The Globe and Mail
Heavy Turbulence
VANCOUVER — Let me tell you about this song. It starts softly, the sweet sound of violin and viola, then it swirls and swells. The words are all true, an unflinching rendering of emotional pain.
It plays out at a bar in Los Angeles, some time around midnight. There is a woman you are definitely not over. She comes to say hello. The scent of her perfume sends your head spinning.
“All of these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind: of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined. And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.”
And then she leaves with someone you don’t know.
“She makes sure you saw her. She looks right at you and bolts.”
And then you fall into a delirium of drunkenness.
And, then, if you are Mikel Jollett, you go home, hole up in your apartment for three days and write a powerful song called Sometime Around Midnight – a song so alluring that L.A.’s KROQ, the biggest rock radio station in the United States, adds it to regular rotation, even though your band has no manager, no publicist and no label. It is the first time in several years KROQ has done this for an unsigned band.
The band is Airborne Toxic Event, named for the dangerous cloud that hangs over Jack Gladney after a rail-car accident in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. Like a chemical spill, the band emerged suddenly.
In March, 2006, Jollett, who was writing a novel and working occasionally as a music journalist, was whipped by a quartet of blows. In a single week, his mother was diagnosed with cancer; he was diagnosed with autoimmune disease (which makes his skin blotchy and, when he is stressed, his hair fall out); he broke up with a long-time girlfriend (not the woman from the song); and he got pneumonia.
Jollett quit his two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction and played the guitar obsessively, drinking and writing. The new words, he realized, were not parts of his novel in progress but the lyrics to rock songs.
“I felt this real, just suddenly, I felt all this music in me I just didn’t feel before,” said Jollett, 34. “Suddenly, everything sounded like a song.”
He paired up with a drummer and discovered that he wasn’t a half-shabby singer (he had been in a band before, but never took the mike). Three more players were soon recruited. Jollett wrote a hundred songs and the group spent the next year self-recording its 10-track debut. Along the way, it performed in the United States and the United Kingdom, earning notice in the blogosphere; Rolling Stone eventually dubbed it one of the best unknown bands on MySpace.
And, then, in January, 2008, an unmastered MP3 of Sometime Around Midnight became a hit on KROQ, less than one month after it was recorded. Majordomo, an upstart L.A. indie label, put out the band’s self-titled debut in August.
“It wasn’t dogmatic, like, ‘We’re an indie rock band,’ ” Jollett said. “If any major had come along and said, ‘Hey, we’ll give you $10-million and put out your record exactly as it is,’ we’d have been like, ‘Sweet!’ But that didn’t happen.”
Airborne’s lack of major-label backing has not held the band back. Sometime Around Midnight opened at No. 34 on the Billboard modern-rock chart and is steady at No. 35 in its third week. In late April, the band played on Carson Daly’s show and in early August hit the Conan O’Brien stage. Their 2008 festival tour has included South by Southwest in Austin, Tex., Pemberton in British Columbia and now the Virgin Festival in Toronto. Reviews have been mostly positive and some times more so: The Boston Herald called the record the best debut of the year. Daily Variety said the disc is hard to distinguish from “dime-a-dozen alt rockers,” though the L.A. publication did concede Sometime is amazing.
The truth is somewhere in between. It is a good first record: At times, the music sounds generic, but the lyrics are magical gems of storytelling.
While the band has garnered a slew of comparisons, such as Franz Ferdinand and Arcade Fire, the closest players in terms of cathartic literary tales are Austin’s Okkervil River.
Jollett calls the 10 songs a carefully ordered series of “pits and valleys and revelations.”
The literal telling of tough tales – every story on the record is as it happened, not just Sometime – was in part inspired by Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, whose works Jollett read while holed up in a desert ranch working on The Great Novel.
“These guys, so much about what they do is about trying to find some beauty in some of the darker moments,” Jollett said.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever read Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. He finds a way to make pissing on his ex-lovers’ grave this super-romantic image. That takes some serious mental gymnastics. …
“You go through this stuff and you write about it. Some people had given me some good advice: ‘Just use it. Just write about [it]. Don’t be afraid of it. Be unflinching.’ ”
After all, you never know when an eyebrow will fall off. Jollett’s vitiligo (splotchy skin from loss of pigments) and alopecia areata (hair loss) linger – even if they only attack, as he says, his vanity.
“I’m always thinking in my head, when we’re playing, ‘Don’t try and look cool, don’t try and look cool, just try and show people how weird you are.’ Because that’s when people get it. Morrissey used to talk about how he’d sing to someone in the back of the room. I’m always doing that; I’m always trying to sing to someone in the back of the room.”
Airborne Toxic Event plays the Virgin Festival in Toronto on Saturday. (http://www.virginfestival.ca/toronto).
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