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Last Updated:
Mar 19th, 2008 - 07:43:02 |
The Misfits:
PAS/CAL
Despite what music critics would have you believe, Casimer Pascal does
not like the summer season. “We had a single out in the spring called
‘Summer’s Almost Here’ and that was supposed to be like my anti-summer
anthem,” Casimer says. ”I hate summer. So, being called a ‘summery pop
band’ is like the worst thing ever. I love layers; I love lots of
clothes; I love hiding my body … The whole song is about the dread of
summer coming on, and then I read reviews and they’re like, ‘Ah,
summery pop fun band writes a summer hit for the summer summer summer
summer summer.’ I’m just like, ‘Uh, you fucking idiot! You just read
the title and then you wrote your review.’ I’ve never listened to music
lightly, ever.”
He’s also never created music lightly. Casimer’s band, fashionable
local septet PAS/CAL, create what their graphic designer Sean McCabe
aptly terms “Baroque Misfit Pop.” The music is frequently up-tempo and
could, to some, sound “summery” and light, but it’s actually quite
intricate and layered. The band craft an ensemble sound that draws
nearly as much from Can and Xenakis as it does Scott Walker and Belle
& Sebastian.
Casimer (along with Gene Corduroy, LTD, Nathan F.H. Burgundy IV,
Richard Panic, Bem and Trevor Naud) spends an inordinate amount of time
working on the songs. “Often, everything I do takes long,” he admits.
“This happens to me all the time … I’ll realize that it’s maybe four
seconds of sound and it’s taken me like four hours to make.” Casimer
also labors over his lyrics, which run counter to the music’s
supposedly “sunny” sound. They’re laced with dark humor and
nostalgia-tinged remorse and melancholy. In “Poor Maude,” Casimer sings
of an old woman: “Her eyes shut she’s dead tired of looking / At the
trees and the stars in the sky / And the children laughing / ‘A hundred
years on they're still doing the same damn things!’” Backed by strings
and harmonies, the overall effect stands akin to The Smiths or Blur —
deceptively upbeat music under amusingly morose lyrics.
As for his production pace, it’s not that Casimer’s just a slow worker;
he has intricate plans. “I’m either blessed or cursed with a vision
always,” he says. “I was in these weird bands before and like the whole
kind of democratic way to do it never worked for me. And maybe because
I do feel like I have this vision and any time you bring somebody in on
that, you’re kind of chipping away at whatever vision this is … So, I
just try to do it all, as much as I can get done, and then I give it to
the band. It’s kind of a goofy system. It doesn’t always work out great
… Sometimes when I do pose [a song demo] to [the rest of the band],
they don’t know what to do with it because they’re like, ‘Well, what
else is there to do?’"
"In some ways, I’m incredibly easy to be in a band with," Casimer
remarks, "because I do kind of work everything out, so it’s like,
'There you go.' But in other respects, I understand that it’s probably
limiting to them … It’s all in the name of the song and I think we all
kind of believe that …”
PAS/CAL have a lot of theories regarding music, its production and
consumption. Many of the members come from an avant garde musical
background. Of his early days playing in bands, Casimer says, “I was
really anti-pop music and I remember making statements saying basically
I like music that has no choruses, no guitars — it was probably just
young foolishness. But I wanted to make my music, whatever that was, so
I think I tended to be as radical as I could to distance myself from
the norm. I did this for maybe four or five years with this mentality
of like, ‘If it sounds remotely like anything I’ve heard before, then
it’s shit.’”
For all of his hardcore experimental posturing, Casimer had a secret
love of pop: “In the back of my head, I really always had this feeling
like, actually the hardest fricking thing in the world to do is to
write a really concise, well-written song that’s accessible to the
multitudes rather than just a couple freaks.” That is how you end up
with a bunch of self-pronounced avant-leaning “misfits” making highly
accessible, yet elaborate, pop music. (A song off of their first EP,
“The Bronze Beached Boys,” was used extensively in a Saturn commercial
last year.)
Now, with a pair of successful EPs and a handful of singles behind
them, PAS/CAL are tackling their debut full-length album titled
Citizen’s Army Uniform. Naturally, Casimer has been doing extensive
demoing of potential album tracks. A few of the sketches indicate
potential for departure from the strict pop perfection of the group’s
prior releases. Could PAS/CAL be embracing their esoteric roots? “Even
though it’s like in the guise of a pop song, it has this underbelly
that is definitely more avant garde influenced,” Casimer explains.
Still, if the bulk of the demos are an accurate indicator, PAS/CAL’s
“classic” sound will remain intact, for now.
Though the demos for Citizen’s are nearly complete, Casimer has more
than a touch of perfectionism. He predicts a spring release. “What I do
like about writing and recording music is the whole process,” he says.
“I don’t like just spitting it out. It’s like lovemaking: you want it
to last longer than a few minutes. You want it to be long and full of
great moments, not just like one, ‘Umph.’ You want many, ‘Umphs.’ So I
think I get lost in the world of writing often.”
PAS/CAL have created a world of their own. It’s everything you would
expect: layered, complex, intricate and full of subtle meaning.
Supremely focused on style (the band dress up for shows as if they were
headed to a semi-formal cocktail party in mid-‘60s France), their
posters and album covers frequently present an idealized world of
salon-style intellectual discourse mixed with Serge Gainsbourg’s wry
humor. “People wouldn’t let us into their world,” Casimer says, “so we
just created our own ...” | RDW
Fashionable alien? Send dinner jacket sketches: keith@realdetroitweekly.com.
PAS/CAL • December 17 • Lager House
PAS/CAL will also perform at the Holiday Sounds and Spirits show on 12/23 at the Magic Stick.
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