www.tvtorso.com

TV Torso is a musical band from Texas with an affinity for skewed pop, repetition, skeletal guitar music, minimalism, tuning drum sets, and recording guitar direct. Matt Oliver and Jordan Johns formed the group in 2008. The two have been playing music together since 2002, when Johns was still in high school and Oliver was blowing his UT tuition on a degree in creative expository writing and Japanese. James Rhea, born in Saudi Arabia, current resident of central Texas, plays the bass guitar.

While early press on the group has been positive, it has tended to fixate on both Oliver and Johns’ previous stint in Sound Team, the avant-pop outfit which after 5 years of self-releasing cassettes, 7-inches, EPs and LPs, and relentless DIY touring, found itself in the role of Austin’s next-big-imploding-major-label-thing. That group fell victim to all of the inevitables associated with such a role and disbanded in 2007.

In 2009 and 2010 the band released two seven inches and completed several short U.S. tours that have brought them as far East as New York and as far West as Portland, Oregon. During this time, helpful references have included the Soft Machine, the Attractions, Brinsley Schwarz, Faust, and, weirdly enough, Paul McCartney.

Now, with the release of Status Quo Vadis, a 6-song, vinyl-only, 12” mini-LP, the band may be judged on its own merits and shortcomings. The songs were lovingly produced and recorded by Matt Oliver and Stuart Sikes (White Stripes, Cat Power, Loretta Lynn) at the band’s studio in Austin and mixed at Jim Eno’s Public Hi-Fi studios. As on the group’s earlier output, the only recording formats used were 2-inch tape, ½-inch tape, and, in some cases, cassette tape.

Though the sessions generally went well, there was one major mishap at the editing stage, when Oliver was using a razor blade and splicing tape, assembling the finalized mixes onto a single reel of tape to be sent to the mastering plant.

Oliver: “We weren’t really into the way the song Elegy was ending, ‘cause when we were playing it we were making it up and didn’t know how it should end, and on the take we just kind of fell off into nothing. So we’d decided to just drop in a couple of big whacks on a floor tom and that would be that.”

Unfortunately, the machine being used for this purpose begins erasing before it begins recording, a fact that was apparent too late to Oliver. “I was standing out in the live room holding a drum stick and I had the drum all mic-ed and ready to go, but as soon as he hit Record I knew we were kind of screwed. The ½-inch machine started recording too early and cut off a few bars that I couldn’t get back unless I re-mixed the entire song.”

So instead of attempting to recreate the now-erased material from the original multitrack tapes, Oliver simply decided to cut off even more of the song using a razor. “It sounds really fucked up now, but I like it.” The aforementioned whack on the floor tom can now be heard on the record in the form of a lock groove at the end of Side B.

Status Quo Vadis presents a wide variety of ideas and shows focus; the songs on the record maintain continuity as a suite of tunes about dissipation, displacement, regret, acceptance, fear, isolation, action, passivity, neurosis, love, and death. The instrumentation largely consists of a bass, a drumkit, guitar and voice, with dashes of keyboard and tape experiments thrown in.

And while still lyrically eccentric, Oliver’s writing has veered a step further away from the oblique into something a bit more emotionally direct. Much of that change and growth could be attributed to being carried through the ups and downs and surprises and pitfalls of daily life. But the imminent arrival and birth of Oliver’s daughter has clearly heralded a change as well.

In the band’s live performances a warbly, scavenged tape echo sees use as a guitar and vocal treatment and the arrangements are generally spare, though occasionally an electric piano or an old synthesizer might be carried onto the stage.