Lip Critic Is A Band You’re Not Allowed To Forget
A recent addition to the remarkable Partisan Records’ roster, Lip Critic is stepping into the light unintimidated and brimming with intensity, possessing a unique aptitude for the abstract and unexpected.
Their music demands attention; it’s hard, it’s fast, it’s loud. It’s a punch to the gut, a broken glass, a head rush. It’s a thrilling and mercilessly addictive amalgamation of punk, hip-hop, electronic, pop, and heavy metal influences. Lip Critic’s world is one of seemingly no restrictions, with their ironic and slightly nihilistic lyricism silhouetting a brash and blistering sonic landscape of carefully crafted chaos. Their live performances have no time for silence or stagnancy. They’re manufacturing a dizzying, beehive-like spectacle bookended by drummers (yes, plural) Danny Eberle and Ilan Natter and underlined by vocalist Bret Kaser and producer Connor Kleitz. Lip Critic is breaking down barricades with stratospheric ambition, untamed and unstoppable.
As you will later read, I ask Bret and Connor how they want people to feel when listening to their music, but the answer is so remarkably apparent that I never needed to question it. Lip Critic makes unabashed and anarchic music for the aggressively alive. Their newest record Hex Dealer is an invitation to free every innate human instinct boiling beneath the surface. Amidst the grit and grime, they’re allowing us to close our eyes and liberate our bodies and release gravelly, guttural screams and lose our bearings in the dark. They’re reminding us that live music is both thrillingly communal and deeply personal. It’s an electrifying and uncomfortable and utterly incorruptible experience. Lip Critic are lighting a fire unlike any to blaze before them. Listen to Hex Dealer in May.
I saw you guys at both the Partisan showcase last summer and at the Broadway at the end of last year. Your crowd is so sick! When I was leaving, I literally saw blood on the floor.
BRET: Oh no!
No, it was epic. It was cool blood. Evidence of a good time.
BRET: Yeah, it can happen, but that’s so crazy to hear!
It was awesome to witness people enjoying themselves to that degree.
BOTH: *Laughter*
Okay, where are you guys from? How did you meet? How did you form Lip Critic?
BRET: I’m from Connecticut. I was born in Port Chester, New York but grew up in Connecticut. And Connor is from Rockland County, Danny is from Staten Island, and Ilan is from Manhattan. We were all going to the same college, a state school in New York, and Connor, Ilan, and I were all studying music, specifically in the audio engineering and production lane. Danny was doing anthropology.
Oh shit! Cool.
BRET: So Danny was playing in a ton of bands all the time, and I had seen the band he was playing in at the time play. I thought he was amazing, I thought he was one of the better drummers I had ever seen play in my life. I was like, I want to play with that dude. We were talking–me, Connor, Ilan, and a few other people–about trying to form this band that would be a super maximalist, giant band that would have two of everything: two guitars, two bassists, two drummers, two singers. It was going to be a gag show we were going to do one time where it would essentially be two bands playing the same song in tandem. We were trying to get the idea together, and people just kept flaking out. The idea was obviously super bad and really inconvenient, and it kind of just started whittling itself down until Connor, Danny, Ilan, and I were the only ones that were still trying to do it. So it resulted in us taking this route of having two samplers and two drummers. That became the basis of all the music going forward.
I was going to ask about the two drummers, obviously. Not that I’m already sold on it, but what is your case for that? Why did you specifically want two drummers as opposed to two of anything else? It sounds like the four of you can do a lot of different things.
BRET: I have to give credit to this video of Bryan Chippendale from Lightning Bolt playing drums alongside Greg Saunier from Deerhoof. I was a huge Deerhoof fan and a huge Lightning Bolt fan, and I had never seen this video. Ilan sent it to me in my sophomore year of college. It’s like an hour long, and I just watched the entire thing straight through. We all just really love drums as an instrument. It would definitely be my favorite instrument if I had to pick one instrument to play for the rest of time, so the interplay of seeing two kit players play off of each other is just kind of a rare occurrence in a lot of recorded music and even live music. A lot of the time you get to hear drummers play off of other musicians, like bassists and guitarists and keyboard players. You get to see drummers interact with other players, but you don’t get to see them interact with other kit players. It’s kind of like two ends of the magnet bouncing off each other. They’re always kind of doodling for position. If you play two kicks and two snares on top of each other, there’s not that much that changes from just playing a kick and a snare on their own. The whole thing is trying to play in each other’s openings and gaps. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. And Ilan wasn’t primarily a drummer; he was primarily a guitar player, and he was doing a lot of mixing and post-production work. I was aware that he had played drums before; he had grown up with Danny in New York and had basically pseudo-learned drums through Danny. So I was thinking, this kind of seems like a perfect mix, because Danny is essentially a professional session drummer and Ilan was a much less fully formed drummer when we started. So he started playing with this project in mind, the understanding that he was playing alongside another drummer. It was a chance to morph into the perfect drummer for this setting.
CONNOR: It was way more intentional as opposed to just throwing two drummers in a band together. It was very intentional for this style of music. Like Bret was saying, they’re playing two different parts a lot of the time whereas in a lot of bands, there are two drummers playing the same part. This is a pretty big distinction between those two approaches, and you can really tell, in the live shows especially, how much it matters that they’re playing different parts and different fills.
You definitely can. It sounds so good. You can hear the intention which, yeah, is refreshing for this kind of music. It’s not just gratuitously adding sound. And I wasn’t totally sure what was going on with this, but it seemed like there was some live production going on during the set?
