beatlanta.com
INTERVIEW + STREAM :: new album “Makeout Mountain” from Atlanta/L.A. band lliterates + info on their ALBUM RELEASE PARTY Fri 9.7.18
about the album from the band: “Makeout Mountain is a 12-track collection that traverses the spectrum from glittery, acid-drenched bubblegum love ballads to whimsical blasts of frantic, over-driven rock & roll, pushed even further into the Twilight Zone by frontman Steve Albertson’s theatrically snotty vocals. Lyrically, the album tackles everything from mad preacher ponzi schemes & elder gods, to the death of Albertson’s lifelong friend Meghan Galbraith (of Chicago queer-punk band 8 Inch Betsy) & the police brutality epidemic in modern America.”
Stream Select tracks from “Makeout Mountain” below. Illiterates on FaCEBoOk
illiterates – Photo by Raymond McCrea Jones.
==THE INTERVIEW==
B: Your bio mentions you’re based out of Los Angeles and Atlanta – what is that scenario? How does that impact your writing process?
Steve Albertson: LaBate and I live in Los Angeles now, and Jesse and Ryan are still in Atlanta. Living in two different cities does make it harder, but we make time. When we write, we don’t come in with parts or even ideas. We all write together and quickly. Half of this album was written during a booze-filled weekend on an alpaca farm, and it was recorded during a week long marathon with producer/engineer Matt McCalvin. He was really instrumental in getting this really cool psych-punk sound we were going for.
Steve LaBate: Living in cities 2,000 miles apart means that every time we see each other, it’s a vacation for somebody.
B: What do you want fans to know about your debut release “Makeout Mountain”?
Albertson: That this is also the first release from our new label Baby Robot Records. We have vinyl pressed and amazing album art from Oh! Oozi! (A.K.A. Jacob Elijah) who was my partner in our comic book Ghost Spy (Image Comics), and he did all the art for both albums by my old band Dr. Killbot. He really came through in his depiction of that ’50s trope of a bluff where the teenagers go to make out, but with a Cronenbergian weirdness that’s completely in line with his GRLZ series of art books at puppygrenade.com. I’ve known Oh! Oozi for a long time. We’ve shared a lot of life-changing moments together… from getting the shit beat out of me by a gang of thugs in high school to skating downtown Chicago at 3am while avoiding pimps and their very weird prostitutes. I’m glad he was able to work on the project, because if you don’t have good friends, then what do ya got?
LaBate: Amen, brother. Also, if you don’t like the song you’re listening to, just wait about a minute and 30 seconds, and there will be another song — 12 in all clocking in at 24 total minutes, which allowed us to cut the 12″ vinyl to run at 45rpm. Ladies and gentlemen, we are breaking land speed records.
B: What is your favorite track from the album? Why?
Albertson: I’m pretty partial to “Owl Commander” because it’s about one of my best friends who passed away a couple years ago. Meghan Galbraith from the band 8 Inch Betsy. She was one of the coolest people. You can learn all about her here.
LaBate: For me, it’s either “White Privilege” or “Makeout Mountain,” for completely different reasons. The former channels a whole lot of rage about how fucked-up institutional racism leads to police murdering black people in the streets and getting away with it, and how as white people we live with a huge amount of privilege, especially the privilege of being able to walk the streets free from the fear of being executed on the spot without a judge, jury or due process—sometimes for suspicion of a misdemeanor, sometimes for nothing at all. “Makeout Mountain,” on the other hand, is a nostalgic ballad about acid and teenage love & friendship.
B: Have you ever lived in a town that had a ‘makeout mountain’? I’ve always wondered if they exist in real life.
Albertson: I live in L.A. now, so yeah—Makeout Mountains everywhere you look. Growing up in Waukegan, Ill., we had all these secret spots for making out and getting lit. Everyone had a secret spot like that, right?
Steve: Yep. I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, and while we didn’t have a makeout mountain, we had abandoned cul de sacs, small patches of trees that hadn’t yet been clear-cut, and also next to the dumpster behind the dollar movie theater.
B: Describe your music in 3 words.
Albertson: Fast! Fun! FinalFantasyTactics!
LaBate: Loud, fast, drunk
B: What do you want folks to know about your album release show on Sept 7th? When folks leave the show what do you hope they will be thinking?
Albertson: This is our first show in Atlanta since we moved to Los Angeles, so it’ll be a bit of a homecoming for us. I want people to leave excited to listen to this album and pumped up for the next one!
LaBate: We are also super psyched to play with our friends The Vaginas, Paralyzer and Sex Farm, all rad bands in their own right. And we’re looking forward to the after-party at Easy Adam’s house. He’s the lead singer of The Vaginas, and he has a shirt that says so in case you forget. Just look at that hammerhead. Full-blown.
