Power Trio

“So Commodity Credit. This one is all about the groove.” Thekla writes out the final chord on the Shed’s whiteboard. “This is the one that’s gonna make some asses move. Kell’s four-on-the-floor, I’m gonna be doing some chukka-chukka funk shit, Sion’s got the hook. Which means Evan’s the body on this one. I was thinking…” She tucks the marker behind one floppy ear and pops out some bubbly octaves up and down the neck of her guitar.

“I was about to say.” Evan mimics the motion. “A little disco, kinda.”

“Exactly!” Thekla swaps to her part, scratching out a bright, choked boogie over his notes. “I mean, not quite this much…”

“That much would be Saturday Night Fever,” says Sion.

“But there’s an element of that,” Thekla insists. “It’s that, but heavy. Like through a lens of apocalyptic anxiety.”

“Saturday Night Bubonic Plague, I get it,” Evan says, and he thinks that’s the first time he’s made Thekla laugh. “Could we loop the verse, and I can try some stuff out?”

“Let’s do it.” Thekla nods to Kell, Kell clicks them in, and the room fills with sound.

Thekla feels the rhythm mostly in her upper body, Evan notices. Back arching, head tossing, her ginger mane always extricating itself from whatever attempts she’s made at taming it, as her guitar churns out layers of dark, growling crunch. When it comes time to belt another lyric, she snaps magnetically to the mic, the motion transferring to her bobbing shoulders. Today’s one of the last chilly days of the year, and her folded glasses gleam off the mock-neck collar of her orange sweater. Evan takes some pride in the knowledge that the beat she’s thrashing around to is, in part, his.

Evan feels it in the hips, which has always embarrassed him a bit. Once, in his first band, the singer asked him why he kept humping his bass. He’s figured out how to dial it down a notch since then. He’s wearing his last set of clean clothes today, a pair of torn camel shorts and a snowflake-pattern red thermal that he ruefully shoplifted from a Christmas sales bin. Ho ho ho. At least he isn’t busking for laundry quarters anymore.

Sion is a statue but for a sharp tapping of his foot, gazing into space as his hands move madly around the fretboard. Evan’s learning the sort of leads Sion writes: wavering, angular sounds, compressed and treble. He has a standoffish, catlike relationship with the rhythm, first falling into lockstep with it, then meandering smugly away into a swaggering legato passage. The ash elf resolutely continues total avoidance of even a scrap of color.

Kell, of course, is the rhythm, and she’s given her body over to it completely. Legs pumping her bass drums and hi-hat, arms lashing across the kit, wine-dark lips moving along to Thekla’s lyrics as she whips herself into a frenzy. Even this relatively simple dance beat has her mark on it, flourishes and fills slamming through like precision artillery. As Sion lives without color, Kell lives without sleeves, her only nod to the chill a patched punk battle vest.

They shape Evan’s bassline as a committee, section by section. Thekla nods vigorously or flashes him the horns whenever he throws in a new twist she likes; Sion steps over and plays face-to-face to show him the fretboard patterns the lead follows; Kell whoops inaudible encouragement into the maelstrom of sound.

After an hour of pounding away, they’re left with a sinuous, pulsing song, punchy and grooving on the verse, sinister and martial on the chorus. Evan even sneaks in a proggy chord section on the breakdown, always a personal win.

When the band takes a smoke break, he’s outside with them now, head spinning with possibilities.

“Smoke, Ev?” Kell offers him a Kobold Blue.

“No thanks,” Evan says. “Never got a taste for them.”

“Hell, me neither.” Kell lights up. “Just an excuse to get some fresh air and conversation in at a show.”

“The idea that humans and orcs are willing to smoke is crazy to me,” Thekla says. “Your lungs are fragile little babies. No filter membrane. It’s all just going into the pink stuff.”

“Not all of us are descended from freaky-deek tunnel dwellers,” Kell says. “Can’t let that lock you out of flavor country.”

“You’re very ego-free in your playing, Evan H,” Sion observes, as the girls pass the dart they’re sharing. “Very ready to serve the sound. You like direction, I think. Like a good little doggy.”

“Can I ask,” Evan says. “At some point am I going to figure out when Sion is complimenting me versus roasting me?”

“It’s a little of both, all the time.” Kell gives Sion a light kick. “He thinks he’s very enigmatic.”

“I am enigmatic,” Sion says. “You’re simply satisfied with the mystery. Keep searching, Evan. You will find my vulnerable truth.”

“We’re two songs down now,” Thekla counts out on her fingers. “Eight drafts left in the hopper. Seven practices after this one till Glorie’s. We finalize two a day, make sure we keep everything fresh as we go. That’s a solid three practices of hardcore running them over and over.”

“Not exactly a relaxing jam band sort of situation, is it?” Sion says.

“It’s a marathon,” Kell says. “We’re sure we want to angle for all ten?”

“Yeah, dude,” Thekla says. “They don’t have to be album ready, but I want no half-sets, no leaving ‘em wanting. Forty-five solid minutes of faces melting. This is our coming out party. World premiere of Stretch Muffler.”

“Of the Firebugs,” Kell says.

“How about Immutable Fate?” Sion says.

They look to Evan.

“I’m still percolating,” he says.

“Not bad,” Sion muses. “Bit too Emo.”

Back inside, they see about getting ahead of Thekla’s punishing schedule with another draft, a complex clockwork of a piece tentatively titled Trapped Like Rats with an ersatz 7/8 rhythm. But by Thekla’s own admission, it’s their least-developed song, and even getting a basic version of it under the fingers proves slippery. None of the structural things they try are sticking.

“Okay,” Kell eventually says. “I kind of want to throw this song in a woodchipper.”

“Tell you what.” Thekla fiddles with her glasses, a nervous little habit Evan’s started noticing. “It’s getting late and between finalizing Fossil and Commodity we’ve already got our two down for today. Let’s re-run those, go out on a high note, and come back to this little bastard next week.”

Going through the stompers already under their belt raises everyone’s spirits, and by the time they break for the night, Evan’s fulfilled but famished. True to their word, the band’s given him a bushel of twenties as a starting stipend, and being able to feed himself whenever he’d like has destroyed his carefully cultivated ability to ignore his stomach. Poverty was like a freezing lake, needing inch-by-inch acclimation; strange how quickly he’s getting used to comfort.

“All right.” Thekla harvests her tangle of pedals. “I’m heading out. Whose turn with the bassist?” The band has agreed to hand Evan off to the next host after every rehearsal.

“I’ll take him,” Kell says. “Yo Ev, are you as hungry as I am?”

“Starved, to be honest,” Evan says. “Maybe that’s why Trapped was such a brick wall.”

“All right. I got a spot.” Kell taps the front of her thigh and makes a clicky noise with her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “C’mon, good little doggy. You’re with me tonight.”

Thekla briefly freezes in the middle of zipping her guitar up.