“Recently in town, there was a play about Old Portland that was made by a company that didn’t exist when old Portland did,” the Woolen Men’s Lawton Browning observed when asked about changes in the town where he and his fellow bandmates had spent their whole lives. “As part of that play, they actually held a funeral for old Portland. But that kind of attitude, that nostalgia for old Portland, has really only arrived once that city was basically gone.”
Portland, Oregon, is a key character in the Woolen Men’s second album, Temporary Monument, sketched out in explosively punk, indelibly catchy songs that recall early R.E.M., the Ramones, and PDX pioneers the Wipers.
“Both me and Rafael [Spielman] grew up here. I was born in 1984. Rafael is a little bit younger, 1985,” Browning explained. “We went to high school together, and seeing the city change, in the way of like, all you would imagine with the gentrification and the condos and everything, that’s something that’s only really starting becoming an exponential thing in three to four years. So because we were making a new record within that time and because we had both been here for so long, I think that it just had to inform the songs that we were writing.”
The Woolen Men grew out of a tightly knit Portland punk community, where kids like Spielman and Browning and bass player Alex Geddes played in multiple bands, sometimes together, before forming their current outfit. “I feel like the way the band formed was pretty common when I was a kid and the way things used to be,” said Spielman, who is the band’s drummer and one of two songwriters. “It felt a lot more free flowing in terms of people forming bands with people they had played with before. I had played in a band with Lawton before, and Lawton had played with Alex before and then just when the three of us made a band together, that was the one that stuck.”
The band began recording soon after it formed, releasing a series of singles and cassettes and posting it all on Bandcamp. Signed to Woodsist in 2012, the Woolen Men released their self-titled debut, a spiky, bristly, hook-laden onslaught. The influential punk blog Still Single raved over these early releases, comparing them to 1970s and 1980s college rock mainstays like R.E.M., the NZ pop scene, and Mission of Burma, and concluding that “Along with Connections, Home Blitz and a handful of other notables, Lame Drivers and The Woolen Men put rock music back in the hands of the feeble hopefuls, the shrinking violets and the dreamers. The posturing is gone once again; vulnerable, special human beings who have found solace and encouragement in music are found underneath. Seek out these unassuming-looking recordings at any cost.”
Clearer, Cleaner, Better
Temporary Monument, the Woolen Men’s second official full-length (never mind the string of singles, cassettes, tour recordings and splits that have come since the self-titled), is like a grown-up, cleaned-up version of the first record, not that different but in every way better. Part of that comes from the fact that the Woolen Men have more experience in the studio. Said Spielman,”We’ve recorded ourselves since the beginning, and in a way it’s just a simple process of getting better at it. You know, after five or six years of doing it. And having a desire for the sound to be clear and clean and not to hide anything.”
But part of the album’s punchy clarity is a matter of intent, a matter, perhaps, of not wanting to read the term “lo-fi” so much in reviews of Temporary Monument. “I think we all wanted to make something that was more forceful and was harder to ignore,” Spielman explained. “Our greatest disappointment with the first record was that it was really easy for people who didn’t engage with it directly to really not listen to it. I think we all just wanted to really get people’s attention more directly. To really put ourselves more in people’s faces and not let them sit back as much.”
The album’s title track hints at this heightened ambition, a desire to make songs so good that they might outlive the band. “I think I was thinking about how art has pretentions to being eternal,” said Browning when asked about the song. “The idea is that when you make a piece of art, you’re making something that’s going to last beyond yourself. And I will admit to believing that. When I write a song, sometimes I think that this is something that won’t be gone when I’m gone. But that’s a story that we tell ourselves. It’s not the truth. If you look at old monuments, their features are gone. Time has erased everything but the basic outline. So it wasn’t a cynical thing, but it was something that I … I wanted to bring that idea into the song.”
The Woolen Men, who release everything on Bandcamp, make an effort to keep their shows and albums reasonably priced and who support and participate in a still-vibrant Portland punk scene, share a certain DNA with another band from their town, the Wipers. They acknowledged the connection, while pointing out that the two bands don’t sound very similar.