B: Who is an up and coming Los Angeles band or artist Atlanta music fans should be aware of?
Albertson: The Manx are the Best! Also, LaBate and I have another project we just started called SP’s. We just recorded some tracks so we’ll be releasing music soon
LaBate: I’ve got another project in L.A. now called Coma Girls, which was actually started back in Atlanta by Chris Spino, but is now a whole new lineup. I’m probably forgetting a bunch, but for L.A. bands I also love Cheap Tissue, Tenement Rats, Bedouine, The Blank Tapes, Veronica Bianqui, The Memories, Peach Kelli Pop, Death Valley Girls, Mara Connor, Lauren Lakis, R, Finn, The Abigails, Sir Canyon, Charlie Overbey & the Broken Arrows, GospelbeacH, Mystic Braves, Wyatt Blair, Anna Ash, and Cigarette Bums
B: What about an Atlanta band or artist for Los Angeles fans?
Albertson: The lyrics of our song “Horton Heats a Who” contain a who’s who of our friends from the Atlanta & Athens scenes. Some of these bands have morphed, changed or broken up since I wrote the song, but all of their music is rad…
The Wild
The Rock*A*Teens
Starbenders
Saint Pé (Black Lips)
Monsoon
Lowbanks
Concord America
Shepherds
Rrest
Powder Room
Sydney Eloise & the Palms
Spirits and the Melchizedek Children
Ruby Velle & the Soulphonics
Seagulls
Shehehe
Free Associates
Grand Vapids
The Head
Zoners
Small Reactions
Powerkompany
Hello Ocho
Jeffrey Butzer
Muuy Biien
Sailing to Denver
Chief Scout
A Drug Called Tradition
Cousin Dan
Hello Cobra
Ben Trickey
Book Club
Hank & Cupcakes
Sara Rachele
Jeremy Ray
The Vaginas
Tracer Metula
LaBate: What Albertson said. And Gringo Star.
B: What are your thoughts on skinny jeans?
Albertson: Makes it harder to fight ninjas.
LaBate: Once I accidentally tried on a pair at an Urban Outfitters on Ponce. Got stuck in the dressing room for 20 minutes. Just couldn’t get ’em off. Thought for a minute I was gonna have to crawl out into the store and beg the girl at the register to cut them off of me, but finally I was able to dislocate my leg at the hip and peel them off.
B: Your old band Sex BBQ once played a BeAtlanta house show on 4/20/13 – remember that? Thats it.
Albertson: Hell yeah! It was a lot of fun and chaos. I got wasted in the backyard with the other bands around the fire. On a really sad note, SEX BBQ’s drummer Steve Brown passed away last week. It’s been a really hard time for all of us. This show is going to be dedicated to him, and if anyone feels like contributing to his memorial fund, it would really help his family… https://www.gofundme.com/steve-brown-memorial-fund
LaBate: That was a hell of a party. More than anything, I remember being crammed in a tiny, hot sweaty room watching Detroit Mutant Radio. Also I remember being really stoned and zoning out on the hamburger buns on the folding table out back for an uncomfortably long time. Fuck, though… Steve Brown. Sometimes you don’t know how much you’ll miss someone until they’re gone. Something most people probably don’t know—Steve Brown was not only the best drummer in SEX BBQ, he was the best bassist and guitar player, too. I was looking back through his Facebook feed when I found out he was gone, and I stumbled on this video of him with like a dozen tiny kittens crawling all over him. That’s him right there—gruff exterior, but kind and gentle as they come. All of us already miss the hell out of him.
B: Please write the ultimate interview question for your band and then answer it.
Albertson: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?
LaBate: 42
Press Release: “Loitering at the unholy junction of Southern Gothic, Jay Reatard’s Lost Sounds and Dungeons & Dragons, you’ll find scuzzy, lo-fi psych punks illiterates. Drawing inspiration from classic garage, Richard Hell, Devo-style New Wave, ’90s skate punk and more, the tightknit quartet constructs unique sonic worlds, luring listeners in with refreshing weirdness even as it proceeds to violently assault their eardrums. The band’s new debut, Makeout Mountain (out Sept. 7 on Baby Robot Records), traverses the spectrum from glittery, acid-drenched bubblegum love ballads to whimsical blasts of frantic, overdriven rock & roll, pushed even further into the Twilight Zone by frontman Steve Albertson’s theatrically snotty vocals.
