A few weeks ago, we were knee deep in the editing process for our big interview with Damon Che and Kristian Dunn. We were also knee deep in gargantuan levels of depression, disappointment, and resentment. A lot was happening. Anyway, we were slicing, dicing, and splicing our Zoom meeting together when we saw a notification pop up – it was from Joyful Noise Recordings, the same label that hooked us up with Damon and Kristian. We figured it was an update to the timeline for publishing, or maybe a photo we should use. We were wrong – it was another massive score.
Within just a couple days, we were in a Zoom meeting with Jason Bartell of Fang Island. Fang Island’s arc may have been somewhat short lived, but in the time they were active they managed to make a name for themselves in a big way. The band signed to Sargent House early on, and it’s easy to see why – the band’s high-five cocktail of sound mixed the introspective leanings of bands like Pinback and Tera Melos with the explosive, immediately rewarding delivery of Hüsker Dü.
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As with all good things, the band eventually went on eternal hiatus to lead normal lives. Understandable. But Jason still makes music as Mythless, and the influence of Fang Island’s infectiously positive vibes are as present as ever in bands today like Medians, Mold! and Velvet Teen.
Below is a more or less full transcription of our chat where we cover some really interesting things, like how The Onion inspired their name, the pressure to identify as a Brooklyn band as opposed to a Providence band while coming up in the same scene as Lightning Bolt, and how the cycles of optimism and cynicism affect creative people. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
FB: Jason, thank you so much for joining me, for those of us who don’t know this is Jason Bartell of Fang Island and I’m very excited to ask him a few questions. I was just telling him that in college uh back in 2012 for me there was a moment where I was really obsessed with “Chompers” and recommending it to people who I wasn’t sure if they were going to like math rock or not. I want to start with something kind of funny – the name Fang Island coming from allegedly The Onion News. It’s been a long time since The Onion’s been super prolific but i’d love to get your opinion as someone who named their band after something from that site. What do you feel now looking back at The Onion, looking at news now, looking back at like just … irony and cynicism in general. Does that fill you with a different emotion now?
JB: Yeah that’s an interesting question, so I think it was Pete was our original drummer who came up with the idea, it was either Pete or Chris or Phil, the original three guys in Providence. I didn’t have anything to do with the naming of it but this is 2005, so maybe there was an online component to The Onion at the time, but it was literally, for a while, just a physical print that we could find on the street. It’s crazy you could even imagine that was the case, but either way it’s funny. I was thinking about this the other day… it was a reference to Donald Rumsfeld, the story was like Donald Rumsfeld’s secret lair on this fictional Fang Island, like it amped up his sort of cartoonish villain nature you know?
It’s just an interesting thing though, when we started in 2005 we played Providence for a couple years and we moved to New York and our debut our debut LP, which was with a more national label and that was where most people kind of came to shows – that was in 2010. But politically and cynicism-wise, 2005 looked very different from 2010. Politically, the fact that we’re named after like a Donald Rumsfeld joke or whatever is very telling. 2010 was like, at least in my view, the trajectory was very hopeful at times. Like Obama had just been elected, and this like a very different now, but trying to remember what it was like to be like that is… like, it’s weird to say, but we’re essentially a Bush era band, right? I think that really does recontextualize the sort of tropes of the band like hyper positivity, like everybody high-fiving, I’m almost surprised it resonated in 2010, because it really was like born out of a 2005 rejection of cynicism kind of thing.
FB: I love that answer because that it just kind of speaks to the tighter and tighter spiral culturally of “this is happening, we’re all pissed, now this is happening, we’re all feeling togetherness, now this is happening we’re all pissed again, etc.” Definitely since the bush era obviously but also probably since the dawn of time – the last 20 years or so have seen have felt very fast forwarded, and that’s kind of why I asked because maybe today, despite it all, it’s as funny as the day it was conceived.
JB: Right, and I wonder if anyone even remembers because it was very natural to us, it’s just sort of what came out in our jams, and we sort of molded this like it was sort of a group sensation with our with our friends in Province. This was just kind of how all of our art was taking shape at the time, it really wasn’t like we were sitting down and being like let’s imbue this art project with politics. It wasn’t very literal to us, but I do wonder if that kind of trend will be back in people’s art making or craftsmanship now, given that sort of we’re in sort of like a snapback period, but then again maybe it just doesn’t really work that way.
