!!! (CHK CHK CHK)
Sacramento’s multi-pronounceable pioneers have spent over 15 years making you dance by any means necessary.
There are very few bands who throw a party like !!!. A six-piece constructed of skilled players of funk, disco, house and punk, !!! will show you a good time whenever, wherever you catch them. As well as being excellent on the ear, their phenomenal live reputation is thanks in no small part to the infectious enthusiasm of frontman Nic Offer.
We were astounded to see what light work he made of bringing a weekend-weary Tuesday night crowd back to life at Shoreditch’s Village Underground on the evening preceding our interview. As well as it being swelteringly hot, it was the day following the early May bank holiday and lethargy was rife. Nic got everyone dancing though. At one point it required him to enter the crowd and dance with the few remaining static pockets, but he got everyone dancing – no problem.
The truth is, Nic Offer is a great dancer. One of the best. His flamboyant gyrations, shimmies, shakes, pirouettes and speaker climbs implore you to grin and join in. There are few frontmen in the world capable of cancelling out audience inhibition like he can. Yet when we compliment him on his dancing ability over a drink the following day, he modestly suggests he can do better. “I actually feel like I’m a much better dancer when I’m just out dancing”, he says. “Onstage I have to remember to breathe so I can sing. And onstage I’m dancing to the same music every night, whereas in a club I might hear a rhythm I don’t normally dance to. There’s so much of what I do up there that’s pure deer-in-the-headlights, fight-or-flight instinct, just going with it.” By the same token, Nic tells us there’s no great level of thought or analysis that goes into delivering one of the band’s unique live performances. Rather, they are born from a shared refusal to be boring.
“It’s something that’s always just been there” he insists. “It hasn’t really been that difficult, y’know? I think it’s because we have the attitude you’re supposed to have when you play live, which is doing it for the fun of it and going for it 100%. If anything, the reason it’s stayed good is probably my frustration with other bands live, because I don’t enjoy that many bands and I’m absolutely obsessed with not letting the audience get bored with me. Because I know when I watch a band I’m bored after four songs. With us, if there’s any point where you get bored in the set, then you’re going to get hit the next song.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but up until 1996, the members of the band had been scattered amongst Sacramento punk bands The Yah Mos, Pope Smashers and Black Licorice. That year they came together after feeling the collective calling to make dance music, or more accurately, party music. “Something definitely clicked, specifically when I played in The Yah Mos” explains Nic. “The Yah Mos were always very influenced by soul and funk. I remember once we played this three-day punk festival and we were the last band on the whole thing. And we thought, ‘after three days of punk, does anyone really want to hear us get up there and go “argh, argh, argh”’, y’know? It just didn’t seem that exciting. So we said, ‘well, let’s just open with Sex Machine by James Brown’. We did, and the place just erupted! It was absolutely the right route.”
Since choosing that route, becoming synonymous with the early-noughties establishment of the dance-punk sound defined by DFA Records along the way, Nic has rarely glanced back in punk rock’s direction. “Dance music is definitely what intrigues me and where I’m at” he states. “It’s always the thing that hits me the most immediately and also seems the most boundless. I always feel like I have more to discover and learn from it. Whereas rock I’m not always so intrigued. There are very few rock bands that surprise me, y’know? It’s like, you can either write a catchy song or you can’t. And if you can’t, then I don’t have much interest in you.”
Having just released the band’s fifth LP THR!!!ER at the end of April, !!! have cause for celebration. The album has been well-received and already delivered two deeply contrasting but equally striking singles; house experiment Slyd followed by feel-good summer disco gem, One Girl / One Boy. Song to song, pace and genre vary more substantially on THR!!!ER than on any previous !!! LP. “It was everything” says Nic, attempting to explain the diversity of THR!!!ER. “Honestly, every record we did we tried to make different. And then at the end of it, people would say ‘it all kind of sounds the same’, and we’d be like, ‘shit, it does?’” He laughs. “We would always try to make each record sound different. But with this record we’ve just got better at getting further away. It was one of those records where I really attribute it to everything: the band was all pushing, Jim (Eno, producer of THR!!!ER and drummer of Austin four-piece Spoon) was pushing back, and everything was focused. I think one of the best things Jim brought to the record was just that he was capable. I think before, when we would attempt things our ideas were bigger than our ability to land them. Jim was great at helping us achieve our dreams. He’s just a really good producer.”
