Those Darn Gnomes’ first album The Years turns a decade old today. In honor of our least-loved record, please, hit play on a forgotten experimental metal oddity and take a look back at the early days of a local band at a key point in their (so-called) development.
Though I’d eventually commandeer the band from him, Those Darn Gnomes began life as Russell’s brainchild. As a freshman starting high school, Russell always appeared exotic to me, showing up to school in a full beard and a Metallica or Pantera shirt. (“Pantera sucks,” I’d tell him. “I know,” was always the response.) At the time he had just quit drumming in a truly awful punk band called Part of the Solution with our classmate Mark, who then asked me to join despite the fact I had never touched a drumset in my life. Neither had Russell before he joined that band, though I didn’t know that at the time. Russell began a begrudging acquaintance with me when I started regularly bugging him to inquire about how Part of the Solution’s songs went, to which he usually responded, “I just made them up every time.”
After a year or two in Part of the Solution during which we all switched instruments a dozen times or more I half-quit and was half-kicked out after arguing with the drummer over whether our cover of “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” needed a metalcore breakdown. (He was in favor; I voted for sincerity.) Immediately upon my departure, Russell asked me to join Those Darn Gnomes, a request to which I immediately acquiesced. Once in the band, my first order of business was poaching Mark, and soon three quarters of Part of the Solution found themselves (re?)united in the new band.
Early on, Those Darn Gnomes wrote our songs through the piecemeal approach favored by nearly every garage band: Russell or I would bring a riff to practice to jam on ad nauseam until we decided the time had come to switch to the next section. We soon discovered we all thrilled at the more complex material, and it became something of a game for me to show up to practice with increasingly convoluted riffs, jumping around our instruments in odd time signatures. But though the component parts were more technical than Part of the Solution’s rudimentary power chord chugs, the songwriting process remained largely the same and soon proved just as stale.
So we re-calibrated: Russell and the rest of the band entrusted the bulk of the songwriting to me and I began composing in earnest, at least for a while. After high school I bounced back and forth between Portland and SoCal, pretending at an education which would later land me jobs at too many taco stands and bike shops to count — at least I never took out a student loan.
The crowning achievement of this period was a song simply titled “Green,” which opened with a metalcore-style pedal point riff before devolving into a through-composed section switching between a dozen or so time signatures. The opening riff — of the ersatz At the Gates type you’ve heard a thousand times elsewhere — was one of our rare constructions to escape the practice room, though only after some debate over whether or not we could actually pull off a 7/8 tag I had appended to throw the beat off balance. (We could not.) After far too many repetitions of the riff we moved into a through-composed section switching between a dozen or so different time signatures, culminating in a flute solo over looped guitar accompaniment crescendoing in an overlong guitar lead until the end of the song. Our early material often fell victim to a prog-inspired tendency toward showing off, though thankfully we’d buck that trend eventually and by the end of our run I rarely even played a conventional instrument.
After this early period (or early early period?) I wrote Those Darn Gnomes’ intended debut record, a conceptually ambitious three-song suite to be titled The Invariant. The complexity of the material necessitated frequent demos so the other members of the band would have something to which they could listen along and practice; knowing we were never going to enter a real studio to rerecord the songs, I simply treated the demos as the first phase of creating the album. We got as far as recording the first two of the album’s projected three extended pieces before we abandoned plans for the album. Looking back, I truthfully couldn’t tell you why exactly we stopped before completing the album’s final song — maybe the fact we weren’t playing shows stripped the process of a necessary urgency, or maybe our lackadaisical commitment to our academic careers extended beyond our educational prospects.
On December 21st, 2013 we finally played our first show for Tony’s inaugural event at Eden, commemorating one year since the fabled end of the Mayan calendar. (Remember that?) Most of Tony’s friends were rappers and DJs, and we were the only band present on a lineup which featured Planet Asia and Fatlip from the Pharcyde; my big regret of the night was not telling the former how much Durag Dynasty’s 360 Waves meant to me as a kid.
SD psych rockers Joy had just been kicked out of a warehouse practice space they’d been renting from my father in National City after someone pooped in the alley and the band had left behind a mountain of cracked cymbals and broken drum hardware. Ever the artistic scavenger, I gleefully grafted the assorted musical detritus onto our drummer’s kit and the resulting mass of cymbals would remain a part of our shtick until the burdens of more regular gigging forced us to lighten our load-in.
At that first show we played “Blacklip,” the first song from The Invariant and to that point our most complexly-arranged song, followed by “Green.” We opened the night, bestowing upon us the eternal honor of having been the first act to play at Tony’s new venue, where six years later I’d get married in a ceremony performed by Russell.
After that first show came yet another semi-fallow period during which I began composing from scratch a new album, and two years later we’d have an all-new thirty minutes of material.
