JUCIFER
Kind Killers
By: Anthony Bartkewicz
You might mistake the Athens, Georgia duo JUCIFER for some kind of reverse WHITE STRIPES, with the girl on guitar and the dude on drums, until you see the monolithic wall of amps Amber Valentine plays through. Assisted by the massive amplification and Edgar Livengood’s pounding, Valentine’s riffing is closer to the MELVINS’ Lysol than to any garage-rock revival, while she alternates between sweet singing and a bloodcurdling screech as needed. Together since 1992, JUCIFER was making their way through the cell-tower-free wilds of America’s mountain region in anticipation of the release of their Relapse debut If Thine Enemy Hunger, when Resound caught up with Valentine.
Resound: So you were away in the mountains somewhere, and couldn’t do an interview until you were closer to humanity?
Amber Valentine: “Yeah, we just finished driving across the bottom of Idaho and the top of Wyoming, so we had no cell phone service for most of this week. We had a show in Boise and then our next show is Rapid City, South Dakota, which is where I am now- lots of big mountains in between them. We have such a huge amount of gear and it’s so heavy, it takes us forever to make those big mountain passes. And gas prices are definitely very painful right now, but we’re surviving. As long as we can keep on hauling that stuff around we’ll be set.
Resound: Do you find a lot of people get confused by your band name? A couple of people, when I’ve mentioned your band name, have said something like “so they think Jews are the devil?”
Valentine: “Actually, our very first New York show, where, you know, there are plenty of people of the Jewish faith there, the person who made the fliers for it spelled it “J-e-w-s-ifer.” When we showed up, we were appalled! Like, ‘Oh my God, these people are gonna think that we’re some kind of anti-Semitic freaks!’ That doesn’t happen very often. The most common misconception of our name when people just hear it is that they think we’re saying ‘Juicy Fruit.’ And one guy, this kinda hippie guy, thought we said ‘juicy grooves.’ I think he ended up in his own tie-dyed paradise that night.
Resound: How important are the elements of volume and physicality to JUCIFER? Do you feel like your songs could exist in a standard full-band lineup or without the wall of amps, and would they be the same songs?
Valentine:“It’s funny, because when we first started to play we just had two cabinets on stage. We recently found a video that someone had shot from back then, and you can’t hear the vocals in the video. And I remember all the sound guys who were mixing us back then going ‘your guitar’s too loud!’ So we managed to do it with just a couple of amps, it can be done. But the main thing for us with the whole wall is that we don’t have to worry about whoever’s mixing us, whether they feel like it’s appropriate to give us guitar in the monitors—which is something that nobody ever thought we needed. Some guy, this sort of crazy coke-fiend guy who mixed us once a long time ago actually told Ed that if he thought he needed guitar in the monitors he was fucking crazy, and acted like he was gonna beat Ed’s ass if he continued to ask for it. So we just sidestep the whole need to worry about who’s mixing us and whether or not they want us to have monitors.”
Resound: There’s also, of course, a lot of femininity in JUCIFER. Do you go out of your way to contrast the heaviness with “girlish” vocals?
Valentine: “I think it makes sense. I am a girl, although I have been mistaken for a dude, occasionally, by really drunk guys who think that girls can’t actually play guitar I guess. ‘Whoa, I thought you were a dude when you were on stage!’ But it really depends on the song and the emotion it contains; I feel like my job as a singer is to convey what I’m writing about, or sometimes Ed writes lyrics and music, so it’s his song and it’s also my job to make it evident what it’s supposed to be about even if you can’t understand the lyrics. You should be able to get a feel for the emotion of the song aurally.”
Resound: Does being a duo make managing the band easier or harder?
Valentine: “When we initially met and started playing together, Ed was actually playing bass and he had a roommate who was the drummer he’d been playing with. I was playing by myself because I was hoping that by playing solo shows I would meet someone who would understand what I was doing, and had something to add to it. My experience in the past had been that I’d either had to direct people, or just play what they were playing. That wasn’t satisfying. So, we played as a three-piece for maybe a month or two, about three shows that way. Then the guy who had been playing drums was a really flaky young dude, and he decided that he needed to hitchhike across the country. So he left and it’s been the two of us ever since. We tried for maybe four or five months to find other members before we had this epiphany that we really didn’t need anybody else in the band.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a band with more than two people, and I wasn’t in any of those bands long enough to make a record or anything with them. But I get the impression that when you’re playing in a larger group of people, there’s still one or two dominant people and everyone else just kinda grins and bears it and just tolerates the fact that they’re along for the ride. It’s really hard even for two people to make unanimous decisions, and then I think a lot of times the dynamic of a group of people is that some of them just say ‘okay, fuck it, I’m not gonna try to be involved.’ With the two of us, it’s a really powerful balance, and we can have some really strong challenges with each other but it works out really well for us because we always feel that after we argue about something musically, whatever decision we come to after that is ultimately much better than what we were initially heading for.”