The first single from THR!!!ER, early house-influenced collage Slyd, deserves particular attention. Given that !!!’s previous LP, 2010’s Strange Weather, Isn’t It?, had probably been their most accessible to date, such an experimental piece without a chorus might have seemed a surprising choice for a first single. It was certainly the right decision. “Well, that one was particularly special” Nic agrees. “It started with the most common way for us to start making one of our songs, which is just a jam loop. We had a bass loop that Mario (Andreoni, guitar), Paul (Quattrone, drums) and I had jammed on and I just got the idea that I wanted to do something like (1987 hit for British act MARRS) Pump up the Volume. It seemed like quite a fun challenge to use the basic groove and then throw in different parts that sounded like they were sampled from completely different songs – that was the initial idea. Then I sent it to a girl we were trying out and asked if she had any parts for it and she came back with the ‘slide’ part. She came over and recorded and I also recorded her chatting and giggling, and I threw all that through the delay pedal and pieced it together from that.”
Slyd absolutely slams live. While their Village Underground set featured a considerable number of !!! classics, it was Slyd that earned the most intense reaction of the evening. “Yeah, that one’s really been getting people, and it’s funny since it’s such a studio creation – we’d kinda never played it, so when the record was done it was like, ‘OK, should we learn this?’ And it’s been one of the most fun ones to play and definitely one of the ones that gets the crowd going.”
Whilst Slyd represents one of !!!’s biggest experiments to date, you can also hear a greater level of planning on THR!!!ER. Epic, freeform, elongated endings have long been an enjoyable hallmark of !!! songs – see the likes of Me and Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard or Pardon My Freedom – but the tunes on THR!!!ER are somewhat tighter, every move imbued with a real purpose, a sense of pure, simple melody at each track’s core. “This was the most prepared we’ve ever gone into the studio”, Nic confirms. “For example, take a song like Fine Fine Fine. The demo was a blueprint, then we just sat in the studio filling it out. It was a great way to work, just really fun. There was still a bit of jamming, but less on this record for sure. I think the idea was always to make something surprising and challenging. The first time we ever wrote a really short song was the first song on Myth Takes – the title track. It was really exciting when we wrote it because we realised, ‘wow, we can just do this, this is a song!’ So it was kind of intriguing to us to work with that: instead of writing these big, involved things where maybe all the parts don’t work, just focusing upon what really works. That was really exciting for us. Jim had a hand in that, specifically on One Girl / One Boy. There was definitely this long part in the middle and he said “what’s this part doing?” and we’re like”, Nic laughs, “… ‘I dunno?!’”
Finally, to the endless quandary of how to say ‘!!!’, that multi-pronounceable monicker. Google and Spotify searches of ‘!!!’ will get you nowhere, and so ‘chk chk chk’ has emerged as the popular spelling (and pronunciation). Nic tells us that ‘pow pow pow’, ‘bang bang bang’ and three clicks of the tongue have become favourite alternatives. He also recounts how the name worked against them in the early days. “I think it was probably like, our fifth show ever – it was in Arizona with this straight-edge band, and I think it was probably in front of about 10 people. No one was there to see them and no one was there to see us. And, of course, the other band thought we were fucking shit. And when they talked about us onstage they said something about playing with [makes wanking motion three times] “pwt pwt pwt”! Nic laughs, “fair enough I suppose!”
This approach to their band name kind of sums up what !!! are about. Provided you’re having a great time with the music, you can say !!! however you like, just like you can dance to !!! however you like. The live show has never wavered from the incredibly high standard they’ve set since the first time you saw them. And in THR!!!ER they now have an album that demonstrates the full breadth and diversity of their irresistible sound.
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THR!!!ER is available now via Warp Records. !!! play Visions Festival on August 10th.
Words: Jack Bolter
Photo: Piper Ferguson
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