This week the Internet exploded with news that Twin Peaks David Lynch’s iconically weird ’90s mystery comedy would be returning to the small screen with a new season in 2016. Factor in recent films about musical luminaries like Elliott Smith the endless mainstream ubiquity of Nirvana or even the mainstream twee comedy of Portlandia and there’s no denying it — the Pacific Northwest is as popular as ever.
One hour south of Seattle Olympia Washington has always been known for its thriving musical output from K Records to Kill Rock Stars but the city has recently gone through a bit of a blog-buzzy “moment” thanks to widespread interest in its current bands among them the loud truly unique rock of the Captured Tracks-signed trio Naomi Punk.
“I think in general we’ve gotten really annoyed with talking about the Olympia scene in every single interview” says guitarist and frontman Travis Coster. “I don’t blame people for asking it but Neil [Gregerson second guitarist] in our band is like ‘Dude are you fucking kidding me?’ People are saying ‘Your music is so dewy is that because of the Pacific Northwest?’ …If our band moved to New York City we’d play the same music. And people would be like ‘Yeah it’s totally the New York aesthetic. They’re channelling the Voidoids.’”
Coster’s right — there’s certainly very little uniting Olympia’s current bands in terms of sound and the manufactured hype of a cultural narrative can grow tiresome. But there’s no denying the sheer volume of interesting acts to emerge from the city over the last few decades. Simply put there’s nowhere quite like Olympia.
To that Coster agrees. On the phone while running errands up in Seattle (read: buying a weird Danelectro guitar with built-in chorus and other effects) he’s still happy to discuss his home. “Olympia’s way cooler in terms of bands and counter-culture” he says. “Seattle’s just more like you know bands trying to get on an Urban Outfitters mixtape or something like that.”
Alongside Naomi Punk bloggers often credit Olympia’s recent shine with bands like Milk Music Broken Water and Gun Outfit but Coster asserts that a real spark ignited further back with the city’s mid-2000s punk scene specifically via the world-renowned cult hardcore act Sex Vid. “I feel like Sex Vid was way more of a driving force in terms of being a hardcore punk band that was arty and not a band of bros wearing hoodies and shit” he says. “They were embodying so much of like a really aestheticized punk movement. Obviously it was a lot more than that but I feel like that element of it was such an Olympia thing already in a lot of ways. I think that generated a lot of things in the community.”
For Naomi Punk hardcore is still a central influence. Though their music avoids throat-shredding shrieks sped-up drumming or any sort of lyrical clichés the band (which is rounded out by drummer Nicolas Luempert) routinely play shows alongside Gag or Nudes and are clearly inspired by certain elements of the hardcore movement. “Hardcore’s like a religion to a lot of people and that’s cool. It’s like a folk music to them” Coster says. “I’m more interested in dimensions of that — being wild and punishing — and not so much being like a tradition for me. I think aesthetically it can be really powerful.
“I like hardcore and I think that it’s really interesting to contextualize in an arty essentially pop band” he continues. “I like playing to hardcore people and I love repetitive stupid riffs…. I love hardcore that’s stupid and bludgeoning and repetitive and punk and I think that we like playing with those ideas and seeing other ways of presenting them.”
Earlier this year Naomi Punk released Television Man their second LP and the first to be properly released on Captured Tracks — the Brooklyn boutique label known for hip acts like Mac DeMarco and Perfect Pussy. The album offers more of Naomi Punk’s singular sound a collection of enormous riffs and weird sing-alongs that sound off-kilter at first before lodging into your brain like loud otherworldly pop jams. They’ve also performed for enormous new audiences around North America which they’ll do once again when they embark on a West Coast tour with like-minded Vancouver act Weed.
As they’ve spent more time on the road the band’s listening habits have continued to evolve. “In the van we’re listening to mostly electronic stuff. We listened to Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt probably more than anything else on this last tour” says Coster adding there are parallels between those two and his own band in that they all succeed in “forcing a part that’s not poppy to be poppy through repetition [and] forcing awkward moments to be awkward moments.”
Strangely however Naomi Punk exists with very few musical rules and even less direct musical influences. “We haven’t made a lot of rules other than wanting it to be really immediate and wanting it to be coming from inside of us” says Coster. “I think we’re informed by a lot of stuff but when we’re just jamming an idea we just fall into sounding like the way we do. It’s like learning a language with each other…. I think we want to explore other stuff and expand on what we’re doing and not write the same song over and over but there’s this other element where we’re kind of trying to get at an essential song inside this box. We haven’t even really designed [the box] in an intentional way it’s just kind of come around. Which is weird.”
