Alunared: Sound And Fury

"Let's make this the most pretentious thing ever," Alunared percussionist Graham Jackson suggests as I sit down to talk with the band. Vocalist/guitarist Jack Duckworth agrees. "Let's talk about Dada," he says.

Sarcasm aside, Alunared have good reason to worry that any discussion of their music will invariably turn into a socio-political debate or an examination of deconstructionist European art movements. Any attempt to talk about this band in traditional rock-journalism terms ("crunchy guitar hooks," "erstwhile pop sensibilities") is doomed to fail. This is simply because Alunared is everything but a traditional rock band.

Elements from several musical genres come to mind while listening to the band's debut CD, The Death Birds. Industrial and post-punk might be the most obvious ones, but each time you think that you might be getting some sort of grip on what the Alunared sound is, they obliterate any dominant musical theme by presenting dirge-like keyboard instrumentals or adrenaline-fueled war anthems. I could say that The Death Birds is the musical equivalent of overdosing on caffeine and Nietzsche at 5 a.m., but any record that lists "a variety of instruments" in the liner notes including "oil barrels, junkyard scraps, a hammer, a food processor, paper, and other odds and ends" should probably be listened to rather than described.

When explaining the band's use of found noises, Jackson says that "in all music you're using tools to make sound. Whether it's a Stradivarius violin or a beer can or a drum machine or someone sneezing, it's all the same thing."

Alunared's all-encompassing approach to music owes a lot to the diverse backgrounds of its members. Duckworth also plays in Radio Berlin, and was a member of now-defunct The Measure. Jackson and keyboardist Erica Neumann are involved with their own solo projects, while keyboardist William Winslow-Hansen dropped his day job in the hardware industry two years ago to pursue his musical ambitions.

Duckworth says that Alunared, like the first new wave bands, uses the no-frills ethic of punk as the basis for more diverse and experimental sounds, although Winslow-Hansen points out that each member of the band "had a different spin on what punk was." However, unlike countless new wave acts, Alunared is trying avoid the trap of adhering to the formula of a major label - what Winslow-Hansen calls "sanding away the rough edges. Our music still has the razor shards left intact," he says.

Lyrically, The Death Birds offers hints, but little in the way of direct statements. While the band says that there was no attempt to create a specific theme for the record, they admit that some recurring elements may have found their way in. Orwellian visions of the future (one song title, "The Ministry Of Truth," is a direct reference to George Orwell's 1984) and a concern over technology's effects on people's emotional lives can be seen throughout The Death Birds.

That being said, the members of Alunared aren't about to use their music to proselytise to an audience the way many politically-driven bands do. Just as their music demands attention from the listener, their lyrics require thought and some degree of imagination.

"If you come right out and say everything and act like you're trying to make a big statement and don't leave any room for artistic interpretation, it's fucking boring," Jackson says of Alunared's cryptic approach. "You have to leave it open to a certain extent. It can't be cold and impersonal. Why would you say it in a song if you could just make a poster out of it?"

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