Resound: There are a lot of bands now that are heavy without really using metal aesthetics. Do you feel like a part of that? What current bands do you think of as your peers or bands that you feel a commonality with?
Valentine: “That’s never been a focus for us, ever; in terms of…I don’t feel like we’ve ever found musical peers. We’ve found a lot of bands that we like and we play with and we respect what they do, but… we’re not consciously working against genre conventions, but at the same time we’re working with zero need for them. We just feel like that would be incredibly limiting, creatively. I think the majority of people seek boundaries to work in, but we’re not those people. We decided early on, and I’m glad that we did, that we had this choice to make as far as what we were presenting to the world with our first album, and we could either try to form our creativity into something that only produced one certain type of music, or not. And if we gave ourselves free reign it might be confusing to people, but that’s what we wanted to do so we did it.”
Resound: How did you end up working with Relapse? I heard that the new album had already been recorded when you were looking for a label?
Valentine: “Yeah, we recorded [If Thine Enemy Hunger] for our old label, but they weren’t gonna be able to come through with being able to put it out or to finish other obligations they had to us. So we were in a position to choose a new label, and because we’ve been on the road for years and years and we’ve toured with Relapse bands, we were familiar with their work ethic. We knew we weren’t necessarily going to get the most glamorous deal from Relapse that we could have gotten, but we felt like it would be the ultimate label for us because our goal isn’t to be super rock stars for a year and then retire and quit playing music. We’re lifelong devoted musicians, and all we wanna do is put out as many albums as we can before we die. That seems to be what Relapse is all about, putting out as many records as they can, and we saw that they do it very effectively as far as letting people know that the records are out, which is a big problem that we’ve had with past releases, and making them available, which is something we had a problem with too.”
“We’ve played with a few Relapse bands over the last few years. I said this in another interview, but I don’t really know exactly why, I think there’s a few reasons, one of them being the way our live shows are and there’s a sort of intensity that runs through even our pretty songs, there’s some kind of weird energy, but it seems like the metal audience understands us on a level that people who fit themselves into other categories of music listeners. I meet a lot of people at our shows who are metal heads who will tell me that they love the DIXIE CHICKS and stuff like that, who are exactly the kind of music listeners we are; we are omnivores. There are people who aren’t into metal at all who like our band, or even say, ‘I don’t like this kind of music, but I really like you guys [laughs].’ It seems sort of okay within the metal community to like stuff that isn’t all the same. That’s what I’ve encountered in the people I’ve met.”
Resound: I wanted to ask you about a couple of specific tracks on If Thine Enemy Hunger; the first one is “Hennin Hardine.” What’s that one about?
Valentine: “It’s about someone whose husband has just died and it’s what she’s going through, never wanting to leave the room again.”
Resound: How about “Antietam” right after it? That’s a pretty unnerving song.
Valentine: “That one’s about a Civil War nurse. The both of us are really interested in history, and Ed actually wrote part of the lyrics and then I finished them. A lot of the women who ended up trying to nurse the Civil War soldiers were very young and didn’t really know what they were doing. It seemed like just an appalling and overwhelming situation for anyone to be in, let alone just a kid, and trying to save people with very limited medical technology and having to watch people die every day. That’s what that song is all about.”
Resound: Where does the title If Thine Enemy Hunger come from?
Valentine: “A lot of the stuff on the record is all kind of collectively based on stuff that happened a hundred years ago or more, and a lot of inspiration for the songs on the record was stories that we’d found about tragedies that were related to, particularly, mining—silver mining and coal mining. All of our albums have had some kind of central theme, and a lot of times it’s not really apparent to people unless you tell them what it is. Which is fine; we like to be more subtle instead of just spelling it out. The title is part of a quote from the Bible, which I think is cool if people end up finding it. It says to feed your enemy, because by doing so you heap coals of fire onto his head. I thought it was great, think it really works with the idea that killing with kindness is the best revenge.”
JUCIFER’s third album, and debut for Relapse, If Thine Enemy Hunger is available now on both CD and LP format. The band will be doing their usually heavy duty touring in support of this new album and are not to be missed live!
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