Photo by Joe Kirschling
When Christian Hansen recruited singer Ashley Smith to join a new project last year, Smith had one stipulation: She didn’t want their new band to sound like their last one, Red Knife Lottery.
In some ways that was a tall order. Smith is one of Milwaukee’s most distinctive vocalists, equipped with an unmistakable, soulful wail that carries for city blocks, so any band that reunited her with her former Red Knife Lottery guitarist was bound to evoke memories of their previous project.
Nonetheless, Hansen understood what she meant. Red Knife Lottery was, for all their innovations, a product of their time, born of that brief window in the late-’00s when it seemed that a spot on the Warped Tour was in reach of any punk or screamo band with a MySpace page. The group’s final album Soiled Soul and Rapture came out in 2009, and though the music itself has lost none of its vitality, it’s so stylized that nobody could mistake it for anything other than a punk album from 2009.
And so, joined by bassist Tyler Chicorel (also of Call Me Lightning and Space Raft) and drummer Andrew Mrotek (formerly of Warped Tour staples The Academy Is…), they set out for something a bit more timeless with their new group, Whips. “Whenever anybody asks me what we sound like, all I can say is straight-forward rock ’n’ roll,” Smith said. “That’s as grand as I’m going to make it sound. We are just a rock band.”
As part of that straight-forward approach, Whips disregard some of the more histrionic pages of Red Knife Lottery’s playbook. The herky-jerk tempos have been tempered, along with the violent, thrashing guitars of their former band. And though Smith’s voice hasn’t lost any of its to-the-rafters intensity, she doesn’t scream any more. If Red Knife Lottery was a niche product, Whips is positioned for a more general audience. At a mid-afternoon Summerfest performance in July, the group played to an impressed crowd of at least a couple thousand, made up of all ages and backgrounds. Red Knife Lottery almost certainly would have chased away 80% of that crowd within a few songs.
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That’s not to suggest that anything about Whips is watered down, however. On the band’s full-length debut Turn It On, Hansen’s delay-drenched riffs are given endless room to reverberate, while Chicorel and Mrotek’s rhythms stomp with blustery authority. And Smith’s songwriting is as biting as ever, examining the politics of intimacy with a mix of righteous conviction and peevish sarcasm. Her voice still goes for the kill at every opportunity, but slower numbers like “Forever Glow” and “Loverly” reveal the vulnerability behind her Teflon voice.
“These songs are pretty autobiographical,” she said. “I could tell you exactly what I was thinking the day that we wrote any given song. I could reference the exact moments, the exact life experiences that inspired them, why I wrote the songs and where the emotions came from. So it’s pretty intense at times. I would say that I’m a fairly even-keeled person in real life, so these songs are my outlet for letting a lot of things go. They let me vent these emotions so that I don’t have to deal with them in real life.”
Whips play an album release show for Turn It On at the Cactus Club on Saturday, Dec. 20 at 9 p.m. with Midwest Death Rattle and comedian Ryan Holman.
