andrea renney

Interview with Chris Bailoni of Grapetooth

Andrea Renney
Grapetooth

Chris Bailoni, one-half of Chicago synth-pop/new wave duo Grapetooth, discusses his musical beginnings, modern new wave, and what’s next for the band.

What do you think of when you think of Chicago? The windy city is known for its deep dish pizza, its two Major League Baseball teams, and its Prohibition-Era history of organized crime. Music wise, Chicago has produced countless notable musicians that span many genres: Muddy Waters, Kanye West, and the Smashing Pumpkins all hail from Chi-Town.

But despite acting as a musical melting pot, a genre that Chicago isn’t particularly known for is synth heavy, ‘80s new wave dance music. The modern resurgence of this kind of music, inspired by bands like New Order and Tears for Fears, is even less associated with the area. However, the wine-fueled partnership of two Chicago-based musicians is changing that.

grapetooth (n.) – one who consumes copious amounts of red wine, to the point that their teeth are frequently stained crimson.

Grapetooth is also the name ascribed to the musical collaboration of producer Chris Bailoni, also known as Home-Sick, and Clay Frankel, vocalist and guitarist for garage rock band Twin Peaks. After bonding over a mutual love of wine and Japanese new wave, Bailoni and Frankel began experimenting with making music together in December of 2015. “There was some night when we were out and Clay was talking about wanting to make some music that’s not rock music, like Twin Peaks. We were drunk at this bar, just chatting about it,” Bailoni, now 26 and gearing up for Grapetooth’s headlining tour this June, recounts. “So he came over the next day and we just started making music. That’s kind of how all that started.”

Grapetooth played their first show in 2016 before they had even released a full-length record. They’ve been selling out venues ever since, gaining a reputation for their rambunctious live shows, which are half frenetic mosh pit, half wild dance party. Bailoni admits he wasn’t initially comfortable with performing on stage, and he credits their song “Violent” with helping him get over any stage fright he felt. “That was the first time I felt like we both broke through the nerves and got more comfortable with how the shows would go live, just because it was so fun to yell [“are you violent?”] so loud,” Bailoni recounts, when describing their first time playing the song at a show in Chicago.

Grapetooth’s bright, high tempo sound wasn’t necessarily intentional and it took some time to find. Bailoni described their first attempts at recording as “pretty strange”: “I guess the drums were dance-y and new-wave-y, but we pitched down the vocals and made them sound like horror movie soundtrack songs, really scary. Weird stuff, dissonant sounding.” It wasn’t until the spring of 2016, when the two wrote Grapetooth’s first single “Trouble”, that Bailoni thinks they really hit on something special. “That was probably the first song we made that we were both like, ‘oh wow, we’ve got a sound here and now we know what we’re doing’”.

Despite finding what Bailoni described as the perfect mesh of his production style and Frankel’s, the two didn’t always have serious aspirations for what they’d created.

“We still hadn’t really planned on releasing it or doing anything real or ever playing a show with it,” Bailoni continues, when asked about their initial plans for Grapetooth. “We were like, let’s maybe make a small EP and put it on Bandcamp for free or something like that.” Despite their modest intentions in their early days, Grapetooth released their first self-titled record in November of 2018. The majority of the ten-song tracklist is in line with their influences, which include synth-punk duo Suicide and Yukihiro Takahashi of Japanese electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. However, the curiously country-sounding closing track, “Together”, sounds a lot more like Frankel’s Twin Peaks work than a New Order song. Including that on the tracklist was no mistake. “I think we just wanted the record to be eclectic of genre and style, but still somehow fit together,” Bailoni explains, when asked about the disparate song’s inclusion. “It just sounds like two friends making music together in their bedroom, which is what the whole thing is.”

When asked about how Grapetooth fits into the Chicago music scene, Bailoni agrees that his city isn’t synonymous with the style of music he and Frankel are creating. “It’s definitely more rock based. Rock, and then obviously rap and hip hop. But all those worlds are so tightly connected – everyone in Chicago knows each other because it’s such a small community, like any community in a city of arts,” he says. “But yeah, I suppose there’s not too much synth/dance stuff coming out of Chicago.”

Maybe being a bit of an outlier in the music scene is one of the reasons why Grapetooth enjoyed such success before even putting out their first record. Personally, Bailoni thinks the combination of his and Frankel’s individual styles is what sets them apart from other bands that have a similar sound. “I do feel like there’s not too much stuff coming out that sounds like us,” he says. “But I feel like Clay’s vocal style kind of separates [us] from the pack and gives it more of a grunge punk sound. Because if you take away all the vocals, we just sound like we’re copying any New Order song or any new wave Japanese music.”

