Chk-chk-check ‘Em Out - !!!

On a flying visit to the UK before they take off to Japan, Gigwise caught up with Nic Offer, lead singer with Brooklyn-based band !!! (or as most of you know them “chk chk chk”).  Answering the door a little frazzled and unprepared, Nic greets us with a warm smile and a handshake.  Surprisingly, he’s calm and composed - a great opposite of how most people perceive him, as his onstage persona can be energetic, loud, and eccentric.

“Come on in, have a seat anywhere,” he says congenially, shoving his suitcase aside to make room for a seat.  Another assumption put to rest—he’s not an indie star with Asshole Syndrome.  He’s a genuinely nice guy. Of course, anyone who is familiar with the music of !!! knows they are an extremely fun group and one of the pivotal members of the so-called “disco punk” genre.

First off, we shoot straight to the band’s third album ‘Myth Takes’, out on March 5. “Well, we feel like the album is kind of a step forward… like every good record should be,” he chuckles.  “We started making a more varied, well-rounded sounding album.  I think we felt like when we started, we made up disco punk as we went along, and it turned into this genre that everybody was doing, so we felt like we needed to step outside of that and make something different.  On this album the lyrics are better, the music is more complex, it’s just better all around.  It’s a record no one expected us to make.  It was because we just worked and focused on it really hard.  It’s stranger and darker.”

The music-making process of this album was different than that of their other albums.  Last year the band rented a house in Nashville, Tennessee as a rehearsal space away from all of their hometowns of Sacramento, California; Portland, Oregon; and New York City.  “Normally we just get together and jam and see where it goes, but when we were making this album it was very much about one of us bringing in a piece that he wrote and building on that.  Our song writing technique is always evolving.  We try not to get tied down to just one way of doing things,” Nic explains.

Following their first full-length studio album, unsurprisingly many other bands emerged with similar sounding tunes. Along the lines of comparisons, we ask Nic about who they usually get likened to, and whether he takes comparisons as compliments or not. “Everyone ends up being annoyed by being lumped into any genre.  People always seem to compare us to The Happy Mondays, and… well, we really just don’t like The Happy Mondays,” he laughs.  “But over here [in the UK] it seems to be a great compliment.  I’ve even gone to up bands after seeing them and been like, ‘You guys really sound like so-and-so’ and they’re like, ‘Uhh, we don’t really like that band.’ Y’know?  It’s just one of those things.  After being compared to the same bands a million times, obviously there must be some similarities, whether we like it or not.  For instance, The Beatles and The Kinks and The Stones were all distinctly different bands, but they always get mentioned together.  We’re just hoping we can stand apart from other bands as much as we can.”

In 2005 the band released an EP featuring two covers, ‘Take Ecstasy With Me’ by cult outfit The Magnetic Fields and divergently ‘Get Up’ by Nate Dogg.  If you’re thinking the latter is a very random song to be covered by a band like !!!, you share the same opinion as us.  “It’s a good song!!” Nic protests.  “Honestly, we’ve always been influenced by that kind of music, and we just felt like it was a great tune, so why not cover it?  We usually make songs where each instrument is all over the place, but this song was all centred around one riff and everyone was playing that one riff, so it was actually a challenge for us.”