Nic Offer, lead singer of New York based octet !!!, once threw a piano into a river for a performance art piece. “I thought it was beautiful,” he says. “It was totally of the moment. Whatever I want to do, I’m going to do it. If that’s tour Europe, do a painting, throw a piano in the river…If I wanted to write a book, maybe I’d do that.
“Actually, no, I probably wouldn’t,” he adds, with a laugh. “But if I ever really wanted to, I would write it.”
He’d certainly have ample material. Based largely on 2004’s Louden Up Now (Touch & Go) and its ubiquitous summer single, “Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard,” !!! have become the vanguard for the current craze of dance-punk sweeping Ipods nationwide. They’ve inspired legions of imitators, while garnering comparisons to legendary figures like Arthur Russell and Delta 5. Back in the mid nineties, many of the band’s current membership played in Yah Mos, a fairly typical sloppy hardcore group. But they never fully committed to the style and eventually found themselves constrained by it. While touring they cooked up the concepts for both !!! and it’s dub influenced sister band, Out Hud (which Offer also fronted along with guitarist Tyler Pope). Both bands showed a willingness to explore musical forms outside the range of conventional punk influences. !!!’s most recent release, the dance heavy Myth Takes (Warp), summons the wild spirit of no-wavy punk delivered with the unbridled enthusiasm of dance floor grooves. It also documents a band increasingly comfortable doing whatever they want.
“We always held up our noses at a lot of that indie stuff,” Offer says, “We’d crash on somebody’s couch and think, ‘Their record collection is bullshit!’ I remember these super-emo guys making fun of our music, because we listened to Chic and didn’t have all these emo records they thought we should have. They were like, ‘You just don’t get it.’ They were right.”
“We’ve always been really into Ian Svenonius. That’s the only reason we got into punk to begin with,” Offer said, referring to Svenonius’s seminal hardcore outfit Nation of Ulysses. “He started with punk, but also explored a lot of black music [with the Make-up and Weird War.] Whatever’s fertile, that’s what we’ll do. Then after a while, it’s been overdone, it’s not fertile anymore and we’ll move on.”
Much has been made of Myth Takes’ departure from the overt political messages favored by many in the punk community, including Svenonius himself. “It’s just less explicit,” Offer answers. “‘All My Heroes Are Weirdos’ is one of the most political songs I’ve ever written,” he says of the incessantly catchy no wavey/afro-pop amalgamation. “We never thought of ourselves as a political band.”
When asked what the future holds for !!!’s future output, Offer seems both uncertain and unconcerned. “We’re into ‘How does this work’ music,” Offer explains. “Music’s most exciting when it’s new and fresh. We never want to make the same record twice.”
