USA Nails: Feel Worse
Available March 22nd
LP/CD/DL
Pre-order here.
On their new album for One Little Independent, prolific no-wave noiseniks USA Nails take us (or push us) through ten punishing rounds of tunes that, although comes close to cardiac arrest, feels utterly wholesome. Louder Than War interviews the group’s singers and guitarists- Steven Hodson and Gareth Thomas about Feel Worse. By Ryan Walker.
Reality TV. The nepotistic properties of an entertainment empire. An industry founded on the blueprints of mythological idolatry replete with an arsenal of divine incentives that look absolutely amazing babes but are up close, just well-worn squeak toys for the people to chew on and satisfy their own salivating desires. Ugh. Vomit in the throat.
Love is blind! Love is deaf and dumb and diseased. Ready the rotten composite of veg for the poor sod bound in a broadcast pillory. Every palette is a platform sanded down by the soles of their feet. Friends turn into traitors. Survivors eat each other alive on islands at the edge of the world. Some televisual martyr who reaches for the stars and chops their fingers off, a gladiator in the middle of a terrestrial spell and landfill lifestyles. Pressure cooker thinking. Binge a pick-n-mix bag of red and blue capsules until you make yourself sick. Yawn and belch and fart next to your lover on the sofa with your arse and spinal imprint firmly dented into it. An implant of drama. Wild animals on the loose. Piss and sh*t everywhere. Territorial ninja warriors. Societal hyperdrive. Bullsh*t. Bloat! Fall asleep to the sound of rummaging through a family-size crisp packet or the screws struggling to turn within arthritic limbs. But hey-ho. Netflix and…oh never mind. Love is… repetitious.
Having attended a gig in Manchester’s Peer Hat recently that saw BLKLSTRS, USA Nails and MUMS share a bill – there’s an overriding sensation that the audience was in the presence of something momentous, reciprocal of something significant.
But despite the fact this writer was (is) always considering how somewhere down the digital tapestries of musical history, this particular gig of significance possibly to only a handful of people here in terms of lasting throughout the ages, an account of some pseudo-bohemian lifestyle down a dank alley in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, surely to be chronicled, by someone with a highfalutin enough mind and time on their hands; this isn’t some belated live review of one of Manchetser’s best kept dive bars where people come to live and come to die. It’s not about the space where people, barflies and daydreamers, experimentalists and the unemployed alike come to get plastered or become stickers, time’s fading tags equally plastered on the bathroom basins destined to be picked to pieces because the f*cking thing won’t entirely peel away. (Symbolic of something?)
Rather, it’s about USA Nails and their new album: Feel Worse. Released on March 22nd on One Little Independent Records, it’s a fierce encapsulation of the ecstatic and epileptic, the same unexpected snappiness that doesn’t just snag your ankle but swallows your leg whole in ten taut, contorted tunes. Ten tunes that thwart the idea of an eleventh, that thwacks the notion of a twelfth into next week. Neither entirely a sardonic filter though which Gogglebox or the Saw franchise is shot, this is a curated distillation of what evaporates the eyes and engulfs one in a flurry of intense flames.
Cathartic Entertainment deems any attempt to brace oneself for what follows in its footsteps as a futile endeavour. People watching people watching people watching people. Entertainment at the expense of someone else being put through a distinct layer of hell to retrieve a unique prize, some golden ticket pockmarked by the bloodstained thumbprints of those who tried, and ultimately failed before them in the race. The profitable punishment people enjoy watching others get put through as though the inferno is something to wade in the cash and ruin lives (although the premise is an attempt to build them – to better it). Sonically it snaps like 16,000 newtons around your neck and drags you down the floor before flipping you back towards the ceiling. Chopped up in the spinning fan central to the space – a hypnotic metronome of whispering shadow and whirring light. Daniel Holloway’s bass pounces and jolts until the jaw becomes dislodged from the hinge and swings from the condyles. Knuckles numb. A hazardous racket of guitars – ripped twins rip in Steven and Gareth (who share vocal duties) caustic, combustive interplay who delight in giving each other nosebleeds, shouting different lines over each other, screaming different lines into each other’s faces like their lives depend on it. They do. Tom Brewin’s one-man marching band drums drop on top of you with their piledriver head-on. Comatose after the convulsion.
