http://www.nypress.com/article-19426-24_7-music.html

NY PRESS

Wednesday, February 18,2009

The Guys are Dolls

Brooklyn rock trio Bellmer Dolls readies its first LP

By Christine Werthman



Real Dolls: The Bellmer boys are Anthony Malat, Daniel Sheerin and Peter Mavrogeorgis.


 Peter
Mavrogeorgis wasnt made for Long Island. Raised in Syosset,
Mavrogeorgis’ early years were spent begging his mother for a Bee Gees
45 and taking forced piano lessons. A fateful mall trip led him to
discover The Rolling Stones and The Beatles on cassette, and by age 9,
he had formed his first band with a friend. Mavrogeorgis recently found
the lyrics for a few of that band’s songs, which he now calls
“disturbing.” “I can’t believe that 9year-olds came up with this,” he
says. But for a guy who now helms Bellmer Dolls, a band that has no
problem throwing itself into brooding, gritty, guitar- and bass-driven
eeriness, those first songs were good precursors.

Mavrogeorgis
received his first guitar at 11 and started performing Jethro Tull
covers at Long Island bars around 13. He didn’t mesh well with the kids
who surrounded him, and as a young teen, he had a moment of
enlightenment. “I remember being 14 and reading Tom Robbins’ classic
cult novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” he says. In the book, there is
a line quoted from painter Paul Gauguin that resonated with the
youngster: “The ugly may be beautiful, but the pretty, never.” Decades
later, Mavrogeorgis recalled this idea when selecting a name for his
current project, Bellmer Dolls.

Before founding the band in
2003, Mavrogeorgis held a three-year gig as the guitarist for Tav
Falco’s Panther Burns, a band started in 1979. “I think I got the gig
because no one else wanted it,” Mavrogeorgis recalls.

As he
explains it, Falco, the rockabilly musician who melded with the New
York no-wave scene in the 1980s, showed up in New York looking for a
guitarist and found no takers. “I felt bad for the little guy,”
Mavrogeorgis says. The gig took Mavrogeorgis across the United States,
Canada and into Europe. It even gave him the chance to open for Ike
Turner.

The idea of making a move to start a new band came to
Mavrogeorgis while he was still in Panther Burns. “Tav stopped showing
up for sound check,” he says. So instead of wasting the time,
Mavrogeorgis and Panther Burns drummer Douglas Hodges started playing
their own music, though, Mavrogeorgis explains, Bellmer Dolls did not
come together until he met bassist Anthony Malat. Malat was living in
Baltimore and playing with the group Love Life, and when Mavrogeorgis
and Malat met at a shared gig, they had an instant musical connection.
Malat eventually left Baltimore for New York, and the duo began what
Mavrogeorgis calls a “miserable audition process” in search of a
drummer.They ended up going with Daniel Sheerin because not only was he
a solid percussionist, he also held his own when Malat and Mavrogeorgis
took him out and tried to get him drunk. “Dan was the only one who
passed the test,” Mavrogeorgis says.

The three became Bellmer Dolls, a name derived from German
Surrealist Hans Bellmer’s “grotesque but somehow alluring,” life-sized
mannequins. Mavrogeorgis says that to him, the dolls are like a 3-D
interpretation of that line out of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that
drew him in as a kid.The band spent most of its first year practicing
in spaces that included a heat-deprived warehouse near Long Island
City, where they kept themselves warm by heating up their shoes in an
oven. The band’s self-induced rehearsal seclusion resulted in the
development of a tight sound with dark and twisted roots of echoed-out
guitars and thrumming bass lines coupled with Mavrogeorgis’s versatile
voice whispering, screaming and all crowing through it all. The band
released its first EP, Never Sates Nor Palls, in late 2004, followed by
a second EP, The Big Cats Will Throw, in 2006. For the second EP,
Mavrogeorgis brought in his good friend, producer Jim Sclavunos, who
had worked with bands like Sonic Youth and The Cramps.The collaboration
resulted in a driving rock romp through post-punk territory with a
gothic twist. After the release, Bellmer Dolls went on a brief European
tour, and when the guys returned, they hit the studio with Sclavunos
again to work on their first LP.The album’s tracks show the band’s
sound becoming sexier, more melodic, cleaned up and focused while
retaining its dark and dirty edge.The album is finished, but it remains
unreleased for two reasons.The first is that since the band has its own
recording studio in Syosset, it has the luxury and burden of unlimited
time for tinkering with the album.The other is some label trouble that
Mavrogeorgis and Malat wouldn’t divulge—other than to say there was no
lawyer present when they signed contracts.

The record release
date isn’t set yet, but for now the band is excited about the challenge
of playing the new material in front of audiences.

“We had to
learn to play [this record] live,” Mavrogeorgis says, due to a stretch
in the band’s instrumentation this time around.To help out, the band
brought on their friend Gabriel Guerena. Is he an official Doll? That
remains to be seen, but as Mavrogeorgis says, “He hasn’t quit yet.”
> Bellmer Dolls