-------------- Gravity's Pull -------------- by Thomas Crone The Riverfront Times, February 28-March 5, 1996, p. 32-34 Waiting. You wanna pop a gasket, y'know? In the grocery line. At the post office. Idling for an interview. Yeah, especially that. The subject at hand. A scheduled talk with Gravity Kills is slotted for 7 p.m., when the band is still pouing into the Galaxy, fresh off an afternoon spent signing 800 T-shirts at an in-store event. At 9 p.m. the group is still splintered, with vocalist Jeff Scheel out to dinner with the label folks, the radio station, the people who are mapping out their lives. The talk's moved to post-show, when it takes a good half-hour to shake the band away from all the look- alike/sound-alike DJs and contest winners and, yup, wannabe groupies. Finally, air, out on Washington Street, where some fans linger: "Hey, it's the band!" "You guys rocked! Hard." At 12:15 in the morning in the coolish basement of a parking garage, the members of Gravity Kills--Scheel, drummer Kurt Kerns, guitarist Matt Dudenhoeffer and sampler Doug Firley--figure that interviews take too long, anyway. Slip it in between the photos, the homecoming-show energy still rolling in. No problem. We're all professionals here. And then the four finally do open up a little bit. Agitation mellows. Horsing around starts. They're ridiculously charming fellows. Always have been. Damn! You just can't stay mad at Gravity Kills. You can get plenty annoyed at that "Guilty" song, but you can't stay mad at the boys. Nope. Asked simply what's good, a sweaty Dudenhoeffer says, "It's 'What /isn't/ good?' It's as exciting as hell. We're on tour, in a tour bus, playing six shows every seven nights of the week. I saw Stabbing Westward open for Depeche Mode two years ago and now they're opening up for us. It's completely unbelievable." Two years ago, of course, Gravity Kills didn't exist. They wrote a song. Recruited a singer. Entered a radio-station contest. Scored a compilation cut. Got rushed by the labels. Signed. Found their way onto two No. 1 film soundtracks. Saw the single begin the explode. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. You know the story. What you don't know is the underground vice of kids in Charlotte, S.C. Scheel: "Charlotte, S.C., for some reason became, like, rock & roll 1978 revisited. I look around and there's 25 people on the tour bus that I don't know." Kurns: "And Ames, Iowa..." Dudenhoeffer: "Kids are always handing us demos, wanting us to pass them along to the label. Then we sit and listen to them on the bus." Kurns: "In Ames, Iowa..." Scheel: "All the kids in Charlotte were really strange. There's a Robitussin subculture there. That's their drug of choice. They say, 'You can listen to our tapes, but they sound better if you drink a bottle of Robitussin first." It's common knowledge, right? Folks in their 20s all grew up listening to a combination of Buck Owens and Martin Denny. Country rock and lounge music, that's where our roots are! All those afternoons driving around in the folks' Impala, listening to country and tiki-tunes on the eight track! Right? Strange; that revisionist history doesn't gibe with memories of the period at all. It seems like the young people listened to Ministry and Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2 a decade ago. Yup, remembering that quite clearly. Those who got into the now-dreaded-word "industrial" scene maybe headed in a bit deeper, checking out Front Line Assembly or Meat Beat Manifesto or Skinny Puppy. Anything on Wax Trax! would suffice. Then it all began to splinter. Lost in the shuffle, somewhere between hyper- soft Erasure and fake-confrontational Marilyn Manson, angry electronic pop has had only one obvious, sustained breakthrough artist, Nine Inch Nails, with the occasional one-single artist--take your Stabbing Westward--thrown in for good measure. Stabbing Westward's set at the Galaxy in support of Gravity Kills had just the feel of an act that'll sell a couple of records each show, with CDs that'll be filling cutout bins in just a few months. In effect, it's that perfect cliche-ridden, almost-wordless drone music that started to wither a while ago, but seems primed for a mini-comeback. Maybe a few pop elements break through, but mostly the music is meant to nod your head by. Gravity Kills write head-nodding songs. No doubt about it. On their self-titled debut, one-word titles and computer sqibs prevail. What the band has going for it is a surprising amount of hooky, potential singles ("Goodbye," "Down"), surprising particularly because the record was being written and demoed almost simultaneously by Firley, during and after the period when the group was signing. Though the three instumentalists worked together in previous incarnations, the new format was, indeed, new, and the results are relatively strong, if lyrically rutted in the doom/gloom department. Strong results, you'll agree, taking into account the presumption that you're (A) into this type of "big" music or (B) spoonfed by radio airplay. Many of both were at the Galaxy. Early on in the show, last week's set seemed to lack just a slight bit of spark that set apart Gravity Kills' first two St. Louis performances, no matter how mauled the second one may've been by sound problems. Those shows were events. Even if you hate the group, the electricity was real. Live. Tense. Manufactured in a large part by a radio staion, but definitely real and live and all of that. Ultimately, it only took three songs for the crowd to get into the swing of the thing. Because the band had no record and only three tracks out there in the wide world, the audience simply didn't know what they were listening to. Except for "Guilty." When Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in an S&M shop in /Seven/, "Guilty" played, very distinctly, in the background. On a 10-track remix CD, the song gets the once-over from a variety of studio heads. Oh, yeah, the Point used to play it a little bit, too. "Enough," the current every-hour track, closed the set, sending the encore- happy crowd home... happy. The hits were delivered with all the studio trickery that Firley and company created, all by themselves in Soulard, without much of a road map-- or even a producer. It's those songs that'll dominate their set list for a while to come. Say, two years? Asked if the show had changed, Dudenhoeffer notes that the set list has basically flip-flopped, with "Enough" now the closer. But they are the same songs. "It just depends when the label will let us," he says of the addition of new works. "Once we get our own tour bus, then we'll bring our studio along. We'll load on Doug's full studio. Then we can start working out tracks." And the songwriting process? "Kurt and I will write all the drums, bass and guitars. Doug adds all the layers, the digital editing and production. Then Jeff adds a fresh ear to it, see if it can go different directions. He'll just scat over the music, then we'll all sit back and write the lyrics based on what was scatting." They skipped the typical million hours in a van, touring dive bars from coast to coast. But they will write the next album in the bus. It's all been flip- flopped. Nothing's going according to plan. As if there was one. Scheel says that, at the in-store, "I expected to see two kids in KMFDM T-shirts and wound up spending all day." Firley says that at his home he "had to get a second phone line with a dedicated fax. I was just getting swamped by tour dates, artwork, everything." Technology. Gravity Kills' best friend. [All copyrights are property of the owner. This article is reposted on this site because the original owner does not have it on the web. All typos are original to the version posted (i.e. not caused by me). This copy is stored at "Perverted" - Gravity Kills fan site http://grantb.net/perverted/index.html -> "Articles" ]