eMusic Selects: Susu
Featured Album
In many ways, the art-punk group Susu embodies the spirit of old New York. Their songs wallop like billy clubs to the back of the head. They play nude modeling shows and have a love/hate relationship with their home city. Their lyrics hew closely to what Mark E. Smith called the “three r’s”: repetition, repetition, repetition. But instead of being off-putting, all that hammering and hollering becomes engrossing; there’s an urgency to the band’s songs that makes every lyric sound like a last desperate plea before the bombs go off.
It’s no surprise that their songwriting process is laborious: songs are worked, re-worked, twisted and re-configured endlessly. The final product feels like it comes as much from exasperation as inspiration: one last angry, aggressive run-through in an attempt to make the whole thing cohere. The miracle is that they do cohere — and spectacularly. Each clobbering drum pattern and swipe of serrated guitar is harrowing and bracing. It’s like being shoved into the person standing next to you again and again and again.
eMusic took the band’s three members — Andrea Havis (guitars/vocals), Mike Gabry (bass/vocals) and Oliver Riviera-Drew (drums) — to brunch to find out what makes them tick.
On their formative years:
Oliver: I took piano lessons in the basement of a church when I was younger, then I took clarinet lessons after that. Eventually I had to give the clarinet back, since it was rented, and so I started playing in the school drum corps. This was when I was about 12 years old. So as a result, my dad bought me a Ludwig drum set, black oyster, looked just like the one Ringo Starr played. So at that point I figured he was just encouraging me. After he got me the drum kit I formed a band with the kid down the street. We were called the Fire-Breathing Bunny Rabbits. The bass player that we recruited used to play slap bass — like Flea in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I just contacted him a few months ago through MySpace, and it turns out that now he plays bass for the band Aden.
Andrea: I started playing violin when I was like 9. My aunt had an acoustic guitar, and I just fell in love with it. I learned how to play “Dueling Banjos.” Violin I’d played really seriously, I was heavily-schooled classically. I didn’t really start focusing on guitar until high school — you know: smoking pot, Nirvana, it all goes together. I moved to New York and started playing with a few bands. Eventually I ended up in a band called Surgery Sunday, which Mike was in with me along with a drummer named Justin and two other people. We slowly started moving in a different direction and the other members felt it was too heavy and they didn’t want to do it. So they quit, and we shortened the name of the band.
Mike: I guess I came to music pretty late. All my friends in high school were in hardcore bands, and they always needed someone to play bass. My friends in high school would always practice in my parents ‘basement, so I was always around. I kinda started playing bass just to hang out.
On their strange touring luck:
Andrea: We don’t get to play much outside of New York. We want to. We’re just not really able to yet. We haven’t actively booked a show on purpose in two years — people just write us and ask us to be on a bill. So we end up playing some pretty strange locations. We played a nude modeling show once.
eMusic: What?
Andrea: Yeah. It was an art bar in DUMBO. [Ed: DUMBO is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. The acronym is short for "Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass"] The place was completely not set up for a band. There were some bourgeois after-work party going on, totally not a crowd that we would normally play to. And there was this nude modeling show going on upstairs — which was the show that we were supposed to accompany. We ended up not going on until 2:30 in the morning — there were only about five or six random people left by that point. People had brought sketchpads, and there was a couch where this transgender man was posing. Then there was another room you could go in and pay extra money for “erotic poses.” We seem to get asked to do things like this all the time. We just got asked to play at some Jell-O Wrestling event on the Lower East Side. I don’t think we’re going to do it.
On their painful songwriting process:
Andrea: The songwriting process is hell. It took us eight to ten months just to finish “Hands Up.”
Mike: Yeah, we just keep experimenting. We throw thing together that we know in our mind won’t work, but we somehow make it work.
Oliver: For every one Susu song, there are thirty or forty that we discard.
eMusic: Do you ever rescue any portions of the failed ones?
Andrea: Not as of yet. I can’t tell you how much stuff we’ve probably lost in the past year. We haven’t been recording, so anything we have is just all memory.
Mike: It’s impossible.
Andrea: We’re writing a song now, and we’ve probably been writing it for about three months.
On their blunt-force lyrics:
Mike: I think [Andrea and I] both use words like instruments. We don’t tell stories. The songs have meanings — I can’t speak for Andrea, but I probably pick my words more for how they sound than what they mean.
Andrea: I think we just bounce off a single idea. “Hands Up” is about a race, so we just toss around a lot of words that are associated with being in a race.
eMusic: The Fall does that a lot.
Mike: Oh, I fully admit to being a huge Fall fan.
Andrea: You don’t feel like it’s a specific description of what’s happening, but you understand what’s going on. It’s like what we do with our music — we try to pick the strongest moments of a song and string them all together. Like “Anarchitect,” that’s pretty straightforward, too. There’s an overall feeling to that one idea. It’s about failure: “built a house/ neck too short/ it came down.”
On the perils of being a band in New York:
Mike: At times I definitely dislike it. You kind of feel like there’s so many people out there trying to capitalize on the same audience. I don’t like feeling like I’m in a competition.
Oliver: I do feel angry and depressed at times. People come up to me and say, “Hey, that was a great show,” and I do feel almost a kind of resentment, because people are just kind of waiting to be impressed. Like their time is so valuable.
eMusic: You feel they’re being insincere?
Oliver: Yeah. Everybody’s got their distance. If you play a smaller town or city, people are much more personable. Playing here, crowds can be incredibly judgmental.
Andrea: Yeah, I don’t read blogs. My boyfriend does — he’s obsessed. I just can’t handle it. Music that I like has always found its way to me.
