“I felt like a fucking clown,” says Panther frontman Charlie
Salas-Humara. “Every fucking time before I played I’d be like, ‘How am
I going to do this? How am I going to start this? What am I going to
do? This is weird.'”
But for three years, all by his lonesome, Salas-Humara went at it.
He’d crank up glitchy beats, sing, shout, and flap across the stage
like a bird caught in an electric fence. “The idea at first was just to
do it and see what happened, just to see how people would react,” he
says. “It was more performance art.”
When Panther began, Salas-Humara never saw it as anything more than
a side project—a chance to try something new and perhaps foreign.
But when the band he fronted, The Planet The, hung up their guitars for
good, the side project took over. “I was like, ‘This is my band now,'”
he explains. “Still I felt like it was really half-assed.”
But the wheels kept rolling. Because of the odd, provocative, and
lighthearted nature of the act, as well as the simplicity of bringing a
one-man band along, Panther was picked up as an opener for a number of
national tours. He did four of them, along with a killer video and some
guerilla stunts, and even spent some time on MTV. Over time, though,
things never really settled into that comfortable place for
Charlie.
“It started driving me crazy,” he says. “When people started taking
me more seriously I was like, ‘Okay, I have to change this and make it
really good.'” He went ahead and flipped the whole thing.
First he got a drummer, Joe Kelly, formerly of 31Knots. Kelly and
Salas-Humara also play together in Leti Angel. They’ve known each other
for years, and their somewhat opposing personalities seem to balance
each other out. Together they shook up Panther’s sound completely. Gone
are Charlie’s schizophrenic beats, breaks, and electro sounds, replaced
by clean guitars, cellos, and Kelly’s tight, angular, yet smooth
drumming. The result, which can be found on the recently released 14
kt God, is decidedly more musical.
All of the album’s 13 tracks are accessible. It’s (slightly) damaged
pop wherein the longest song clocks in at four minutes; most are done
in less than three. It’s brimming with hooks, though the levels of
production keep Panther from scoring that one killer single. For the
most part the lyrics are dominated by cryptic wordplay—where
sounds are as important as meaning—but from time to time
Salas-Humara throws out lines that resonate. (“We will relinquish the
past/We can’t extinguish the past.”)
An air of glam pervades 14 kt God, but for some reason the
album never really goes over the top. There are a number of places
where a few more layers might’ve really added something. But as
Salas-Humara and Kelly told me, they have no intention of delivering
anything wrought or too predictable.
What’s happened to Panther since Kelly has joined is a complete
rebirth. The sound and the show are both markedly different. They’ve
been signed by Kill Rock Stars and are now setting off on their first
headlining tour. Then it’s off to Europe and Japan. But more important
than any of that, perhaps, is that when Salas-Humara takes the stage
with Kelly by his side, things finally
feel right.