Your Heart Out
It’s a Saturday night and I’m at the Hot House. I’m kind of surprised my friends were able to convince me to pay fifteen dollars to get into this fundraiser (despite the good cause), but once I’m in, I’m happy I’m here. The free booze helps, but what really has me feeling my money was well-spent is the discovery that Centipede E’est is playing. It’s nearing 11pm and I’m milling through the crowds of people, free food, and displays when I hear the band start up like an explosion on a stage off in the distance. Without a second thought, I turn and head in the direction of the music. There, center-stage, is Caulen Kress, rocking out with his black bass slung around him. He’s got on black-frame glasses, a T-shirt and jeans, and a Steelers arm-band. When he plays, his body rocks to the beat and his dark hair covers his face.
Centipede E’est play fucking loud. By the time I reach the stage, they start into “Blue Streak,” which features a tight, rocking bass-line—the backbone of the song—which allows guitarists Jim Lingo and Nick Fallwell to wank and produce feedback-driven guitar solos. I’m standing maybe five or ten feet from the stage, there’s a guy holding up a stick of incense maybe two feet from the stage, and there is a break-dancing floor set up behind to me. It’s a strange but cool juxtaposition to see people break-dancing to Centipede E’est. Sam Pace is hitting his drum-kit so hard it’s falling apart, it seems, and Kress is kicking at it. The snare is all over the place. The high-tom and crash fall over. Above the band, a movie screen plays a chaotic mess of colorful shapes. At one point, between songs, Lingo offers his whiskey to the audience and a few drunks stumble forward and huddle around him at the edge of the stage. Then it’s back to the rock. The band kicks into “Come + Go”—Kress and Pace keep a steady driving rhythm while the guitars bounce back and forth. I steal a pen from my friend Leslie and scribble in my memo-pad, “These guys are my heroes.”
My first conversation with Caulen Kress took place some years ago in a stuffy, cramped classroom in the Cathedral of Learning, and though I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation now, I’m sure we talked about music. Kress and I were in a class together called “Ballads and Blues,” and from the first class meeting, we acknowledged each other with a head-nod that referenced my regular trips to Paul’s CDs, where Kress worked (and still works) the counter several days a week. And Kress, no doubt, knew from my taste in music that I knew of his talents as a bass player. It’s pretty hard to miss the bass player of the premier indie-rock band in town when he’s standing behind the counter of the city’s best independent record store, and he’s standing next to the frontman of said band.
I saw Kress play bass for The Karl Hendricks Trio only a couple of times—most memorably a show at the 31st Street Pub with Silkworm. For one reason or another, I didn’t know about KHT until a few years ago when my friend JL moved out here from California and mentioned the Pittsburgh-based KHT as one of his favorite bands. And Kress left KHT in early 2004 to focus on Boombox, his other musical venture at the time. That same year, Boombox’s drummer moved to Chicago, and Kress formed a new band with former members of local bands Shopping and Dirty Faces. The band was originally called Centipede, but soon—perhaps to avoid legal confrontation with Atari—the band tacked on an “E’est.” When asked where the “E’est” came from, Kress shrugs—“No one’s really sure where it came from. We came up with the name Centipede and then Sam sort of had an idea for a band for a while that he just wanted to call Eest. No one’s really sure how the apostrophe ended up in there.”
Kress, 28, grew up in West View, in the suburbs just north of Pittsburgh—“There wasn't much that interested me or my friends in the area, so we were lucky to be a ten-minute drive away from Oakland, Bloomfield and other neighborhoods that had much more going on,” Kress says, “We drove to the city for shows or art openings almost every night from roughly 1992 to 1996, when I graduated and moved to Squirrel Hill.” Music has long been a part of Kress’s life—throughout his childhood he took piano lessons and played cello in a orchestra. When he was 15, he got his hands around a bass guitar, and that, he says, “has been my musical focus for the past 10 years or so.” In 1997, Kress joined the Karl Hendricks Trio and in the summer of that year, he played his first show out—“I never played in a ‘band’ before that. I would jam with some friends but nothing, luckily, in front of an audience. Looking back though, I wish I had played at least one show before my first KHT show—it was a very nerve-wracking experience.”
Centipede E’est oscillates between indie-rock, garage-rock, punk, and metal—and oftentimes in the course of one song. In a song like “Franciscan Position,” the somewhat-discordant intro/outro reminds me of Polvo while the rhythm-section sounds like The Fall, the reverb-drenched vocals make me think of Black Sabbath, but there’s also a lead guitar line that sounds kind of like Pavement to me. Other bands I hear at times in other Centipede E’est songs include The Stooges, MC5, Silkworm, Slint, Don Caballero, and Modest Mouse.
I might use the word “sludgy” to describe Centipede E’est, except that usually everything is clear and distinguishable—the instruments are never muddied. The vocals are typically distorted, reverbed out, or buried under the music so that you can’t catch the lyrics, but the lyrics don’t seem that important. The band treats the vocals as more of instrument. At times they jam-out, but they’re no jam-band. When they jam, it’s more along the lines of a Sabbath-wankfest.
