Fever Pitch
The Fever's latest, In the City of Sleep is a demented funhouse of a recording, a 60-minute ride through the psyche's dark recesses. It all starts with vocalist Geremy Jasper's cover art, a febrile collage that recalls Hannah Hoch's disembodied photomontages of the '20s. But that's nothing compared to the music inside, which delivers some of the most unsettling songs you're likely to hear this year. But at the same time they're strangely melodic, insinuating themselves to lodge under the skin.
"This is the kind of record that we always wanted to make," explains Jasper, "but it takes a while to figure out how to actually do that. A lot of trial and error-like juggling fire."
Jasper's haunting lyrics update classic blues tropes (his two favorite singers are Howlin' Wolf and Roy Orbison) with a postmillennial sense of paranoia: "I asked my baby for a glass of water, she brought me gasoline." The long insomniac walks he took through industrial Brooklyn became his source of inspiration.
"I was living alone during that time and my girlfriend was away. I have really bad sleeping habits, so a lot of that stuff was written while just kind of wandering late into the night around my neighborhood. The mind goes to strange places."
Jasper's cohorts-guitarist Keith Stapleton, new member J. Ruggiero and percussionist Achilles Tzoulafis-shared his liminal sense of exploration, finding its aural equivalent in the recording's adventurous sound.
"Achilles is the son of a mechanic, and he's a real hands-on kind of guy. He would bring in all kinds of different things to hit with sticks or with pipes-stuff he would find in his garage."
All in all, it's a far cry from the octane-fueled retro punk of the band's previous recording, 2004's Red Bedroom-not to mention Jasper's early performances.
"I started as a little kid doing Michael Jackson at the talent show. It was supposed to be the moonwalk, but it was kind of like walking on broken glass."
Clearly, The Fever has done some growing up.