PicoBlog

This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. It’s also the home of Weekly Neil, but this week, I’m excited to present something different. The great New York band Patio — featuring my good pal Loren DiBlasi on bass and vocals — have just released their second album, Collection. In addition to Donna Summer and The Bee Gees, Patio’s influences on this new record include 2000s New York indie bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol. Medium Rotation began by looking back on artists of a similar ilk from the same time period, so I invited Loren, guitarist/vocalist Lindsey-Paige (LP) McCloy, and drummer Alice Suh to share some of their favorites. Find those reflections below, after a little bit more from me.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Patio is how, at certain moments in a song, they can evoke the light playfulness of early R.E.M. and the chunky grit of Interpol. From the moment Loren told me she had started a band, she made sure to include their genre tag as “pastel post-punk.” Apart from being better than anything a publicist could dream up, it also does so much to adequately prepare your mind for what listening to Patio feels like: a night out, a frenzy, but also rife with plenty of moments of quiet contemplation. There’s space in Patio songs. There’s so much life.

At the risk of belaboring the point, Patio feel inextricable from their New York formation. As such, their music feels like the perfect soundtrack for an evening in the city — in the tradition of some of their most formative influences. I asked the trio to write about some of them; their responses are included below. Check them out, listen to Collection, and if you’re in New York, head to their record release show at Gottscheer Hall on Saturday, September 30. They’re playing with Customer, and there’s a DJ set from DATA DATA. Don’t just take my word for it. Hear that magnificent pastel post-punk for yourself.

Loren: Interpol — Antics (2004)

I know Turn On The Bright Lights was the big breakthrough record that made Interpol huge, but I didn’t hear that one until later — in 2002, I was still a bit young to be hip to all that was coming out of the city, especially considering the internet was less of a thing (at least to me; two years later, I would be fully immersed in the world of fan forums for every band featured in the NME). 

I probably heard about Interpol from a forum, or maybe Pitchfork (which I was reading daily at that point), or possibly even MTV… they might have played the video for “Evil,” because I remember the puppet from that video so clearly. In 2004 I turned 15 — this was peak me developing my taste, and discovering the world I was so desperate to be part of. Growing up in the suburbs, I had one cool, weird friend who had made me a mixtape with bands like Hot Hot Heat, The Shins, Modest Mouse… I liked the songs, but they didn’t tilt me off my axis in the same way that discovering Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand did. All those 2004/2005 post-punk revival albums were so incredibly formative… it was like someone flipped the switch from dark to light inside my brain. 

There’s something obscure, cryptic, almost seedy about the way Antics sounded to me upon first listen. Of course Paul Banks’ voice, which everyone was comparing to Ian Curtis, who I had to google because I had never heard of Joy Division (which ignited a whole other obsession). “Evil” hooked me because of the bass, an instrument which I had never paid much attention to before this era… I feel like when I was really young, in the late ‘90s/turn of the millennium, there was this idea of the bassist almost being like a joke, the loser of the band, the guy (because 99% of musicians were guys to me) that no girls wanted to fuck, because nobody cared about his instrument. My perspective on what a bass did, and what it could add to a song, began to shift the more I began to discover music I actually cared about… Carlos D was a big one, which helped lead me to Peter Hook, Tina Weymouth, Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, Mike Watt, and many others. 

I like the bass because I find it to be extreme — it can be jubilant or menacing, but it’s rarely delicate or quiet, even when it’s subtle. On Antics, obviously “Evil” is such a monumental riff, but I love the way the bass (and later guitar) builds on “Not Even Jail,” and the rhythmic rollercoaster that is “Length of Love.” The relationship between the bass and drums on the “Length of Love” outro absolutely wrecks me — it’s the sort of euphoria I wanted to channel, in our sparse Patio way, on Collection. 

“Patience,” written and composed by LP, was one of the first songs we wrote for Collection, and before it had a proper title we just straight-up called it “Interpol,” because we were so inspired by Antics (we all agree it’s the best of their albums). But I think, even beyond the sonic influence, something I thought about a lot throughout the making of Collection was getting older, the pandemic uprooting life and the band as we knew it, and the sort of simple, fleeting joy of being young in the early 2000s — discovering bands that would literally become my life (as a music journalist and later musician myself) and watching that time slip further and further away as I entered my 30s. I don’t wish I could go back, but I do wish I had more opportunities to feel that way again.

LP: Kings Of Leon — Aha Shake Heartbreak (2005)

Songs and performances rewire your brain sometimes. Aretha Franklin’s “Since You’ve Been Gone,” Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma,” Red Velvet’s “Psycho.”  Right around the time I turned 16, my parents gave me a laptop for Christmas and I started watching music videos I downloaded from official websites on my QuickTime Player. Maybe the third one I watched was Kings Of Leon’s “The Bucket.” Very little happens in this video — it’s a classic performance video in a retro set — but something about the song worked its way into my memory and it’s stayed since. When I’m writing music, I chase a simplicity I learned to appreciate listening to Kings Of Leon albums at least once a day for five-odd years (Aha Shake Heartbreak is the best one but I won’t deny that “Molly’s Chambers” still hits). 

There’s an elemental, guttural communication that runs through all of their work from this era. The lyrics don’t make any sense, and they’re better when they don’t. The chords barely change (if they change at all), but the addition of a key pedal tone can throw it from grinding to ecstatic to sinuous. Melodies can live in the bass, in the rhythm guitar, in the vocal melody, in the leads, and in the drums simultaneously. Simplicity breeds innovation! I first read the maxim that everyone who listened to The Velvet Underground started a band when Jared Followill mentioned it in a magazine interview. I’d never heard of The Velvet Underground until I read that, so I guess my equivalent was listening to Kings Of Leon. 

Alice: The Faint — Danse Macabre (2001)

I have a special place in my heart for certain electro dance-punk parts of that indie sleaze/post-punk revival era, specifically The Faint’s Danse Macabre, several songs of which were handed to me via mix CD at school. I was too young to be going to shows when I listened to this but it made me imagine what being in a club might be like, which was basically like the opening sequence to the Y2K-classic Batman Beyond, and in this Faint version we would be dancing in broken glass and drinking blood. I didn’t know it then but this album packaged elements of new wave and hardcore punk that I would discover much later in an emo-coated dance pill that deeply appealed to my early teen brain. We aren’t channeling the same type of energy or industrial sounds as The Faint (if anything the opposite) but when we were making Collection we often discussed dance hits from bands like New Order and The Bee Gees, and I think there’s some transference there for me in the urge to be playful through getting dancey and being a little dark.

Patio’s new album, Collection, is out now. It’s $10.99 on Bandcamp.

(Weekly Neil will return next week.)

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