The No-Breakfast Club

08/09/2001 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Carolyn Kellogg

If you played drums for punk-rock saviors Sleater-Kinney, you might just want to rest your weary bones when you finally got off tour. But Janet Weiss wouldn't. When Sleater-Kinney came home to Portland, Oregon, last winter, she got right to work--in her living room--recording the new Quasi CD.

Quasi, Janet's other band, released its first CD five years ago. Quasi is just a two-piece, not that you could tell from its new record The Sword Of God, which swells with the sounds of dozens of instruments, all following the mad inspiration of Sam Coomes.

"The best thing about working with Sam..." Janet thinks for about a half-second. "He's a genius!" Coomes shares the willowy vocal tone of Elliott Smith, with whom he's been touring recently. They used to be bandmates in Heatmiser, but in the years since they've gone in different musical directions.

On this CD, tubas, cellos, synthesizers, string sections, and an interlude of nature noises bump into rough guitars and bouncy piano tracks. Just as on Quasi's previous records, Early Recordings (1996), R&B Transmogrification (1997), Featuring: Birds (1998), and Field Studies (1999), Sam and Janet's voices blend in strangely addictive harmonies. Whereas Elliott Smith's songs are forlorn and elaborate, Quasi's have room to breathe and seem gleefully rickety, like they could fly in a million different directions at once.

"Sam is loaded with musical ideas, and 95 percent of the time they're good," Janet says. "He's really a true renaissance man. He can paint, draw, write, play music. He can't make a dinner reservation at a restaurant. But he can do all the important creative things."

Janet and Sam have been playing together so long (they were once married, in fact) that their communication is almost effortless. "We work together really well," she says. "It's pretty incredible for me, to have an idea about something, just say the idea and in 20 minutes he can flesh it out, he can play everything so well."

To record The Sword Of God, they played everything at Janet's place, with cables and equipment set up in the living room, dining room, and bedroom. "We've never tried to record a whole record by ourselves," Janet says. "It felt like we were delving into some pretty virgin territory."

A combination of real and synthetically generated instruments were used on the recording, but Janet's not spilling about what was what. "That's part of the illusion," she says with a smile. Then she pauses, and hints, "I can pick up a 'fake' cello."

Whether it was Quasi's new sense of control over the recording process, or simply having a wide range of "instruments" to play with, the resulting songs are lushly layered and stretch out for some musical exploration. It's like instead of stomping through a meadow, they stop and meander around for a bit. But it wasn't always as easy as stopping in a meadow.

"There were some pretty dark moments, when I didn't think we were going to be able to do it," Janet admits. At one point, they realized that they had lost five days of work. "It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us." Despite that setback, they persevered, eventually spending a total of four months recording the record, deep in Portland's winter months. "I kind of like recording in January and February--there's not much else, really, you're going to be doing. It's rainy and cold."

Now that summer is here, Quasi is packing up the Clubwagon and getting ready to skip breakfast in a town near you. That's one difference, Janet will tell you, between Sleater-Kinney and Quasi: Sleater-Kinney always eats breakfast. Quasi just stops for coffee. So their nerves are a bit jangly, just like their songs.