The year is young, but Chicago duo My Gold Mask have already created a record that rightly belongs on the Best of 2013 lists.
Leave Me Midnight is the band’s second full-length album, although the record doesn’t officially come out until February 19th (on the group’s own Goldy Tapes label), and the band isn’t scheduled to play an official record release show until March 9th at Schubas, the advance copy leaves an impression. Unlike many modern rock ensembles today, My Gold Mask has crafted a collection of songs that deftly defy classification, belie any disparate influences and are in many ways anachronistic.
Drawing from numerous threads of rock, bridging the gap between’ 60s girl-group and today’s directors of darkwave goth, the duo wove together such a novel tapestry that it’s hard to even pin down the time-frame. It’s easy to imagine this album being released in the late 1970s, yet it doesn’t feel stale.
On a gray and blustery January afternoon, in the band’s rehearsal space in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo, the two parts of My Gold Mask, were kind enough to share their story, insights into their creative process and some of their inspirations.
Although Rochelle is originally from northern Louisiana and Armondo’s birthplace was Brooklyn, after more than ten years of living here, the twosome considers Chicago home. “I definitely call Chicago home at this point, and I think it’s safe to say that Chicago might even agree with me,” he says.
The two met at a rooftop party some years ago, and knew almost immediately that they had to make music together. Armondo says they started talking about music and instantly connected. “If not from the first second, literally twenty, thirty minutes into the conversation, we started making plans to make music together,” he says.
As is typical during Pop ‘stache’s wide-ranging discussion with My Gold Mask, Rochelle continues Armondo’s thought, “we came to this practice space literally two days after we met,” she says. Armondo jumps in finishing her sentence,“that was even before My Gold Mask.” Under this moniker, the duo started as a home recording project, and as Rochelle puts it, “we were just coming up with weird sounds and vocal melodies to lay on top; it started there.”
In the beginning the two were simply experimenting in hopes of doing something different, relying only on one another. “I was playing around with my guitar, trying to push myself into different territory, and then Gretta started singing to it, and I had never actually heard her sing the way she did at the time,” Armondo says. “It inspired me to keep writing like that, and we grew organically that way.”
Once properly ensconced in their rehearsal space, Rochelle and Armondo had to figure out how to make that work with a beat. “From there, Gretta, who had never played drums before, literally pulled out some of the drums in our rehearsal space that were left over,” says Armondo.
Rochelle says it was to “have something as a place-holder, I never thought that I’d be actually doing that live.” Neither Rochelle nor Armondo had done any drum programming.
“We were leaving it open, “Armondo continues, “but then when she started playing the drums with it, we left it that way because we thought it worked.” From there they brought demos to friend and engineer Balthazar de Ley, and as Armondo explains, de Ley responded positively with, “Well, just do that.” And so they did,with Rochelle picking up drums and singing simultaneously for many shows.
Although Rochelle still plays most of the drums on the new record, and when they play live she still does a little bit of percussion herself with the toms, the band brought James Andrews aboard as a live drummer, since pulling double duty was starting to compromise Rochelle’s vocals.
“To Gretta’s credit it’s pretty amazing how controlled she was able to get her voice and the drums at the same time.” says Armondo.
Armondo continues, explaining that the addition of a drummer has expanded My Gold Mask’s sound, giving the band new possibilities and inspirations in comparison to earlier work when the band was still experimenting with its sound. “We just wanted to fill out the sound and maybe hone in more, so James is our live drummer, and he’s great, we’ve been really happy to have him in the band with us,” says Armondo.
The sound’s evolution is paired with an increasingly astute subject matter on Leave Me Midnight. “We focused a lot more on duality, there’s a lot of love and loss, of course, there’s inner turmoil,” Rochelle says.
Armondo agrees with that assessment, underscoring that the songs deal with “contradictory emotions, things that are kind of bittersweet in a way,” then adds, “to me, some of the best music is music that conveys that conflict of emotion that you feel sometimes. So that’s what we write about. We let the music decide too, sometimes . . . “ Rochelle jumps in to clarify, “that’s true, if he starts writing certain riffs, it will evoke an emotion about something or other and then the lyrics will flow from that.”
As organically as Rochelle and Armondo work together, they still gather much inspiration from the arts. Rochelle says My Gold Mask was more inspired by film than by any particular music, specifically the giallo films of the 1970’s, which are characterized by by extended murder sequences featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements and which typically introduce strong psychological themes of madness, alienation and paranoia. In that vein, the album’s cover art was inspired by film maker Dario Argento.
As she says, the music of My Gold Mask is “inspired by so many different aspects of different bands, different genres.” It’s refreshing that the end result is so much more than just the some of its many disparate parts.
Rochelle is cognizant that everyone writes songs differently: “I know people who write lyrics first and then come up with music after, but we primarily write melody and music and let that kind of evoke the lyrics,” she says.
“We’ll even write vocal melodies before the actual lyrics, and then the lyrics kind of fit in with what that feels to us. We do our best to articulate it, which sometimes can be really hard,” Armondo says with a laugh.
When asked what their goal is for the music of My Gold Mask, the duo concurs that they’re shooting “for music that definitely creates an emotion out of people” but that also satisfies the emotions they feel inside when writing or performing, “almost like scratching an itch,” Armondo says.
They are quick to differentiate their recording process from their live shows. To that end, Rochelle says, “I really love performing live. For me I enjoy the energy from the audience. I completely feed off of it, and it really feels amazing when people are giving you that energy. In a recording setting you’re closed off from anything. That’s a very intimate moment, which is a completely different feeling, which is pretty amazing too.”
Armondo agrees that for him it’s almost a completely different experience. “In the studio you’re honing in on specifics and trying to perfect things, and once you get to live shows, when you’re playing in front of an audience you have to let all that go to the background of your mind and be in the moment of the music and experience it as it’s happening.
That’s when you really enjoy the live show and can feel that you’ve connected, it sort of creates a little circuit in the room and that’s a good feeling. You don’t get that in the studio.”
The duo is planning a short tour in the spring, focusing on the Midwest and hopefully the East Coast, where they’ve also been well received. They also hope to do a longer, live tour later in the summer, with a focus on conquering the West Coast, which is untouched territory for the band.
In the meantime, My Gold Mask will celebrate the release of Leave Me Midnight on Saturday March 9, playing Chicago’s Schubas with Shuteye and K Serra.
