HUMANWINE

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HUMANWINE: Tales from Vinland (May 2006)

It’s been exactly one year since I’ve seen HUMANWINE perform at Great Scott as part of Anngelle Wood’s Rising Tide Series. From the first chord, they delivered an arresting and indescribable sound; a gutsy amalgam of carnival schmaltz, punk and cabaret. The musicianship was stunning, the vocals intoxicating, and their best songs were fueled by outrage – at hypocrisy, intolerance, enslavement in all forms. 

As we approach June 2006, HUMANWINE has matured and revitalized. Fresh blood, renewed spirit, different in texture but no less intoxicating. Now along with Mat McNiss (acoustic guitar and vocals) and Holly Brewer (lead vocals) are Nathan Greenslit on drums, Jeremy Pilny on piano and multi-instrumentalist Brian Carpenter. Holly and Mat have moved from Laconia, NH to Jamaica Plain for proximity to like-minded thinkers. They’ve got a record deal with Warner. They’ve played increasingly bigger shows, most recently to a capacity crowd at the Dresden Dolls CD release at the Orpheum. The next big thing is their EP release show, on June 3rd at the Middle East Downstairs, with Reverend Glasseye and Campaign for Real Time. And they've won the WFNX Best Music Poll for "Best New Band." 

So. What’s this band all about? 

Before we explore what demons induce the HUMANWINE vision, first things first: it’s vital to get the name right. HUMANWINE is, as one crafty fan phrased it, “all caps, no gaps.” “That’s important,” stresses Mat when we talked at the Jamaica Plain apartment he shares with Holly, bandmate Jeremy and a very small, very horny dog named Fern (fern and holly grow together in California, I’m told).
Secondly, try to get past Holly’s tribal tattoo. Holly’s ink, just like her music, is as beautiful as it is striking, and wholly inexplicable to many people. Holly expresses frustration when people can’t truly “hear” the band until they get some answers, such as what do you call this music? And why did that girl tattoo her face? “But I totally get it,” she says. “You know when you see someone so androgynous that you really don’t know if they’re a man or a woman? Well I can’t hear one fucking word they’re saying until I find out. So I get it. People ask me well what if you want to get a job? I don’t need a job at The Gap, okay? Well what if you want to get married? I am married, here’s my tattooed wedding ring. Well what if you want to have kids? Then they’ll come out my fucking vagina, do you have any more questions?” 

Musically, this is a rock band, but one constantly seeking to redefine the meaning of rock. Rattling the cage of genre-pigeonholers is, in fact, their goal. How DO you classify a band as obsessed with death as Devil Doll, as politically charged as Diamanda Galas, as poignant as the Tiger Lillies and as mythical as, say, the Legend of Gilgamesh? 

Taken as a whole, HUMANWINE’s body of work gives the impression that it’s an adaptation of a grand-scale epic musical that hasn’t yet been made. Epics are defined as long, multi-part tales that describe the trials and feats of characters whose actions define the very ideals, morals, and politics of a particular people; if the HUMANWINE epic musical were made, the cast would throng into the hundreds and include dissenting villagers, marching ogres, disillusioned elite, corpses in love, sycophants, junkies, heroes, poets and witches. And the title would have to be “The Vinland Chronicles.”
Because if you spend any time with Mat and Holly, you begin to understand that they’re artists and storytellers, and “Vinland” is to this duo what Dublin was to James Joyce. With just as many dead guys walking around. “We’re talking about a world,” summarizes Mat. “We usually have a movie in our heads. We think, what is the music that goes with that? So there’s many different cultures, and influences, and voices, and attitudes.” 

“And colors and characters,” adds Holly. 

“And weather patterns.” 

“We always get a vision of something that’s happening in Vinland. Then it becomes about how the fuck can we portray that without a video. We try to portray themes and actors and set. Like the drums will be the wind and the guitar will be someone cleaning or sweeping. If the song is loud it’s typically chaos or destruction happening, and it always matches up with the words. Then if there’s a clean or surreal period after that, it’ll be like a rebirth or cleansing period for the people that are living where the story is happening. And everybody in that world has to get their moment in the light. If we only focused on the villagers, you know…” Holly trails off, looking to Nathan Greenslit for corroboration. “Well,” he offers, “When song ideas come to me, they’re never melodic, ever. I hear music from the bottom up. I hear drums first. Lyrics are like an afterthought for me. So when I finally heard the lyrics to some of the HUMANWINE songs I was blown away. If ever I’m looking for a cue for a part of a song, rather than charting it out, it’s an image. Something cinematic for me to translate rhythmically.” 

