Caught between rock and a weird place

Touring Washington DC band Weird War say they've reacted against rock'n'roll conformity with their own take on dance music.

Ian Svenonius has just got home from his part-time job. "I work occasionally in this record store," says the singer from Washington DC band Weird War.

"The owner's not there so it's not really working. I just sit there listening to Kinks records, really."

This deadpan, slightly tongue-in-cheek attitude is the reason he gets away with his often highfalutin statements about music and politics.

He really is an incredibly likeable chap, but quite exasperating with it. You wait.

"We just wanted to make something that was absolutely boldly pretentious, and have guitar solos going all the time," he says of Weird War, which he formed in 2001 after his previous band ended.

"Weird War was born in an era when underground rock'n'roll had started aping the fascist conformity of the parent culture.

"Instead of refuting it, or rebelling against it, there was a new attitude prevalent in underground music that was self-satisfied, conformist and vacuous. But for us, when rock'n'roll is stripped of a mission, then what's the point of the music?" A good point.

Svenonius grew up in Washington DC and his early musical influences came from the DC hardcore music scene.

"It was an exciting period," he remembers. "There was this localism in the 80s that fuelled a lot of the music scenes in the US and, for DC bands, it was really defined by this anti-authoritarian mayor we had.

"He was a civil rights activist, he financed bands on summer youth programmes, there were venues for high-school bands to play in.

"In New Zealand that's probably normal, but for America that's very unusual. So that socialistic flare rubbed off on all the groups here.

"And [also] in the 80s, independent music was a reaction to the fact the people in entertainment had become smug and arrogant and lost contact with what something meant to people.

"Things like Beat It [by Michael Jackson], or Miami Vice, they weren't recognisable to anybody and that's why hardcore started."

But Weird War's latest album, Illuminated By the Light, has little in common with DC hardcore, and with songs about dog food, motorcycle mongoloids, and girls, it's hardly political. Or is it?

Svenonius could talk politics all day, be it historic Prussia or the state of the political climate of the United States. But instead, he'd rather talk about one of his favourite albums which gives a good indication of where Weird War come from.

"Chocolate City, you know, the Parliament record, it's about DC," he says flippantly of the 1975 album by the Detroit P-Funk band.

"It's a playful album but it's really an album about over-throwing the government. This is Chocolate City, it's a really politicised, Afro-American city," he says.

If you combine the cheeky politics and funk of Parliament, and sister band, Funkadelic, with rock'n'roll, then that's Weird War.

They formed just as garage rock was taking off and bands like the Strokes were coming to prominence. "So we reacted against that," says Svenonius. "We didn't want to have this kind of faux pretence. We wanted to play dance music, but not the [traditional] dance music. Part of it is imitating the music we love, like Funkadelic and [Parliament guitarist] Eddie Hazel. But that said, if everybody was playing Eddie Hazel slide guitar in the underground [music scene] then we obviously wouldn't."

He likes bands from places other than the "twin-pincer movement of LA and New York", which he believes dominate and dumb down music.

"A lot of the most interesting stuff comes from the hinterlands and the backwoods. DC is a really weird place. It's technically part of the south so it has this kind of a slave, plantation mentality. It's just interesting for me to live here.

"And everybody I know, I feel like they surrender and move to New York and they want to feel affirmed in being an artist, or a Bohemian, or whatever. But they get swallowed up by what's happening there whereas I think the bands that come from weird places are more interesting."

* Weird War play the Kings Arms Tavern, tonight, with Coco Solid and Erik Ultimate

Latest album: Illuminated By the Light (2005)