While a lot of musicians were seemingly born with guitar picks or drumsticks in their hands, Bailoni didn’t start dabbling into music until his second year of college. He credits his friend Kevin Rhomberg, known to many as producer and musician Knox Fortune, as his inspiration for getting into music production. “I remember him showing me all the music he was making on his laptop in his bedroom, just with shitty speakers,” Bailoni explains. “His ability to make songs that sounded like they were produced by a full band on his laptop kind of inspired me that you didn’t really have to have a lot of equipment or anything expensive, or any real [technical] musical knowledge, to be able to make songs.”

While a lack of musical knowledge might hinder some facets of the songwriting process, Bailoni thinks there’s a benefit to being less experienced with the technical aspects of music. “I think there’s definitely a positive aspect of not being too musical if you’re a producer, because you tend to lean more towards what sounds good emotion-wise versus what would make sense musically,” he says, when discussing his process for creating music.

“The lack of knowledge tends to force more outlandish, creative ideas, I suppose.”

Bailoni may not have started making music seriously until he was nineteen, but he had a different artistic outlet before that: filming and editing skateboarding videos. This skill would later benefit the band when it came time to make music videos, particularly the video for “Trouble”. “We just kind of grabbed a camera and then went out with a couple of weird outfits with our friend Jackson, who filmed it,” says Bailoni. “It ended up being kind of fun, just the mentality of how you film a skateboard edit: go out with your friends, edit it afterwards, and see what comes out of it.” Keeping with the band’s spirit of experimenting and seeing what happens, Bailoni explains that neither he nor Frankel aim for any kind of narrative in their videos, opting instead for videos that resemble “visual collages”.

What’s next for Grapetooth? For now, they’re proceeding in the same fashion as they always have: taking things as they come and having fun with it. “As far as what’s gonna happen in the future, we don’t really know. […] I guess we’re just gonna keep making music whenever we do, as we always have, and then actually put out a second record.” In the meantime, Bailoni thinks Grapetooth may put out a few singles or an EP this year. But rather than working with any big-name producers, he and Frankel will continue to employ the do-it-yourself method to create, as he puts it, the feeling of two friends making music together in their bedroom. “Just keeping it fun and simple,” Bailoni reiterates. “Us and friends.”

Grapetooth is currently on a headlining tour with support from Ian Sweet and James Swanberg. Catch them in Los Angeles on June 21st at the Echoplex, in Vancouver on June 25th at the Fox Cabaret, or anywhere else that fine concerts are sold. Tour dates can be found here.

Written by: Andrea Renney

Vancouver Special: Shannon Shaw at the Fox Cabaret

Andrea Renney

Shannon Shaw, vocalist and bassist for Shannon and the Clams, embarked on a tour supporting her debut solo record, Shannon in Nashville, this May.

As discussed in my review of Vundabar’s Vancouver show in February, the Fox Cabaret is a historic porn-theater-turned-music-venue in the city’s hip Mount Pleasant neighborhood. On May 9th, the Fox played host to Shannon Shaw and her band – Jose Boyer, Mark Cisneros, Garett Goddard, and Andrea Scanniello – for the first headlining show of their May tour. Shaw, frontwoman and founding member of Oakland’s ’60s-inspired garage rock outfit Shannon and the Clams, was north of the border to promote her solo record, Shannon in Nashville, released last June. 

I arrived at the Fox just after 10:00, and Shannon and the band took the stage right on schedule around 10:30. Visually, they looked every bit as glamorous as I’d expected, given what I know about Shannon and the Clams’ stage presence.

I imagine jeans and t-shirts are comfortable to play in, and giving no care to what you look like on stage might be “punk rock”, but there’s a certain magic in a band coordinating their wardrobe around a specific style to really cultivate an image.

Shaw herself was in her usual pinafore dress getup, complete with sparkly suspenders and guitar-shaped enamel pins on her collar. Her glittery black bass, which I recognized from the Shannon and the Clams show at the Belly Up Tavern that I attended last year, sat waiting at the back of the stage. Her bandmates were equally done up: Boyer, Cisneros, and Scanniello donned similarly adorned Mariachi band-esque jackets, and Goddard was rocking a neck scarf and an impressive handlebar moustache. Their outfits’ consistent color palette of red and black seemed intentional, given the venue’s similarly colored decor.

If you’re a fan of Shannon and the Clams’ retro, ’60s girl group vibe, you’ll find a bit of it here.

