Worlds by Jason Lee; Photos by Sydney Tate
James Brown was a noise artist. There we said it. Or he could be at times, at least. Obviously we’re well aware most people would categorize the one and only Mr. Dynamiate as “funk” and funky he certainly was (RIP) in fact Brown is widely acknowledge as one the music’s primary architects and would surely be included in any proposed Mount Rushmore Of Funk alongside Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Donnie Osmond…
…but here at the DeliCorp we don’t advocate the pigeonholing of artists into mutually exclusive categories or in other words what we’re trying to say here is that James Brown could be at one and the same time a funk legend, but also, far less often acknowledged, a master of avant-garde sound art who routinely straddled the line between what most would call “music” and something closer to pure textured sound with an ability to use repetition to mesmerize rather than bore audiences on par with Steve Reich or Philip Glass…
…cuz whereas the best material by all those seminal funk wonders like Sly or George or Isaac or Curtis would make even the most emotionally numb person in your orbit nod their head vigorously and be seized by a sudden desire to put their hands on their hips and let their backbone slip whereas James Brown created a style of funk that can elicit these same responses but which can also make you break into a cold sweat just from the sheer tension built up through James & the Famous Flames famously tight rhythm section and instrumentalists locking into grooves so tight you bounce a quartet off its bottom wile doing the boogaloo and the Philly bop and the hand jive and popping and locking all at the same time…
…cuz that’s what can happen when you take music and break it down and build it up to the point where it becomes elemental in effect, like molecules whirled around in a circle and submitted to musical fusion and musical frisson all while tapping into that most primal part of the human brain where nothing is desires so much as machine-tooled, deep-in–the-pocket grooves which means one can dispense almost entirely of usual niceties like melody and chordal prosssssssssssgressions and lyrics organized into poetical stanzas…
…but (and here’s the kicker) where hardly no one even notices or don’t care to anyway being so entirely focused on and immersed within the mesmerizing interplay between thumping bass and syncopated drums, chicken-scratch guitar, horns, percussion and urgent vocal exclamations that hit the ear with such alacrity and urgency that they’ll end up being sampled again and again for decades to come and getting turned into a stand-alone instrument of their own…
…which is exactly why it makes so much sense that our favorite merry band of (mostly? entirely? we’ll fact check this?) North Carolinian-via-Richmond, Virginia Brooklynite avant-rock serious pranksters PONS have just today released a radically-reworked-but-way-more-true-to-the-spirit-of-the-radical-nature-of-first-wave-funk-version-of-the-song-versus-some-garden-variety-slavish-cover cover of James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” (1967) which they’ve smartly streamlined title-wise to CAN’T STAND IT out today on DEDSTRANGE records & tapews…
…cuz Pons pretty much meet all the criteria listed above for “funk” while sounding nothing like most people’s nostalgic-hued notion of what funk should sound like cuz this threesome’s brining the cutting edge new-new to the point where they even updated the song’s title tho’ to be fair James himself dispensed with his usual propensity for parentheticals when he re-recorded the song as “Can’t Stand It ’76’” in, um, 1974, as a side opener for his Hell concept album which is actually just one of four count ‘em versions he recorded ver the course of his career…
…and we’re guessing that if JB were still alive today (happy 101st!) and able to attend PONS’ single release show tonight at Our Wicked Lady he’d most likely declare right there on the spot that Pons’ version officially be named “Version #5” with it meeting his own criteria for reworking his own material in a way that keeps the essential essence of the original version while branching off into some wildly different musical directions with the material at the same time…
…anyway we figure Pons sounds like what people back in 1967 must’ve thought funk would sound like 57 years into the future namely old school funk crossed with newer cutting-edge styles, styles they couldn’t even begin to imagine or fathom like glitch, skronk, and chipwave tunes which just woulda sounded like itch & ooze to 1967 ears…
…cuz here’s ia band (at last!) expert at making songs that sound like they’re been played off a badly scratched CD or a cassette tape run over by a truck or a vinyl LP left out in the sun too long or an 8-track tape used as a hockey puck or, well, you get the idea and we’re running out of formats, but they’re to make these sounds on actual musical instruments with the help of guitar pedals of unknown origin and the occasional electronic interjection and oh by the way the band even has two drummers which you already know if you’ve been watching any of the clips above and they’re a freakin’ three-piece…
…and even if their music may sound “chaotic” we figure it’s gotta be meticulously constructed in reality cuz how else could they stay say coordinated with sudden transitions and such turning on a dime which makes us wonder if maybe just like James Brown Pons has a policy of charging a steep fine to any of its members who so much as miss a single note at a live show thus resulting in a band that knows how to funk you up in their own special chaotic way and while getting funked you’ll wanna shake your tail feather no mater all the noise…
…and while we by no means mean to suggest here that PONS could stand to make use of a bar of Irish Spring between them, what we are saying is that “funk” in its original meaning means the smell of sweat and sex and jockstrap tossed in a laundry hamper and forgotten about for months and Pons sounds like the soundtrack for that laundry hamper where if you dig down to the bottom of it you’ll likely find clothes badly stained with the muddy roots of both funk and avant-garde noise alike so good thing for us they’re not into showering…
…and seeing as we’re already gone on for too long here we’ll have to save doing a proper “band profile” type piece on Pons for later but hey we’re not done yet cuz talk about “burying the lead,” Jack from Pons was kind of enough to answer a few queries we sent a couple days back inquiring as to how and why they decided to cover James Brown and here’s the reply which we found to be amusing and illuminating enough to reproduce in full here so please do enjoy and oh yeah we asked about things that they can’t stand…
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Around the time we were transitioning from a guitar-drum duo to a trio with Sebastien on auxiliary percussion, Sam and I (Jack) were getting into a lot of repetitive and linear rhythm-based music like Talking Heads, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, etc… and that kind of hypnotic, repetitive groove stuff has really gone on to be one of the biggest influences on Pons in its current iteration.
Pure Dynamite (the 1964 James Brown live album), specifically. That album has colored our live show and recorded music a lot over the past couple of years. The energy is insane. You can tell how hopped up the entire band is on speed and they just tear through all of these songs at a comically fast rate. It really hits a great balance of being extremely tight and being right on the brink of totally falling apart. The tension in a live performance created by trying to pull off something slightly beyond your reach and almost failing is where the most interesting stuff happens for us.
The cover of CAN’T STAND IT It was sort of born out of an entire James Brown cover set we did at Trans-Pecos last year for a G.L.I.T.S. benefit show. We created a super group with Venus Twins and Joel Ronson (The Admiral) and had a fun time with the challenge of arranging such minimal songs in a fresh way. We had the opportunity to do a track with Jeff [Berner] (from Psychic TV) at Studio G and repurposing one of the covers from the benefit show felt like a fun idea. Can’t Stand It felt dynamic and structurally varied even though it’s literally just repeating the same incessant idea throughout the entire song non-stop, so we decided to see it through.
The track is probably the closest we’ve gotten to capturing our live essence in the studio as of now. We approached the vocals almost as another instrument and went way farther down the processing rabbit hole than we usually do, the main touchstones being Brainiac and early Animal Collective stuff.
Things Pons can’t stand:
Grunge
Lack of discipline
Lack of groove
People who don’t like The Rolling Stones
Identical twins
Virginia (Harrisonburg excluded)