Like most toddlers, Grant Mullen wanted to fly like Superman. He was at his friend Henry LaVallee’s house, and his host had a brilliant idea: if Mullen wrapped the drawstring from the blinds around his neck and jumped, it would look like he was flying with a cape. By the time LaVallee’s mom discovered them, Mullen’s face was purple.
“He was almost dead,” Henry LaVallee recalled. “I was just watching him and we were both laughing. Like — really weird thing if you’re a parent to walk in on and see that.”
Despite the near-death experience, the preschool-partners-in-crime now share an apartment in Seattle and, with bassist Gianni Aiello, they are Naked Giants, a rising power trio whose debut album, Sluff, is out now on New West Records. They will also join Car Seat Headrest on a world tour as both openers and as auxiliary members of a seven-piece Car Seat Headrest in support of the newly revamped Twin Fantasy.
Following the blinds incident, though not directly because of it, Mullen and LaVallee drifted apart as friends until high school. They reconnected at a family party and learned that they both played drums. Mullen was beginning to play the guitar and his dad suggested they jam together. They then attended rock camps at Seattle’s Experience Music Project (currently the Museum of Popular Culture), and the exposure to live performance forever reordered LaVallee’s list of favorite things.
“I had a girlfriend at the time and I was like, ‘Man, playing drums right now is way better than sex. I would love to get paid to do this.’”
“Wait — to do sex or music?” Mullen asked.
LaVallee brushed off the question after a moment’s hesitation. “Not everybody can experience what that feels like. But when you do, it’s like, man — I don’t want to lose that.”
Perhaps that explains why LaVallee rarely makes it through a whole set without leaping out from behind his drumset, screaming and headbanging his way offstage during eight bar breaks, only to punctuate the return to his throne by pounding the crash cymbals with his full bodyweight. Mullen and Aiello are equally erratic. With sweaty locks of strawberry blond hair dangling in front of his eyes, Mullen squeezes blistering miniature guitar fills into spaces where most guitarists would simply strum an extra power chord. Whether hopping on one foot, or twirling with his bass behind his head, Aiello resembles what a young Albert Einstein might look like if he stuck his tongue in an electrical socket and discovered that the meaning of life was slapping melodic bass runs like a champ.
At a June 2017 triple bill concert with Ron Gallo and White Reaper in Portland, Oregon, the floor was empty when Naked Giants took the stage. Before they’d hit the chorus of the opening song, “Slide,” the dancefloor was packed. After their set, as is common after Naked Giants performances, the line to the bathroom was buzzing with two questions: 1) “What just happened?” 2) “Who the fuck was that?”
The one constant between Gianni Aiello’s on and offstage personas is his flare for bright clothing. When we met in Seattle, he was wearing an obscenely yellow rain slicker, a split-down-the-middle blue and yellow shirt and olive-green pants with calf-high orange and black checkered socks peeking out.
He was examining the glass case items at the Capitol Hill Goodwill while Miley Cyrus’s “Party In The USA” played. “A watch is such an adult purchase,” he said before choosing the most childish timepiece in the store — a $4 cat watch with a band that barely fit his wrist. He then ventured to the clothing racks and was drawn to the brightest striped shirts.
“Are you looking for stage clothes, street clothes, or is there a difference?” I asked.
“I wear what’s comfortable on stage so they usually end up being the same thing,” he said.
In contrast to his boisterous stage presence, Aiello is a reserved and thoughtful person. While looking at a miniature briefcase, he tipped an adjacent picture frame off its base. He tried to catch it, but the glass shattered on the ground. “I subscribe to the ‘you break it, you buy it’ policy,” he said. “I should probably go tell someone about that.” The employee didn’t charge him for the frame and thanked him for admitting there was broken glass in the store. Most people don’t. “So you’re saying people just leave broken glass on the floor and people could step in it?” She nodded. “That’s horrifying,” he said.
Aiello lives in Seattle’s University District in a seven-bedroom, one-bathroom house with eight residents. They call it the Spacebar, and it’s where Naked Giants practices most days. The interior of the house looks like it’s recovering from a hangover, which makes sense since most of the decorations became permanent after being hung for birthday parties months ago. With gold streamers dangling in doorways, pages torn from Where’s Waldo books hung as kitchen wallpaper and audio and art equipment sprawled across the creaky wooden floorboards, it’s the type of house where creativity exudes from the walls if you know how to harness it; it’s also the type of house that would drive an orderly person insane.
