Tag: Strengths

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From “Big Jim” to The Farmer’s Revenge, Alyssa Moore Finds Relief in Creation

CREDIT: Courtesy Alyssa Moore

I’ve been a musician for quite a while now,” says Alyssa Moore, with characteristic understatement. She’s lived and breathed music for as long as she can remember, and to this day it helps her process any upheaval in her life. As many of us have gone into semi-hibernation during the era of social distancing, the multi-instrumentalist has done just the opposite, creating art-pop and grunge-metal masterpieces into the wee hours with gear from her Move the Air recording studio.

“I put my studio on hiatus because I was about to move locations, almost at the exact same time that everything got locked down,” she tells me. “A CrossFit gym had just moved in next door, and all day long, I could hear them throwing weights against the wall. It was awful.” Accordingly, Moore was relying on her live sound work more than ever when shelter-in-place rules went into effect. “I remember my last show. We didn’t know if we could shake hands or how close to stand to each other. Every minute, another band would call to cancel a show. Things got really dire really quickly.”

Courtesy Alyssa Moore

Alyssa Moore

And yet, if anyone can handle dire circumstances, it’s Alyssa Moore. Three years ago, her former boyfriend, suffering from severe mental health issues, immolated himself outside of Murphy’s, and attempted to take the bar down with him, while she was running sound there. That was more than dire, but Moore’s natural response was to work through the trauma musically. That led to her finest work to date, a pair of closely related albums titled The Girl Became a Farmer (2017) and The Farmer’s Revenge (2019).

“It’s no secret that I was in a pretty violent relationship,” she reflects. “All my life, the way for me to express myself has always been through music. So it just made sense for me to write an entire album about what happened. I figured, ‘Maybe somebody else will relate to it, and feel better.’

“So, when I say, ‘The girl became a farmer,’ my idea was, ‘Okay, here’s this person who’s been put into a situation where they have to grow because there’s nothing else that you can do.’ I like the idea of farmers growing things and this girl being forced to grow from this situation. With the next album title, The Farmer’s Revenge, the farmer has now grown, and now she is a full, able person. And when I look back at my abuser, I do feel it’s a bit of a revenge just to be able to keep writing and recording songs and putting them out and expressing myself. Especially expressing myself — because in abusive relationships that’s one thing that’s really taken away from you.”

Meanwhile, she’s perfected another kind of revenge via a character she created last year, complete with mustache, who has the music community in stitches. “Big Jim” is the ultimate male explainer-in-chief. In Moore’s video vignettes, Big Jim takes it upon himself to enlighten his female audio engineer interlocutor. “I guess your boyfriend left his tool bag in here,” he says as he goes through the studio gear. Fervently holding a package of guitar strings, Big Jim exclaims, “You’ve gotta look at your guitar strings under a microscope, or else you’re gonna ruin the fretboard!”

“As a teenager, I wanted to be either a documentary maker or make ridiculous, dorky cartoons,” says Moore. “So I feel like Big Jim is both of those, in a way. I’m a woman in a field where only about, like, 3 percent of audio engineers are women. So it’s very easy for me to come up with material, just based on how I’m treated sometimes.”

Meanwhile, her home studio and one-woman band are always on call, until live sound becomes a thing once more. Her video and song, “The World is Listening,” written in response to a Donald Trump press conference early in quarantine, captures our sense of dislocation in driving ’80s New Wave rhythms. Look for an album of related material from Moore in the near future. “I want to do something, but I have to wait until I can figure out what our world looks like in a year. Usually when I do something, inspiration hits, and within a day, I’ve got to either do it or give up. ‘Cause I know that inspiration doesn’t stick around very long.”

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Spray Paint Live at Murphy’s

Austin, Texas noise rockers return to Memphis this Thursday night for a show with locals NOTS and Strengths. Spray Paint are no strangers to Memphis (or Murphy’s for that matter), having played here multiple times including their memorable performance at Gonerfest 11. The Austin band often gets compared to UK post-punk pioneers Wire, which is a fine comparison, even if Spray Paint’s drummer Chris Stephenson hits the skins way harder than Robert “Gotobed” Grey (Wire’s drummer) ever did. The band has been around for the past few years, cranking out records for labels like Upset! the Rhythm and 12XU (run by Matador Records founder Gerald Cosloy) before settling with Monofonus Press for their second record of 2015, Dopers. The album will be officially released on October 23rd.