CONNOR: Yeah, so Bret is using a sampler inside a laptop, and I’m using a hardware sampler. So we’re basically using two samplers with production that we’ve worked out beforehand, and then there’s production that we’re modulating live, all of which is being triggered rhythmically to the drums: no backing tracks or anything. We’re both playing along to the drums as if we were to be playing a piano or any other rhythm instrument, triggering samples and sounds and manipulating those in the same way you would any other instrument.
Did you by any chance have anything to do with the lighting? That was also cool.
BRET: I can’t remember if this was that show or the one before, but we have this friend who plays in a band who does lighting stuff. We didn’t plan it out or anything, but we were about to play and he just hopped up into the booth and started doing lighting. So I’m not sure, I honestly can’t confirm or deny.
Whatever was happening was sick.
BRET: I feel like at a venue like Elsewhere where there’s projection walls and LED walls, we usually bring a set of projections that we made. So we have done stuff with the show design before.
What inspires the visuals?
BRET: It’s all these keyword sort of things. It’s a giant red wall that’s flashing this bold white text the entire time. It’s kind of like an emergency message. One of the big things it’s flashing is “Don’t worry.” Another one is “It’s the magic,” which is now a song that we’ve put out, but we were using that a year ago.
CONNOR: An easter egg.
BRET: A little easter egging. One of them says, “This performance is property of LucasArts.” “Are we safe in this eggshell” flashes up a couple times. They’re keywords that are trying to stir up some confusion or questions out of the audience while you’re watching the show. You’re like, why are they putting that up there? I want people to be reading into it and overanalyzing it while at the show.
So is that how you ultimately want people to feel when they hear your music? Obviously everyone relates to music differently, but what would you hope somebody on the receiving end would feel?
BRET: That’s a hard question because while we’re making it and performing it, I always emphasize trying to figure out, more than any symbolic or metaphorical meaning, whether or not the work gives you the feeling that you’re aiming for, whether it’s hitting the mark that you want it to hit. So I think that there’s a big element to that when you’re making work that is that abstract and not concrete that people are going to feel 100 different ways about it and have 100 different feelings about it when they’re listening to it. There are people that have talked to us and said, This song feels like it’s just a super fun pop song. And different people will talk to us about the same song and say it feels really dark and harrowing. I don’t want to say there’s any one thing I want people to pull from it, but I want people to be open to whatever they end up feeling and understand. It’s designed to be amorphous in the meanings it holds and how it makes you feel.
Makes sense. There’s never just one feeling about anything, ever, especially because there are so many nuggets from different genres present in the work you make. Did you pull from a lot of different places for inspiration, or did it all just come from the four of you?
BRET: I watched this Steve Martin movie called “Leap of Faith.” Have you seen that one?
Oh my gosh, yes I have. It’s crazy.
BRET: It’s a crazy movie! I watched that a lot. I was listening to a lot of this band called Soul Coughing; I’ve been listening to them for my entire life. I was listening to their album Ruby Vroom a lot. Connor, I know you were listening to a lot of stuff too.
CONNOR: Yeah, I was listening to Fetch by Melt-Banana; that was a big one.
BRET: Fetch is a big record for all of us in general.
CONNOR: That one is always the one that pops into my mind.
Melt-Banana is such an awesome name. I haven’t listened to Soul Coughing, but now I really want to.
BRET: Definitely.
And you had the chance to play a lot of shows last year, including a set at Pitchfork Paris. What was that like?
BRET: It was great! We opened the festival, so it was a lot of people’s first show of the festival. I can’t remember how early it was, but it was early. We had basically just gotten off of the plane. I weirdly felt like it was one of our better shows ever. I felt weirdly manic and sleep deprived, and the people just seemed like they had no idea who we were. There was something cool about staring at a bunch of blank faces of people who definitely were not there for us that makes me go 50 times harder. I thought it was a really fun show. It was a great start to that European run.
Had you played shows in Europe before that?
CONNOR: No, never
I get why the feeling of having a clean slate to create some sort of imprint in is exciting.
BRET: There’s something about certain shows where you’re more present in the flow of everything. We try to have the performances be very engaging, second to second. We try to not leave any dead air. Most of the shows are totally gapless. There are shows where we really feel like we’re hitting it perfectly, every second is good and full of entertainment and value for everybody. There are other shows where you just feel like you were distracted or out of it. It doesn’t happen like that often, but that’s the biggest thing for me: feeling present and executing everything without effort.
CONNOR: Presence is huge. For me, feeding off the energy of the audience and being able to have a symbiotic relationship with the people that are there to see us definitely fuels me. Not necessarily my technical performance, because most of the time the higher the energy of the audience, the worse the technical performance is. It’s compensated for by the amount of energy that we’re able to bring onstage when the crowd is reciprocating the energy. It cancels each other out. It’s more impactful that way.
BRET: It’s really fun. It’s what we enjoy. We’ve all played in a ton of different situations, solo and in other bands, and this one has steadily been the one where all the shows feel a little out of body. All the shows feel like we’re pushing towards an ideal that is really fun and going to be really cool. I still don’t feel like we’ve accomplished really what we want to with the shows, having them be these big, hivemind-y, insane, whirlwind shows. Every show we play, we’re getting closer and closer, but this is definitely the focus of what we’ve wanted to do musically individually and together. We’ve finally started to turn a corner on a few aspects of that.
Find Lip Critic on tour in North America right now, here.