A couple of weeks before he was heading to Virginia to mix his “solo garage instrumental” album followed by a trip to New York for an appearance on WFMU, I spoke with Seattle-based rocker Evan Foster of Boss Martians fame. Turns out this guy has been extremely busy, having just released ‘The Set-Up’ – the Boss Martians fifth album, working on his solo project, contributing tracks to ‘Guitar Ace’, a Link Wray tribute, AND on top of all that, working on more Boss Martians material for the band’s next record.
The Link Wray tribute on MuSick Recordings (home of Boss Martians) features (inevitably) a Boss Martians track (“Fire and Brimstone”), a solo track (“The Girl Can’t Dance”), and yet another from Evan’s side-project Mystery Action (“Raw-Hide”). Yet, when asked about the current status of this last band, Evan says he’s so busy with the Boss Martians it doesn’t seem too likely there will be any Mystery Action records coming out in the near future. Still, he doesn’t dismiss the idea completely, provocatively adding at the last moment, “There may be a Mystery Action EP here and there.” Why he has shelved Mystery Action at the present time is simple: just before he wrote the material for ‘Making The Rounds’ – the Boss Martians’ fourth record – “I decided to roll all my song-writing efforts with Mystery Action…into the Boss Martians and do it all under the name Boss Martians.” What this merging of songwriting means is that on ‘Making The Rounds’ and the latest album, ‘The Set-Up’, in particular, Evan has incorporated the “super, super, super-poppy” aspects of Mystery Action into the Boss Martians’ cool garage rock/rock ‘n’ roll sound, making for quite an impressive and fun album.
This latest style from Boss Martians certainly differs from their two initial albums on which surf/garage was the norm. Evan says the band’s sound made the transition around ‘98 or ’99, when he took a break from doing the Boss Martians and began to concentrate on Mystery Action. After deciding to fuse all his Mystery Action work “under the banner of the Boss Martians,” he says, “then we started to experiment with some different sounds.” As a result, he concludes, “My songwriting took on some additional angles. Then, he continues, “ultimately we started playing with heavier-sounding rhythm sections – bass players and drummers and stuff – so that helped it rock a little bit more. And we’ve just been going since then.”
Evan and the Boss Martians, comprised of organ/keyboard player Nick C. who met Evan at college, and a rotating line-up of bassists and drummers (the current bassist who Evan seems to be thrilled with having in the band is Brandon Gonzales, and the two main drummers on ‘The Set-Up’ are Dusty Watson and Mike Musberger), are influenced by many bands and styles, most notably Elvis Costello And The Attractions, The Joe Jackson Band, and rather apparent on this album, The fuckin’ Damned (he’s especially fond of their earliest work on Stiff Records (and rightfully so…), yet he avers, “I really try and make sure we maintain our own identity, our own sound. It’s based around the guitar and organ…the keyboards are a really, really big part of the band no matter what, be it power pop or be it garage, punk rock, or whatever you wanna call it.” He also is adamant that when it all comes down to it, the Boss Martians’ sound is fundamentally just rock ‘n’ roll, and according to Evan, “that’s one of the most important things for me personally.”
His love for pure, stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll is apparent in his musical tastes – he’s almost giddy when speaking of the present wave of hard-rocking, raw, energetic, back-to-basics bands out there like The Hives, The Vines, The White Stripes, and The Libertines, who are “rocking the fuck out” – as well as his utter disdain for the state of pop-punk, which used to be a label with respectable bands – there still ARE some exceptional bands around – The Queers, Riverdales (Ben Weasel’s enduring band that actually has a comparable sound to the Boss Martians’ latest work), and The Methadones, to name a few… However, the current crop of generic, pre-packaged, so-called “punk” outfits out there who forsake artistic integrity for record sales, have truly given the genre a bad name. We both whole-heartedly agree these acts are the bane of music today, and Evan even goes so far as to say, “I’m extremely tired of pop-punk and…I’m actually gonna say I’m entirely grossed out by pop-punk,” adding, “There’s nothing PUNK about that.” Perhaps these thoughts sum up the killers of pop-punk best: “It’s just tragically fake. It’s kinda like Cheez-Wiz. Grab a can off a shelf and fuckin’ spray that shit on a cracker.” Wow, ok. This is a sore subject, and I’ll stop now before I get WAY off topic…
So, yeah, Evan is a staunch music fan and critic, and before his interest was piqued by surf and garage and “all that ‘60s stuff, I was a punk rock kid totally,” his allegiance lying with more pop-infused punk bands like The Descendents and Dag Nasty. And as if it wasn’t made apparent already, he is one exceedingly talented musician/songwriter himself. As aforementioned, he’s working on new Boss Martians material, and from how he describes it, this new direction sounds very enticing. Evan expounds, “[It’s] got a bit of a refocusing on the garage, but it’s a little harder, a little more sneering…and a little bit more venomous,” adding, “It’s a little darker, a little louder…but I’m trying to maintain some of the same pop elements we achieved on ‘The Set-Up’.” Logically, he’s “trying to keep the best of what we did on each album…and just try and keep on refining it and bringing it forward, experimenting with some new keyboard sounds especially too.” And if that’s not intriguing enough, he tauntingly declares, “There’s no question it’ll definitely be a rock ‘n’ roll album, but I think there’ll be about two major surprises on [it] that I’m really looking forward to dropping on people.”
Now all this writing comes straight off the heels of a hellish (well, for anyone else – Evan seems to actually thrive on creating his art in a short amount of time) schedule for completing ‘The Set-Up’. Their previous record came out in 2002, and Evan admits he didn’t even expect this album to see the light of day in 2003. However, his record label, MuSick, had brought up the idea and Evan agreed. “I was kinda happy about the challenge, so I sat down and wrote the album. I really only had four weeks to write [it],” he relates. The band was concluding a tour in early May and the label wanted the album in late June. “[I] got into the idea, though,” the songwriter states, “‘cause I really wanted to make a record that sounded pretty fresh and live…[with] a lot of energy and I wanted some rawness, like just get in and rock ‘n’ roll.” Well, being pressed for time like that was certainly a good way to get the results he was looking for, and ‘The Set-Up’ succeeds in every aspect he was trying to attain. Just listen to frantic tracks like the opener “I Wanna Be Your Addiction” and the title track, an invigorating tour de force of a finale, to say the least.
So turns out for some reason after this hectic experience of creating ‘The Set-Up’, he can’t stop writing, confessing, “It’s not something that I’m even really thinking about much anymore.” It makes sense: “I had to go through so much rapid-fire writing getting ready for ‘The Set-Up’ that I feel like I just stayed in that mode.” There is no release date set, nor does he know when the band will go into the studio. He says he writes best when he’s “not too over-focused” and that his songwriting is governed by his state of mind and what “emotional condition” he is in.
Evan and the Boss Martians will be doing much touring in 2004, heading out in February for a short stint on the West Coast and in March, they’ll be at South by Southwest, and April/May they’ll be going across the U.S. and heading to Europe. In the summer they’ll probably do a couple weeks of Midwest dates and then in the fall, Evan says he’s “sure” they’ll be doing more U.S. dates. So do yourself a favor and go check ‘em out when they hit a town near you.