Nietzche’s definition of Schadenfreude was ‘a revenge of the impotent’. This idea of Schadenfreude or ‘harm/damage- joy’ is a conceptual organ consistently palpitating to various extremes throughout the album, a perfect match that suits the band’s predilections for butchered structures and jagged edges jam-packed with venomous moods and vital cues that erupt at unpredictable moments, illogical playfulness, haphazard art but oh so coherently slotted together, an intricacy that splinters one moment, then shatters the next and scrambles to scoop up its brains in its bare hands the next. This is a sonic, joyous harm, (or harmful joy) that bulldozes your nose off and sandblasts your spine until you can see straight through your stomach on the other end. Revenge!
”It was pretty easy getting going with the theme for me. We’ve touched upon it before with some previous songs but wanted to have a consistent theme for the whole record this time’’ says guitarist and singer Steven Hodson. ”For me, Embarrassing Bodies and Jerry Springer et al were big inspirations. I have no idea why people would go on these shows. Social media has really taken the attention from reality TV now though. Everyone is a start! Just like Warhol predicted’’.
”We discussed having a theme once most of the music was written. Musically, we just do what we do. If we like it, it sticks. The process was trickier this time around as I moved out of London a few years back’’ explains Steven. ‘’A lot of my input was after the songs had been arranged, adding my parts and vocals. A different process for us, which was hard for me but the album came out good’’.
From the aastounding marks of unruly musical abrasion that was Sonic Moist, their debut, straight through to Shame Spiral, the band are always promiscuous when it comes to suitable labels that can see to the correct curation of the band’s current racket. It’s a racket that’s changed considerably and that’s just so damn good that we don’t realise what’s happened in the interim to understand just what is different, just what distinguishes one collection of newness from one to the next.
Or it’s a racket that hasn’t changed that much at all. But by the time a brand new USA Nails album has been announced – we feel like it’s been aeons since the last one and just absorb its molten mould with every bodily pore as if it was the first time we’ve heard anything like it. A noise as natural as gasping for air after years of having the oxygen gradually switched off. A decisive noise as new and as now as staring into the sky after years buried in a bunker belowground. In either case, it’s a tripwire we keep on returning to. Addicted to even. ”Yeah we don’t really discuss things ahead of writing music, we leave it more up to instinct, whatever ends up feeling right’’ adds Gareth. Lyrically, having a theme did set the agenda a bit, and certainly gave us a framework to work within for the lyrics that we’ve not tried to set before but we were careful not to boundary ourselves too strictly’’.
But worry not – it’s hardly like USA Nails have churned out….whisper it under your breath with your hand above your prog-gob: a concept album. They’re far too clever for that. A subtle hint, or a smack in the face as and when is a more desirable way to drive these points of focus home.
And despite their predilection for unleashing a penalty of punishing noise that reconfigures brutalist architecture from the 90s and squashes it into a box of tissues it slams so hard, USA Nails aren’t going to go around tying people’s shoelaces together and laughing at them when they trip up or popping the balloons at a child’s 1st birthday. It’s too easy to do that. To bloody obvious.
”It’s probably important to note that the lyrics are not us personally taking pleasure in others’ displeasure, it’s more observations of schadenfreude, out there in the big nasty world. I think it was Dan who originally pitched it as a theme, I don’t think had any one example in mind when he did’’ adds guitarist and singer Gareth Tomas.
Rather, there’s a greater sense of subtlety and studiousness involved, a lyrical dexterity in the whole affair that births blinding immediacy that catches you off guard, splits you in half with ferocious surprise and little reprieve. This kind of intellect, this removal of the filter through which our impressions of the world stare through (and we stare at) means they can dig deep into the subject matters at hand in a way which is credible and not crassly executed.
They can dig as deep as they want and investigate this multilayered plethora of what this modernised Schadenfreude, this joie maligne, this sensation of virtuosity over the defeats of others has to offer people and not be penalised for senseless violence at the expense of someone else’s traumatised state of mind. The group take aim at Schadenfreude, not the folks it influenced. They observe and analyse, from lenses both politically poignant and personally sharpened, the distressing repercussions of the ones responsible for Schadenfreude, measured in terms of how much it makes audiences at home cackle, cry, complain (all at the same time).
USA Nails prefer to take the piss out of the various moguls and rip the magnates to shreds with acts of bullying in a playground, and not the unfortunate, even unknowing souls that blithely fall victim to, often negatively scalded under the international spotlight, this sacrificial, televisual altar, all built in the name of Schadenfreude. Now that’s an extended metaphor.
