CONFIDENCE MAN: “I know what I’m going to say,” says Dave Berndt. “So when it’s time to say it, I better say it like I fucking mean it.” |
There’s a song on Logan 5 and the Runners’ first album, Featurette, where Dave Berndt sings, “I wish I could see you at night/Naked through your window.” It’s a quick, dirty come-on that gets more sinister and weird the more you hear it — especially since you can’t tell whether the sentiment is coming from a smooth operator hitting the club scene with an unbuttoned shirt and a chest full of hair or a horny teenager with a fledgling moustache in an anonymous chat room.The Runners, who are self-releasing Featurette this Saturday at Great Scott, are a two-year-old band from Boston with their feet planted firmly in this city’s long-established Anglophile scene. On record, Berndt has this throaty Jarvis Cocker thing where he ends every other line with “Yeeeeah . . . ,” as if he were cranking out Soloflex reps inside a reverb chamber. It’s an intimidating thing to imagine walking in on.
When I sit down with three members of the band at Bukowski’s Tavern on Dalton Street, it’s a bit like meeting the men behind the curtain, the guys sitting back at the controls while their avatars do the posturing on stage. Everyone picks at a plate of steamy ranch fries. Guitarist Nick Balkin has just stepped in from his nearby desk job at Berklee; drummer Mark Beaulieu is carrying a brand-new hard drive he’s just received in the mail. (The line-up is rounded out by keyboardist/trumpeter Chris Barrett and bassist Mike DeLisle.)
“You can’t just get up there and be the same guy that was at the office all day,” says Berndt. “You’ve got to free yourself up to say things you normally wouldn’t say and do it like you mean it. You could say the same thing into a microphone with no band behind you and it would be a little different.”
Berndt’s alter ego came about when friends noticed his more-than-passing resemblance to Michael York, the thickly maned star of the 1976 sci-fi flick Logan's Run. York’s Logan is a straight-ahead guy who tells Jenny Agutter’s Jessica, “You’re beautiful. Let’s have sex.” Brendt’s Logan seems more like the guy who’d spend the night staring at a girl across the room, pondering how much like a lit, bitter cigarette his inevitably hopeless fling will be.
Still, borrowing the name is a start. Featurette is a gallery of cocky adolescent spite, defiant mood swings, and persuading girls to do things their parents don’t know about. Which would make it weird if it were, like, the guy from your office singing it.
“I’d love to say it was all off the cuff, but I don’t know,” allows Berndt. “If you have a sort of character to start off with, it helps. You have the songs written — I know what I’m going to say, so when it’s time to say it, I better say it like I fucking mean it.”
Balkin (whose parents banned rock music from his stereo until eighth grade) has a simple take: “Glam was always about getting on stage and becoming something else.”
The quintet — who’ve done time with many of Boston’s more creative pop acts (the Shelley Winters Project, American Girls Club, and Christians and Lions among them) — strutted into Pete Weiss’s Verdant Studio in Vermont last summer with a nitpicky plan for the album (they had already recorded it once on their own for practice) and a few uninterrupted nights to run free with Verdant’s hodge-podge stockpile of keyboards and guitar pedals. The result supersedes its own glitter. Yeah, it’s a Britpop record: there’s dancing-in-your-bedroom beats, that propulsive sort of industrial-fan-in-the-face energy, and huge instrumental outros cascading to the finish. But the cold synths and strangled guitars make it seem the songs would be at home playing in a rusty flying car from Blade Runner. It’s the little things — the guitar cables fraying to shit in “TV,” the morbid electronic drone mobs in “Girls of the Internet” and “Someday,” the errant trumpet melodies all over — that combine for the biggest differences. This is more than a genre exercise.
The Runners save the best surprise for the end with “Supernova,” which just sounds laden with Brit-’90s throwback potential. What we get instead is a mopy love story with a sweet tinge of ’70s country soul. The hushed Rhodes keyboard shuffles around like something in a made-for-TV Muscle Shoals recording. It’s a long way from London.
“I was a latecomer to the whole ’90s Pulp and Blur and Libertines and stuff,” says Berndt, almost apologetically. Fans should be thankful — instead of a tribute act, we have a group throwing the whole thing into a neurotic disarray, not from an elitist high but from a deep-down scavenger low. Unassuming as he might seem, Berndt makes a great desktop commando. “I just got into the idea of having the balls to say what you want to say.”
LOGAN 5 AND THE RUNNERS + THE LUXURY + THE DAILY PRAVDA + MR. NI$E | Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, Boston | January 17 at 9 pm | $8 | 617.566.9014 or www.greatscottboston.com
