While many of their contemporaries have since faded away, !!! are still at it and recently released their sixth LP, As If. Frontman Nic Offer is as incredulous as anyone that the band are still alive and kicking.
“I’m truly surprised to be here after all this time and still with so many of the same people as when this band started,” he says. “It’s been fun for us the whole time that we’ve been doing it. People ask us why we’re still around and so many other bands like us have gone away. We can’t speak for them, obviously, I don’t know why they’re not here. I only know why we’re still here – and that’s because we still love doing this.”
Released last month, As If is a timely and vital illustration of just how much fun Offer and co. are still having. There’s a sense of urgency in the album’s harder-hitting tracks, which, given they were created during a time of considerable creative transformation, makes perfect sense.
“We were kind of sitting around on our hands for awhile waiting for Thr!!!er [2013]to come out,” Offer says. “I started learning Ableton, and so did Mario [Andreoni, guitar]. The two of us would come up with little beats or loops that we’d show one another, eventually bringing what we’d started over to Rafael [Cohen, keyboard/guitar/vocals]. He was already well across using Ableton, so he was able to clean things up really easily.
“Before too long we had this massive backlog of demos – all the time we were promoting Thr!!!er, we had this whole other thing going on. We had 40 songs, eventually recording 20 of them. We then went even further and whittled them down to what ended up being the songs that made the album – our friends, people on the label and the rest of the band all had a hand in voting in and voting out songs.”
Going from 40 songs down to the 11 that made the final albumwasn’t an easy process. There were plenty of arguments and disagreements over what would eventually get pressed to disc and put on wax. However, as Offer testifies, it ultimately generated a positive outcome for the !!! camp.
“The process really helped us look at what we were creating a little more objectively. Of course there were songs that I was vouching for and really wanted to get through the voting system. When you’re saying yes, though, and at least a good share of people are saying no, you have to take a step back and think about what’s not working. It allows for the songs to develop and for us to work toward better songs as a collective.”
While Offer’s confident they selected the strongest 11, they’re not done with what’s left of the 20 songs that made the shortlist. “You may well see another album in fairly close proximity to this one,” he says. “We’re tossing up the idea of taking them into the studio with another producer and seeing what more we can do.”
The earliest formation of !!! goes back to the mid-’90s when Offer was brought in to front a new project that rose from the ashes of two Sacramento acts, Popesmashers and Black Liquorice. According to Offer, the key to their near 20 year career has been ensuring it never feels like a chore.
“There’s something to not taking yourself so seriously. I mean, we take the creative process seriously, I suppose, but in a lot of ways we’re just laughing at ourselves the entire time. It’s music, after all. It should be fun, I think. It deserves to be fun.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