Albertson’s lyrics tend toward the bizarre and seamy, whether he’s drawing from his many non-musical interests (horror films, role-playing games, the occult), pop culture or personal experience. The idea for Makeout Mountain’s “Xmas Carols in the Psych Ward” began with a trip illiterates bassist Jesse Cole took over the holidays to visit his father, whose worsening dementia had landed him in a psychiatric hospital. Once there, he and Jesse entertained the ward’s residents with a spontaneous set of Christmas songs. In Albertson’s hands, though, “Xmas Carols” drifted quickly into a strange alternate reality. “Somehow,” he says, “it morphed from this story about Jesse and his dad into this swindling mad-preacher touring psych wards and singing songs to the residents as part of some shady scheme.”
While illiterates are attracted to dark subject matter and tend to approach things from a (charmingly) warped point of view, there’s still a streak of sincerity running through their music—something that sets them apart from their garage-punk contemporaries. Makeout Mountain opens with “White Privilege” the band’s jarring response to the ongoing epidemic of black Americans being murdered by police. “At the time we wrote ‘White Privilege,’ I’d been going out to support a lot of Black Lives Matter marches,” illiterates guitarist Steve LaBate says. “It seemed like every week there was a new incident on video where cops were either harassing, profiling or straight up killing black men, women and children. I was talking about it with the band, and we were all reeling from it. With ‘White Privilege,’ we wanted to memorialize people like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice, who were unjustly murdered, but also to accept responsibility for being part of an oppressive culture of that systematically denies people of color the most basic human rights.”
The anthemic Stax-meets-Sex Pistols riff rocker “Owl Commander” is another of the record’s more thoughtful, heartfelt tracks. Dedicated to the memory of Meghan Galbraith, a member of Chicago queercore band 8 Inch Betsy and a lifelong friend of Albertson’s, it celebrates her kindness, sense of humor and ability to inspire others. The video for the song—which follows a young girl as she discovers her passion for rock & roll—was directed by filmmaker and New York Times photographer Raymond McCrea Jones.
Musically, illiterates call on influences from every reckless corner of the rock & roll universe. Drummer Ryan Sloan’s favorite bands are Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and Slayer. Somehow the result is compelling rather than chaotic or contrived. LaBate attributes this to a complete lack of premeditation in the group’s songwriting process. “Our only rules are you have to act fast, and you can’t overthink anything,” he says. “We have a weird conglomeration of influences, and because the writing is always spontaneous, with the four of us playing at full volume in a tiny room, we’re able to smash together all these different sounds that might otherwise seem like an odd fit.”
Adhering to this impulsive, open-ended ethos is more important to the band than fitting some predetermined aesthetic. In fact, it’s an integral part of illiterates’ DNA. The group itself was formed without a moment of premeditation. Though LaBate and Albertson now live in Los Angeles, illiterates first came together in Atlanta (where Sloan and Cole still reside) for the sole purpose of disrupting a poetry reading at bank-turned-rock-dive the Star Community Bar. Albertson and LaBate’s other, more musically sophisticated group at the time, SEX BBQ, proved hard to rally for the event. Their solution? Start a new band three weeks out from the show. Sloan, a high-school friend of LaBate’s who’d played music with him back in their teenage years, was tapped on drums. And Cole, a college friend of Sloan’s, fortuitously responded to a Facebook post from LaBate that read: Seeking bassist for loud, fast, extremely drunk rock & roll side project. Influences: Dead Boys, Dead Kennedys, Stooges, MC5, Mudhoney, early Replacements. Minimal time commitment. We have to really like hanging out with you. Also, no complaining or creative disagreements allowed. In fact, creativity is frowned upon. We favor pure adrenaline and enthusiasm over chops and interesting ideas. Have no songs yet, but we have a show booked.
From there, the parts clicked rapidly into place and the creature known as illiterates was ready to prowl the city. “With illiterates,” Albertson says, “we were coming up with entire songs in 10 minutes, just going with our instincts and writing as fast as we could.” In just three practices, the approach yielded a set’s worth of primal yet inventive tunes.
Similarly, many of the songs that appear on Makeout Mountain were finished by the band during a barbecue- and booze-fueled weekend retreat on a North Georgia alpaca farm, before being recorded in one delirious week with producer Matt McCalvin in Atlanta. McCalvin, who has played previously with Gringo Star, Zoners, Dinos Boys, Black Lips guitarist Ian St. Pé and many more, not only produced, engineered and mixed the record, but handles all the keys and synths, too. The band now considers McCalvin the fifth illiterate, and credits him with shaping the album into the psyched-out ride it is.
With Makeout Mountain hitting late this summer, illiterates are set to play a run of supporting East and West Coast dates in September. In the meantime, Sloan and Cole are busy cultivating their prize-winning Black Krim tomatoes, and Albertson is focusing his energy on trying to get LaBate into D&D.
 