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FB: Speaking of Rhode Island, I am curious, I made music in a semi-small town for a while, and everyone’s idea was to get established in your area, then push on to the bigger city. You guys are from the same area as Lightning Bolt, who had a big big come up in Rhode Island, which is such a small place that you can’t help but sort of explode into the next area. Can you talk a little bit about what that pipeline was like for you guys guys? Did Fang Island feel that explosion of like, “okay well we’ve maxed out Rhode Island and now we’re going to do something else, or was it something different?”
JB: Yeah it’s it’s something like that, I mean it felt very natural at the time, Lightning Bolt does not play a small role in our lives, like if you were living there or making the music you’re into in the early 2000s, or even now, Lighting Bolt is the band. I still think they’re basically the best rock band in history. The Fang Island members all met in college, and we were just friends who would go to shows and stuff and we all saw Lightning Bolt – it basically rewired me. At 18 coming from the small town in New Hampshire, basically not seeing many shows and then seeing something like, it still like gets me. They’ve just fully tapped into something, and we all were like “well, this is what we want to do.” We just looked up to them so much musically. They were a big part of our desire to be in a band, and I think the Providence scene was very giving and welcoming too. It’s a small city with a small town feeling, so once you go to even one show, you’ll meet people. The next show, you’ll remember those people from the first show. I think it still is from what I’ve been told.
But it wasn’t so much that we maxed it out, I mean I think we had a lot of fun there it just was like when we graduate college there was sort of a natural progression. We stayed in Providence, we didn’t want to move away – the band all lived in one house so we got to continue the band. But I had a job in New York, some of the other guys had work or jobs in Philly, so when we were sort of like “let’s move out of Providence and see if we can still make this work,” it was kind of a long distance band for a while around like 2008, and so Brooklyn became the scene. It was kind of in the middle of a post-The Strokes era where The Strokes were still young and like the new indie had started, like Dirty Projectors and MGMT. That’s kind of when you started seeing Brooklyn get kind of like… exported, we just kind of happened to be there. We weren’t even all living there, actually less than half of us were living in Brooklyn. I was living there, but by the time that record came out in 2010, we were in three different cities. Some of us in Providence, some in New York, some in Philly, and the label is just sort of like… where do we say you’re from? We were playing a lot in New York, that’s where the shows were happening and things that like, and we were booking cool venues like Cake Shop. So we were kind of a New York band and the trajectory just flowed pretty smoothly. I would say Providence will always be our scene, in my mind at least. New York, even though I was living with some of the other band people, like the guys Dirty Projectors were practicing out my house, it ended up being like… a small feeling. In New York there’s just so many other things going on and it didn’t feel as like tightly knit to me as Providence always did.
FB: Interesting! Would you say that there was pressure to identify with any one place in particular?
JB: I think so, I think at the end of the day, at least pressure from the label. It was like, it would make sense to call us a Brooklyn band or whatever but it sort of felt like a new thing. Again, it’s kind of impossible to put how much it’s all definitely changed. Like, this is definitely hubris, but I’m sure if you watch Sex in the City from early 2000’s, they don’t go to Brooklyn. It wasn’t considered what everyone thinks it is now. But at it did feel sort of like there was more energy, and at the time it was possible to live there and make art and unlike now. Rent was still relatively cheap.
FB: When I was in a lot of bands, I was doing that from Eugene, Oregon, which is basically a couple hours from Portland.
JB: We played a show there! I can’t remember where the venue was but anyway, continue!
FB: It was probably small, dank, and dark! It’s a fun place though, I’m honestly probably going to move back this yea. Anyway, whenever I was trying to make moves with bands it was like, you’re going to make the biggest ones in Portland. You’re going to be doing the biggest moves in NorCal. Picking your battles, so to speak. There was Seattle too but it’s just a little bit too big, like you’re just a little drop. But I think I understand the pressure of having members in multiple areas, struggling with the work happening in one place but not where the most asses are in the most seats. I can only imagine it gets more complicated with a label ,which is kind of where I wanted to head next here: what was it like bringing a label to the project?
