Into the Woods

In preparation for their sophomore album, Loses Control, the four members of Hey Mercedes spent a couple of weeks last year at punk-rock summer camp. Not the Vans Warped tour, mind you — we’re talkin’ wilderness, lakes, canoes, bears shitting in the woods, that kinda thing.

“We went to this cabin in this really remote part of Wisconsin called Spread Eagle,” explains singer/guitarist Bob Nanna. “None of us had ever done anything like that before, and it was this combination of being really relaxed — we had all this food and we could hang out on the pier and the scenery was awesome — and also the sense of like, we’re stuck here in the middle of nowhere and the town is pretty weird, so all we have to do when we wake up is eat breakfast and then come up with songs.” The lack of wild animal attacks and dead bodies buried nearby (à la Chevy Chase’s Funny Farm) allowed Nanna, bassist Todd Bell, drummer Damon Atkinson, and guitarist Michael Shumaker to enjoy some distraction-free bonding, the kind they couldn’t get in their Milwaukee home base or wedged in the back of a tour van for months on end. “It definitely helped our productivity,” he says, “because we ended up writing seventeen songs in two weeks.”

Loses Control reflects that vibe. It’s even more cohesive and vigorous than their excellent 2001 full-length debut, Everynight Fire Works, all blistering, jagged riffs and hot-blooded rhythms that masterfully dance around striking, accessible melodies. The album often channels the spirit of Jawbox, one of the Nineties’ finest, if unheralded, postpunk bands. The resemblance manifests itself in the angular passages and quickly shifting dynamics. “Oh Penny,” for example, is reminiscent of that D.C. combo’s “Tongues,” opening with a ringing, repetitive chord that’s initially engulfed by robust drumming and soon outmuscled by a much heavier, distorted guitar line before scraping and clawing its way back to the surface. If Nanna were to dispute the fact that his tone and smart, thoughtful delivery sounds uncannily like Jawbox singer J. Robbins (a long-time pal and the producer of Everynight), well, he’d be a perfect candidate to become the next Iraqi Minister of Information.

But Nanna takes the comparison in stride. He’s been dealing with it since the mid-Nineties when he was part of Braid, a Robbins-produced band that also included Bell and Atkinson (Hey Mercedes formed just months after Braid dissolved in 1999). So this time the band sought out studio wizards Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade (Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, Radiohead) for Loses Control to distance themselves from those old associations.

“None of us were interested in making Everynight Fire Works Part Two,” says Nanna. “Working with J was cool because he’s a friend and he really knows what we want and how our stuff sounds, but we wanted a fresh perspective on us and our music.”

Certainly it’s a good start, even if the band hasn’t entirely broken away from the past. Although its components occasionally sound familiar, the songs are unique and well written, the energy level is high, and the intent is heartfelt. Since Loses Control isn’t scheduled to arrive in stores until October, the only way you can hear the new material for the time being (without risking a lawsuit from the RIAA) is during Hey Mercedes’s current tour. But just in case you want to try and download the album from the Internet, Nanna’s got a message for you.

“We spend a lot of time and effort making an entire album and sequencing it the way we want, and the notion of an album from start to finish is getting destroyed by downloading since most people only want the ‘hit song,'” he says. “So for anyone out there downloading our record, please, for the love of God, download the whole thing … in order!”