“Ritualist” was intended from the start as a natural opener for our live sets. The dinky little guitar-vocal intro was just long enough to catch the ear of anyone who had wandered out before our set began, then as soon as they had reconvened in front of the stage we’d hit them with the 1-2-3-4 count straight into the meat of the song. True to form, just as any audience would begin to feel they’d matched our energy we’d break off into the extended improvised section ending the song.
“Nothing but a Burden” was meant to be our mosh-friendly song on the rare occasion we played with an actual metal band, an occurrence which after our first couple of shows never happened again. Still, the extreme metal influence was never more apparent than on our first album, where we channeled honest-to-god death metal as opposed to noise rock and free jazz. I always liked to think of our music as “post-metal” in the sense we played with the tools of the genre but to wholly disparate ends, even down to the style of our production. Sometimes we played with the listener’s expectations to subvert them, and other times we consciously went à rebours: I hated the muddy scooped-midrange tone favored by many metal guitarists, so I consciously chose to boost the middle and high end on my amp in hopes of creating the harshest attack possible.
Speaking of that amp: at the time I was playing a Peavey Vypyr, a modeling amp with a dozen or so built-in effects. Any teenage shredder who ever ripped through a Line 6 Spider in “Insane” mode will recognize the fizzy high-gain tone, which I further emphasized by running the signal through a brickwalled compressor to create immediate feedback any time I removed my fingers from the strings. Later in our “career” I’d joke that during this period we had been a noise band in metal drag, and it was only a stunning lack of self-awareness which kept any of us from seeing it sooner.
Outside of the distorted tone I used the Vypyr’s multitude of effects to fill our improvised soundscapes, many of which can be heard in unedited form on my early solo album Ceiling Joy, which also provided the basis for songs on multiple Mortal Bicycle records.
Like “Ritualist,” “Crustacean Eulogy” makes obvious the influence of Gorguts’ and Atheist’s start-stop riffing style. Besides the album’s epic-length closing track, “Crustacean Eulogy” features perhaps the most complex structure of any song on The Years, though the riff salad use of repetition was something we’d abandon after this record. Along with “Ritualist,” the improvised section closing the song still strikes me as the strongest recorded moment of this incarnation of the band. (But don’t take my word for it.)
One need look no further than Those Darn Gnomes’ dark, obstreperous improvised excursions to see the influence of King Crimson’s Red looms large over basically every record I’ve ever made. “Admission” welds the snaking, dissonant guitar leads of that album’s title track to an atmosphere inspired by latter-day Deathspell Omega and Swallowed’s then-recent album Lunarterial.
Inspired by the “bestial” war metal of Revenge’s brutal primitivism and the more chaotically layered sound of Teitanblood and Deiphago, I began dubbing onto The Years strings, brass and woodwinds. At their worst these extra layers strike me as little more than an effect (or perhaps merely an affect) but at their best — and I’d rank the saxophone solo in “Admission” among those moments — they manage to broaden the album’s palette far outside the basic guitar-bass-drums unit as which we began. As with basically every element of our sound, we’d push that broad palette to cartoonish extremes beginning with our next album, but this early in our development those moments carry the quaintness of a young band trying desperately to break out of their own self-imposed limitations.
Like “Nothing but a Burden,” I wrote “Consequence” as something of a crowd-pleaser devoid of the thorny riffs and jumpy dynamics characterizing the rest of our material. It didn’t work — the slow, moody march was the slowest and probably least welcome moment in our live sets — but the final result is not without its charms: though of all our songs this one most resembles traditional heavy metal, there’s almost no repetition across the piece. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but years later I’d hear one of the guys from Psalm Zero describe metal songwriting as “slave to the riff,” giving words to whatever it was against which I thought I was railing all those years before.
“Fault of the Sun” began something of a trend across Those Darn Gnomes records, all of which feature a pseudo-epic closing track anticipating the sound of the next album. (This expectant trend has continued even into my recent solo work.) The layers of twisting, dissonant guitar work and non-repetitive structure look forward to The Zodiac, and true to that latter album’s spirit we’d play this song live only once — at our final show at Eden, fittingly enough — before we retired from performing preexisting material at all. I’d later xenochronously recycle the dueling rhythm guitar parts for the end of “Birds” off Calling Whitetails to a Tuned Bow, where they appear under a six-part canon in 24-tone equal temperament played on tuned samples of bees. I’ve often wondered if we might have had more success (if only as a novelty act) if anyone had been able to discern what we were actually doing on our recordings.