JB: Yeah that’s a good that’s a good question, see if what I can remember… it was definitely a big deal. I mean, I’m sure you’re familiar with Sargent House, you know, very math rock heavy like it felt like a good fit. They really took a chance on us, I think we kind of like grew with them. It was very helpful and like stressful, honestly, like to be like… I don’t know, I think we kind of accidentally skipped a couple steps. I would say that’s what some of our narrative was about in that time period. It was sort of like we really wanted to start touring nationally, that’s why we were even pursuing a label who could help us with that, like get us a booking agent for instance. We never had a booking agent until the label so they kind of took care of everything for us, it really helped in those early years to get us on bills that were really beneficial, but it happened at the exact same time the record came out so we were suddenly playing to some people were interested and liked us as we were.
I think was extremely exciting, but also, we hadn’t toured. If we had had like, five years of touring going into that moment, I think it could have felt very different. Our label was also our manager, so that is sort of like… I’m not sure if was just the style at the time, and I’m not sure if it’s still like that, but we were just talking to one point person at the label constantly, and it was a kind of a like stimulus overload. Ultimately it was good, but it was a bit of a transition to go into from being just the band and making all our own decisions.
FB: I see. Well, not to not to draw conclusions necessarily, but it wouldn’t be unusual to hear that a band was doing okay, got picked up by a label, had a great moment, and then got super stressed out to the point of collapse. So I’m wondering, did Fang Island just sort of like mellow out and find other things to do, or was there a pressure point involved?
JB: I think it’s a little of both, it was stressful. Especially after the first album cycle, we felt scared it would go away, and we felt so lucky that we had the kind of break that we did. The album got way more good press than we were expecting, kind of accidentally, and we got a very good Pitchfork review. This might be spicy, but this was at a time when you couldn’t just like buy those. We had no connection, and didn’t really have like a huge head of steam coming into any of it… I don’t even know if Pitchfork reviews have that effect anymore, but it really did change the trajectory of our career, or quote unquote, career. It started us even attempting to have a career, which like, never really materialized, but at least like led to people showing up and people paying attention and I always felt very lucky. I didn’t want to like lose that, you know? But the pressures you get in your own head can catch you off guard, it sort of shook up the whole internal system of the band. I still feel really privileged and lucky to have had that happen. Also, I like to think of it fondly, but I imagine if I just like placed my brain or like my nervous system in my 2011 self, the stress would make me like immediately crash out.
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FB: Of course, the pressures you put on yourself when you’re on tour can be insane. I remember at the end of my first two months tour with Thom Simon, we were ending the tour at what was probably the shittiest venue of all of them, still trying like map out the next one on a napkin. Like, we wanted to stay in that van forever, we wanted to do this for the rest of our lives. Which is like, weird, because you know that you’re not making money. You know that you’re not making a lot of things. Most of the things the average person needs to feel successful or safe, you’re not getting, but tour puts this weird lens over everything. I don’t know if you felt this way too, but I got a what I felt like was a an actual taste of life from it, something that was not televised or curated for me. I got to see a side life that has nothing to do with what was being projected on the news/ I constantly think about that feeling and hope that it’s still true you – that the TV isn’t real haha. So all that being said, was it before or after Fang Island quieted down that you started doing solo stuff as Mythless?
JB: It was taking a little bit of a shape during. I was just sort of like writing stuff that I
felt like was outside or wasn’t fully like Fang Island. When we had more off time in the band, I was playing with other musicians and I was looking to broaden things I was playing. It initially started as this idea where I would try to like write stuff with a singer um who wasn’t me, so part of it was I really like writing, and found it challenging to write songs that had that had words and lyrics and singing.
I’ve just never been a natural singer, so like whenever I ever played a show, I was kind of yearning for
the time when I just played guitar. I didn’t really want to sing, so I’d find someone who’s just a singer, like that’s their thing that they are passionate about and good at. They don’t have the same sort of anxiety that I did. But I had reconnected with my old friend from college who is like an incredibly gifted singer Cassandra Jenkins, who now has a really great discography and amazing solo career, but for a while we were jamming and collaborating on things and some of the Mythless stuff came out of those sessions. She and I performed with a trio and we put a couple shows, but then she was like I’m going to focus on solo stuff, which was clearly the right call. I can’t say enough good things about her, but yeah I got a taste for this new project with her.