Shaw’s solo work maintains the dreamy, nostalgic feelings that the Clams’ shows evoke, and the individuals in attendance at this show were clearly here for that. A mix of twentysomething hipsters and over-fifty eccentrics made up the Thursday night crowd, bonded in their tattoos and ironic facial hair. A John Waters lookalike, complete with the iconic pencil moustache, towered over us all from a few rows back. A fitting character in the scene, as Shannon and the Clams have been described as “something from a John Waters lucid dream”.

The set began with “Golden Frames”, the opening track from Shannon in Nashville. This song set the mood for the night: a vintage-inspired, heartfelt soundtrack to sway along to, as sparkly and captivating as Shaw’s bass guitar. After “Golden Frames”, I turned to my friend and made the following very astute observation: “She’s really good”. My KCR reviews might be 2000+ words, but I’m clearly a lot more concise in person.

The consistent use of keyboards and the inclusion of a trumpet during “Leather, Metal, Steel” added to the unique, enchanting sound of the night’s entertainment.

Shannon played through eleven other songs from her album, taking occasional breaks to chat with the audience about the weather, the venue, and the “haunted” whisky bar at which she and the band had been treated to dinner before the show. “Coal on the Fire”, the closing track on Shannon in Nashville, was perhaps the most Nashville-esque song that she performed for us. Its jangling, old-school-country inspired sound was the most danceable of the night. “Cold Pillows”, with its heartbreaking lyrics and group harmonies, was clearly inspired by girl groups of the 1960s.

To the best of my recollection, Shaw performed every song from the record except for “Lord of Alaska”, likely to the dismay of the person who requested it for the encore. She concluded her set with “Cryin’ My Eyes Out”, dedicating it to her father and asking that we send him positive energy. This was one of my favorite songs of the night, and the importance of the song to Shaw was clear to all of us.

I find that the Clams’ instrumentals, which lean more towards a doo-wop/surf sound than Shaw’s solo work, sometimes mask the underlying emotion of their songs’ lyrics with an inherent danceability. That’s not a bad thing, but at this show, Shaw’s raw feelings took center stage both in her lyrics and in her delivery. She’s an incredible vocalist, and the combination of her words and her powerful, soulful voice had me mesmerized in the front row.

If you don’t have a professional camera, exclusively use the Huji app so your photos can still be ~art~

I’ve noticed that my music taste seems to be going through a transitionary period in recent months. I used to consider myself more of a music person than a lyrics person, caring more about the energy of a live show than about the message a song was trying to convey to me. I was happy to mosh along to songs like “Cheap Beer” by FIDLAR and leave a show covered in a hundred other people’s sweat. Now, I find myself overcome with emotion when listening to “Holy Shit” by Father John Misty and being brought to almost-tears while dancing to “Someday” at the Growlers’ Snow Ball III show.

The only prerequisite for the music I’m currently obsessing over is that it must break my heart.

The point is, I think Shannon Shaw’s performance resonated more with me now than it would have if I’d seen this show a year ago. I guess context is key: sometimes, a fun punk show is all I’m looking for. But when I’m feeling a bit lost, swaying along to songs about unrequited love and loss can be cathartic. Anyway, I digress. This is supposed to be a show review, not a diary entry. Do I understand the difference? Probably not.

I’ve praised Shannon and the Clams before on this blog, calling them one of the most underrated bands of our time (and I am such an authority on the matter). Onion, their sixth studio album released last February, was one of my favorite records of 2018. Both Onion and Shannon in Nashville were produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, so I suppose it’s understandable that I’m also a big fan of Shaw’s solo record.

This brand of garage rock that Shaw has created, refined, and propagated throughout her different projects is just so unlike anything else in the music scene these days, and I’ve yet to find anyone else that comes close to imitating it.

I don’t want this review to read like an essay comparing Shannon’s sound to that of her other band, but I think the comparison is somewhat inevitable, given how integral she is to the Clams. This show was certainly as fun as the Shannon and the Clams show I attended, but it also felt like we were sharing something special as Shannon poured her soul out to us on stage. I guess my final verdict is this: if you like Shannon and the Clams, you’ll like Shannon Shaw. I mean, you already do. So is her solo stuff just more of the same? No, but it retains all the best parts of what we already know and love.

Written by: Andrea Renney

Vancouver Special: PUP at the Wise Hall

Andrea Renney
PUP

PUP returned to Vancouver, British Columbia on March 29th to a sold-out crowd for the first leg of their 2019 “Tour-Pocalypse” in support of their third record, Morbid Stuff

KCR Canada special correspondent checking in here! I finally did something on a Friday night other than drinking beer in bed alone and ventured out to catch Toronto’s beloved punk rock sons, PUP, at the Wise Hall and Lounge on March 29th. Having seen PUP one rowdy night in 2016 at the now-shuttered Cobalt Cabaret, I knew this was a show I shouldn’t miss.