The album’s title borrows from Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt. Beginning with his Mars books, Robinson has remained one of my most enduring literary and artistic influences, alongside Philip K. Dick — to whose paranoid malaise Robinson’s trademark “angry optimism” works as a sometimes necessary antidote — and Thomas Pynchon, whose own semi-jaded post-hippie idealism forms something of a bridge between the two poles. Of course that “angry optimism” is nowhere to be found on The Years, nor anywhere else in Those Darn Gnomes’ discography for that matter. But Robinson’s imaginative scope in brainstorming possible worlds (be they utopian or otherwise) informed from the beginning how I approached conceptualizing the musical “world” we sought to inhabit.
The album’s cover came from John Martin’s Pandemonium, one of his illustrations for Paradise Lost, a work whose shadow hangs long over The Years; we’d quickly shed the Romantic influence of Martin though Milton stuck around more stubbornly. A drawing by Giordano Bruno, whose concept of the memory palace was my introduction to the hermetic tradition, supplied the disc art. In addition to putting together all our album layouts, Sam Hinsvark drew our first ever shirt design for the show by copying Elmyr de Hory’s forgery of a Michelangelo self-portrait from Orson Welles’ F for Fake. The copy of a copy of a representation of the self felt like a natural fit for the album’s themes of self-deception and the construction of identity, a deeply internal approach inspired by early modernist literature which we’d push even further on The Zodiac. For better or worse (and we’ll leave the question unanswered, thank you) I wouldn’t be who I am today without having played in Those Darn Gnomes, and the construction of the album in many ways mirrored the construction of myself as a young adult piecing together an identity through my piles of influences. I’ve alluded recently to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept “minor literature,” but for a solid decade of my life this band embodied their primary tenet of linguistic deterritorialization: the “impossibility of not writing,” tied to the problematic of finding a voice in a language at once alien and familiar. Our inability to fit into any one musical niche was apparent from the start, and awkward though our early attempts may have been, we were always happy to co-opt whatever creative styles and “languages” might allow us to relate to a world of which we were eternally part and apart from.
We shared the stage for our album release show at Til-Two with our friends from the Twin Cities Maeth and local prog-death group Fadrait. In truth, the album had only been perhaps 80% completed when Steve from Maeth asked if we would play with them, and the impending show made for a perfect self-imposed deadline for what otherwise very likely would have become a writeoff like The Invariant. We didn’t have the means to record live drums, so out of necessity and my love for drum machine cybergrind we simply retained the MIDI drums I programmed for the album’s initial demos, and for the improvised sections used a Roland V-Drum kit to control the same samples.
I was too young to get into the bar, so when Russell got his wrist stamped by the door guy I pressed mine against his the next time he stepped outside. (This strategy would serve me well on multiple occasions, though it famously failed the next year when we were booked to play with Pale Chalice, who were using our gear as a backline. So I waited out the whole night in the Tower Bar’s triangle-shaped parking lot, a notoriously treacherous zone of demarcation. And good thing, too: during Morphesia’s set, a drunk driver ripped through the front of his gorgeously-restored Crown Vic and tried to take off. Lucas and I chased him down the block and when Z came offstage he filled out a police report still in full corpse paint.)
Maeth spent the night at my house, but not before one of San Diego’s legendary potholes sent a the corner of an amp through their van’s back window. Boone dutifully slept in the van to keep an eye on the vehicle while the rest of us drank PBRs in the garage, and in the morning Safelite came to repair and replace.
(I first made Steve’s online acquaintance through the blogs MetalSucks and Toilet ov Hell, whose founder Joe flew out for this show and for which Steve wrote an excellent road diary chronicling this run of Maeth’s.)
Our next show was another fest out at Eden, just a few weeks later. Tony had made it out to Til-Two for the album release and left so impressed by Fadrait’s set he asked if they wanted to join the bill. When they showed up to his house in the desert cooked off mushrooms they thought we had played a prank on them. No, we were just that weird.
Early in 2020 when Those Darn Gnomes began a hiatus which would continue until our final show I ended up joining Fadrait on bass; we practiced regularly for a hypothetical gig until the first stay-at-home notice shut us down. The five years between when first we shared the stage and when I briefly joined the band feel like a decade unto themselves; the five since then are like another still. Alex ended up joining us on drums for both our last show before the pandemic (along with Zach on vocals) and our only one after.
The stories recounted here carry no moral or lesson, not even about starting a middling band; they serve only to record a few memories of a group who never really belonged to any sort of scene. In the annals of noise or DIY avant-garde music we qualify as nothing more than a footnote at best, but from our inception we were always aggressively “minor,” in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense if not in every other. The Years is an exceptional album only in its representation of our immaturity as artists, and yet of course for that very reason it remains perhaps our most important, as the rhizome from which every future permutation of the band sprouts.
Of all the primary members who ever held tenure in Those Darn Gnomes, Russell is the only one still alive with whom I’ve kept in contact. He’s still my best friend, and if I’m writing this for anyone, it’s for him. Love you, buddy.
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