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FRIDAY, Aug. 6, 9PM
@ Mikey's GyrosStereopathic on Hypem
Dec
31
This is a good time of year to contemplate death and the inevitability of change and decay. The leaves fall and the flowers fade; the cornstalk withers and the punkin is a-rotting on the vine. Christmas snow hasn’t come and Indian summer is gone like Frank Sinatra. This is a good time of year to identify with creepy black-and-white movies of yore with the inevitable bell tolling at graveside encircled by ravens, and the time is ripe for a musical group that encapsulates said black-and-white bell tower. Enter Seattle’s newest group, The Nine Tailors, a group composed of acoustic poets from the band Jubilee.
The Nine Tailors is a quartet of sober-minded intellectuals who were inspired by the title of a Dorothy Sayers novel to call themselves after the term for the church bell death toll in 17th century England, a toll in which “the lowest bell was sounded nine times in succession to announce the death of a man,” explains Kurt Schuler, guitar and vocals of The Nine Tailors. “We want to write songs that have somewhat of the same effect as that low ringing bell. We want to be heard like thunder… We want to draw people out of their busy world of distractions into a place where they can be confronted by the inevitability of death and the urgency of the struggles presented to us in our everyday lives.”
All avid readers translating writing skills to an audio format, The Nine Tailors put stories to strings drawing from the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien and a vast horde of literary references. I keep thinking of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the romance of inevitability; but this is a skin-deep comparison and relies on the accident of “bells” and “tolls,” the “inevitability” of “death.” The Nine Tailors are improvisers. Their literary flair is organic. “I sometimes get frustrated with songs that seem to be just a mess of cool-sounding images or phrases,” comments Schuler, “Our songs… are a lot like short stories, with plot lines and characters.”
To understand The Nine Tailors, understand Flannery O’Connor’s grace of reckoning and darkness. Understand the sub-creation of Tolkien and the undiscovered world of potential beneath your talented fingertips. “It’s not that artists are saying anything new,” says Schuler, “They just find new ways of telling old stories… good literature can do this and I think good songs can do this as well.” They keep returning to Tolkien: now they’re referencing his philosophy again, this time, Of Fairy Stories.
“The problem with language is that words lose their meaning over time,” concludes Schuler after brain-storming with his band-mates, “When it comes down to it, art is about defamiliarizing our ordinary surroundings so that everything that normally prevents us from seeing something beautiful or true – clichés, cynicism – can be bypassed for a moment.”
Through lyrical dark-chocolate rock with a smooth mellow tone and a bittersweet edge, The Nine Tailors bypass now to the moment at that funeral we have all attended where kebang! for a moment, we empathized with the corpse and could feel that moment in between this world and the next. The word is sobering, reflective, and certainly nothing apocalyptic or bordering on death metal, although Schuler shared that he has a name in his pocket waiting for a death metal band. “The purpose [of The Nine Tailors] is not to get people down,” says Schuler, “But, rather, just to wake people up.”
Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with a knack for exasperating computer experts through no fault of her own. She claims that the screws just fell out – and there was her hard-drive on the floor. The docxs are now recovered, but iTunes is gone like Frank Sinatra… or Al Pacino’s cash, anyhow. ”T9T” is a relic from the old hard-drive and ageing like cheese, so it’s high time for pub.
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