By 2011 Revision Text were in a rut. The Milwaukee indie rock band was in the final stages of completing an album they’d poured considerable time and effort into, but nobody in the band seemed all that excited about it. So they trashed the album—a decision that was painful at the time but that seemed obvious in hindsight. Singer/guitarist Nick Perow looks back at the aborted record with no affection whatsoever. “It was just built from a generic-sounding, indie-rock template,” he said. “It didn’t say anything.”
It wasn’t just the album the group was down on. It was the band itself, which over the years had succumbed to a series of compromises that had gradually drained the group of any individuality. “We’ve always operated as kind of a democracy, but it’s easy to end up going somewhere vanilla when you’re trying to make everyone happy,” Perow said.
So the band opted to rip it up and start again. They retired Revision Text and carried on as Midwest Death Rattle, pledging a very different mentality going forward. “With Death Rattle, we made it a rule to fight for whatever was better or more interesting to us,” Perow said.
That approach paid dividends on the group’s 2012 self-titled debut, a weirder, darker and more theatrically bizarre record than anything Revision Text had ever attempted. If Revision Text was the type of band that neither offended nor excited anybody, Midwest Death Rattle introduced a band that invited strong opinions. You could love them or hate them, but you couldn’t deny they were putting themselves out there.
Any fears that the band might fall back to their own compromising ways should be quashed by their new sophomore album, Post-Apocalypso, which doubles down on the nervous edge of the band’s debut with even gloomier examinations of anxiety and alienation, set to an ever-shifting backdrop of post-rock, art rock, funk, punk and stoner rock. “It’s more mature than our first record,” Perow said. “It’s more serious on the whole. There’s a lot more contrast between the joyful moments on the record and the serious moments on the record.”
As part of that ever-widening scope, the group brought in a handful of guest musicians, including Dead Man Carnival’s Mary Rodgers on sax, Group of the Altos’ Andrew Eshbaugh on trumpet, Heavy Hand’s Isa Carini on tuba and cellist Rachel Icenogle.
“That’s what’s fun about recording your album; you can take it in any direction you want,” Perow said. “Maybe the record is unnecessarily maximalist, but there are parts that I would hear in my head and be like, ‘We’ve got to find a horn player for this.’ Or, ‘Holy crap, we need a tuba.’ Being able to bring in other musicians is one of the most fun parts of recording. It’s like, ‘Oh, I get to record a new instrument today.’ It’s not the most important part of the process, but it definitely adds something.”
Midwest Death Rattle play an album release show Saturday, May 21 at the Cactus Club with Mutts and DJ Chris Schulist at 9 p.m. They’ll also play a live broadcast of WMSE’s “Local/Live” at Club Garibaldi on Tuesday, May 24 at 6 p.m., which is free and open to the public.