I recently asked Kress a few questions about Centipede E’est. I’d read about their first full-length LP, Cheeks of Neptune—about how they
had recorded it in a farmhouse in rural Paint Rock, Alabama. But I was curious specifically about Centipede E’est’s song-writing process. TNY: I know that there are many different ways songs come together, and that you guys probably don't have a set formula, but are there any typical ways songs are written in your band? Or, rephrasing the question, can you remember anything about how a specific song (say, “Zion is Cyan” or “Mountaintop Beaches”) was written?
CK: With our first album, Cheeks of Neptune,we were mostly bringing fully formed song ideas to practice. Of course the ideas would then be put through each others' filters, which can be a really interesting way to work. “Zion is Cyan” was something Nick had worked out, possibly as a new Shopping song . . . That song basically existed—with a few tweaks—before we all played it. "Mountaintop Beaches" started while I was watching footage of the tsunami in southeast Asia, which had a large impact on me. The night before, I was one click away from buying a plane ticket to southern India to travel around for a couple months. Anyway, I was absently playing the guitar and came up with the basis for "Mountaintop Beaches," but it didn't really come together until five minutes before we recorded it.
TNY: When Centipede E'est went into the studio to record Cheeks of Neptune, did the songs evolve at all in the studio or were they pretty set when you went in?
CK: Most of the songs were set, but that doesn't account for the "sound" that we had in mind when recording. The studio became another filter that the songs went through. We recorded on Nick's childhood farm in Paint Rock, Alabama, so we were completely isolated for almost a week. We would literally wake up ten feet away from the recording gear and start playing. A lot of ideas came out over the course of recording, so in a way the songs were not finished until we were done mixing.
In November of last year, Centipede E’est put out Cheeks of Neptune on their own label One Hundred Legs Under the C. But the band hasn’t slowed down at all since that release. Almost immeadiately, they started thinking about the next songs and the next album. With their new songs, however, the band slightly altered its approach to the song-writing process.
CK: This time around, we're taking our time, which has changed the way we write. Now there are songs, like “Crawlin’ Out West,” that actually started as two different songs that just weren't working out on their own, so we combined them. It takes a lot longer to write songs now, just because we are all contributing equally, usually without an idea brought in by someone. I definitely prefer the results, though there can be a lot of tension. We have a bunch of mics and a computer set up at our practice space, so we’ll record everything and figure out the parts that we want to keep working on. “Twilight Mirage,” which is on the new Unicorn Mountain CD, was written like this. It started off as a long improvised search for something interesting. Sometimes it takes hours to come up with anything we want to keep, be it a three minute verse or a ten second break.
One thing I’ve always admired about Kress—beyond his bass-playing abilities and his determination to create great rock—is his knowledge of and support of local music. “I’ve always been a big believer in the quality and originality of Pittsburgh bands,” Kress says, “In the early 90s some of my favorite bands were Don Caballero, Revo, Swob, Thee Speaking Canaries, Blunderbuss, Watershed, and the Karl Hendricks Trio. After I turned 21, I went to most of the Rickety Nights and got into the Johnsons, Dirty Faces and that whole aesthetic.” Rickety Nights was a weekly showcase of local Pittsburgh bands and was started by Mike Bonello (of Dirty Faces and Viragos) back in 1996. The shows were originally hosted at Tobacco Roadhouse and later at the 31st Street Pub. The project died in 2000, but many of the Rickety bands (or off-shoots of the Rickety bands) are still around. “My interest in locals waned for a bit,” says Kress, “but with bands like Zombi and the Modey Lemon, and all of the newer bands doing interesting things, I feel lucky to be a part of it.”
It’s nearly midnight when Centipede E’est brings their Hot House set to a close. They finish off with a epic jam called “New Sudan,” a new tune based on a song Lingo found on a Sudanese army tape on a trip he made to Africa. Falwell sets his guitar down in front of his amp, revealing the Steelers sticker on the back of the guitar. Kress comes down off the stage and starts chatting with audience members. He’s sweaty from the show, and seems pretty exhausted—you can tell he’s played his heart out. I walk up to him and he smiles, says, “Hey man, how’s it going?” He seems genuinely interested, shakes my hand. I tell him that the set was great and he thanks me multiple times. We talk about the show, talk about my band, talk about upcoming Centipede E’est shows. They’re going on tour later this summer, he tells me. The Hot House seems to be clearing out. “Okay, man, we’ll I’m taking off,” I say. “All right,” says Kress and smiles again, “I’ll see you soon.” And then I turn around to hunt for my friends and my car.
Scott M. Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh. His prose and poems have been published in Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, good foot, nidus, and Kitchen Sink. He is an editor at The New Yinzer and a rocker in the band Workshop.
Paulette Poullet is a puertorican pittsburgher who draws comics for fun and deficit. In addition to the New Yinzer, her work has also been featured in Unicorn Mountain and Backwards City Review. Visit www.comicore.com to take a look!