Henry LaVallee had an ecstatic grin plastered on his face as he slammed the Spacebar’s kitchen door behind him. He skipped greetings and darted for the open seat next to Aiello. He immediately pulled out his laptop and a small tower of blank CDs. It was 8:15 p.m. He had to leave in 45 minutes, and he had work to do. The girl he has been in love with since 2013 recently texted him that she is back in Washington. Their second-chance romance was rekindled when she asked if he was seeing anybody. “I said, ‘I haven’t met anyone who made me feel like you do,’” Lavallee explained. “And she said, ‘That’s funny. I feel the same way.’”
LaVallee had biked over after giving lessons at the School of Rock. With sweat slowly dripping down his face, he was furiously putting the finishing touches on a homemade mixtape of love songs he has written since high school. Now he and Aiello, who recorded and played bass on the songs, were huddled over the computer screen, overseeing the final tracklist while LaVallee drew the cover art.
I asked LaValle if he wrote all the songs specifically for her. “Nah,” he said. “This one I wrote when I was super high.” He played a bright, mid-tempo, two-chord song called “Blind.” “When it comes to the songs I write, they’re more Taylor Swift, if you will. I kinda save those for my mixtapes.”
“Henry writes really wonderful pop songs,” Aiello said. “Like, outstanding.” Although it will likely never make an album, “Blind” showed the poppier edge of Naked Giants, which is apparent on Sluff songs like “Everybody Thinks They Know (But No One Really Knows)” and the title track.
Before Aiello joined the group, he was in a synth-pop band called Laser Fox. Laser Fox and Naked Giants — just Mullen and LaVallee at the time — first shared a bill in June 2014. When Laser Fox’s drummer moved to Portland, LaVallee filled in for a few practices, but his tenure was short lived. “I couldn’t keep time well enough,” he said. “Which is fine because that’s not what I was about.”
“You’re a drummer who doesn’t keep time?” I asked.
“I’m a drummer who feels. But now I feel time because I practice with a metronome,” he said with a laugh. After joining Laser Fox didn’t work out, Mullen and LaVallee asked Aiello to join Naked Giants to help round out their sound. “Long story short, I thought this bassist could help me keep time [in Naked Giants]. ”
At this point Grant Mullen walked into the kitchen and started massaging LaVallee’s shoulders with punishing strength. LaVallee had been teaching the Stranger Things soundtrack to his students at the School of Rock for the previous three hours, so he welcomed the shoulder rub. “Maybe we should do this where I’m not actually in the band,” Mullen teased.
“You’re just the masseuse,” LaVallee said, contemplating the idea. “The harsh masseuse.”
When the three bandmates are together, their friendship and mutual respect shines. They view their roles as equal, as they share songwriting, press and recording responsibilities. They say each person’s strengths balance out the others’ weaknesses, forming a triad.
“It’s like Rush,” Aiello said. “You can’t have Rush with three Neil Pearts. That’s ridiculous.”
As a senior in high school, LaVallee planned to attend Western Washington University. But after his dad suffered a stroke, he decided to stay in Seattle, where Mullen and Aiello would attend the University of Washington. They both dropped out at age 20. Aiello was studying biochemistry, but he realized his skills would be put to best use as a musician. “Not everyone has to learn in a classroom by being talked at.”
As Mullen dug his thumbs deeper into LaVallee’s shoulders, he explained how most of the band’s favorite compositions are the ones that include parts from each member. “Rarely do I have a fully formed song,” Mullen said of presenting song ideas. “Because then we all get to put our own little fairy dust on it. And it’s special when a Henry part comes in, and it works with a riff I wrote and Gianni has another part.”
On Sluff’s “Dat Boi,” they realized that three separate song ideas could be merged into one. Mullen contributed the intro, Aiello the verse and LaVallee the “whoa-o-o-o” chorus. It’s a disjointed departure from their typical sound but it’s what they call a true “Naked Giants Trifecta.” “That song doesn’t feel like it really matches our sound because it’s kind of all over the place, Aiello said. “But in a weird ironic way, it’s also the most Naked Giants song since it’s all three of us.”
With the cover to his mixtape drawn, LaVallee jumped up and attempted to print the lyrics. “I can’t get the printer to work,” he said at 8:58 p.m. He dashed for the door with that same grin still on his face. “I’ll just email her. Wish me luck.”
In 2015, Naked Giants released the six-song R.I.P. EP. “We’d been playing those songs for so long we wanted to lay them to rest,” Mullen said, explaining the title. Of the six songs, only “Ya Ya” and “Twist” come close to capturing the infectious energy of their performances. The problem with Naked Giants recordings is that the band sounds restrained in the confines of a recording studio. Without the visual aid of the neon socks, headbanging and twisting, the R.I.P. EP songs sound like exactly what they were at the time — a young band in its early stages searching for something to set them apart in an overcrowded pool of indie bands.
