{image1}Musician Blaine Schultz wipes his hands in relief as he can finally take a break from building a garage in the back yard of his South Side Milwaukee home. This project has kept him occupied for some time now, so talking about the band he has been a member of for several years, The Aimless Blades, is an activity he greets openly.
As the conversation continues, an epiphany comes to the guitarist about the early 1980s one-hit wonders Dexy's Midnight Runners.
"If that isn't alt-country, here are some guys in overalls playing a banjo and a fiddle," he remarks, "At the time, it was a big hit song, but they certainly weren't a hip band. I remember writing a review of that record and people would say, 'Those guys are kinda dorky.' They were playing country music and jacking it up to modern stuff."
It's certainly an enormous stretch, but his observation about the kitschy MTV-darlings (however briefly) nearly runs parallel to elements of the history of The Aimless Blades. The group's latest release, "...standing at the crossroads and some of them are dying," is dedicated to, amongst others, Joe Strummer, one of the members of the famed punk-rock band The Clash, which the members of Dexy's Midnight Runners likely considered an influence.
Schultz explains, "The people that we sort of dedicated (the album) to had died in the course of finishing this and were fresh on our minds. My brother picked up a bootleg of Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros from when they played at Summerfest. My brother was a huge Clash fan when we were younger and he got to take his son to see them."
Even some of the members of The Aimless Blades -- which includes guitarist Scott Krueger, Paul Setser on keyboards, drummer Jim Richardson, Angela V-Elles on bass, clarinet and vocals, and violinist Sarah Filzen -- fall into the musical cliché of being in an alt-country band while having a background in playing in punk rock bands.
Schultz says, "Our drummer, Jim Richardson, was in a band called Death, which was a punk rock band in Milwaukee in 1975 or 1976, back in the day when you seriously got the sh*t beat out of you for looking different."
Beyond that, The Aimless Blades' similarities with any New Wave bands end, and so do the alt-country clichés. The group actually started out as a project for Schultz, as an outlet for music that didn't quite fit in with another band he was in. He brought in some friends to help bring these tunes to life. The reaction was so good that people started urging Schultz to continue the project as a real band.
It's almost unfair to lump the sextet into any category, as clichéd as it sounds. One of the advantages the band has is that the members come from varied backgrounds. "...standing at the crossroads..." is a 12-track musical trip filled with the freedom of the open road and the concealment of a mystery that is nowhere near being solved. Multiple spins in your CD player are almost required to even scratch the surface the layers of music this album offers.
"I don't know if any one thing inspired (the album)," Schultz says. "This batch of songs, speaking for myself, and the ones I wrote, came together in a pretty quick flurry. We wanted to record stuff with mostly acoustic instruments. We borrowed some old guitars from an old friend up north ... and tried to keep it as funky as possible."
Some inspiration, at least for the title of the album, came from the world's greatest (dead) rock critic Lester Bangs. Savvy music fans may recognize the title as a quote from the writer, a person Schultz holds in very high regard because it was Bangs' writing in Creem Magazine that brought the New York City music scene to his mailbox.
"When I was in college, I took a directed studies course where you focus one semester on one subject. What I chose to do ... was to focus on Lester Bangs. He ... ended up being the greatest music writer of all time. He showed that it was another avenue. If you want to do something, some people talk about it, some people do it. He did it. It's a tribute to him."
The work on the garage beckons Schultz back to his perch. The garage has become a priority for him, and music is a priority for him, too. It's prioritizing that helps keep the band together, and also keeps it from having the official CD release party until many months after the album was pressed and completed.
"The fact that a person can be in a band, write original music, get gigs, and put records out, that's a f*cking cakewalk," remarks Schultz, "You've got six people who are trying to arrange their work schedules to play, that's all a matter of prioritizing things."
The official CD release party for The Aimless Blades' "...standing at the crossroads and some of them are dying" takes place at Linnemann's Riverwest Inn on Saturday, Sept. 18 at 10 p.m.
