Photo: Rat Bath - Facebook
Rat Bath
Rat Bath
Fred Kenyon stands firm in their argument that My Chemical Romance’s emo masterpiece Welcome to the Black Parade is actually a country album.
“There are a lot of blues riffs—it’s very Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque,” Kenyon says. “It’s about a Vietnam soldier that comes home and has all of these issues and then dies of cancer. It’s just really reminiscent of a lot of country music in the Vietnam era.”
It’s less surprising then to learn that Kenyon’s band Rat Bath actually started as a cover band playing country renditions of My Chemical Romance songs. The band’s lifespan was supposed to extinguish after only one Halloween benefit show but the chemistry was too strong, and Rat Bath was born.
Rag-Tag Travelling Troupe
Now, Rat Bath is not a My Chemical Romance country band. The band’s music conjures imagery of a rag-tag traveling troupe that mysteriously shows up in your town one day only to begin weaving spooky tales to the backdrop of searing rock-and-roll solos paired with punk-rock ferocity and Southern hospitality.
It’s a formula that sounds chaotic on paper but works well largely in part due to the strong connection of the band. Guitarist Cora Bequeaith and Kenyon had previously played in a folk duo called Tiny Hands that was based out of California and Arkansas. The duo needed a change and vowed to move to the city that they had the most fun in while on tour. Milwaukee’s DIY punk scene gladly welcomed them to their new home.
Rounding out the lineup is Roisin Shields on guitar, Phoenix Lehner on bass and backup vocals and Emmett Roehr on drums and backup vocals. All five members are transgender members of Milwaukee’s LGBTQIA+ community, and Rat Bath’s music builds a narrative that reclaims characters that are often queer-coded and tells a new story from their perspective.
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Battling the Demon
For Rat Bath’s upcoming album Rat from Hell, that character a witch. Throughout the album, the witch battles a demon—a physical manifestation of the protagonist’s past traumas. The witch’s relationship with the demon is unstable. In one song, they are fist fighting, and in another, they are falling in love.
“I draw on my own experiences often. I find inspiration in things that have occurred in my life and pull a lot from my past traumas,” Kenyon says. “This album became a way to show all the ways that trauma can be managed.”
Rat from Hell opens with “The Tale of Dead Ol’ Fred,” a tune that plays out like a chilling campfire story, if the campfire was placed in the middle of the circle pit at a punk show. It’s a sample platter of everything that makes up the band’s unique DNA—Lehner’s sauntering bass lines walk the country walk, while Bequeaith’s searing guitars leads push the band’s sound into rock-and-roll territory. Kenyon’s vocals dance between snarling and soaring as she kicks off the tale of the witch.
Different Aspects
From there, each track sort of showcases a different aspect of the band’s sound. “Bone Eater” comes out of the gate swinging with its rock-inspired riffs and maintains that pace throughout. “I think objectively, Bone Eater is one of our best songs,” Kenyon says. “But personally, I hate it—it just hits a little too close for me.”
“Coke Dealer” would fit right on a punk rock album, with Roehr’s drumming taking the classic snare-on-the-up-beat pattern into overdrive, while Kenyon lets the vocals become unhinged. “At Least You’re Lonely Too” slows things down and takes a country ballad approach to its structure, complete with slide guitar.
What Rat Bath has managed to accomplish with Rat From Hell is to take many genre influences and string them together, forming an album that is at times all of these different sounds at once, and at others, Rat Bath’s interpretation of a punk song, country song or rock-and-roll song should sound like. The band manages to take three different genres and shake them up like a snowglobe—never giving that snow a chance to settle into one category. The result is a sonically-familiar-yet-unique collection of songs.
“For me, I feel like both punk scenes and country scenes can be very over-powered by cis hetero-normative toxic-masculinity-type bands,” Kenyons says. “We’re a band of all trans people —we’re inserting ourselves into those scenes and mixing it up.”
Rat From Hell is available for streaming on Feb. 18. The band is celebrating the release with a show at Cactus Club featuring performances by Moonglow and Guerilla Ghost, poetry reading by Chelsea Tadeyeske and a drag performance by Santisimo Ramon. There is no cover for the event, but a suggested donation of $5-$10 will be accepted for Butterfly Collective, an organization dedicated to helping domestic abuse survivors.
For a taste of Rat Bath, go to: ratbathmke.bandcamp.com
