Bands get close, closer than most extended family sometimes… the hours on the road, sleeping in the van, borrowing clothes, and fighting over the last beer… So to find members of The Johnny Ill Band on the inner sleeve of Ask All the Doctors sitting in a wood sauna, in nothing but towels, is no surprise. Shot during the recording of the album in a hexagonal hunting cabin they dubbed the ‘Sexagon’ (also a track on the album), it’s a symbol of just how close things have been since the beginning.
What started out with Johnny Ill writing songs for his friends on a four-track quickly turned into regular rehearsals with a full lineup of members from The Terrible Twos and Fontana, who were all practically roommates at the time, including organist, Pete Steffy. His ‘60s style psych keys might have been unusual for the otherwise straight up garage sound, but The Johnny Ill Band has been evolving into their own post-rock sound in the promised land of Detroit. Cheap rent, and the camaraderie that comes with making things happen for your friends, are what led these guys to start playing together in the first place. Three singles later found them sweating together in the Sexagon and creating a decidedly laid back, idiosyncratic album.
The way their sound developed has as much to do with their environment as it does the guys behind it, and at the center is Johnny’s casual vocal delivery. Going out of his way to sound like he’s not even singing at times, it’s a sincere effort to not take things too seriously. In that way, Johnny’s got a lot in common with Jonathan Richman in his complete originality when it comes to anything but a love song. Paired with the Ill Band’s tight, minimal instrumentation and solid no-wave inspired compositions, it’s the perfect support for Johnny’s blunt lyrics about good posture and washing machines. From the sketchy drawing of an airplane bombing a crude city below on the cover of the record, it’s an unpretentious, candid take on the everyday mundane and even modern songwriting.
Compared to romanticized hard-luck folksongs or the emotional blues, this matter-of-fact, detached kind of sadness is what takes this beyond self-deprecation. The second track, "I Live In a Garage", has a snare/kick caveman stomp that slowly builds into a mechanical sounding march with jabs of organ and single note distorted guitar melodies. It’s like they’re building each measure in the same kind of monotone as Johnny’s lyric about not working, sleeping next to a car, and wondering what’s going on inside the house. The Johnny Ill Band manages a delicate balance of creating a disarming superficiality while making a very concerted effort to distill all of those nervous, jagged post influences down into succinct tunes with a weird kind of sincerity. On "Used To Be Confused", they polish up the plodding rhythms behind Johnny’s confession about reconciling some kind of ‘adult’ life and getting used to having a computer ‘to write emails and things’. He doesn’t have everything figured out, but he’s not trying to.
B-Side’s "Where Do You Live" gives way to their heavier side, building something of a late ‘70s inspired groove. Beefy organ drives a head-banging Foghat bass line, while Johnny’s deadpan vocal points out how regional differences don’t really define where you’re from, because basically we’re all talking about doing the same things. The instrumentation itself seems to be emulating his delivery as well; the room sound is deadened, packed with pillows, creating a reverb black hole. They end up with a Devo-esque anti-personality out of this extreme attempt to avoid one.
Speaking of matching jumpsuits, "Future" could also be a nod to the Mothersbaugh brothers, in the robotic drums that give way to precise synth sound effects. The alien presets of sine wave oscillations towards the end of this track are used in the way so they’ll always fail to be shockingly futuristic. But that’s exactly what they’re going for here… that failed promise of the future because, "The World Is Bad" especially in old Detroit. They come home and their car is stolen (between this and hiding his things in "Washing Machine", there’s a lot of theft in Detroit apparently). For as much credit as Johnny gets for this unique vocal and lyric style, the band shows a lot of restraint in never overworking the melody or forcing another solo. It’s sparse and stays exactly on track, making their clear, punk point.
If this review of Ask All the Doctors was written by The Johnny Ill Band, it would go something like this:
Hey everybody, you should hear this album we just recorded. We worked hard at not sounding too serious and took time off from work and did everything with a real engineer. It’s not over your head, we’re not trying to outsmart you. We think we deserve your money… but that’s not even the point, if you don’t like it… well, we tried our best.
MP3 Stream: "Sexagon"
