The New Mexicans

Thurs July 8

Tonic Lounge

3100 NE Sandy

They may try to convince you otherwise, but the members of New Mexicans are not a terrible bunch of musicians. On the contrary, the Seattle four-piece plays complicated, driving, heavy guitar rock on a par with Helmet and Drive Like Jehu, anchored by a drummer whose frenzy will fatigue your eyeballs if you attempt to follow his movements more than a couple of seconds. Continental Records came into being just so owner Marcus Lolario could put out a New Mexicans seven-inch. He wasn’t the only fan to be instantly enthralled by their visceral appeal.

The band (singer/guitarist Rob Hampton, guitarist Joe Crawford, bassist Jeff Montona, and drummer Creighton Barrett) recently finished recording an album, with Phil Ek producing. They talk as if they were a bunch of blockheads who drooled, farted, and pawed their instruments until they were transformed by a master. “I felt like a speck of crud on the bottom of his boot,” says Barrett, “because there was the issue of a metronome and a click track, and there is just no way I could ever, ever [use either of those]. [Ek] must have thought we were retarded. He came up to us once and said, ‘Do you know you guys are on one-two-three time?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we knew that… uh.’ It’s fucked up, what bad musicians we were before we went into the studio. There’s no excuse for that.”

This might surprise folks who consider New Mexicans to be a technical band, because everything is so synchronized and there are a lot of stop-start points to their music. Says Hampton, “All that stop-start stuff is just because we don’t know how to transition.”

So why do it? Chalk it up to boredom, and, for Hampton at least, a love of melody. “I’ve never been into punk rock, because it’s boring. I can’t really get into it because it gives me a headache when it’s straight-ahead yelling. Like the Locust–I don’t understand how people can listen to it when all they are is just a grinding headache. They’re terrible. The theory of it all is fantastic… oh, whatever, I just can’t stand it. Even Motörhead, back when they were good, had melody even though they were playing hard and fast. There was something you could get into, not just chugga- chugga hardcore. Snapcase is the good kind of hardcore because they have melodies, whereas Earth Crisis is a terrible hardcore band because it’s all just growling and angry and makes you want to beat someone up.”