“We’ve definitely playedshows where I get the impression we were only booked because someone saw thatwe have a banjo in the band,” frontman Daniel Bullock says. “Then people getindignant when we start playing our miserabilist take on early American music.We played one show in Minneapolisthat was a total disaster. We finished our first song and nobody clapped, so weplayed the rest of the set without leaving any space between songs, just tryingto get the hell out of there.”
The group was similarlyout of its element when it performed as part of a concert series at theMitchell Park Domes, a floral backdrop inappropriate for the band’s mordant talesof switchblades, ghouls and apocalypse.
“We played some of ourlonger, downtempo songs, and afterward a woman from the park came up to us andsaid, ‘That was just miserable,’” Bullock recalls. “We were just kind oflooking at each other, wondering what they had been expecting from us. Did theywant an old-timey version of Bay City Rollers or something?”
Though The ScarringParty traffics in the antique, acoustic sounds of music hall jazz, early folkand cabaretcomplete with huffing tubas and carnival accordionit’d be astretch to call them revivalists, since their songs never could have existed inthe 1920s or ’30s. The imagery is too violent, the humor too caustic and thearrangements too jarring. The Scarring Party’s music is more a re-imagination thana re-creation.
“There’s not the sensethat the band and I are trying to make something that’s in our CD collections,”Bullock says. “We’re trying to make something that’s missing from our CDcollections, so we’re mixing up everything, these pieces of the past and thepresent.”
This week the bandreleases their second album, Losing Teeth,which they recorded in parts with Brief Candles’ Kevin Dixon, then Call MeLightning’s Shane Hochstetler. The sessions were smoother than those for theband’s 2008 debut, Come Away From theLight. Three members left the band, at the time a quintet, during athree-week period while they were recording that album. By Losing Teeth, though, the band had settled on a stable four-piecelineup, with Bullock joined by multi-instrumentalists Isabella Carini andWilliam Smith and drummer Christopher Roberts.
“For this album we wereopen to trying all these different sounds, liked bowed cymbals or birdwhistlesit was fun because we were basically playing with toys to augmentarrangements,” Bullock says. “I think Shane in particular liked having us wheelin orchestral chimes for a couple tracks, because everybody loves an instrumentyou can hit with a hammer. And there’s a lot of interesting percussiontreatments that Chris uses on this record. He’s very much the type ofpercussionist that’s going to take his entire drum kit apart and reconfigureeverything to create new sounds.”
Thematically, Losing Teeth continues where Come Away From the Light left off, withmore story-songs about outsiders and outcasts, many of which end with violent,darkly whimsical twists. Collectively, the songs form a thesis of sorts.
“When civilization comesin contact with barbarism and savagery,” Bullock explains, “barbarism alwaysoverwhelms.”
The Scarring Party headlines arecord-release party at the Turner Hall Ballroom on Friday, Aug. 13, at 7:30p.m. with The Celebrated Workingman and The Trusty Knife.
