Conan Neutron (né Newton), the 23-year-old lead singer and guitarist for East Bay trio Replicator, is trying to persuade me that his group wasn't named after the duplication gadget from Star Trek.
Jasmine Jopling
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With the Paramours and Graves Brothers Deluxe
Thursday, July 5, at 9 p.m.
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"Seriously, we didn't think about Star Trek until months and months after we came up with the band name," says Neutron. "We thought, "Oh, man, we're going to attract the geeks now.'"
With his nerd glasses perched precariously on his nose and his baby face twisted into an amiable smirk, Neutron is only somewhat convincing. Replicator drummer and co-founder Chris Bolig, sitting beside Neutron in a brightly lit coffee shop in the Haight, offers a better explanation.
"It's "Replicator' because of all the bands we rip off," says Bolig, 24, eliciting laughter from Neutron and the band's bassist Ben Adrian, 26.
There are equal parts truth and sarcasm behind Bolig's assertion. While Replicator admittedly wears its influences -- harsh-but-concise rockers Shellac, progressive punk trio Unwound, and noise pioneers Sonic Youth -- on its sleeve, the band's music is more than just a cheap knockoff. On its recently released debut, Winterval, Replicator cleverly mixes its inspirations into a sound that is familiar yet forward-looking.
To be fair, Replicator's type of music isn't often heard in the steamy confines of local venues, where genres such as electronica, guitar pop, and retro rock rule. Because Replicator fits none of these molds, Neutron seems almost apologetic about his band's allegiance to deafening, precision-oriented indie rock.
"We are artier than most rock bands in the San Francisco area, but I think we rock too much for the art rock crowd, " says Neutron.
But if any band can inspire a stuffy, shoe-gazing crowd to let loose and rock out, it's Replicator. Beyond its exuberantly loud sound, the band makes tireless attempts to infuse humor into its performances. From Neutron's staccato dance moves to Adrian tossing his old clothes into the crowd, it's clear that even if Replicator's music sounds serious, the band certainly isn't.
"We enjoy ourselves onstage; therefore, we can't be precise, progressive art rock folks," says Bolig.
"But I do enough mescaline for everyone," deadpans Adrian.
Part of Replicator's refreshingly glib attitude toward indie rock stems from the fact that the two founding members were novice musicians when they started playing together.
The pair met in early 1998 through an ad Bolig placed in a local paper. Bolig admitted in the classified blurb that he was a "beginning drummer looking for other beginners." He also made the mistake of listing Black Sabbath as one of his influences, which attracted a stream of serious-minded metalheads.
"People would call up and say, "You any fucking good, man? Are you any fucking good? 'Cause we're fucking good,'" says Bolig sarcastically. "I mean, come on, I said I was a beginning drummer [in the ad]."
Luckily, Neutron was a burgeoning guitarist himself. Though the two hit it off and agreed that they should jam together, it wasn't until six months after a chance meeting at a Mudhoney show that the pair started playing at Bolig's house in Oakland.
After a police raid over noise violations forced the band to stop practicing there, Replicator found another spot in Oakland -- and a permanent bass player in Adrian. (The previous bassist, Dan Kennedy, performs all the bass lines on Winterval; Adrian joined after the album was recorded.) The band spent much of the last two years paying its dues at venues such as Kimo's and the Stork Club, while refining its repertoire of songs.
In January of this year the group recorded its album with Shellac bassist and producer Bob Weston at San Francisco's Tiny Telephone studio. The trio eventually settled on eight numbers -- tunes that, according to Neutron, represent the band's current sound, which is more mature than its early indie rock thrashing.
"We included the songs that have more complicated song structure and more dynamics," says Neutron. "We [left out] the poppy stuff."
Replicator also eliminated a substantial number of vocals -- three tunes on the album are instrumentals and others feature only a minimum of words. In fact, it takes five minutes and 57 seconds before you hear Neutron's voice at all, and then he's not even singing. Instead, he's speaking of "ice cubes, conspicuously absent" in a brooding monotone that sounds as if he's trying to talk himself out of a bad LSD trip.
Neutron's vocals follow this precedence throughout most of the album, with some gut-wrenching wails thrown in for good measure. When Neutron does finally sing -- on the record's fifth and catchiest track, "Motivationally Challenged" -- his voice is surprisingly good, if more than a little off-key.
Almost all of the songs on Winterval start off sparsely, then build their way through a series of stops, starts, and rhythmic changes. One of the record's more diverse compositions, "Will C. Wood," begins with jazz-flavored guitar and bass and Neutron's quirkily intoned vocal line, then spins into a thrash-funk maelstrom. Eventually, the song comes to almost complete silence, Neutron howls, and a dissonant, psychedelic jam returns the song to the original verse.
The record's closing track, the instrumental "Taxi Driving," resembles its Winterval predecessors as much as Red House Painters sound like Slayer, but at the very least it is proof of Replicator's range. The song is slow and pretty, meandering through a shimmery landscape that features a disembodied, repetitive piano track and understated, ambient guitar. With a song that departs so drastically from an otherwise consistent sound, it's not surprising that Bolig admits Replicator's style may change soon, especially with the addition of Adrian. The Indianapolis native, who also plays drums in the Librarians and performs as solo boy-and-his-guitar act Guitar vs. Gravity, moved to San Francisco last September, bringing with him a new set of influences that range from My Bloody Valentine to Kraftwerk.
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