There’s virtually inspiration anywhere if Schadenfreude through the lens of reality TV is the prime subject matter. With that in mind, do they watch Reality TV? ”Yes. Not fanatically though. I recently watched a series of Married At First Sight Australia though that was particularly gripping’’ Stephen says. ”I’m a complete doom scroller though and need to knock that on the head’’.
The playground experiences shape us as we get older. Experiences the band has encountered and marvellously harnessed in tunes such as the savage dynamism and feral, Looney Tune grooves of Pack of Dogs or the impenetrable maelstrom of the title track, Feel Worse, a corrosive kaleidoscope of distorted, disorienting voice cascades and feedback that chips your tooth to a hilarious stump. Some of the stuff kids say to each other is another trauma added to the pile that will one day tumble upon them when they reach a certain age and realise it was all boiling up under the surface: dormant but destructive when all those little triggers rear their ugly heads. More broadly it’s about male mental health. About being vulnerable and how that vulnerability can become an armoured suit in spite of the elephant that attempts to shatter it. The sh*t.
”I was going from more of the bully’s perspective though. On reflection, I was probably talking about my own experiences. I’ve been on both sides of name calling and it sucks. Especially when there was no ill harm meant’’ Steven states. ”I guess everyone has their own threshold for what constitutes ribbing/bullying. Americans have the whole roasting culture and we have a similar thing I guess but we need to check ourselves at times. I’m a teacher but I’m fortunate enough to teach little guys and this isn’t really an issue with the younger ones’’.
Named after a roundabout, itself named after a semi-fictional estate near where Gartheth lives in South London, Sun in the Sands is an infernal, nauseating noise, ”a heckin’ soap opera around here sometimes’’ quips Gareth. All thumping bass that could eat steel, lines looking for trouble (welcoming confrontation and territorial defence) forced down our throats by Daniel Holloway, strangulated guitars sizzle before spiralling out of control then collapse back into some sort of identifiable shape, they moan and complain and command attention whilst Tom Brewin’s deafening drums are an insurmountable uprising of hellraising, rebellious toms that strip walls to the various pipes and mice behind it.
It’s just something you’ve seen, something wonderful and dumb. Something bizarrely funny yet deathly tragic where the oxymoronic ‘damage-joy’ of this album’s loose (yet very much palpable) thematic undercurrent comes to the forefront. Sometimes what you see and what you get is the most poetic and poignant analysis of something rather than eternally scratching away at its surface to reach the core through constant lyrical embellishment and symbolism. The extraordinary can be written down as we see it despite being banal, belittling everyday experiences of extreme mundanity that belies that power.
”Can I quote you on that next time someone tells me my lyrics are too obvious? I mean there are loads of different ways to express stuff, sometimes being pretty on the nose works, but sometimes it’s cool when the listener has to work a bit harder’’ says Gareth. With no obnoxious frolics but plenty of thrills throughout, the album is a raw account of everyday life, elevated to something of a surrealistic snippet of what life is like within each perfect frame, each pair of shoes, each alternate lifestyle, within each passing moment in the pasabahce goldfish bowl. “Much of the world is presented to us as if it’s a meritocracy when in actual fact, it’s all nepotism and prejudice. It’s so galling to listen to certain types of comedians, actors and musicians etc complain about how much easier it would be to be brown, or to be a woman, or be gay, when they’ve had by comparison the best of everything’’ he adds.
”Technology has democratised comedy to some extent, and I’m fascinated by how many creators of memes and other digital content don’t seek copyright or credit for their work.” says Gareth on Beautiful Eyes!
It’s a soaring, searing-hot blast of bitter, fragmented punctuations that pierce the composition at randomly mischievous intervals that could animate the corpse of a dead horse, now suddenly resurrected and twitching, a mad galloping down the tracks as though a hot poker has branded its arse. A comment on the gluttonous habits of consumer culture – on a steady diet of streaming services, arse-ache due to another Marvel film thrown into the f*cking universe and a stack of boxsets that have turned your bookshelves into a marker of either your how much spare time you have or how much you have failed to read the books the shelves were built for,
An Audience of Love greets us with a canvas of, irksome, frenetic cricket chirp guitars and bass groove that rummages around in the skull looking for something to unplug. Abject arrangements, splintered shells and cracked shrapnel riffs stick into spools of drums that race through along a rattling track. Steadfast and unwavering yet always changing, uncaring of what boulders should come into its path. A bass guitar either before it or behind it (maybe both) provides the ball and the chain, the bullet and the gun, the mouth and the gum, the sword and the scabbard, the skin and the scab, unbothered by what sonic comets should scrape the cheek of it’s spinning earth.