I ran into a slight complication in my plans to attend this show: the tickets to PUP’s Vancouver show sold out in minutes. Granted, the Wise Hall is a pretty small venue, but PUP really seems to be blowing up in recent years. They’ve sold out tons of their upcoming North American tour dates, including all of their Canadian dates, the Fillmore in San Francisco, and both nights at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles. For what I once considered a small Canadian punk band, this is unheard of. I managed to get two tickets a week before the show when the band tweeted that they’d released some more.

The Wise Hall is located just off of Commercial Drive in East Vancouver in the Grandview-Woodland/Little Italy neighborhood. It’s sort of reminiscent of the Irenic in that it’s on a residential street, has a capacity of about 250 people, and was clearly never meant to be a punk rock venue. It’s the type of place that feels homey and welcoming, with gothic chandeliers and a disco ball giving it added charm. Barricade status: none. Hooray!

I arrived at the Wise in time to catch the second opener, Pkew Pkew Pkew.

While I really enjoyed their set, I despise saying their name aloud. They reminded me a bit of The Gaslight Anthem, but I also haven’t listened to The Gaslight Anthem in about eight years, so that might be completely off the mark. Pkew Pkew Pkew is also from Toronto, so they’ve spent a lot of time with PUP over the past few years, both as label-mates and as tour-mates. As such, the crowd welcomed them with open arms and an open mosh pit.

PUP took the stage at 10:45, opening with “Free at Last” from their not-yet-released (at the time) third record, Morbid Stuff.

Morbid Stuff wasn’t released until April 5, but the band played four other songs from the record in the middle of their set: “Sibling Rivalry,” “Kids,” “Scorpion Hill,” and “Morbid Stuff.” Lead vocalist Stefan Babcock prefaced their performance of “Morbid Stuff” by asking us not to film it, in part because it hadn’t been released yet and in part because they “fucking suck at playing it”. While the first reason may have been true, the second certainly wasn’t. The song sounded great, and I’m excited to hear it again once the record comes out.

Fan favorites like “Guilt Trip” and “Sleep in the Heat” were well-received by the crowd; these moments were punctuated by fans (crowd) surfing and (stage) diving overhead. This is the closest thing I have to a day at the beach now that I’m not in San Diego. Anyway, if you’re a big fan of Netflix’s Stranger Things, you should check out PUP’s music videos for these two songs, which both feature Finn Wolfhard. I myself recently almost walked into Finn Wolfhard while coming out of an Urban Outfitters in Vancouver’s affluent, yoga-loving Kitsilano neighborhood. Welcome to Vancouver, aka Hollywood North.

Recently, PUP tweeted that they would be partnering with a local charity for all of their headlining shows on this upcoming tour (and for the foreseeable future).

They’re additionally committed to giving the charity a space at future shows to provide information about their cause. For their show at the Wise, they partnered with Urban Native Youth Association. UNYA provides support for Indigenous youth, empowering them to excel in life and inspiring them to become leaders in their communities. Towards the end of the show, guitarist Steve Sladkowski took some time to talk about the organization, praising them for their work and condemning the government’s abhorrent treatment of Indigenous people throughout Canada’s history. He urged us to fill UNYA’s donation box at the merch table, emphasizing how much work the organization does not only in Vancouver, but particularly in the very neighborhood in which we were attending their show.

Punk has always been about expressing yourself and finding acceptance among likeminded individuals who challenge the status quo. However, initiatives like these really exemplify the shift that’s been happening in the scene recently, a shift in how bands use their platforms and how they prioritize inclusion and safety for everyone at shows. This doesn’t mean that we have to cancel mosh pits and put up barricades at every opportunity. It means that bands are becoming more accountable for how their fans are treated at shows and doing their best to use their platforms to give back to the communities their fans are a part of. Clearly, being punk rock and being a good person don’t have to be mutually exclusive anymore.

Towards the end of the night, the band invited us to participate in a special activity called “PUP Karaoke.”

It’s exactly like it sounds: they invite someone from the crowd to come up and sing one of their songs. Tonight, that song would be “Reservoir” from their 2013 debut self-titled record. While Babcock said that “no one should know the words to any PUP song,” he also said the karaoke participant at their Calgary show had never heard the song before. That would not be the case for tonight’s volunteer, “Seth” (wearing a Space Jam-esque “Abolish ICE” shirt), who knew every word and took this opportunity to live out his punk rock dreams.

