cover photo
The Telepathic Last Words of the Empire (page 21)
Course of Empire's new album has compelling lyrics behind a percussion-driven beat
Labels can be one's best friend or one's worst enemy. They can help give a
prospective listener or fan a clue about what to expect from one's music, or
they can create a wrong expectation.
Course of Empire has mixed feelings about descriptive labels. "There are five
guys in the band, and we all listen to completely different kinds of music,"
said Chad Lovell, one of the band's two drummers. "All the influences coming
together create our sound. We've been doing it for ten years and still can't
describe our music."
With that in mind, it's easy to call the band's music tribal gothic glam
industrial rock mixed with an electrified vein of Middle Eastern sound and
the dark shadows of the Illuminati.
You know what the Illuminati is, don't you?
Or is that wat they want you to think?
Dallas' best conspiracy band, Course of Empire, finds its themes in the X-
Files, in Waco and Roswell, and in the Pentagon and in the shadows.
No, wait. That was the second CD, 1994's Initiation, featuring the hit single
"Infested!" The new CD, Telepathic Last Words, goes beyond conspiracty
theories to delve, in its own way, into the personal psyche of paranoia.
"I found it to be much more interesting to look at the psyche of someone who
had been more or less swept away by all the paranoia, than the actual
'conspiracy' itself," said bassist Paul Semrad.
Singer Vaughn Stevenson has a similar take. "The last record was about
getting caught up in looking for answers in this pile of information that was
being passed around in the underground - conspiracies, whatever," Stevenson
said. "This album is more about just trying to find your own little spot of
sanity in the middle of it all."
Both CDs are heavily themed, unified presentations rather than simple
collections of songs. The whole band - Semrad, Stevenson, guitarist Mike
Graff and drummers Michael Jerome and Chad Lovell - share the creative
process and writing credits. "Initiation was right on the crest of all the
conspiracy theories," Lovell said. "We were really deep into a lot of that
stuff. It was also a very pissed-off album. This one's not so pissed-off.
It's probably a little more enjoyable, while still retaining some of the
dark elements."
The name of the new CD comes from a story Stevenson read about escape
artist Harry Houdini, who spent his later years trying to prove or disprove
the existence of a spiritual world. The phrase "telepathic last words"
comes from the idea that his last escape would be to communicate with his
wife from beyond the grave. (If he succeeded, the feat died with his
close-lipped wife.)
For a while, it looked as if Course of Empire would have to communicate
from beyond the grave. As the single "Infested!" began getting airplay
around the country, the band toured with industrial rock acts including
Prong and Sister Machine Gun. A remix of "Infested!" containing old
Benny Goodman big band swing horn samples became a minor club hit,
influencing other remixes.
Telepathic Last Words was originally scheduled for release in August,
1996. But the band's label, Zoo Records, ran into hard times and
eventually went out of business. "We had our suspicions that Zoo's days
were numbered, so instead of blowing the budget for our third album on
one month of recording in LA, we decided to build our own studio," Graff
said. The band's cluttered, 32-track digital recording studio is located
near Deep Ellum.
The band extracted itself from its Zoo deal and signed with TVT in March
1997. The band finished remixing Telepathic Last Words last September.
"People who really like us didn't understand why the last record didn't
make us kinda famous," Lovell said. "Then we kinda vanished. We got
trapped in a little void for a while."
The stressful delay turned out to be a blessing of sorts. "We are very
happy with TVT, and they seem to be happy with us," Lovell said. "I
expect we'll tour through Christmas. I guess at that point if it's doing
well, we'll keep touring."
Lovell said the band reworked Telepathic Last Words "because we'd had
time to listen to it, and I think we came out with a far better record.
We added more songs like "Automatic Writing #17," the introduction,
the whole concept of the radio, the extra track at the end, "Blue Moon,"
etc. We rearranged the order of the songs, remixed half of it with Dave
Bianco in LA. We were able to step back from it and look at it."
"Everybody in our group is really happy with this record the way it is,
and it feels really good," Graff said. "If people buy this record, it's
going to be in their CD collection ten years from now and they'll still
be listening to it."
Course of Empire's music goes beyond just being loud. But it rocks too
much to be called intellectual. "Around the time we started, we all went
to see Kodo drummers from Japan," Graff said. "We had all basically been
brought up around the early '80s gothic sort of stuff. We had an
interest in dark things, and fairly industrial rock. But we basically
wondered what it would be like if we took the kind of things the Kodo
drummers did, but fuse it with sharp guitars and see what happened."
"It's somewhat cinematic," Lovell said. "That's how I think about music
- like big giant landscapes. We're somewhat expansive, dealing with
broader imagery. We tend to get contextually involved in an album."
Graff was a film student when he started the group. "We didn't have
enough money to make films, so we put it on audio tape," he said. "Chad
was a video editor. We decided to use a sound studio to create a little
movie. But in front of live audiences it's a lot cooler just to rock,
so we evolved."
Telepathic Last Words is still fresh, despite sitting in limbo for so
long. It's original and powerful, and well produced. You can listen to
it loud, or pay attention to the interplay between the words and music.
A two-minute "establishing shot" of somebody twirling a short-wave radio
dial, picking up snippets of Middle Eastern radio stations - music,
drums, brief voices, singing, more drums - creates early tension and a
sense, to Westerners, of "otherness."
One of the new songs, "Automatic Writing #17," criticizes the media's
tendency to sensationalize and to make the trivial important, and, by
extension, people's willingness to go along.
The hypnotic "Ride the Static" builds into a complex plea: "All I want
is a place in the sun, all of the problems I face will not keep me
away, all I want is a ride on the static, super gold chromatic, to the
center of the universe."
Another of the CD's strongest songs, "59 Minutes," proclaims, "There's
a minute every hour I will stop and go away... I work for 59 minutes
to share one with you... all of the police have left a hole up in the
atmosphere, where all the things that matter here will vaporize
without a trace... Nothing will save you from human behavior, nothing
will save you, you build your own savior. The eyes always give you
away."
Course of Empire's version of "Blue Moon" ("I'm always standing alone
without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own") is an inspired
choice in this context. A persistently strong drum beat, a lonely
guitar and sound effects add a whole new dimension to the simple 1934
romantic standard.
If the paranoia of the first 13 tracks doesn't get to you, be patient.
A quiet, eerie, invasive, talky hidden track at the end of the CD will
get to you one way or another. There will be no middle ground on
"Anonymous Call to an Unknown Woman."
Course of Empire plays live shows from time to time in the Dallas/Denton
area, and sometimes in Austin. "We really don't play much, because we
don't want to be considered a bar band," Lovell said. "We like for our
shows to be a bigger production, an event."
The band's powerful live performances contrast with its studio
productions because of the visual and aural dynamics. You have to
listen to Telepathic Last Words to fully benefit from the paranoia in
today's cynical Postmodern society where we don't know if we believe
in conspiracies or not.
[photo caption: "The majority of the new album was recorded in the band's
32-track digital recording studio near Deep Ellum: Course of Empire"]