A song about the sad*stic, ritual indulges of audiences, both desensitised and attracted to, the amusem*nt of others suffering – a big reveal, a botched surgery, a family reunited, a terrible holiday in Torquay, blind dates for deaf people. If you feel empowered by that sort of thing. Fine. “Audiences loving the unease of others’’ Steve says. ”It becomes an uneasy comedy in itself, and almost a cycle of parody. Infidelity and abuse normalised through public shaming almost.’’
Four since their last album (two years including the split with Psychic Graveyard). Four years waiting for a cyclone to suck your face off. Four years filling a void Reality TV repeats attempt to fill. ”I don’t know if we make a conscious decision to start working on an album. We didn’t in the past. We would practice and come out with a couple of tunes, so albums would tend to be more of a collection of songs. I think with our time being more precious now we have to be slightly more organised and planned out’’ Steve explains. ”We have a WhatsApp group with a pile of ideas on for the next record. These will need bashing into some sort of shape soon and we’ve discussed a theme. We just need time, a deadline and a babysitter’’.
Based on a ”daydream about watching awful people fail’’, Networking Opportunity approaches from nowhere and then devours anything in its path – an endlessly swelling blemish dominating the space like a squid’s siphon squirting ink into your face. Bellowing vocals are heard both upfront and afar. Falling through floors and dissolving into dust particles.
It’s soon followed by a protest of spittle and vinegar, acid and malice as Holiday Sea surges forward in a godless swarm of distorted, disorienting warbles of rotten, techno punk pulse beat power and chords crushed to pieces like grinding steel in the nude.
The roster of One Little Independent (FKA One Little Indian) should be on the Voyager message released into space in 1977 – for Crass and Bad Breeding, Finitribe and Zounds, The Shamen and Kitchens of Distinction. ”Don’t forget Bjork too! But yeah I know, my imposter syndrome is through the roof these days. We are so lucky to have worked with so many amazing labels over the years, with great rosters, who have all without exception been generous and trusting’’ Gareth says. ”I feel more like we’re on the kids table rather than being a bonafide part of their lineage at the moment though. I also love that they have the punk history, as well as dealing with more abstract and experimental artists too. I like to think that we can have a bit of a foot in each of those categories maybe. Though, your old-school hardcore punks might think we sound more like Keane I guess. And I mean to your average Steve Reich-er, we probably sound like Sum 41. It was written a bit differently than we had before. We’ve ended up with a record that I’m really proud of” he adds.
Surely such an erudite and astute piece of work must be the result of hours pouring over audience theory journal articles produced by Routledge, Marxist manuscripts and Charlie Brooker podcasts. ”I thought I was writing about external stuff but in listening, there’s a hint of the personal in it all’’ Steven says. ”We aren’t philistines or anything, we consume a lot and are often showing off new bands or podcasts or books or memes to each other, but I feel like the biggest thing that influences us is boring everyday stuff. Our lived experiences, our families, our ethnic heritages, work, TV, etc. That and all those Steve Reich, Sum 41 and Keane records we listen to”.
But musically it hits all the right spots in all the right ways. Their influences are not so much stitched into their sleeves or inked into their skin but worn away through years of internalising the essential crux of all the influences they can think of: Do more sh*t. Bastardise the past to birth a new future.
”In the process of writing stuff, I don’t think I’m ever consciously trying to channel stuff I’ve been listening to or reading, but listening back to the album now I guess I can hear elements which feel like they reference Wire, or The Fall or The Slits or The Pixies – who I listen to a bunch’’’ he adds.
On A Computer Screen bursts with nonchalant, sprechgesang vocals that match the nonchalant charge of the whole momentous onslaught. A mangled swagger, woozy and contused, a slow flagellation. A song about catfish that fascinated Steve, ‘’Both the catfished and catfisher would put themselves on global television, again both parties displaying their vulnerability to the world for entertainment purposes, it’s an unnerving ambuscade of catchy, cat-and-mouse chorus guitars, restlessly fidgeting in their seat, tempestuous tantrums of sonic toddlers in the supermarket aisles told they can forget the sweets of their appetite will be spoiled.
