Never
Bet the Devil Your HeadOne hazy afternoon a couple years back, while slumming it in lower Allston, I saw Quintaine Americana's sinister frontman Rob Dixon on the number 1 bus. He was standing there, hair slicked back, lips clamped shut, staring straight ahead, with the kind of steely gaze that suggested we were all headed to Vietnam, not Harvard Square. Quintaine had played a few nights before at the Linwood, and my teeth were still rattling from the experience. "Set me on fire, you son of a bitch", I remembered him growling, in the song of the same title, a lurching chunk of throb n' roll. "I like when it's painful." I admire guys like Rob, guys who are so far from home that everyone's a stranger, even after all these wasted years. Guys like Rob mean every word they say, are intent on making sure you know exactly where they're coming from, and how you fit into the plan, if at all. I thought of strolling up to the front of the bus to congratulate him, both for tearing a hole through my brain with his searing rock and roll band, and just for being mean as a rattlesnake, even when there's no good call for it. But then he shot a quick glance towards the back of the bus- not even at me, really, just at whatever was lurking behind him- and I thought better of it. He looked as though one friendly slap on the back would have been enough to keep the paramedics busy for awhile. Then, just as quickly, he sucked back into his own seething thoughts, alone in a crowd. It was the perfect crystallization of the QA experience, a grand summation of this band's sonic death trip. Quintaine Americana is the amplification of awkward silences, the shameful welts that show, misery and bravery riding the same razored saddle like a vital new force of nature. Don't tangle with tigers, baby, because tigers bite. Especially tigers from Mississippi.
You think I'm Psycho, Don't You Mama?
Rob Dixon's surname couldn't be any more perfect, and neither could "Dark Thirty", Quintaine Americana's new album. Sure, a few things have changed in the past few years since the band's last record, 2000's "The Devil Went Down to Mississippi". Most noticeably, ex-flash metal guitarist Pete Valli has taken up the cause, muscling up Quintaine's signature indie-clang with a torrent of ropy power- riffs, and famed LA-not-Boston super producer Mudrock (aided and abetted by Andrew Schneider) did whatever the fuck producers do, only he did it so well that it sounds like Hell has finally come to your house, and it's declared war on your stereo system. Otherwise, Dixon, Schleicher, and drummer Jason King have delivered a devastating dose of prime QA, a whirlwind of full throttle bad mood rock that sounds like SonicYouth in used leather, randomly tearing out whole pages from the Book of Revelations, and using them as sheet music. "Dark Thirty" gets unleashed on March 13th, so I called Mister Dixon a week before, to talk about it. I braced myself for a sneering verbal battle, but I got easy Southern drawl instead. Maybe it was the wrong number, I dunno; but the cat sure knew a lot about rock and roll, which is good enough for me.
"We
used to be scary, ya know?" Rob rhetorically asks, and I think about the
signature song from 'Needles', Quintaine's debut album from way back in
'96, a stuttering slam dance of nauseous lust called "Retarded Whore". I
think about how it looked and sounded live, with Marc Schleicher angrily
thumping away at his bass like it was lying to him, a leering look of
booze induced madness on his face, his lower lip spitting out a mist of
cheap beer like the Great Kabuki and his green gas clouds; and Rob
snarling away, all twisted up and bothered, desperate to escape his ugly
circumstances. Evil Live. Live Evil. The Apocalypse as panicky rock and
roll band. Yeah, Quintaine Americana used to be plenty scary. "We've
always been confrontational", Rob says. "We used thrive on the discomfort
level between the band and the crowd." The band's refusal to fall into any
convenient genre tags like 'punk' or 'metal' got them one, anyway, and
Quintaine found themselves playing the dubious role of World's Most
Dangerous Indie Rock Band. "That was always been my problem with indie
rock bands", Rob tells me. "They would bring you to that point when they
were just about to explode, and they would stop, or cut it down. We never
did that. To rock out is an instinct of ours. We don't stop. We blow it
up." Truer words are rarely spoken around these parts, but there's more
thinking than drinking in the band these days, so you are less likely to
get sprayed with blood and beer at a Quintaine show then you were in their
hurricane years. But if new songs like "Holes" are any indication- "I want
to fill them/I want to crawl in them all/ I want to climb up your legs/
And crawl in your holes"- the band still wants to hurt you, they're just
using different weapons. "I've always been sort of apocalyptic", Rob
explains. "I grew up in a really Christian household, where there was a
lot of pressure to conform. I think I've always consciously rebelled
against that. I've always been interested in fate, in pervasive evil, in a
path of destruction that you can't escape from." The twang in his voice
says it all, really. Dixon was born and bred in a small Mississippi town,
and even if he writes the perfect epitaph here in Boston, his tombstone
waits in Dixie. "The older I get, the more I miss it, the more I feel like
I'm in the wrong place", Rob sighs. " I never thought I'd be here this
long. I've been here 13 years. It's calling me back, more and more." I ask
him how much of an influence 'down home' was on the new album. "There's a
lot of souls down there that are not at rest", he explains. "There's an
energy there. That's what Dark Thirty is, it's the first half hour after
dark. You can feel a kind of spooky energy at that time of day."Something tells me Rob feels that spooky energy all the time.
Photos: Lindsey Walker