FB: Got, got it. So, I guess whether it’s in Fang Island or Mythless, some of the words you might see thrown around as as far as trying to describe your general sounds sounds of both projects are pretty ‘out there,’ like one of them was hypnotic hardcore or psychedelic death metal something like that, and that that kind of stopped me in my tracks a little bit because I had the same problem trying to describe Fang Island back in the day. I wonder if you think often about genre, or if when you’re writing, do you think about what box you’re pushing yourself towards? Or do you just kind of let that come naturally?
JB: I think more the ladder, just having it come naturally. Like a lot of people, I’m very self-taught, like now that I’m in my 40s and have playing guitar for a very long time, I don’t really feel limitations. Like more than ever, honestly, and I mean that as positive thing mostly, although it can be very frustrating when I’m just sort of like… I don’t really know how else to play this instrument, you know? I really want to take some guitar lessons and learn some new angles or something but in terms of genre I’ve never thought of songwriting that way. I don’t have the control or the discipline to hear a piece and be like, that gives this sort of mood, and that’s what I want this song to sound like. I hear people describe their writing some sometimes in that way, where it’s like I’m referencing like sort of mood from
piece or this score or something , and I just sit down to play guitar. So I try to have it just come naturally. If I’m playing by myself trying to write, or just just jamming by myself whatever if I stumble
upon a loop or a sound or a riff that I want to repeat and try to shape until I’ve played it for like an hour. There’s just something indescribable about it, sort of the video game effect where if you’re listening to song on a loop and you kind of don’t notice it, or it’s still like as pleasurable as the first time, I
know I’m kind of moving in a right direction. It’s just like a totally close circuit but there’s something telling me to follow that that feeling. That’s when I know I’m in the right spot.
FB: That’s the first time I’ve got an answer like that, that’s super cool. So many that I know then come into contact with through Fecking Bahamas are writing a song to fit in the genre. That’s a process I struggle to separate myself from and often has me… um… kind of hating math rock a lot. Well I don’t totally hate it, I think I just have a lot of feelings when a song or even a band is predetermined before a song is even written.
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JB: Definitely, even outside of genre it reminds me of what little I’ve seen in the sort of like Instagram and Tik-Tok trendsof this, like… power competency. It’s all about like how competent the person on
screen is at like playing a scale. Like raw skill is the only thing on display and that’s so clear from the how well people are executing these parts, I just worry that sometimes it’s like the most disinteresting thing. I’m so disinterested in presentation of that, like it’s just executing cleanly, whether it’s a sweep or a run or whatever, there is absolutely nothing interesting happening, even though in a way, it’s the most
interesting thing. You could see is that kind of talent if you’re around classically trained people I feel
you get that too where they’re just like, “oh yeah I really appreciated that arpeggio that you perfectly swept across the fretboard.” But some people are are really good at blending the two, like I’m not saying that it be interesting, but some of the best people at it are the ones who blend a little soul into it, like some feeling or heart or whatever. Something interesting.
Even me, like we would play a lot of shows with truly like math-y bands, and a lot a lot of them were really
great, but I think what I love most with Fang Island was playing on bills like that, then having us come out playing… what’s a random song off the top of my head… we have the song called “Sisterly” that’s like a very straightforward like rock thing. The only thing math-y about is it’s like 6/4 or 6/8 and then 4/4, but it’s very understandable. It’s not that complicated, and our drummer Mark, who just has the ultimate time feel, he would just come out and play this really straightforward thing but just so soulfully, so cleanly, so perfectly, so beautifully. I loved those moments where we’re on bills that are kind of all about being crazy and we’re just playing this extremely dumb (in a good way) thing.
FB: I am all for reclaiming the word dumb! Were you stoked on finding the new song song or I guess the song that was just released?
JB: Yeah! I was most stoked about that, I was most stoked about people hearing it because it was this thing we had recorded that with Carl from Joyful Noise Records, who does or at least did this cool vinyl box for VIP members. You’d get a flex from their dedicated flexi disc printer press, and they would get bands that weren’t on their label to do a unique song for them, press on flexi, and give it to the VIP members of with the expressed directions to not digitize or upload it. The band wouldn’t either, so it only existed as a pressing against the sort of like hyper availability of everything. So there was like a hundred people who had heard of of the song. But it’s a totally live take with no no edits or overdubs or anything, which we didn’t really ever do on any of our records… or you know, not since the very beginning.\
Don’t forget to order the Fang Island box set, Doesn’t Exist II: The Complete Recordings, here!
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