“I don’t think you should ever be comfortable with exposing yourself,” Aiello said. “It would be worse if we were completely satisfied with [Sluff].”
Only “Easy Eating” made the jump from R.I.P. to their full-length debut, Sluff, and it’s the album’s only track that feels like a backward progression. Mullen’s vocals are noticeably less steady than on the original recording, and it sounds like a hollow shell of the R.I.P. EP version. They said they’ve moved away from playing the song live because it was their first popular song, and they wanted to make room for their more ambitious material, but it was tacked onto the end anyway.
Naked Giants quickly learned that not everything goes according to plan when recording. Now signed to New West Records, they entered with a pre-determined 12 song tracklist, but they were told that bands rarely have complete control over the final order. The band was scheduled to record in Los Angeles with Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith) but he cancelled roughly a week before the sessions. They instead stayed in Seattle to work with Steve Fisk (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Car Seat Headrest) who they said understood the band musically and as people.
“[Fisk] has a really good ear for pop music. Not pop in the true pop term, but pop as in what people will like,” Mullen said. “But he’s also really experimental and weird. So I think that was a really good mix for the album.”
Like many debut records, Sluff is existentially complicated in the sense that the band is not sure if it should exist. In one sense, they are thrilled to release their debut album, but with at least two future ambitious concept albums occupying their minds, they feel Sluff is already a product of the past. Aiello said he’s not entirely comfortable with Sluff, but he thinks that’s a positive feeling as an artist.
“I don’t think you should ever be comfortable with exposing yourself,” he said. “It would be worse if we were completely satisfied with it.”
The discomfort is likely due to the three year span between the R.I.P. EP and Sluff in which the band expanded its musical palate. Aiello’s New Year’s Resolution for 2018 is to listen to a new album every day. Although this resolution began after Sluff was recorded, he feels the band’s discovery of DIY punk and new wave music has influenced their forthcoming material. “Maybe that’s where Sluff doesn’t feel as genuine, because that was before that happened,” he said. “Since then our writing has changed to reflect that.”
Sluff bursts out of the gates with Aiello’s wobbly, pitch-shifted bass line on “Dead Alien” before rocketing into a power-chord-fueled mantra-like sing along of “I can make this song if I want to / You can sing along if you want to / Staying up all night to feel alright yeah, oh yeah / I might be dead or alien.” As they contemplate their sanity, the bridge presents the song’s biggest question: “Am I losing my head / Or am I just getting high?”
Throughout the album Mullen and Aiello’s voices intertwine, break and harmonize with the music. The album thrives on its collection of old-fashioned throwaway rock lyrics that champion feeling over meaning. “Slide” may contain the best such lyric with, “You’ve been dead / In your head / You’ve been wrong / You have lied / Underfed in your bed / You’re still constantly vivid as fuck.” Much like Aiello says of the album title, it means everything and nothing at once.
The album reaches its peak with the six-and-a-half minute “TV.” “If you really want to be on TV,” they howl in off-kilter unison, “You gotta die!” It’s a less-than-romantic view of how celebrity culture can evolve into a soul-sucking desire, but as the song flies through tempo changes and sloppy breakdown jams, it allows the listener to forget that we once had to actually go down to the crossroads to sell our souls; we can now make the exchange from the comfort of our living rooms.
Naked Giants are strongest when at its loudest and loosest, but “Goldfish I,” “Slowdance II” and “Shredded Again” display the band’s versatility. “Shredded Again” ends the album on a note reminiscent of what might happen if you put The Kinks around a campfire with an acoustic guitar, a drum machine and a pound of weed. All three Giants trade verses, growing more abstract as the song breezes by: “I am an overgrown cell phone / I get my ego on the run / I only donate for myself now / I’ve been living in two places at once.” Aiello sings about exchanging emails with his dead mother. She responds at once.
Have they lost their heads, or are they just getting high?
Sluff begins with this question, but does the answer really matter? At its core, Sluff is a straightforward rock ’n’ roll album that hints at greater things to come. For a genre that has reportedly been dead for most of its life span, it would be too easy to call Naked Giants the next best thing in rock — what they do next is what’s going to matter. What they are now is a great live band on the precipice of becoming a Great Band. But, undoubtedly, they have a future worth following.
As long as they don’t get too high.
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