Photo credit: Joe Kirschling
Sometimes a band name just clicks. When guitarist Tony Catalano suggested the name Duckling to his bandmates, they ran with it. And then they kept running. The group’s debut EP, Sup From a Duck, features a duck on the cover and opens with a cacophony of duck noises. At their album release show, singer-drummer Quinn Cory is preparing some duck-shaped food to share and hopes to have a kiddie pool filled with rubber ducks.
“It’s not even that we’re obsessed with ducks,” Cory says. “It’s the nature of who we are, and what our relationships are in this band, that it made sense to push this duck thing as far as possible, definitely further than it needs to go.” Pushing things too far is sort of a pattern with the band, who play loopy punk and buzzy alternative with echoes of The Rentals and The Breeders but with a screwball edge that’s all their own.
“The things we talk about, the things we laugh about, they just bring out the weirdest version of myself,” Cory says of her bandmates, the exiting Catalano (who’s moving to New York and will soon be replaced by new guitarist Derek Marinello) and bassist Jordan Moreno. “That’s why I like playing with them so much. We’ll have days where we play for hours and hours and it gets weirder and weirder as it keeps going.”
Cory also sings and drums for the politically minded folk septet Ruth B8r Ginsburg, but Duckling, she says, gives her an outlet for her louder, wilder impulses. While Duckling isn’t entirely a joke band, there is an element of that. At least a couple lyrics on their quickie debut amount to some variation of a “your mom/your dad joke,” and the closing track, “Animalz,” has a line about Larry David’s shiny head.
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“I think people just take things so seriously, especially music,” Cory says. “When we got this band together, we were pretty clear that we’re not trying to do that. All we wanted was to play music and express ourselves without really caring about what people think. For me, a lot of those vocal tracks are really further than I’ve gone in a recording before. We’re screaming and taking it that far, and I think when people I know first see us, it’s surprising for them, because that’s not really who I am, but that’s kind of the point.”
Even for a band as unconcerned with the outside world as Duckling, though, releasing an EP is a significant occasion. It marks the moment that a band that’s hitherto only existed as a live entity officially enters the public record, and Cory has mixed feelings about that. She speaks longingly of the pre-internet days, quite a bit before her time, when bands could operate both relatively anonymously, as sheltered from the public’s response to their work as they wanted to be. “There’s something special about not knowing much about a band and having a little mystery,” she says.
“I know everybody says this, but this band really is for ourselves,” Cory continues. “Opening it up to other people to tell us what they think, for me personally that’s hard, because I’m really trying not to care about outside opinions. That’s why we’re not on Facebook. We’re not even on the internet really. For us it’s hard enough even just to make a Bandcamp and put this online.”
Duckling will play an EP release party on Saturday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. with Ben Yela, Mark Waldoch and Bum Alum. Details are available on Facebook.