When I saw PUP in 2016, they opened the show with what I consider to be their two biggest crowd-pleasers: “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP,” both off their second album, The Dream Is Over. The first song segues perfectly into the second with no gap in between, both on the record and at their shows. This time around, the songs were shifted to the end of what was a pretty short set. Probably a better spot for them, as a band’s de facto anthem(s?) are usually best reserved for the finale.

A note about PUP: they don’t do encores, claiming that they “feel like assholes” playing their (fake) last song, leaving the stage for a couple minutes, and returning to play a couple more. As someone who hates clichés, I am in total agreement with their views on encores. With this in mind, PUP sent us off with the aforementioned twin bangers and thanked us for what they said was one of their favorite shows they’ve ever played. I might miss San Diego every minute of every day I spend in Canada, but shows like these suggest that maybe there’s hope for the Vancouver music scene after all.

Catch PUP at the Irenic on June 19th, supported by Ratboys and Beach Bunny. Don’t miss your chance to see ‘em while they’re still playing venues this small!
Written by: Andrea Renney

Vancouver Special: Vundabar at the Fox Cabaret

Andrea Renney
Vundabar playing at the Fox Cinema

Boston-based “sludgy jangly pop” (per their Facebook About page) trio Vundabar went on an expansive North American tour with a number of different supporting acts.

Vundabar came to Vancouver’s Fox Cabaret with support from El Monte, California’s The Red Pears and Washington’s Le Grotto.

The Fox Cabaret is a historic venue in Vancouver’s hip Mount Pleasant neighborhood that hosts touring bands, themed dance parties, and intimate comedy shows. Until 2013, the Fox was actually an adult movie theater known as the Fox Cinema. After a thorough cleaning and a major facelift, the Fox Cabaret was opened in 2014 among the craft breweries, vegan donut shops, and themed bars that populate the area.

I arrived at the Fox around 9:00 and Le Grotto was midway through their set. The venue wasn’t full yet, but everyone who was there seemed into the band’s ‘70s-inspired rock (including me). I’d call them garage rock, but their Facebook genre is listed as “Vaping Rules”. Take my label with a grain of salt, I suppose.

The Red Pears were up next. For a sad Canadian girl like me who’s perpetually missing the Southern California music scene, they were a nostalgic treat to have in Vancouver. They reminded me so much of all the local San Diego surf/garage rock bands that I miss dearly. As The Red Pears concluded their set and began packing up their equipment, the familiar sound of the Growlers rang out over the speakers. If you read my review of the Growlers’ Snow Ball show, you know that for me, there is only the Growlers. I danced around to “Who Loves the Scum?”, inadvertently clapping at the end as if I were actually at a Growlers show.

Fortunately, The Fox Cabaret really knows how to get people excited for their next act.

Vundabar came out around 10:00 as the crowd moved in toward the stage that has had countless pornographic films projected above it. They opened with “$$$”, a six-minute-long song from 2018’s Smell Smoke. Things were immediately off to an uproarious start.

I find Vundabar’s sound a bit hard to describe. I hear a lot of grunge in the tracks from their newest record, Smell Smoke. However, the first single from that record, “Acetone”, leans much more towards pop punk. Their self-imposed “sludgy jangly pop” label feels pretty accurate, especially for 2015’s Gawk. Genre labels aside, the energy they put into their shows is infectious, and the crowd at the Fox reciprocated by keeping things rowdy throughout their set.

The band played all their well-known favorites, including “Alien Blues”, “Holy Toledo”, and “Oulala”. Lead vocalist Brandon Hagen’s signature rapport with his bandmates and with the crowd made everything extra fun, particularly when a piece of the drum set went missing and we had to wait for a replacement to be brought out.

Unfortunately, Vundabar’s set was cut short to allow time to set up for the 80s vs. 90s dance party that was scheduled after the show. For once, the band’s “last song” actually was the last song, as the crowd’s cheers for an encore were left unfulfilled. I, however, was treated to yet another song by the Growlers as the 80s vs. 90s DJs set up their booth. If we weren’t going to get a Vundabar encore, dancing around to “City Club” was good enough for me.

Written by: Andrea Renney

A “Vancouver Special” is a popular style of home that was built in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in mass quantities between the years of 1965 to 1985. The homes are boxlike and visually unappealing, often featuring a second-floor balcony on the front of the house and a stucco exterior with brick accents. Vancouver Specials are still seen in most Greater Vancouver neighborhoods despite the city’s major gentrification and increase in property development over the last few decades.
Vancouver Special is also a new series on the KCR College Radio Blog featuring show reviews, interviews, and maybe other things located in/related to Vancouver. The series is written by KCR member and ex-SDSU exchange student Andrea Renney. This is KCR Canada.