Sitting round a North Hollywood rehearsal studio on a latest Wednesday night, the members of the Onerous Quartet are taking a break from prepping for the primary live performance by this indie-rock supergroup by recounting the primary gigs they performed with a few of their different bands.
Drummer Jim White volunteers a recollection of his first present with Soiled Three, which fashioned in Melbourne within the early Nineties as a result of “this guy had a bar, and he wanted a band,” as White places it. “We played three sets for three people, and we got 60 bucks.”
“Each?” asks singer and guitarist Matt Sweeney, identified for founding New York’s Chavez across the identical time.
“Total,” White solutions. “Plus all you can drink.”
Says Stephen Malkmus, indie-rock well-known because the frontman of Pavement: “That’s a f— deal in Australia.”
Does White reckon the Soiled Three downed greater than $60 value of booze?
“Oh yeah,” the drummer says. “We left our gear there and came back again the next day. The drinks were still flowing.”
Given their established-veteran standing — the Onerous Quartet’s fourth member is Emmett Kelly, who’s performed with the Cairo Gang and with Will Oldham for years — these guys ranging in age from mid-40s to early 60s appear not in in the slightest degree anxious about the truth that, 24 hours from now, they’ll make their debut in entrance of an viewers on the Belasco in downtown Los Angeles. Sweeney passes round a tray of brie and raspberries as we chat; Malkmus is carrying tennis shorts and tennis footwear, having come right here straight from a day match at a pal’s place.
But their laid-back angle is accompanied by an endearing pleasure concerning the music they make collectively. “It’s good, right?” Malkmus asks. “Some of the lyrics are kind of blah-blah-blah. But I get a kick out of the songs.”
As he ought to: The band’s self-titled debut, which got here out final month, is a tuneful blast of fuzz-bomb pop — glammy, folky, a bit of psychedelic — with nice riffs and a loping, late-Beatles-era groove. Malkmus, Sweeney and Kelly take turns singing lead, evoking recollections of every of their previous initiatives (particularly Pavement). But the pleasingly off-kilter approach they mix these acquainted components feels contemporary.
The Onerous Quartet got here collectively after Malkmus and Sweeney labored on Malkmus’ 2020 solo album “Traditional Techniques.” No person within the band pushes again significantly exhausting on the time period “supergroup,” although it does appear barely embarrassing to all of them. The best way Sweeney sees it, every member’s ample expertise simply meant “we didn’t have to talk about a lot of stuff” to ensure that everybody to seek out frequent floor. The Onerous Quartet having a couple of lead singer and songwriter was a part of the deal from the get-go; Malkmus says that setup places the band in a lineage that additionally consists of the B-52’s, Sonic Youth, X and Royal Trux.
“It adds this communal element,” he explains. Provides Sweeney: “Different points of view from the same spaceship.”
To date, a minimum of, the man enjoying bass on any given Onerous Quartet tune is without doubt one of the guys who didn’t write the tune — which shouldn’t lead anybody to conclude that bass is an undesirable instrument. The truth is, Kelly says, “it’s the one that everyone wants to play the most — even Jim.” (Sitting behind his drum package, White nods in settlement.) “There’s all these weird myths about rock ’n’ roll, but maybe the weirdest is that nobody wants to play bass,” Sweeney says.
“Back in the hardcore days, it was a rite of passage that the new guy would be on bass,” Malkmus factors out. “People wanted to move up to guitar. I don’t know why. I guess Johnny Thunders was cooler,” he provides of the famously dissolute New York Dolls member. “The guitar hero and all that.”
“Which is hilarious now because nobody cares about the guitar anymore,” Sweeney says with fun. “Young people come up to me and ask how I do what I do, and it’s like they’re saying: ‘Oh, it’s so cool that you still sew your clothes by hand while everybody else wears real clothes.’ ”
The Onerous Quartet began recording its album in New York earlier than ending it on the storied Shangri-La studio in Malibu owned by producer Rick Rubin, for whom Sweeney has labored steadily as a session participant, together with on albums by Adele, Johnny Money and Neil Diamond. (Enjoyable truth involving the well-connected Sweeney: The rehearsal house the place the Onerous Quartet is practising in North Hollywood is owned by Bob Brunner, whose father was a writing companion on TV’s “Happy Days” with the late Garry Marshall, whose son Scott performed bass in Chavez.)
For the sweetly shuffling “Rio’s Song” — which Sweeney wrote about his pal Rio Hackford, the actor and bar proprietor who died in 2022 — the band filmed a music video within the type of a shot-for-shot remake of the Rolling Stones’ charming early-MTV-era clip for “Waiting on a Friend.” Requested whether or not the Stones’ endurance is inspiring, Kelly says, “I think it’s cool that rock ’n’ roll still seems vital to them. They’re still trying to tap into it instead of being like, ‘I’m too old for this s—.’ ”
Sweeney remembers seeing the Stones in 2002 at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. “I went with [David] Pajo,” he says, referring to the prolific indie-rock musician with whom Sweeney performed in Billy Corgan’s short-lived Zwan. “We were joking beforehand like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they did “Turd on the Run”?’ After which they did like each tune we needed to listen to. They began ‘It’s Solely Rock ’n’ Roll,’ and the group’s going apes—. I’m like, ‘What’s occurring?’ It was as a result of Bono got here out onstage. We needed to go away in protest.”
Talking of the U2 frontman, has anybody within the Onerous Quartet been to Sphere in Las Vegas?
“I know about it because Phish played there,” Malkmus says. “And I’m in the Phish hive. Accidentally. I clicked on something one time in my ‘For you’ feed, and now if I look over there…”
“This is Twitter-related?” Sweeney asks.
“Yeah, there’s this ‘For you’ thing — this dark, weird, instant algorithm that makes you regret your decisions immediately,” Malkmus says. “You know how you try heroin once and then your whole life’s over? It’s like that, except in a social-media way.”
