The starvations

I GET THE FEELING, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, somewhere in the middle of The Starvations' set when the band members, in turn, look mesmerized, energized, and saved, that this is a band that can't live without making music. It makes them, regardless if anybody else ever heard them. In perhaps one of the most unforgiving and treacherous musical environments--the Hollywood club circuit--The Starvations have been able to carve out hard-earned mementos of real music while keeping their integrity intact. Man, they're good. They deliver deceptively simple and stark songs with no filler notes, wrapped in effortless melodies. Frontman Gabe's drinking lullabies and swinging explosions fit perfectly with the hopeful, melancholic celebration music of the band. It's a mix of curiosity and exploitation. The songs play alternately happy and sad, set in a world filled with neon wilderness and pollution. The band populates a world where strangulation and love swap places; a place where there are no shortages of cigarette burns on the furniture or chunky lakes of puke in the alleyway. If you think of the Pogues--but young, American urchins living on a diet of smog, with troubles of their own--you would be a bit more right than wrong. But there's more. The Starvations have the distinct knack of twisting up loose strands of the past, and are busy weaving a future of their own.--Redtodd

Tell me about being abducted by Christians.

Gabe: They weren't Christians.

Jean-Paul: We weren't exactly abducted, either We were coaxed into coming into their house. They were kicking everyone out of the shelter. These people were like, "Oh, come over. Take showers. We've got clean socks. We've got food. We've got booze. We've got cigarettes."

Gabe: We got caught in the worst blizzard that area of Colorado had seen in 20 years. One thing led to another, and us and 80 other people had to be crammed into this one-room trailer park club house. Oh, there was a church group there. That's probably how that got misconstrued.

Jean-Paul: And then this chick went into labor. It was fucking hectic in there.

Gabe: Some Mexican girl went into labor and everyone was freaking out, and they had to get Vanessa, our accordion player, in there to translate. The paramedics came and they couldn't speak Spanish. She had to translate the whole time.

Jean-Paul: I think the woman was miscarrying so she's screaming, and Vanessa had to translate everything.

Gabe: Translating cuss words, "She said: 'It fucking hurts!' "

Jean-Paul: It was a bad situation. The woman wasn't well off.

What happened with this latest tour?

Gabe: It was super-duper good. Total treatment we weren't used to at all. Total guarantees, being put up in hotel rooms, and totally hospitable people. We were leaving Chicago and we blow a rod in our engine. To make a long story short, our van, with all of our equipment and our albums, is still in Chicago.

Jean-Paul: We'll find you and kill you if take our stuff. If anyone's taking our stuff: You're dead.

Do you think things are going your way now?

Jean-Paul: If down is our way.

Gabe: Playing music, in general, rums you into a manic-depressive. On top of the world one moment and the next moment, whether you'll read a shitty review or someone's picking apart your lyrics--it's so up and down all the time. It's so hard to tell. You can never even say, "Things are going our way now." I do feel confident that we're doing what we set out to do. Even being on some hip-ass label like GSL doesn't mean your van won't break down and your equipment isn't 2,000 miles away, along with our records, which are probably warped.

Jean-Paul: I haven't looked at the audience in about a year, and I don't know if there's anybody there or not. I could care less. I'd rather be in the studio than playing shows all of the time, but that's how it goes.

Ever read a review of your music that you just didn't get?

Jean-Paul: Most of the time when I read reviews I feel like they're reviewing a Gun Club record that I've never even listened to. All the reviews talk about that. We may sound like that--I had one of their records years ago and I sold it for a pack of smokes. All I know about that band is Sex Beat, and we don't sound like that. That's all I ever heard, and it's kind of annoying because they don't talk about our music. They talk about other people's music. I understand people need references 'cause it's hard to write about music. At the same time, I feel like no one's ever said anything about one of our records. Usually, they don't.

Gabe: No offense to you or anyone, but the thing is with rock journalism it seems like it's so fucking easy these days to go on a search on the computer and read what other people have written about you.

Jean-Paul: Steve Martin totally put it best. He said, "Writing about art is like dancing about architecture." It's really abstract. I've been trying to write about music, too, lately It's abstract to put it in words. It's not words. It's not molly something you can describe.

Gabe: You can always tell when someone has actually listened to the record and read the lyrics and really tried to pick the band's brain a little bit. I read a kind of lukewarm review of us just yesterday and this guy picked apart my lyrics soothingly on "American Funeral." Despite that, I'm glad that he really, really, really listened to the record. I keep on getting compared to this fucking kid Conner Oberst from Bright Eyes, and I still haven't even listened to his music at all. Every single person I've asked about that says, "That's fucking ridiculous." Supposedly, he's this really mellow singer-songwriter. It's strange.