Animal instincts

Back with a new album, Numbers have plenty to crow about.

By George Chen

CHECKING IN WITH Numbers should be a simple project, but somehow it feels bigger. It's like going in for a checkup, assessing where we stand at this particular juncture, both the audience and the band. It's become customary to conflate the rise of Numbers with the concurrent rise of San Francisco party rock, itself a bubble of chemically altered bad behavior and prankster merriment tied into a confluence of postbubble economics and shell-shocked alienation. Hell, I've made that leap of logic myself – Numbers were one of the first bands I interviewed in my semi-legit journalism infancy, prior to the release of Numbers Life (Tigerbeat6, 2002). To do what feels like a follow-up interview is weighted with extra meaning, as if our fates are somehow connected. Perhaps I am still semi-legit, but it is hard for a band three albums into their career to deny their legitimacy.

It might be this sifting through the recent past that leads drummer-vocalist Indra Dunis to announce, "We don't want to play 'disco punk' anymore."

The trio also concede that their song "The Party's Over" almost provided the title of their new album, before they opted for the less-of-a-downer We're Animals. That decision is understandable, in the way child actors grab controversial and image-eradicating parts to kill off the characterizations that become insufferable and that lock viewers into one idea of what they are capable of doing. "The Party's Over" is a childlike waltz, with guitarist Dave Broekema's standard buzz-saw sound replaced by a gentle baritone strum. It's less of a cop siren come to bust up the scene than a parental lullaby, with Dunis sounding out the word "changes" over and over. With Numbers, that means changes long in coming – changes in how they write songs and how they want to present themselves. Perhaps those changes are connected to that dreaded word maturity, which has become music shorthand for "failure to rock."

Numbers are savvy enough to avoid that VH1 fate in their bid for the M word. We're Animals is their first album for Kill Rock Stars, after two full-lengths for Tigerbeat6, and it signals a turning point in their "short-fast rules" aesthetic. Engineered at Tiny Telephone with longtime fan Alex Newport, who mixed their last album, In My Mind All the Time, this record drops much of their trademark sound. The trio of Wisconsin expats rose to acclaim in 2002 with their first album (in the interest of disclosure, I worked for their label at the time it came out). Deadpan songs like "Product Lust" and "Too Cool to Say Hi" placed dance impulses and the poetry of the mundane up against tense, agitated bursts of noise. The subsequent years led to an EP, Ee-Uh (Troubleman Unlimited), and the remix album Numbers Death (Tigerbeat6), along with copious tours of the United States and Europe.

"By the end of it, we were burned out," Dunis explains in the unicorn-festooned kitchen of the Mission District flat she shares with members of Burmese. "They were both intense tours physically, traveling long distances without much of a break. We just got exhausted and kind of overdid it. I think that we were ready for a change musically at that point. When we got back from the tour, we didn't really know what we were going to do. We were all thinking we should take a break and think about things." For Dunis, that included planning a move to New York with her Dynasty bandmate Jibz Cameron, though those plans fell through at the last minute. The downtime also saw keyboardist Eric Landmark pursuing his old-timey acoustic guitar act and touring the US. It was unclear exactly how long this break would last.

Landmark puts it more bluntly. "It was either do something new or break up," he says. "Solid Pleasure" is the first song Numbers wrote after the self-imposed sabbatical, and on it they slow down their frenetic tempos and add vocal harmonies. Broekema cites the influence of Brian Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) on their songwriting, while Dunis references the percussive repetition of Krautrock progenitors Can. Landmark credits Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi as a formative influence on his expansive keyboard parts. All of which appears to be at odds with the adjectives the band was once saddled with: spastic, dancey, and, uh, dance punk.

"I wasn't sure if people would be like, 'This is a totally different band,' because it feels really different," Dunis says. "I think we just all evolved and reached a limit with what we were doing. This is what we came up with. I don't think any of it was very conscious or thought-out."

Dunis's vocal leads, once robotic and abruptly yelped, have expanded in range. So has her lyrical content, though songs like "Fuck You Garage" maintain that classic Numbers agit-spazz buzz. A signal of this change in direction is the pretty and epic "Black Crow Heart of Gold," a song loaded with metaphor, according to Dunis. "There was a crow expert on the radio.... He was talking about how they were birds that were intelligent and they mated for life. Not only do they mate for life, but, unlike other birds and other animals, if another crow in their flock is sick, instead of abandoning it or trying to get away from it, they actually stay with it and try to help it get better, which is really unusual."

Landmark wrote a song about crows coming down with the West Nile virus, which plays less straight but ties in with the nature imagery of the album. Polaroids Dunis took from a moving tour van adorn the artwork inserts, and the cover drawing shows a crow silhouette against clouds. This may be a key to the more hopeful title of the album, which is an affirmation of animal instincts. It's different from the winking irony of an earlier song like "We Like Having Things," or the implication of naming your band Numbers. All that urban angst seems to have dissipated with a few desert daydreams and a peace that accompanies the acceptance of human flaws. The track that should be most self-explanatory, but that I am still reluctant to prod Dunis about, is "I Love You till I Don't." The title is either superficially sad or a threat, but it explains simply a quandary that most songwriters trip over forever. The thesis that Numbers have matured, whether they intended to or not, is proved by the couplet "It didn't work out / And it's nobody's fault."

Rather than nitpicking about a failure to encapsulate the thrill of a live experience, as I had with past Numbers records, I find myself thinking about We're Animals as an entity. Dunis asserts that the lesson of "Black Crow Heart of Gold" is that "crows are sort of a misunderstood bird – people think of them as pests or representing some kind of evilness." I think about extending this lesson to my process of thinking about Numbers. Our need to turn animals or bands into symbols or scapegoats may be innate, but it doesn't leave much room for them to be what they actually are, or what they can become. Who are we to stomp on evolution?

Numbers play with Limited Express (Has Gone?), Death Sentence: Panda!, and Remember the Maine Thurs/8, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8. All ages. (415) 621-4455.