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See the full article here: http://www.reaxmusic.com/articles/view/clock_hands_strangle_the_passion_of_dispassion-721 Or read the text:
Clock Hands Strangle: The Passion of Dispassion
from volume 04 issue 02 // admin
Clock Hands Strangle: The Passion of Dispassion Words: Evan Tokarz Artwork: Courtesy of Clock Hands Strangle Clock Hands Strangle explore detachment in their new album, Distaccati.
Thanks to a frontman who loves modernist literature, Fellini films, and
Bob Dylan, only a few moments go by listening to the album before you
quickly realize that this is not a generic band making generic music. Lead
singer and songwriter Todd Portnowitz thinks of Clock Hands Strangle as
a literary project. Like one of his major influences, Bob Dylan, he
tries to center each track on the lyrics. For the band, the music is
secondary, and used to draw out feelings that can’t be expressed in
words. “We’ll use any style we can to get across what we’re trying to do lyrically,” he says. True
to the literary influences, Portnowitz counts the esteemed Italian
director Federico Fellini as one of the band’s influences. Fellini
influenced the album’s title through La Dolce Vita, a film in which the character Steiner makes a modernistic comment about living outside of passion. “It’s
the idea of killing your personality,” Portnowitz says about the
album’s title. “It’s about asking how much of your self should be in
the album, and how much should be objective.” Portnowitz
himself speaks Italian, having minored in the language at Gainesville’s
University of Florida. At UF, Portnowitz majored in Literature, the
influence of which shows in some of the lyrics. For example, on the
title track, he sings, “Walt Whitman laid his blanket next to me/and
said, ‘The more you know the smaller you grow/You may remain fat and
sane/or follow me.’” It’s
clear Portnowitz has read a few books. The lyrics draws from dense
sources - his recent readings include Anton Chekhov, Aristotle, and the
The Life of Reason by George Santayana, the latter of which
features passages such as, “It may be said, however, that principles
and external objects are interesting only because they symbolise
further sensations, that thought is an expedient of finite minds, and
that representation is a ghostly process which we crave to materialise
into bodily possession.” Hmm, hmm. Yes, exactly. Wait - what? Some
of the songs, however, are about simpler ideas, such as trying to reach
equilibrium in times of stress. This is the case on “Ode to Green,” a
song that mixes science and philosophy. For the song, “green” is the
equilibrium point, the middle. Red and blue are the polarized ends of
the light spectrum: anger and sadness. It’s a paean to calm, to
leveling out. “The
lyrics on there are talking about no more blue, no more red - getting
away from very drastic emotions. Moving away from extremes,” Portnowitz
says. Hailing
from the 321 area code and beaches of Melbourne, Florida, the band has
grown to love venues like The Social and New World Brewery. The band
played throughout the state on 2007’s tour with Do Make Say Think. Even though all the members of the band are from the South, sometimes the states of the Confederacy still surprise them. “When
we did a short Halloween Tour, we were driving through Alabama in the
middle of summer and there was cotton everywhere - no green anywhere,
just white,” says Portnowitz. The
lyrics of the twangy “Cotton” describe the event: “It’s cotton fields
on/both sides of the road/Hey, driver, slow down/Roll down the
windows/White, white taste buds/on the green tongue of the earth/Lick
the sunlight/Be jealous of the worms.” Portnowitz
says it’s impossible to pigeonhole the band in a certain genre, due to
the unique way the band approaches songwriting - because each song has
different lyrics and influences, it follows that each song will have a
different vibe and feel. However,
if he had to, he would describe the band as the opposite of a jam band,
since they try to edit out so much. He describes Clocks Hands Strangle
as heavily influenced by elements of pop, ‘60s classic rock, Joni
Mitchell, Neil Young, and even jazz. In fact, he says Joni Mitchell
influenced him more than anyone else did. “That’s the reason I started
writing songs, because her songwriting is so well done,” Portnowitz
says. As
for a band philosophy? “We like to take things seriously and take
responsibility. We’re very concerned with doing something worthwhile,
not just playing something because we want to go have fun. We do have
fun, but we definitely take things seriously.” Distaccati is out now on Chocolate Lab Records. Clock Hands Strangle are currently writing and recording new material.
4:38 PM
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