“I remember when I bought the three CD box set around 1999, and it was $15. I was shocked by how cheap it was,” said Browning. “And the record store guy said ‘It’s cheap because Greg Sage wants it to be cheap.’ At the time, I didn’t even really think about the fact that you had to decide how much something’s going to cost. It impressed me. That he said that was his policy. And with Woolen Men we try to adhere to the same thing. We feel really strongly about making our music available to people.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I listen to the Wipers as much as I did when I was younger, but Greg Sage as a person, and especially as person in Portland and someone who really made the Portland punk scene happen,” Spielman agreed. “Really it totally coalesced around him, and all the energy he put into it being a community, I think that aspect becomes more of an influence for me anyway than the music as much. I think this record, I mean, we’re talking about Portland and the city, and I think this record is really about that. As a band we really operate with that in mind and how what we do affects other bands that we’re around.”
The band also gets compared fairly frequently to early R.E.M. for the way they infuse chaotic punk energy with pretty harmonies, and to the Ramones for their command of very fast, very aggressive tunefulness. Both Browning and Spielman acknowledge the two bands as influences (Browning: “Personally I love everything about R.E.M. minus Michael Stipe.”). However, there’s another band whose name comes up less often that has left a mark.
“The big one, the weirdest one, is The Go Betweens,” says Spielman. “Me and Lawton are big Go Betweens fans. Not in the sense of wanting to sound like them necessarily. But those two, as songwriters, are incredible.”
“To me, those two manage to talk about events and relationships with a degree of subtlety that’s missing from most pop music,” Browning agreed. “And they manage to do that while also managing to make their songs indelible and memorable. Finding that mean, where you’re talking about things in a grown up way and taking them seriously and also retaining the punch of a pop song, it’s such an achievement.”
Engaged but Not Political
Several of the album’s songs talk directly about Portland’s gentrification. Others seem to touch on issues like student debt and climate change. However, ask Spielman and Browning whether they see Temporary Monument is a political album, and you’ll get a difference of opinion.
Browning seemed comfortable with the idea. “One of the things that drives me most crazy about popular music now is how unwilling people are to discuss what’s happening in the world around us. I don’t know if it’s uncool, but it just seems ridiculous to me to now … like trying through music to grapple with these terrifying things that are happening. You just have to look in the newspaper. It seems like the world is tearing itself apart a lot of the time. If you get a small group of people together, everybody’s going to be on the same page about climate change and all that. The fact that music is so much of an escape from that and it’s that kind of turning away from the realities, it really is very disheartening to me. So the fact that you’re calling it a political record makes me happy.”
But Spielman disagreed. “I would say the opposite. I don’t think it’s a political record. I’m not interested in making political music. I’m pretty wary of anything that calls itself political as an art form. It’s political in the sense that it … our own sense of unhappiness with the world around us is expressed.”
The song “University” for example, sounds political, but Browning said it’s really about his own experiences. “I was in a graduate program and then I left the graduate program, and when I was writing that song, I wrote it before I left and it was only after I left that the story became that,” he explained. “I think what Raf is saying is that we’re writing about what’s happening to us right now. It’s just that we happen to be reflecting something that’s more than ourselves.”
And “After the Flood”, despite its title, is mostly about a personal relationship; too personal to go into with a reporter, Browning said. “I wanted to write a song about regret and what a destructive force that is, and that was what came out,” he explained.
“Isn’t there some underlying level of earthquake anxiety?” Spielman asked. “I’ve always assumed that was part of it.” And yes, Browning said, his anxieties about the West Coast fault detailed recently in this New Yorker story played into the song as well.
There is also, just to round things out, a song about the performance artist Spaulding Grey called “On Cowardice”, which explores Browning’s fascination with the man’s life, work and sad end (Grey committed suicide in 2004; he had been depressed and mostly unable to work for three years after sustaining brain injuries in a car accident 2001.) “Yeah, the story of his life is such a tragedy. It has kind of a Greek tragedy quality. Like an inevitability to it. Given what we know now about him. So he became a character for me in that song because I wanted to memorialize him in my small way,” Browning said. All of the songs on Temporary Monument are illustrated with tarot cards on the album back; the tarot card for Grey’s song is the hanged man.
The Woolen Men are currently touring Temporary Monument, and they have another album, full of songs recorded during the same period, set for self-release soon. (They are working out the details now.) Spielman explained that the idea was to get all the old songs out soon, so that the band could start on something new. “I think we’re interested in really doing something, to consciously push ourselves in another direction for the next record, so it made sense to put one more release out that’s in the same vein as this record so we could start fresh,” he said.
“We’re just starting to work on that now. Just starting,” said Browning when pressed about the nature of that new direction. “There’s a lot of work to be done to make this record as public as it can be. We have one foot in the future and one foot in this moment where we’re playing all these songs.”