Can punk rock have a jazzbo's sense of tempo and tune?
by Mike Gibson
It's mid-afternoon, the day after a chaos-ridden nine-band punkfest at McGhee's Irish Pub on Cumberland Avenue, and Patrick Mitchell is splayed across a buddy's couch, still bleary-eyed, vertiginous, palpably hung over. The drummer's three-piece outfit the Infuktionz was planted steadfastly in the thick of the mosh; their 10-song, 20-minute buzzsaw of a set kicked up more than its rightful share of general wanton ruckus, leaving a handful of multiply-pierced and mohawked patrons rolling in the well-trodden muck of a beer-sloshed, ash-stained floor.
"We judge a show by how many times the mic stand gets knocked over," says Mitchell, chuckling in the midst of a groan. "Five or more is a good night, and last night we had at least 10. We've got a lot of drunk friends who like to go crazy and flail around. That can be a lot of fun for us sometimes, but it can also cause problems for other people who want to enjoy the show."
It's easy to see why the Infuktionz inspire such raucous response; their particular metal-inflected species of roughhouse punk is bracing, noisome, stirringly visceral. But lest anyone think the band proffers little more than three chords and a cloud of dust, know theirs is a sound that's also marked by structural complexity, a sort of primitive jazzbo's sense of tempo and tune.
"We're trying to do something different, as ridiculous as that may seem," explains guitarist Ian Lawrence, collapsed in an easy chair adjacent to his afflicted 'mate. "I'll try to write a song by making up my own chords. It usually doesn't work out too well, but it sure gives us a different sound."
"None of us have any formal musical training," says Mitchell. "That gives us the liberty to make a lot of awful noises."
The Infuktionz made their formative utterances about two years ago, founded by Mitchell and bassist Forrest McCorkle, late of well-traveled local punk rockers American Trust. After a string of ill-fated partnerships with other guitarists and singers, the duo was joined last year by Lawrence, who made his bones with implosive Knoxville foursome the Malignmen.
Their collaboration is at once primal and complex, fueled by an appreciation for early hardcore and "cheesy, 1980s-era thrash," but more akin to the searching rumble of innovative late-era punk. Mitchell cites the '90s Southwestern hardcore scene, and reels off names like Logical Nonsense and Little Rock, Ark., combo Econo-Christ.
"We have a punk-rock mentality, but I don't think we're a typical three-chord band," says Mitchell. "We'll take a six-minute metal song, condense it to two minutes and play it twice as fast, with lots of time changes and grinding breakdowns."
Adds Lawrence, more succinctly, "We don't like to remain too formulaic."
All of which makes for some strange, damn-near-uncomfortable dichotomies. The Infuktionz are an engaging, even thoughtful bunch, making loud and raw but compositionally unconventional music that often inspires the basest displays of punk attitude and raunch. (On the previous evening, one besotted reveler capped his night by hurling a bar stool into the middle of Cumberland Avenue.) According to Lawrence, those seeming contradictions owe much to punk's less-than-comfortable fit in bucolic Knoxville, Tenn.
"It's not difficult to play and have a fan base, but it gets hard after a while to find places to play," says Lawrence. "Kids here like to get pretty rowdy, which isn't the case in a lot of other cities I've played. Club-owners don't tend to like it when the cops come out to your show."
Undaunted, the Infuktionz maintain that they're in for the long haul, eager to foist their discordant rattle on new ears in far-flung towns. In the meantime, their immediate plans are appropriately punk-rock sketchy, other than expanding on their still-limited repertoire of fewer than a dozen songs.
"We might add a singer," says Lawrence, who currently splits sparse vocal chores with McCorkle. "But we're not really looking that hard. As long as we're playing, and as long we're doing something a little different, I think we'll be all right."
May 18, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 20
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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