Recorded in California by Chris Woodhouse (The Blind Shake, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall), Dopers features eight tracks of noise-infused punk, and the recently premiered second track “Signal Master” indicated that Dopers could be a sleeper for one of the last great punk albums released this year. Thursday night’s show is the start of an East Coast tour for Spray Paint in support of the new album, and hopefully the band will have copies of Dopers for sale at the show.

Also on the bill is NOTS, who are about to go on a relatively long East Coast tour. The band recently had their breakout album We Are Nots re-released in the UK by Heavenly Recordings, and they plan to head to England sometime before the end of the year. Opening up the show is Strengths, a new-ish noise-rock band featuring Alyssa Moore, who was recently voted best sound person in Memphis in the staff picks of our “Best Of” issue.

Spray Paint, NOTS, Strengths, Thursday, October 8th, at Murphy’s, 9 p.m. $8.

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Ten Strong Songs

CREDIT: John Pickle

Last January, the three members of the Strengths, vocalist Alyssa Moore, guitarist Will Forrest, and drummer Daniel Anderson, were living together in a condo off Sycamore View when a neighboring unit caught fire. Forrest recalls that, as the flames spread to their home, “The firemen had time to run in and get some stuff for us, so they asked what to grab. I said ‘Instruments! Anything that makes noise!'”

Soon, a pile of instruments grew in the yard: five or six guitars, drums, an autoharp, and a couple of accordions. Once the fire was contained, a paramedic came up to Forrest and said, “So, you play music?”

Forrest, his head spinning from having his house burn down, said, “Yeah.”

“What kind?” asked the paramedic.

“I don’t know,” Forrest said. “Rock?”

That sums up the Strength’s strength and the thorn in their collective side. “We can’t even describe our music when our house is burning down,” Anderson says.

Listening to their new self-released album Ten Strong Songs, it’s quickly apparent that no other band in Memphis sounds like the Strengths. They combine stunningly complex instrumental workouts with Moore’s dreamy vocals, turning from one genre to another on a dime.

“It’s great to be in Strengths because you can be pop punk for a few seconds, then metal for a few seconds, then whatever else,” Forrest says.

John Pickle

Strengths

He and Moore both come from musical backgrounds. “My dad’s been playing down on Beale Street for 30 years in blues and R&B bands,” Forrest says. “I grew up jamming with him and his friends. I had to learn how to make my guitar solos a little more atonal when I got to be a teenager.”

Moore is the daughter of Mike Moore, a veteran of the 1980s Antenna Club-based punk scene and co-founder of Truant Records. “I was friends with Noel Gallimore, who is Stan Gallimore’s (from the Grifters) son,” she recalls. “I was at their house once, and Tripp Lamkins was there with Stan. I picked up a guitar and started playing, and Tripp said ‘You’re not a guitarist, you’re a bassist.’ I had never even played bass before, but he said, ‘When you get older, you’ll realize you’re supposed to be a bass player.’ And he was right.”

Moore holds down the low end on Strengths’ technically challenging songs while singing. Her vocal melodies unify the quick-cut music on songs such as “Slugfest,” which veers between haymaker power chords and dreamy pop, while she coos “Nothing is cohesive.”

“My sister was pursuing opera for a long time,” Moore says. “She is just an amazing singer. When we were growing up, she would show me choir pieces she had, and I would sing the harmony. So I’ve been singing with other people since I was a little kid, and I’ve been playing the guitar since I was 8. I was always writing my own songs, not learning other people’s songs, so it just made sense for me to sing and play at the same time.”

“Just remembering these songs and trying to play them is hard enough,” says Forrest, “But trying to remember all of the lyrics, and singing, and all of the things that go along with singing …”

“It’s really impressive,” says Anderson.

The young trio has been playing together since high school at White Station, and they can finish each other’s sentences musically as well as in conversation. Most recently, they provided muscle for Whose Army?, making a name for themselves among the Midtown rock cognoscenti, even though they mostly played house shows. “I don’t think we ever played to more than 20 people,” Moore says.

But when that group dissolved, Moore stepped up as lead singer. “When I was little, I would listen to Hole and Nirvana. When we were in Whose Army?, people constantly compared me to Kim Deal, which I thought was goofy, since I was obviously ripping off Courtney Love.”

Their idiosyncratic sound evolved organically from constant exposure to Midtown Memphis punk. They played with other bands such as the venerable Adios Gringo, whose taste for complexity and uncompromising spirit were influential on the Strengths. “They’ve got a lot of weird time signatures,” says Forrest. “To me, it’s metal, but I don’t think you can call us metal. But I’ve always loved them because they’re so not boring.”

But once Ten Strong Songs drops, everyone will have a chance to decide for themselves what exactly the Strengths are.