A concise, evocative and melodic drummer, Nate first saw the band at that aforementioned Great Scott show and took over on drums three days later. If that sounds fast, it is, but then Nate is a genius. He holds degrees from St. John’s College, Johns Hopkins and MIT, in Philosophy, History of Math, Comparative Lit and Cognitive Science and is “five minutes away from completing his Phd.” HUMANWINE is the only band I know with a cultural anthropologist keeping the beat. Plus he’s got chimes. 

Between Nate’s ability to “see the shape” of songs, Jeremy’s flawless piano holding down the bottom end, and Brian Carpenter’s addition of everything from accordion to slide trumpet, Holly and Mat feel that they have achieved the means to stretch “omni-directionally,” as Mat phrases it. “What we had been working with in the past was material that…I don’t want to say ‘in a rut’ but it was in a very specific direction. And that was interesting because it was clear that we had a bunch of different influences. But it was really hard to control that. It was hard to branch out.” About former bassist Tony Metsiou, Holly says, “he’s definitely a sweetheart, one of our best friends for a hundred years. But he grew up on heavy metal and that’s all he knows. And occasionally he’d funk. And pretty much everything that he’d bring was like a mix between funkadelic and Slayer, and with HUMANWINE, um, not so much. And then drummers were always like four-on-the-floor guys, doing the Green Day or whatever kind of drumming. 

With HUMANWINE you can’t just say ‘oh it’s one of THOSE beats, right?’ You won’t be right. It’s just not fucking Human. I don’t think we’re like, SO unusual, but we have a habit of finding ‘rock’ people. That’s bad for us when it doesn’t allow us to branch out. You can bang your head to anybody around here, go bang your head, have fun, drink and forget you ever saw them the next day. We prefer a sit-down audience like in a theatre, people that are ready to watch a show that’s like a SHOW.” 

The band collectively voices the desire to someday have a budget for props and characters, but I’m here to say you don’t need those visuals to “see” the show in most HUMANWINE songs. Take “Bizaare,” for example. Musically, it hearkens back to a long lost Broadway, when musicals were de rigueur without needing Disney money. Part fairy tale, part cautionary fable, this is a cleverly worded account of a grand gala. Though we never learn what’s the occasion, it’s clear that the protagonist feels compelled to attend (“only a fool would decline without a reason”) but finds the experience revolting (“who in their right mind would go to such a thing?”) and then turns to alcohol to cope with the disgust (“does it even matter as you head for the bar”). At first listen (say, the first time you hear the band play it live) it’s a simple anecdotal tune. But later (say, once you’ve gone home and listened to the CD a few times) it magically reverberates into a greater reality. “Bizaare” becomes a statement about disillusionment and, like every other song in any musical, or a chapter of an epic poem, this one advances the entire story being told. In this case, the story of the people who live in Vinland. And also like a musical or an epic, this single song bears signature motifs but doesn’t (and doesn’t have to!) sound like any other song in the HUMANWINE body of work.

“What we like,” explains Holly, “is to have is our set change throughout the night. Literally, to have these songs sound like different people wrote it.”

A good descriptor, and apt. Taking a hard left from “Bizaare” is “Drugs,” a sort of extremist “to each his own” manifesto. It’s not about destroying oneself with drugs. “When my really good friend died, I was like FUCK THIS. That was my 35th friend who’d died. It sucks, it’s so lame. I’m so sick of it. If you’re going to be a junkie, it’s really fair to your friends to just not have any. Act like you’re falling off the face of the earth, because you’re going to anyway unless you’re one of the one percent who makes it out. So how about everybody who loves you, everybody who cares about you, they have their own lives and they don’t need your fucking drama?” The song is a churning maelstrom, veering from staccato and stark to chaotic. The drums beat a dark death march under Holly’s exquisite voice, always the emotional compass, resonating from the depths of frustration to finally scream out the last line, “if you don’t change, you’re dead in my eyes.” Pretty powerful stuff.

What’s next for this amazing band? Well, the EP comes out on June 3rd. After that, they’ll see what happens. Musically, HUMANWINE knows better than to bargain with inspiration. Their main goal is to follow where Vinland leads, to change and grow and avoid musical ruts. “We can’t be stuck in any rut, in any of the lands that we go to musically,” says Mat. “It would be unsatisfying. In the end, we’d feel like we’re lying.”

“I know audiences don’t want you to change, but they have to get a grip on it,” says Holly. “We can’t promise the audience that we’re never going to change. They change, everybody changes.”

“Yeah, everybody changes.”

Especially in Vinland. 

www.humanwine.org. 

(This story was originally published in The Noise, Issue 262. Interview took place in Jamaica Plain, MA on 23 May, 2006)