Today’s independent music scene is dominated by a bunch of kids all placed under the heading “emo.” In the eyes of the cynic, they’re the kids with the dark glasses that sit at coffee houses waxing philosophically or moping about the most recent girl that dumped them.
But labeling aside, within every group, be it the football team or A.V. club, there’s always the crazy loud guy. The guy who’s just as smart and dresses a lot like his friends, but doesn’t have the time to sit around lamenting about girls because he’s forgotten to take his Ritalin. The Detachment Kit is a group of those guys that got together to make some music.
The Detachment Kit is sonically a cross between Northwest lo-fi indie popsters like Built to Spill and East Coast hardcore punk, with the hermetic lyrics of Midwest emo sprinkled in. But enough with the geography lessons — in the words of lead singer Ian Menard, “I think we shamelessly pawn ourselves off as ‘dark pop.'”
Their first album, The Raging. Quiet Army, comes out Tuesday on The Self-Starter Foundation, a New York City-based label that proclaims on its website: “The Detachment Kit are from Chicago, and they’re good. We say it that way, because the two things don’t go together very often.”
“They got us into a shit-load of trouble with that comment,” says Menard. “We’ve gotten a reputation of knocking Chicago, but really we don’t know a whole lot about the Chicago scene. I’ve only lived there for a couple of years, but I have heard some bands that I’ve liked.”
The Raging. Quiet Army is an album filled with abstract lyrics (“We’re breaking the strong arm and I’ve got a dirty mouth.”) coupled with appropriately abstract song titles (“Sitting Still, Talking About Jets,” “Dead Angels Make Slow Sound”).
Menard’s background in poetry has definitely affected his songwriting process. “I love the way language works. Even though writing lyrics is a lot different than poetry, I try to treat each song as a poem. I see titles as an opportunity to embellish [on] the songs. I think it’s dumb to just take the title straight from a lyric,” he says.
The Detachment Kit, however, does not allow all the literary obscurity to slow down the energy of an album that starts with the fist-pumping anthem “High Seas.” Menard’s vocals run the gamut from genuine singing to spoken word to pure screaming on this song and the album as a whole. The guitars on “High Seas” are very reminiscent of Built to Spill; the rhythm guitar played clean, with a very active jangly distorted guitar on lead. There’s rarely a moment’s silence, with crazy bridges between almost every verse and a fist-pumping chorus, which features Menard screaming “It was a bad, bad idea.”
The Detachment Kit shows that it’s not afraid to slow down a bit on songs like “The Euphio Question,” which slowly builds and releases until it explodes in a shower of distorted guitars and a chorus of vocals singing, “There’s something out there.”
On songs like this the band shows that it is not afraid to actually use dynamics to shape the songs, unlike so many other pop-rock bands today.
There is an energy in The Detachment Kit’s music that seems like it’s not fully portrayed on CD, which is probably why the group enjoys touring so much. “It’s one of the highlights of what we do,” says Menard. “We tend to break things. It’s a good time though — it’s very spirited, you could say. Live is what we like to do. We like to put on a show.”
You can see The Detachment Kit Thursday at the Catacombs.