Not wanting to refer back to the concept category again, but all the tunes do feel bundled together, belonging to the same cut of cloth. I Love It When You Succeed races through the veins with distorted low/high vocal work creating a sonic schizophrenia, a dance of disjointed razorblade guitars are soon to be dismantled, possibly decapitated by the bass lusting for your lungs but also delights in taking out your heart and pushing a convex into your head with a white, four-gang extension lead.
Do the band even consider the thing to be ‘conceptual’? The entire album, start to finish, back to front, considering the broader, fragmented narrative of Feel Worse and the subjects it frames, always returns to a familiar issue at its beating heart. It’s not an album erupting with a pastiche of multiple ideas and a potpourri of scattershot agendas colliding at different times but keeps its observations in-tact, the experiences coherent, the ideas intimately bound in personal travels but creates a bigger, more resonant, psychosocial picture because of that.
A concept album hardly, although maybe Steven would disagree. ”We had a concept, so it is in my eyes. We discussed having a theme once most of the music was written. Musically, we just do what we do. If we like it, it sticks’’ he confirms.
It pulsates with specific ideas that string everything together. Lures everything towards the same scolding point. Such things may nudge it closer to conceptual territory, some allegorical living room or metaphorical television set where nuclear families gather and D-list celebrities sit around fires discussing their sex lives before millions of amused monkeys. ”I wouldn’t say so’’ says Gareth. ”We tried to apply an overarching theme to draw it all together, but most albums have something that draws them together stylistically or thematically right? Something that may have been applied consciously or by virtue of the fact that the songs were written close together and are subject to similar influences and ideas. I quite like the idea of concept records but I don’t think ours is one really. We didn’t decide on a concept until after most of the music was written, and the photos are just a bunch of random stuff I shot. But I guess there’s no “concept album” rule book is there? So, f*ck I don’t know’’ he explains.
However, energised by the ideals of others, this tune is a finalising inversion of what the whole album has been conceptually boiling to until now. About actually acknowledging the goodness in people and their selfless altruism as a quality to encourage. No irony included. No sarcasm attached. No filters applied. “It’s the first song we’ve ever done where I’ve written the lyrics but Steven has recorded them. I couldn’t get them to sound right in my voice, but thankfully Steve nailed it’’ says Gareth. ”This number takes the theme of the album and flips it upside down. I have so many amazing friends who are out there, doing things, and achieving things, and I love it. I get pleasure from their pleasure. I’m intensely jealous too though, don’t get me wrong.”
More. More. More. Bullies baying for your blood. Technology that talks a good talk – maybe talks too much. Talks for us. Audiences awaiting the arrival of some poor sod stood centre stage and watch them drop, f*ck up, fail: ‘forgot their lines!’ (live apparently). A tick list of things that piss them off essentially. Well, they can stay pissed off.
Although not an album that relishes in watching someone else tortured for casual amusem*nt, in how it forces the focus of one’s attention towards the malignant, all-seeing empires that smile at the banquet of delights about to be extinguished before thousands of awaiting eyes, some depressive delinquent buffoon born in a dunce cap, the least likely to set the world alight, the last to look up, innocence exploited, parents appalled, peers nonexistent, nevermind imaginary, rebuilt in a mirror outlined by a trail of LED lights that intensify the illusions encapsulated within its perfect reflection, filmed falling flat on their face, only to be carted away as entertainment’s disposable deadwood in the wake of another lump of lifeless muscle incoming on the ever-churning conveyor belt, we all enjoy revelling in someone else’s misfortune – especially if they’re a twat.
At least I do. I had a dream about it last night that somehow made my day better. This album did the same. But what if they’re not a twat? What if they’re just innocent people, apparently culpable for whatever’s thrown at them because of how gullible and misguided by the golden lights they are? Well…get pissed off about the ones who dropped them there. Fashion designers with furniture lines who consider themselves either Zeus or Dr Frankenstein depending on the f*cking budget. Now where’s that dump of A Place In The Sun episodes I recorded six years ago?
~
USA Nails Bandcamp | Youtube | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Spotify
Photos by Patrick Smith ©
Words by Ryan Walker except band PR and interview text.
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