Hooked on phonetics

Baltimore’s Ponytail turn an art-school
project into a yelping noise-rock assault

CLASS ACT: Ponytail

By JOHNSON CUMMINS

On the surface, Baltimore, Maryland’s Ponytail may look like your typical blog-rockers, with outfits garnered from rummaging through thrift stores and guitars hung high like neckties, but that’s where the similarities end. Although they have been championed on tastemaker blogs, their sound has more to do with cinematic surf music, Krautrock repetition and the Minutemen’s sense of urgency, with two serpentine guitars battling it out in a healthy competition recalling Television’s Verlaine and Lloyd.

Hovering over the dance-driven maelstrom are the phonetically frantic vocals of Molly Siegal, who—like Can’s Damo Suzuki, Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galas and The Boredoms’ Yamatsuka Eye—uses her voice as a fourth instrument, rarely harnessing herself with linguistics. “It really wasn’t a conscious decision to have that style of vocals, but it just came out more organically,” says guitarist Ken Seeno. “I find that her vocals are the icing on our cake, and really complete our sound.”

When you consider how the band first got together, there’s no wonder that Ponytail’s sound sticks out so much from their contemporaries. Unlike most bands that group like-minded people with common musical goals, this musically disparate foursome was forced to work together. While all four members were attending the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005, they happened to enroll in a class taught by New York poet Jeremy Sigler called “Parapainting” that helped illuminate the parallels between music and art rock. Pupils were urged to huddle up and form bands, the class culminating with a show put on at the end of the semester.

“We didn’t really know each other before that, but by the second class we started to realize how it was meant to be that we were put together… because we didn’t really have to think about it too much and just did it,” recalls Seeno. “After the show we took off for the summer, but when we all came back to go back to school, we just really wanted to keep doing it. I think it’s been to our benefit that musically we all come from such different places, because when we all start musically exploring in a song it’s really exciting when we all come back together.”

Once the class ended and it was obvious the band were still up for doing extra-curricular studies, they hunkered down and quickly recorded their debut Kamehameha in late 2005. Unfortunately, the sophomore slump that has afflicted so many bands started to set in, with their latest, Ice Cream Spiritual, taking a full three years to complete. Not that the band were bankrupt of ideas, but following up on past successes was not an option.

“I have to admit, it takes us a really long time to write songs,” Seeno explains. “I think we had a lot of room for experimentation and to grow from the first record, and we wanted to just work differently. The first record was recorded in 10 hours, and we really wanted to take a little bit more time and make sure we were ready, but at the same time try and record live off of the floor as much as possible to try and capture our live energy, because I think that’s something we all value a lot. I’m just really glad that we took our time.”

With Don Caballero at Club
Lambi on Mon.,Aug. 25,
8:30 p.m. , $12