Experimental trio Gold tries 'playfully aggressive' sound
It's fair to say that guitarist Michael McSherry is a social artist, the kind of visual thinker who truly discovered the euphorically communal effects of playing music after locking himself in a room with paint and canvases for almost four years at NIU.
For the most part, he doesn't even consider himself a technical guitarist. Not like singer and guitarist Jess Northup, his partner in crime in the three-piece experimental rock outfit Gold. No, "artist" is definitely a more apt description for McSherry, whose love for music's artistic scene and the people that scene generates is as sincere as the "sloppy dance" rock riffs he creates as his contribution to the community.
Fixtures of DeKalb's music scene know McSherry as the guy who opened the now-defunct DIY rock venue The Rodeo and who ran a virtual guitar store on eBay. He played for a while in the now-gone local band King & Queen, part of which later morphed into Geneva's Bachelor Party Weekend, and got an internship at Saddle Creek in Omaha. After graduation, he moved to Chicago to further explore the music field and landed unpaid soundboard gigs around the city.
That's basically where Gold's story begins. During a 12-band engineering job at Double Door three years ago, McSherry endured a day of nearly unbearable sounds from every kind of music that bores him more by the minute. And then, near the end of the day, a shining beacon of light stepped onstage. They were called the Van Allen Belt and spewed just the kind of formulaic and dizzy rock chaos that McSherry admires.
After listening to 10 hours of garbage, his attention was captured by something truly "refreshing," McSherry says. "They were the only band that I was like, 'What are these guys doing?'"
Introductions were made, phone numbers exchanged, friendships sown. Turns out the Van Allen Belt's bassist was on the outs, so McSherry stepped in, changed the role to guitar, and at least one drummer later, he and Northup changed the name to Gold, producing unpredictable deconstructions of classic rock riffs and mashing them together into steady, semi-epic jams.
Three years and two EPs later, it's abundantly clear that the two guitarists couldn't be more perfect for one another. The way McSherry describes it, Northup tends to take the technical reins while he tackles songs visually. Yes, visually. He's not kidding when he says song construction begins with a riff and continues with a big piece of paper on the wall. As the two collaborate, they'll give their working "parts" code names and add them to a growing list on the wall. So what later sounds like one string of seamlessly crafted stream-of-consciousness started out in bits and pieces with names such as Purple or Spider. "Moments," as McSherry likes to call them.
"We'll do five purples and two spiders and then we'll do - the chainsaw part and then we'll go back to the purple part," McSherry says as an example of how the duo rearranges their offerings of slow dropping chords and alternately speedy interludes. "I didn't even learn how to technically play the guitar," he says. "I just know it in shapes and sounds, but Jeff went to school for it."
Add in new drummer Kevin Vlack from recently disbanded Chicago band The Narrator (Flameshovel Records), and McSherry says Gold's latest batch of songs for a planned third album is closest to the "playfully aggressive" style and driving tributes to old rock 'n' roll that he and Northup have aimed for since the beginning. Slow rehashes of someone else's instrumental rock pretension this is not.
Thankfully, new fans won't need to wait around to hear their revamped style while the new record is being made. "Here is Where You Find Yourself," Gold's 2-month-old second EP, acts as a definitive stepping stone to the band's current sound. They recorded it at the Grand Avenue locker room in Chicago where U.S. Maple and The Jesus Lizard - two of the band's common influences - kept their practice spaces.
During their most successful songs -- tunes including "Arnold Writer" and "Slinky" -- you can nearly hear old Black Sabbath breaks being stuffed between Gold's thoughtful mid-song pauses. Impulsive cohesion between Northup's reverb-soaked guitar tricks and McSherry's rising strings (though there's no separating players in this mash of guitars) balances extrovert sound competing for space, and Northup's slightly buried vocals tie it all together.
The plan from here is to tour the whole month of August and return to more writing and Chicago shows. McSherry dreams of leaving his house-painting day job for touring and recording, but for now, he says, he's content just playing the scene and hosting as many onstage shenanigans as he, Northup and Vlack can fit in a set.
"We're just trying to have fun more than anyone," he says. "Really, we're just trying to make people smile."