Q&A: Spiro Agnew

 

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San Francisco isn’t known as fertile ground for an up-and-coming electronica act. Spiro Agnew is trying to change that perception. Formed as the creative brainchild of Alex Musto, the band recently released its first LP, OH What Model Citizens We Be in August. Best described as a fusion between the fuzz guitar of The Jesus and Mary Chain and the synth-pop of New Order, Spiro Agnew is an exploration of noise and feedback heavy music grounded with a foundation in electronica. Recently, Bestnewbands.com caught up with Musto to discuss how he came up with the project’s name, the songwriting process and his plans for the remainder of 2010.

DK: What inspired you to name the band after the disgraced Vice President? Is it to honor or poke fun?

Alex Musto: Well it’s certainly not to honor Spiro Agnew.  It more or less began with his name always having stuck out as sounding like the name of a band.  I used to mess around with some friends in college making very Metal Machine Music-like noise (to reference your later question), a pure atonal mess that surely drove our neighbors insane, and Spiro Agnew was one of the names we referred to ourselves as.  I think I returned to it for this project as I realized as I was writing this album how political it was becoming.  I tend to work out anxieties in songs, and a lot of that seemed to be coming out of these songs were anxieties about how divisive the political arena is at present. Considering his role as one of the most insidious and divisive political figures in American history (the Sarah Palin of the 60s/70s) it seemed to fit as a band name.  But then also, his name really does sound like it should be a band.

DK: How does the typical Spiro Agnew song come together?

AM: Not a very flattering process.  Generally it involves me sitting with a beer and a pack of cigarettes in my under ware banging on a guitar until something comes out.  I’ve since, however, quit smoking so we’ll see if this process cleans itself up a bit more as I work on the next album.

 

DK: What are the band’s expectations for the album and how does the rest of 2010 shaping up?

AM: Well we’ve got a few out of town tour dates a head of us (DC and New York next week) as well as continuing to play regularly around San Francisco.  As far as our expectations for the album of concerned, of course we’d love for it to be huge sing to a label quit the day job play around world yada, yada pie in the sky.  You’ve got to manage your expectations so at the very least I’ll settle for some people liking the music.  That’s not going to stop us from shooting at the moon though.

 

DK: With a self-described sound of ‘exploration of noise and feedback-heavy music’ are you guys closer to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or New Order?

AM: I’d think we’re somewhere in the middle, though realistically probably closer to the New Order end. There is plenty to peek the interest of the ears of someone who is into noise music but it’s not overbearing and dogmatic in the way Metal Machine Music or a band like Lightning Bolt can seem.

With an original sound that fuses two completely different styles of electronica, it should be interesting to see how Spiro Agnew develops on it’s second album. But for now, tour dates in some prominent cities should do this band wonders and gain them a new audience, which Musto said, is the name of the game.