Photo credit: Joe Kirschling
WORK
It’ll surprise nobody who’s seen Joe Cannon perform with his band WORK to learn that he lived in Chicago for a time. He spent 11 years there in the ’90s and ’00s, playing in a number of bands, most prominently Check Engine, and he performs with the same shouty, irritable intensity and love-it-or-hate-it zeal of so many of that city’s most notable noise-rock bands. Old habits die hard, he says.
“When I’m on stage being the old guy cranking at you kids these days, it’s because that was the intensity you had to perform with before you could get famous on the internet,” he says. “I think a certain kind of aggression was required to hold the audience’s attention, so I still think in terms of musical performance where you would live or die on stage. And a lot of people you see now, you get the sense that they never really experienced that. There isn’t really that same intensity anymore.”
A proudly showy singer, Cannon emphasizes his self-effacing lyrics with a lacerating howl, and he’s backed in WORK by a rhythm section that shares his conviction: bassist Jeff Brueggeman and drummer Kavi Laud, both formerly of the Milwaukee rock trio New Red Moons.
“They’re younger than me but very much on the same wavelength, and they love to play with that same intensity,” says Cannon, who credits their buy-in for giving him cover to go all out on stage. “It’s that experience of when you’re on the stage and even if you’re facing a bad crowd or an unfriendly crowd, the rhythm section behind you is burning so bright that you can’t not enjoy yourself up there.”
On the band’s new album Stictly Cruis’n, Cannon puts his gallows humor on full display. “We write serious songs, but I’m never going to be in a position where I’m like, ‘Dammit, take this seriously!’ because even our most serious songs have strong jokes in them,” he says. “I mean, we have a song on the album called ‘Everybody Loves Me Like the Hole in My Head.’ I just don’t have the will to put on my serious face all the time.”
Produced with typical wallop by Shane Hochstetler, the record calls back to a louder, more volatile era of indie rock, and albums like Jesus Lizard’s Liar, The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West, Les Savy Fav’s 3/5 or Nation of Ulysses’ Plays Pretty for Baby. Even the band’s name, Cannon says, is a throwback to a pre-internet ideal of immediacy.
“The constant joke is that it’s utterly un-Googleable,” he says. “This is also another thing that comes from me having been deep into punk rock for decades: The first time I saw WORK on a poster, I just thought, ‘Fuck yes this looks awesome!’ It’s this big brutal word that you could put in 190 point type on a poster. Visually it’s a slap on the face! So it’s this amazing band name for the punk age, even though it’s an absolutely terrible name for the internet age.”
WORK play an album release show with OUT and The Ornerys at High Dive on Friday, Aug. 31 at 9 p.m.
