Louis XIV vocalist/guitarist Jason Hill is strolling the streets of Leeds, England, trying to convince me of his recent epiphany about his band’s obsessive sexual bent.
“I’m only recently coming to terms with it,” Hill says, still shaking the cobwebs out in a recent early-morning phone interview. “But last night I got into a discussion with a girl who was talking about our music and if it’s sexy or misogynistic and why it’s that way. I was saying to her, ‘There are only two or three songs dealing with sex,’ and then I’m like, ‘Oh, well I guess there’s another one,’ and then, ‘Oh, I guess there’s another one.’ And as it turns out, quite a bit of the album is about sex.
“Somehow (sex) became the vehicle through which we recorded,” he says. “But our album, to me, was never about sex. It was about recording. It’s important to me that you’d solo the drums, and people who know our music can say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Louis XIV.’ Is there a unique sound? Yes. And there’s also girls and sex – maybe it’s not sex but the flirtation, if anything, with a girl, or girls. But it wasn’t really planned out that way. That’s just sort of what was happened.”
Riiight.
Anyone familiar with Louis XIV, which plays the Hi-Dive on Tuesday, and its breathy, gritty, glammy, dirty, stylized synth-rock has to question Hill’s motives. Take in the first three tracks off his debut full-length, “The Best Little Secrets Are Kept,” and feel the sweet saliva practically dripping from each half-spoken word. The band has captured the sound and scent of sex – fuzzed guitars and half-whispered vocals, seductive bass lines and sprawling harmonies, climactic snares and lyrics meant to make you blush.
“Finding Out True Love Is Blind” is the album’s true jam, and the bold-face swagger comes straight from the overindulgent libido: “Ah, chocolate girl, you’re looking like something I want/Ah, and your little Asian friend, well she can come if she wants/I want all the self-conscious girls who try to hide who they are with make-up/You know, it’s the girl with a frown with the tight pants I really want to shake up.”
It’s not subtle. It’s not meant to be. What makes Louis XIV so delicious is its brazenness and its ability to be ridiculously misogynistic and over-the-top while still maintaining its credibility. It’s an expanded experiment in Peaches-styled sexuality, although it has decidedly more mainstream aspirations than those of the electro queen.
Louis XIV’s roots are in the pop-punk dominated San Diego music scene where three of them were a part of Convoy, an alt-rock six-piece whose sound was too vague for Hill.
“When you have a band of six members, it’s quite a musical democracy of sound, and you can’t dictate to everybody what to play,” Hill said. “I just wanted to quell it down to my style on the guitar while including Brian (Karscig) and Mark (Maigaard) and their influences.”
After splitting from Convoy and its pending record deal, the near-penniless trio started writing new music. They eventually sold some old equipment and migrated to Paris for a few weeks in April 2003 where they stayed and recorded in a friend’s basement.
“The Rolling Stones recorded ‘(Exile on) Main St.’ in a basement in France, and at the time I was especially into Van Gogh and I was reading his biography and watching stuff on him on A&E and The History Channel, so I liked the idea of going over there and being an artist,” Hill says. “We didn’t see anything. We just recorded in the basement – all the first songs, ‘Louis XIV’ and ‘God Killed the Queen.’
“‘Louis XIV’ was the first song we wrote, and it got us back to our roots in so many ways,” he says. “It reminded me of my first band when I was 12, of when I learned an E chord with an electric guitar and an amp behind me. It was like that scene in ‘Almost Famous’ where he screams, ‘I am a golden god!’ And I was like, ‘I am powerful, yessss.”‘
Back in the States they solidified their sexed-up, fuzzed-out sound in wildly perverse tracks such as “Paper Doll,” “Pledge of Allegiance” and “Finding Out True Love Is Blind.” Hill was living in a small office space that lacked a bathroom; he showered each night with the hose in the back. Already in debt, Hill was constantly taking out loans to satiate his fix for recording technology and equipment.
“It wasn’t like we made a band to be successful,” Hill said. “We made some music that we thought had no chance of ever getting on the radio. First thing we made was a concept record, and … who buys concept records? It was liberating because it allowed us to make music that we thought was cool. And being really poor and getting that idea that I’m not going to make money with music was good. It was like getting that monkey off your back.”
And now that he and his band are making money and signed to a major label?
“That’s not so bad, either.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Louis XIV
FUZZ-ROCK|Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway; 8 p.m., Tuesday with The Swayback|$10-$12|through TicketWeb outlets.
5more
LE TIGRE Pro-grrrl electro will be all the rage Tuesday at the Gothic.
THE BRAVERY Ridiculously dancey synth-pop reigns Tuesday at the Bluebird.
SECRET MACHINES Carefully crafted Zeppelin-styled rock will take over the Paramount on Tuesday.
SCOUT NIBLETT Powerfully written and performed girl-rock a la the PJ Harvey school will rock the Larimer Lounge on Tuesday.
NAS Intelligent hip-hop is the game’s name with this New Yorker bringing the “Illmatic” to the Universal Lending Pavilion on Tuesday.
– Ricardo Baca
