The Hunches Wanna Make Albums That'll 'Fucking Live Forever'

With the aid of everything from a scrap metal-filled Radio Flyer Wagon to a Irish tin flute, from washboards to wrenches, Portland, Ore.'s frighteningly raw punk rock band The Hunches recently wrapped up a week-long session at L.A.'s The Distillery Recording Studio for the follow-up to last year's well-received debut Yes. No. Shut It. (In the Red Records). The new album, tentatively titled Hobo Sunrise, scheduled to be out on In the Red in the spring, incorporates a whole slew of noisemakers and injects a slight psychedelic tinge into the band's heavy, trashy sound.

"Some of the songs are more psychedelic and some are just depressing (in a good way)," drummer Ben Spencer wrote in an email. "There's plenty of noise and trash and speed as well — it's gonna be a pretty schizophrenic album."

In addition to the traditional guitar-bass-drums lineup, The Hunches — singer Hart Gledhill, bassist Sarah Epstein, guitarist Chris Gunn and Spencer — also used sheet metal, maracas, cowbell, crickets, tambourine and a Halloween-monster voice changer.

There was no question when it came down to who The Hunches wanted to work with for their second full-length. "Fuck anyone else — [The Distillery founder/engineer] Mike McHugh is a genius, complete and utter genius," Gledhill said in an interview at a Portland neighborhood bar a few days before the band left for California to begin recording with McHugh.

"The new stuff turned out really good," Spencer wrote upon return. "The production is a bit bigger — still raw, but you can actually hear the instruments and whatnot."

Which, after they'd delivered a manic, feedback-immersed debut, is a bit of a shift for The Hunches. But with honesty and soul — and, frankly, still loads of feedback — at the foundation of their music, it's not the slight alterations in sound that matter as much as their foremost goal: "To make the albums that's gonna fucking live forever," Gledhill said. "We made a staple album before, and now it's pretty much to make something that's even better."

Ask In the Red label founder Larry Hardy, and he'd say they did that and then some. "I'm very excited about this album," he wrote in an email. "I thought their debut would be nearly impossible to top but that's exactly what they did."

Inspired by labelmates the Cheater Slicks, garage/proto-punks Electric Eels and The Mirrors, The Hunches' riotous punk-rock noise finds a soulful strut in its R&B influence and wild originality in the innovative, bleeding hearts that drive it. Yes. No. Shut It. credits a Hoover vacuum cleaner for heaving distorted backup roars and other metal scraps for spewing literal garage thrash into the mix while the band blasts through swaggering, wailing songs of explosions, disasters and, of course, a little love and confusion.

"Our goal is to make the best album we can do right now; to make an album that we like considering the fact that we hate everything else," Gunn said at the tavern.

"Exactly, you're right!" Gledhill chimed in. "We're gonna make ourselves an album that we can listen to — if anyone's doing it for any other reason then fuck them." — Jenny Tatone [Thursday, October 16, 2003]