Tuscaloosa duo Them Natives, on their grimy MySpace page, offer two helpful approximations of their sound. “It’s like Weezer tied to a U-boat during the Civil War,” writes someone. Elsewhere, simply: “cats in heat.” The prose-laden webpage smacks with heady fluster, cultlike in its sincerity, almost literary in its execution. Bizarre imagistic run-ons, pseudo-spiritual rhetoric, fake or misspelled words. An organic slop of Weird Culture stewing in an iron cauldron.
Of course, Them Natives are mostly just postmod folkies. The partnership of Milton Ragsdale and Jasper Lee, intact through a long decade of various incarnations, first arose from necessity, as a way to pass the time. Together they developed gluttonous sonic appetites, absorbing an array of eclectic styles and traditions, which invariably seeped into their own musical identities. Distinguishable influences run the gamut from hardcore punk to Indonesian folk music. They’ve made countless recordings of themselves over the years, few intended for public release.
So what do they sound like? The most forthright comparison may be to renowned post-punk experimentalists This Heat. That group’s second (and last) LP, 1981’s “Deceit,” was a highly-textured affair, rich with tribal chants and springy electric guitars. Though more thickly arranged than a typical Them Natives effort (This Heat had an extra pair of hands, after all), both groups embody the same collective-improvisatory vision.
Secondary comparisons to recent indie-folk experimentalists such as Akron/Family and Grizzly Bear might be more familiar to some readers. Those two groups, especially the former, portray elements of the Appalachian horror-folk that is a vivid ingredient of Them Native’s aesthetic. Still, where those bands work within expectations for basic tunefulness, Them Natives prefer to explore abstraction and repetition in a manner more akin to the minimalist-drone ethos of avant-gardists like La Monte Young and his numerous spiritual offspring.
Their 2007 album “Soul Power Communion,” which comes pleasantly wrapped in what looks to be psychedelic wallpaper, plays like a long lost field-recording from some pagan revival in the woods.
The first track is 20 minutes long, a gradual build-up, from ambient to fully-apparent, with a fitful postscript. The second centers around a vocal drone before giving way to clattering percussion and swirling harmonics. The third and final pairs familiar electric guitar strumming with improvised percussion and vocals, then disintegrates into prolonged noise experiments. While each track stands alone as a distinct work, the three in tandem achieve a cohesive arc with a seamless segue between the second and third tracks proving especially effective.
I’ve been fortunate enough to see Them Natives live on several recent occasions, and I’m pleased to report there wasn’t a dud-show among them. The best performance came in a small room at a house show surrounded by sweaty people, no surprise. I also saw them play a sparsely-populated, barnlike garage, just the two of them out in the center of the gray concrete floor, just a few of us on the periphery. They showed no less intensity or devotion to the matter-at-hand and imprinted a memorable performance onto my brain.
Of the Tuscaloosa bands I recall over the years, Them Natives are a valuable singularity: simply no one else in town does what they do. Even more so, relatively few people anywhere do what they do, and their active presence in town can only distinguish today’s squalid-yet-burgeoning Tuscaloosa arts scene. Their influences are admirable, their experience-level is high, their talent for joint-improvisation is plainly apparent. What else to say.
Them Natives appear tonight at Egan’s around 10 p.m. (no cover), and on Aug. 13 at The Bottletree Cafe in Birmingham. They’ll also make appearances at the 2010 Improvisor Festival, going on in Birmingham throughout the month of August.
