From the Dallas Observer, Wednesday February 4th, 1998
Changing the Course of Empire
Local favorite emerges from the commercial doldrums
By Matt Weitz [some minor errors corrected]
Chad Lovell, drummer for Course of Empire, has a barely noticeable
habit: Whenever he discusses the history of his band, he tends to
laugh a lot -- as a person will when later recounting a terrifying
or trying experience. You can't really blame him. After a host of
troubles -- including its record company turning turtle on the
very day that the band received accolades from Redbeard, the
influential DJ at rock station KTXQ (102.1 FM) -- the longtime
local rock band has released its third album, Telepathic Last Words.
During the early '90s and the Second or Possibly Third Great Wave of
Dallas band signings, when COE got on board with Zoo Records, it
became a hometown success story. The band's Zoo tenure, however,
wasn't all that peachy. "I can't say that I hate them," Lovell
allows by phone from COE's Dallas studio. "I just think they
didn't know how to handle us." The band put out Initiation on Zoo
in 1994, and Zoo reissued the group's self-titled 1990 release that
appeared on Allen Restrepo's local Carpe Diem imprint. The group
was waiting for Telepathic to appear in the summer of 1996 when it
stopped by KTXQ for a little pre-release schmoozing and got
Redbeard's encouraging feedback.
Later that day, COE was informed of Zoo's folding. "It was a...um,
shock," Lovell admits, bursting into laughter, as if releasing the
strain of long-ago trauma.
The group went right back out, shopping itself to labels and playing
showcases. It had an unreleased album to its name, but reacquiring
the rights to it from the now-defunct Zoo would take time. "When all
the lawyers' dust had settled," Lovell says, "It had been a year."
To make matters worse, the group found themselves in an unusual bind
when it came to playing live: If they appeared too often, COE's
audience might be utterly familiar with the songs on the new album
long before it came out. Although the band still kept busy, people
in Dallas wondered what had become of them.
"People just aren't that aware of what's out there," Lovell
complains. "We're playing out there, but it's outta sight, outta
mind. When we were touring around for Initiation, we were kicking
butt in all these other markets, but since you didn't hear us on
Dallas radio, everybody thought we vanished."
The band decided to go with a smaller label, TVT. "We liked them
the most," Lovell says. "They showed the most interest in us early,
and they seemed to understand what we were trying to do." One of the
things the band and its new label agreed on was the need to tweak
some aspects of Telepathic. "We wanted to change up the flow of the
album, record some new songs, do a little bit of remixing, and just
generally fix some things that we felt were problematic on the first
[Zoo] version," Lovell says.
"Automatic Writing #17" is one of the songs that's new on the album,
written specifically for the TVT release. The band also added a
reworking of "Coming of the Century," off of their Carpe Diem debut.
"That's on there as a kind of reaffirmation for us," Lovell says of
the old song. "Who'd have thought that we'd be here -- still as a
band, even -- two years before the end of the century?" Indeed, the
band's persistent popularity is a tribute to the appeal of their
music, all the more impressive in light of the lower profile they've
had to maintain.
"We've only released three albums in eight years," Lovell notes with
another bout of laughter. "That's probably not so productive, but a
lot of the reasons for the delay weren't our fault. It's not going
to happen like that at TVT, however. I have a feeling that we'll be
popping another one out for them here within a year, at least."
Telepathic Last Words has been worth the wait. COE has always been a
rock band -- a "hard" rock band, if that's the terminology you want
to use -- and they're still based on the heroic old-school, Led
Zep-style principal of bigness: of sound, of song, of ambition. The
band's two drummers (for a change) understand the potential of their
twinned rigs and work up a juggernaut momentum ("Coming of the
Century") powered by rhythms that somehow seem to be both complex
and essential. The tunes on Telepathic can change form and mood
widely within a single song -- "59 Minutes" goes from rocker to
subdued, subcontinental drum clinic almost before you notice. When
you trace the movements within a song on Telepathic, the tune can
sometimes seem like small orchestral pieces.
Vocalist Vaughn Stevenson meets the listener with the force and
character that you'd expect from a singer who lacks a guitar to
hide behind. Guitars crash and fall around him, strings ringing,
and there is a definite weight imparted, whether it's wickedly
rolling ( "New Maps") or dreamily ethereal (their remake of the
old starndard "Blue Moon"). The group's tendency toward minor
keys and almost Middle Eastern-sounding melodies is more developed,
and the album is full of not-so-obvious loops, samples, and sonic
tricks. Rock bands are beginning to borrow more and more from
electronica, often in clumsy attempts to boost both their image and
their sales. Usually they end up looking like idiots. Course of
Empire, however, pulls it off. Their songs are well written,
densely textured and surprising enough, to simply stand on their
own. They are of this time, so they sound like this.
That posed a bit of a problem when it came to duplicating the
songs live for the band's album release party Friday, January
23, and Saturday, January 24. Lovell had come up with the noises,
passages, treatments, and loops not with a sampler -- as many do --
but at his computer in the studio. "All of the weird noises you hear
on that album were made on the computer. I've never been afraid of
electronics or electronic music," Lovell says. "To me, it's all
instrumentation, all a means to an end."
But there's a limit. "It was important to me to actually trigger the
samples [live] rather than play along with some DAT [Digital Audio
Tape] somewhere," the drummer says. The samples were rather involved
-- some ran nearly the length of their songs -- and the process of
rendering them reproducible live was fairly complicated. Lovell
turned to Tim Sanders (formerly of Code 4, now half of the Terror
Couple along with wife Jaqueline) for help, and the two spent every
spare minute before the weekend gig at the Curtain Club working on a
solution.
Saturday night, the packed house testified to the enduring affection
Dallasites feel for COE. "These shows always feel like a big wedding,"
one person there remarked. On stage, the band captured the fullness
and density of the album perfectly. COE has long operated at a
different level than most local acts -- a couple of serviceable local
bands will open up the bill and you think, "'hmm, not bad," then
Course of Empire takes the stage and reminds you how much difference
there can be between "not bad" and "good." Live, the band called up a
tornado of sound -- thick with the samples and loops Sanders and
Lovell had worked on and impossible not to consider -- and whipped it
around the room, making it do tricks with aplomb. The band has a new
booking agent and an upcoming appearance at the influential music-biz
Gavin convention, and is considering a number of tours and opening
slots. And they finally have Telepathic Last Words.
"All our career, we've been hearing something like, 'You're too
diverse; it's like you have no idea at all of who you want to be,'"
Lovell says, no longer susceptible to the giggles. "To me, that's
looking at it exactly the wrong way. In Course of Empire, we strive
to somehow have meaning in our music that attaches itself to life as
a whole."
(
geocities.com/sunsetstrip/club) (
geocities.com/sunsetstrip)