Trying to dissect the innards of a band like Joan of Arc (and
specifically of chief songwriter and only consistent member Tim
Kinsella—a man who once infamously altered his last name to
“Kinsellas” because he was feeling plural) is like trying to forge a
fire without flint. And with a brand-new collaborative album, Boo!
Human, the common thread of baffling, seemingly heady ruminations
from the group has once again sparked another vague flame on the
collective psyche of underground rock.
Boo! Human is new ground for the ever-evolving Kinsella, as
the members of Joan of Arc (a group whose lineup shifts from show to
show and album to album) have incorporated the efforts of various
collaborators on an eerily barbed assemblage of tunes. No two songs
sound alike, but Joan of Arc have ironically managed to put out their
most cohesive and defiant album since Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark
Twain.
“We don’t think about the end result going into things as much as we
think about an interesting means of approaching things that seem
absorbing to us,” explains Kinsella from his home in Chicago. “That’s
more the trick for keeping things fresh.”
Fourteen musicians were tapped for the recording of the album, as
former collaborators of Wilco, Iron and Wine, Bonnie “Prince” Billy,
Beth Orton, and Prefuse 73 joined the band’s core group of musicians
(Sam Zurick, Bobby Burg, Nate Kinsella, and Mike Kinsella, among
others).
“This has become a much easier and more open thing,” said Kinsella.
“It may as well just be like having a potluck together except there’s a
byproduct of music.”
Since the band’s inception in 1995 following the breakup of the
seminal Chicago post-punk band Cap’n Jazz (touted as one of the
forbearers of the dread “emo,” an attribution Kinsella has dismissed on
more than one occasion), critics have consistently expressed
befuddlement at both the prolific nature of Joan of Arc’s output and
the relatively impalpable nature of their songs. Kinsella, however, has
little concern over what is made of his art, other than the simple fact
that it has been made.
“I don’t think about being prolific or not. I don’t feel like I’m
working very hard at being in a band right now, ” he laughs.
This sentiment, though, seems a bit muddled in light of the fact
that Kinsella seems to be always working on one band or another at an
almost Herculean rate. His other main project, Make Believe (which
projects a much more aggressive milieu), releases Going to the Bone
Church this summer. The similarities—or lack
thereof—between the two entities, Kinsella reasons, are really in
the eye of the beholder.
“There’s definitely a continuity of my personal biases,” says
Kinsella, “but there’s definitely an awareness of wanting each to be
its own self-contained independent thing in relation to my impression
of the other records.”
Regardless of the spiraling nuances of Joan of Arc’s catalogue, the
perceivably arty overhead and the innovative lyricism noted by
detractors, it’s Kinsella himself who’s still his own worst critic.
“Nate [Kinsella] was telling me he walked into the Mailboxes, Etc.
yesterday and they were listening to a Joan of Arc record, and he said
it just sounded so horrible to him. He was like, ‘I don’t know, man, it
just sounded like shit.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know!'”