pop. Stars
It was a dark and stormy night. Seriously. It was a dark and stormy night, and appropriately so, last December when kill.pop. wrapped up work on its just-released debut disc, 1. “It had snowed a lot that week and was supposed to snow more that night,” singer/guitarist/bassist B. Kinder recalls. “I’m not really much into mixing or producing or anything like that, so after we laid all the tracks and I laid all the vocals, I went for a walk in whatever town that was [Independence, Missouri]. It was, like, a Thursday night, and it was friggin’ cold, and I thought I’d go looking for a bar. I picked a direction and started walking, went about a mile or so without finding one, turned around, walked back to the starting point, and picked a new direction. This one landed me at Joe’s Corner Bar, which contained one bartenderess and one patron hitting on the bartenderess.”
Kinder continues, “I had a couple beers, couple whiskeys, learned a few new pick-up lines and then walked back to the studio. I figured they’d be done by then, and as it turned out, they still had one song left, so I added some vocal effects to that song, ‘Away.’ By then, it was snowing like a motherfucker. We drove back going about thirty miles an hour down 70. It was pretty damn scary, and the van was having problems the whole time. We were pretty lucky that we even made it back.”
“Henceforth, kill.pop. will never record during the winter again,” vows drummer T. Schroeder. But as a souvenir of its experience, kill.pop. produced a disc that eerily communicates the mood of that fateful night, from its moody inebriated feel to its sense of lingering doom. Not to be confused with The Beatles’ compilation of the same name, 1 is soaked through with riff-heavy post-rock, filled with sullen low-end-heavy tunes that teeter between sighs of frustrated resignation and sudden bursts of rage. With its prominent rhythm section, accessible yet angry vocals and pronounced dynamic shifts, kill.pop. brings to mind a stripped-down version of Tool, without that band’s prog-rock leanings, epic song lengths or obtuse lyrics.
“I’ve always written music in response to something else,” Kinder explains. “If I get pissed off about something, I write an angry song. I get hurt, I write a song about that. Some of the songs that stick out in my head, lyrically, are songs like ‘Away,’ which compares the fall of romance to the fall of Icarus, and ‘Bow,’ which is about religion. My favorite line from that song is let’s all pretend that we’re actually in charge and boss everyone around, which is pretty much how I see organized religion.”
Schroeder, who writes a good chunk of kill.pop.’s lyrics and who drew 1‘s striking artwork, is relieved that Kinder doesn’t take a literal hint from “Bow” and boss around his bandmates, as vocalists are occasionally wont to do. “With these songs, I am finally able to say the things that I want and not have the singers feel weird about the lyrics and want to change them a bunch, like ‘Blank,'” Schroeder says, referencing the song that opens with the impossible-to-miss declaration stick your finger in my ass before moving on to its message, which might or might not be about universal acceptance.
Guitarist/vocalist M. Fann doesn’t contribute to the band’s lyrics, but he enjoys a degree of musical freedom he didn’t experience in past groups, such as Stick and Kelly’s Heroes. “I just try to get out whatever is in my head and heart through an instrument,” he says. “The songs that we wrote as a band are very fulfilling to me, and some of the parts we used are things that I’ve had kicking around in my riff book for years, but they weren’t really a punk thing to do with Kelly’s Heroes, or whatever band I was in when I came up with them. But with these two, I can play something that I think is cool in some way, whether it’s a ‘heavy’ thing or more jangly or whatever it is, and they’ll find it cool in another way that I hadn’t thought of. We just snowball from there.”
The status of kill.pop. has also snowballed, from a side project of sorts to each member’s current main musical pursuit. In late 1998, Fann and Schroeder started the group as a studio project, but its early incarnation split up early the next year when Fann returned to Kelly’s Heroes and Schroeder teamed up with the short-lived pop combo T&A. Last year, Kinder, whose group The Black Water had played a show with kill.pop. on one occasion, asked both Mann and Schroeder to join his band Angie Fights Crime, which eventually mutated into kill.pop..
kill.pop. will follow 1 with its rendition of The Catherine Wheel’s “Fripp,” which the band is contributing to the tribute album Too Much Is Not Enough. Beyond that, a few shows and tentative plans for a second kill.pop. record, nothing is certain. Schroeder is set to move east in August, while Fann is just moving to Kansas City, and Kinder promises that The Black Water (now on hiatus) will indeed soldier forth and that Angie Fights Crime might return. But all that doesn’t mean that kill.pop.’s going kaput anytime soon, because it wasn’t even originally conceived as the type of band that spends much time onstage.
“We wanted the focus of the band to be the creation and recording process, rather than the ‘let’s get people to like us and play a bunch of shows and maybe we’ll get signed thing,'” Schroeder explains. “That way, we could be either as self-indulgent and pretentious or as straight-ahead rock as we wanted without people having any preconceived ideas of what a kill.pop. record or show was going to be like. Besides, when you don’t set your sights very high, each achievement feels a lot better.”
