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Face To Face
By Scott Harrell
Trever Keith, singer and guitarist for Southern California punk quartet Face To Face, ponders for a long minute the balance between an established band’s inexorable need to grow, and it’s responsibility to give the people what they want, as it were.
“It’s easy to talk about in theory, but it’s difficult to get across,” he muses. “We just kind of write music that we like, number one, and is inspiring to us, and that we think is indicative of what Face To Face should be.”
By “indicative of what Face To Face should be”, is Keith acknowledging that he feels fans, by dint of support, earn themselves an influential position in a group’s creative process? That they are ‘owed’?
“Obviously, when you’ve been in a band for almost a decade, fans expect a certain sound, and it’s only fair to own up to the responsibility we have as Face To Face to deliver the Face To Face sound. If we wanted to veer too far off from that, we should probably call it something else,” he concedes with a laugh, but quickly adds, “all of us, with our respective instruments, want to be able to sort of push the envelope a little bit.”
Most bands are not AC/DC, and couldn’t release the same ten songs every twenty months for thirty years even if they wanted to. It’s not a question of getting away with it – it’s simple evolution. Dynamics shift, relationships and perspectives change, people get restless. The organism develops, or it dies. But rock n’ roll in general, and punk rock, where The Ramones and God knows how many others have been happily (and quite famously) pounding out the same three chords since time began, in particular, have consistently faced their practitioners with the most difficult of high-wire acts. Here, bands always have to grow, and too many fans never seem to want to let them.
When Face To Face fans picked up 1999’s Ignorance Is Bliss, most were surprised by what they heard, and more than a few criminally closed-minded purists surely felt a bit betrayed. The disc took FTF’s trademarked muscular, melodic punk into new arenas, belying pop, rock, and postpunk influences for the first time. Keith, guitarist Chad Yaro, bassist Scott Shiflett, and drummer Pete Parada kept the loping rhythms, engaging vocals and two-Les-Pauls-fighting riffage intact, but tempered them with moody changes, ambitious arrangements, and a slick, multilayered production. There might have been (gasp) keyboards; there was definitely (sob) a ballad. On the whole, Ignorance was an excellent release, and one hell of a daring move. But, audiences being what they are, its reception was decidedly mixed.
“It was mostly well-received by our audience, but the people that didn’t like it, REALLY didn’t like it,” Keith agrees. “They were very vocal about it, and that was kind of a bummer. People want, I don’t know, they want to keep punk rock whatever they think it’s supposed to be, and any deviation from that is frowned upon.
“But it’s just one album in a succession of many records.”
For their latest release, Keith and company foiled the ambitious songwriting and weighty production of Ignorance by simply going back to the practice space and banging out an album’s worth of material in a couple of months. They then made the unprecedented move of making snippets of all sixteen resulting tracks available on an internet site, partnered with the currently legally-embroiled mp3.com, where fans could vote to decide which songs would end up on the release.
“We basically cooked up the idea for doing it because I wanted a way to get the music to the audience early,” explains Keith. “We typically write more songs than we need for each record, and then the band, the manager, and the label all talk about which songs they want to go on there. We just thought it would be cool to let the audience tell us what songs they like the best, and put those on the album.”
Any speculation as to whether the experimentation of Ignorance had thinned the Face To Face herd was silenced, as the site quickly racked up over two million ballots cast, and the twelve top tracks now appear on the literally-titled Reactionary. Keith called the outcome “fairly predictable”, with the fastest, ‘punkest’ tunes garnering the majority of votes – a band favorite, ‘Nullification’, didn’t even make the cut. But while the urgent, careening Reactionary does represent a return to form for Face To Face in some ways, it also admirably splits the difference between Ignorance’s deft songwriting depth and the energy of previous releases. Every blast here benefits from a stronger sense of craft and a newfound dynamic confidence. Rather than backpedaling from what the punker-than-thou might sneeringly call a misstep, the quartet has taken stock and moved on, incorporating what works into what’s next.
“I still think Ignorance Is Bliss is a great record, maybe our best record ever. Reactionary is a great record, too,” Keith affirms. “I think records are supposed to be a snapshot in time for the band and the songwriter. It would be boring to put out the same record every time.”
THE END
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