a lot of method acting.

“We don’t, like, cut ourselves up or anything,” Standeford says, laughing. “We’re not all Henry Rollins, I need to feel, I need to feeeeeeeeeeeeeel! It doesn’t get that intense. But we do try to get a lot of energy across, and as long as it’s got a good vibe, that’s the most important thing, not if it’s supertight or superperfect. So far, what we’ve wanted to do in our recordings is make really abrasive music, ’cause we’re big fans of that sort of stuff. But … I’d like to try stuff with more melody and better song craftsmanship — it’d be more of a challenge. It’s way harder to write a Kinks song than to make a noisy punk-rock song.”

With all that’s going well for the quartet at the moment — good reviews, Sub Pop firmly behind them, a summer vacation on the road — Standeford admits that the rigors of rock and roll can be tough to endure. Sparse crowds. Pressure to “sell” the band. Too-frequent Mudhoney comparisons. The self-imposed burden of simply being a good, original band able to connect with its fans. Factor in a shy, anxious personality, and the stress might be enough to drive a guy to drink. Oops … too late.

“Somewhere in those European tours of a couple years ago, it was like, whoa,” Standeford says. “That was when I started drinking whiskey straight, which was a pretty bad move. I mean, I was like, I fuckin’ went through a bottle of whiskey fast, and I’m still depressed, so that kinda stuff catches up with you and saps your energy when you’re totally drunk every single night. It got to a point where it was hard to break out of the routine, because you get nervous before shows, so you have a few drinks. And we had some sketchy shows because of it.

“It totally worries me,” Standeford says of his drinking. “But I try to keep it under control. It’s hard to resist all that stuff. I wanna take a week’s break from drinking, but we’re just playing bars, and when it’s free, well, it’s like, Oh, I’ll just have one, and then one turns into I’m fucked up.”

Sensing that he’s drifting into woe-is-me land, Standeford chuckles and apologizes for bringing down the conversation.

“I still love being in this band, and we’re all getting to do what we’ve always wanted to,” he says. “It’s just that we care about it so much, there’s so much invested in it. We need to stop worrying about all that external stuff. We’ll improve at our own rate and in our own time. And we’ll keep doing it ’cause it’s fun. That’s why we started in the first place.”