Hubcap City (From Belgium)
Superlocalhellfreakride
2007
Xeric/Ponce de Leon Records
XER-CD-112
Compact disc
Bill TAFT and Will FRATESI are luminaries of Atlanta’s indie rock avant-garde — Taft’s legacy as a key player in Smoke and Fratesi’s tenure as the rickety percussionist behind such lonely and urbane Southern specters as CAT POWER and TENEMENT HALLS culminates in HUBCAP CITY with slow, serpentine miasma. Superlocalhellfreakride is a guided tour through Atlanta’s underbelly; a survey of the acoustics found in its burned-out buildings, graveyards and long-abandoned mills. The humid ghosts of Hubcap City’s ancestors, including Smoke, the Jody Grind and Atlanta’s seminal Destroy All Music Festivals in the 1980s all echo in these folkish dirges of melody and noise. With each lazy and uplifting honk of the horn over a clatter of strings and metal the group pushes the old weird Atlanta into deeper and higher levels of beautiful imprisonment, and the only way out is through.
“...Hubcap City plays a kind of loner-volk-whatsis with edges that recall mock trumpet-era Michael Hurley and some of Kweskins’ rare slow tracks. It’s the type of sound that makes you think about sneaking onto a freight train, but there’s a definite weirdo overlay as well. They certainly seem as though they have tuned themselves to some of the universe’s looser strings, and it sounds great.”
Byron Coley, The Wire
“Pretty far removed from all things modern, and better off for it, these hole-in-shoe lapses in time compel with the natural momentum and lost-era charms they carry.”
Dusted
“Instead of playing the usual [Atlanta] rock club scene, singer/songwriter Bill Taft and his cohorts, guitarist Matthew Proctor and drummer Will Fratesi, set up their usual performing gear—guitars with detuned strings and Einstürzende Neubauten-style scavenged trash for percussion, mostly—in bridges, tunnels, and condemned houses around the town's seedier areas. Elements of Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits, the Spartan alt-blues of Smog, and Texas outsider Jandek are visible, and often, they combine into some disjointed but genuinely arresting tunes.”
AllMusic
Under the bridge
BY CHAD RADFORD
In between and underneath Atlanta's rapidly gentrifying cityscape lies the withering remains of a much older Southern city. In this sagging post-urban panorama is where local trio Hubcap City (From Belgium) finds refuge. Since 2000, the rickety outfit has drawn inspiration from its surroundings, fashioning desolate and deranged junkyard folk songs. Made up of singer/guitarist Bill Taft (formerly of Smoke, the Jody Grind), guitarist Matthew Proctor, and drummer Will Fratesi (Cat Power, Smoke), the group makes music that is a cluttered and verdant anomaly. Taft's unwavering voice mixes with a percussive rattle pounded out on large bits of found metal debris from loosely tuned steel strings to a metal I-beam. All of these elements add force to Taft's apocalyptically Dylan-esque laments.
An array of battery-powered recording devices, including a Walkman cassette recorder, a mini-disc recorder and a cell phone bring textures to the group's recordings. This is a technique Taft compares to juxtaposing photos from a 35 mm lens next to Polaroid pictures. The most striking examples of these textures come to light with A Tour of Southern Homes, a patchwork of poetry interspersed with field recordings.
As for performing live, the group is less inclined to book a show at a traditional music venue than to set up and play in a half-demolished building or a drainage tunnel underneath Moreland Avenue. Playing and recording in such unorthodox locations forms an intense link between Hubcap City's sound and its surroundings, translating to an uncanny character in the music. "We don't fit into the rock club world," says Taft. "The less electricity we use, the better we sound."
