And You Can Eat It, Too
Brooklyn’s Out Hud bakes up something funky
Every band searches for that perfect recipe of sound and personality. For Brooklyn-based dub-electro quartet Out Hud, that recipe’s a type of baked good.
“Baking a cake and music are kind of similar, in that if you stir things up too much, the consistency can get way off,” says Out Hud co-founder, multi-instrumentalist and amateur cook Phyllis Forbes. “When you’re making batter or making a song, if you try to mix it too much or mix too much in, it’s gonna get weird.”
Appropriately surrounded by baked goods in a corner of a Williamsburg pastry shop, Forbes and Out Hud producer Justin Vandervolgen squirm. Forbes squirms because she’s being put on the spot about Out Hud’s songwriting process. But Vandervolgen, Forbes’ boyfriend and a member of !!! (pronounced “Chik Chik Chik”), fidgets because that’s just what he does; or at least that’s what his mother once told Forbes. His constantly tapping foot does nothing to belie this notion.
Out Hud is a band of captivating contradictions. As Forbes, the prolific-in-spurts Zen baker, explains how Out Hud songs often seem to end up with “100 million parts” once practiced and recorded, the fidgeting Vandervolgen professes his dedication to focusing the band’s quirky molten funk sessions while peppering them with happy studio accidents.
“If you think of famous bands, most of the time it’s two people who write the songs, and so the songs are focused. So when you work in a band like Out Hud where almost everyone writes on a song, everyone thinks their part should be important,” reflects Vandervolgen, who helps distill sprawling parts into a streamlined skip.
“You have to find room so everyone has space to speak their piece,” continues Vandervolgen, laughing at the pun on “speak their piece/peace.”
Formed in Sacramento, Calif., in 1996, but relocated in New York four years ago, Out Hud is a group of individuals - mixing engineer Vandervolgen, keyboardist and percussionist Forbes, bassist Nic Offer and vocalist/cellist Molly Schnick - that have been for the most part living and jamming together constantly for nearly a decade. The result is a catalog of songs distilled from 150 equal parts, including those furthering the fine post-punk/mutant disco lineage of ESG, the Tom Tom Club, Arthur Russell and Adrian Sherwood. However, with the release of Let Us Never Speak of It Again, the group’s sophomore album, there’s one part in particular that’s being singled out as the critics’ and buying public’s main focus.
Whereas 2002’s S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. was a wholly instrumental mélange of disassociated guitar skronk and cello stabs, buoyant synths, metronomic beats and spiraling salvers of echo, Never Speak has actually had a lot of people talking about vocals along the more melancholic yet still plucky pace, and among the burbling, wide frequencies-prickling keyboards.
“I feel a lot of people are either really into the fact we have vocals, or are really offended it’s not more like S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.,” observes Forbes, who mentions that Out Hud’s first release in 1998 also had vocals. “But I’d rather have it polarized like that than the album be considered mediocre.”
“People shouldn’t concentrate on any one aspect,” interjects Vandervolgen in the supportive manner Out Hud’s familial members pick up each other’s points. “The lyrics are perfectly vague: They give you enough of an idea to form your own idea without making you stay in one headspace. It’s always been about movement with Out Hud, never having any one thing too prominent in the mix.”
“I find if people put the record on with an agenda - it’s ‘dance-punk,’ it’s a New York record! - they won’t like it regardless,” concludes Forbes about the group’s slung low pulsing-meets-hands-up clap. “Because we didn’t make it with an agenda. You have to let it be what it is to you.”