Feature: Interview With A Nightstalker
By Garrett Bower, Staff Writer
Down a shady drive in a quieter burg of Athens lies a twisted brick house that looks like it’s perpetually reflected through a funhouse mirror. The architecture bows and twists and within, the walls are decorated with bits of shattered mirror and crooked blackened beams. The brick of the floor spirals in on itself, hypnotically inviting those that may stumble in.
This is the domain of Nightstalker; a three-piece psych-punk outfit conjured up in the heart of Athens. Stepping through the door, the gang is mid-song with vocalist Chris Lute’s low, frantic vocals bleeding through fuzzed out guitar, Lucas Longanbach’s dark robust bass and the rolling pound of Anthony Longanbach’s drum work. The songs are loud and fast but seem to hang thick in the air even after the band stops for a smoke.
“We just liked partying and jamming at [Anthony and Lucas’] old house on Hooper Street,” says Chris of his initial meeting with the brothers.
Sitting outside, walnuts plunk haphazardly from the surrounding trees as Anthony tells the story of the Nightstalker, serial killer Richard Ramirez, from whom the group derived their name. “He’d shoot up street-level speed and run around L.A. parks at night strangling women.”
Chris quickly adds the name is more an adaptation for the band instead of a direct inspiration. “I just like the way it sounds,” says Chris. “And Charles Manson is played out.”
“It’s a two-way metaphor for partying,” adds Anthony.
Instead, the band pulls inspiration for their music from more conventional and less menacing pools. “At the time when we started this band, we were staying up for days in a row on drugs,” says Chris, “and that’s how most of our songs were written too… in one half an hour jam session.”
The resulting tracks are quick and sludgy and cull feelings of frustration and isolation. “I would say [influences mostly come from] social anxiety and relationship problems,” says Chris, “and resentment of people.”
After a conversation about hippy neighbors and shitty jam bands, the trio files back inside. The door opens to the bottom floor’s one main room, entirely open with no interior dividing walls. Near the entrance is a great curved stone table that sits low to the ground. The windows to the right are classically shaped rectangular slivers, but each is placed at an odd angle. The brick around these windows vary as well as the grout between them. The clock in the kitchen is a simple black disk with the face numbers written in various mathematic equations.
Nightstalker sets up at the far end of the room in front of an orange brick wall with bits of mirror appearing to ooze out of it. The whole scene feels manic, and as the band begins to play it only adds to the chaos. Alone observing this spectacle, the isolation is fully realized, even as the music invites further interest. Heads nod and bodies shake as the sound seeps into every crack in the grout and knot in the old, twisted wood.
With such a free-form atmosphere, the band is able to change things up on the fly, which leads to some really wild tangents. A key moment comes when one of Chris’ pedals begin picking up an AM radio broadcast that is perfectly garbled, the subject matter of which seemed equally disjointed. Without missing a beat, Anthony cries, “Loop that shit!” and the band began constructing a listing gloomy instrumentation around the broadcast.
Anthony’s drumbeat stays simple staccato as Lucas lays a smooth two-tone bass beat beneath. Chris riffs softly and that core is slowly buried under layered, biting sound. Bits of toothpaste advertisements and excitable announces attempt to claw their way out only to be bashed back in by Nightstalker. A woman’s voice echoes and sounds as though it will tear itself apart as Chris manipulates it with more effects.
After sending the broadcast into oblivion with a looping of the woman saying, “It goes,” at higher and faster frequencies, the band hangs it up as Lucas excitedly sums up the whole strange occurrence, “We’ve never done that before!”
“I broke another string,” replies Chris.
It’s this adventurous nature that has led Nightstalker to much of its own more structured creations. “A lot of our songs, the [instrumental] parts just happen out of building off of this idea,” says Chris while Anthony demonstrates the “Nightstalker trick,” flipping a cigarette a few feet up in the air and catching it right side out in his mouth, immediately lighting and taking the first drag.
It’s this dynamic that keeps Nightstalker always feeling fresh. The music can feel heavy and have the strong punk fury; there are lighter surf influences that keep things feeling cool and groovy. Similarly, the boys don’t take themselves too seriously as they talk about favored cigarettes, the new season of Trailer Park Boys and The Bride of Wonderboy, a legendary Avalanche specialty pizza that has gone extinct since Anthony’s days as a delivery boy.
Nightstalker is currently whipping up some new jams but have a few releases out already. Pentagram Palm is a live bootleg of their first Athens show at The Union last fall. The group put a few physical copies out, making CD sleeves from random odds and ends lying around the house. One sleeve features Chris’ graduation photo, roughly cut and marred with splattered multicolored paint.
The band put out a more formal release this summer on cassette, a self-titled 12 track album recorded at Young Camelot in Chicago through the band’s own label, Dark Circles Records.
“A lot of the people involved in the label moved up there, so we went and recorded [in January],” says Chris. “It was freezing with like subzero temperatures and there were the worst potholes of all time destroying the car. But we tried to make a vacation out of it.”
“Actually, that was one of my favorite times! It was just really fun,” chimes Lucas.
While the established songs sound like more straightforward punk, the band is working on getting more atmospheric with a new release. The direction is already apparent with their current set up with diverse effects and arrangements.
“We all have influences as a band for our sound, but for songwriting, I’ll be attached to a certain band or a certain song and then I’ll pull directly from a song or a band at that time,” says Chris. “ Overall for the band, I think initially we were trying to be like The Cramps. Kind of like psychobilly. Just creepy…Evil surf music was our initial intention but we’re trying to make our second album more spacey. More mellow.”
As the crickets picked up in the waning light, the dudes set off for Slice Night. The time had come to part ways, but it was the most easy-going of “see you laters.” Nightstalker beckons, all you have to do is bang your head.
