Milwaukee quartet the Promise Ring have finished their fourth album and first since 1999's Very Emergency. To make Woodwater, due April 23rd, the band ditched the states and holed up in a converted English farmhouse with U.K. producer Stephen Street.

Best known for his landmark work with the Smiths (Louder Than Bombs) and Blur (Parklife), Street was apparently just as excited to work with the Promise Ring -- singer/guitarist Davey vonBohlen, guitarist Jason Gnewikow, bassist Scott Schoenbeck and drummer Dan Didier -- as they were to land his services. "It was a one-man list, and luckily we didn't have to make a new list," vonBohlen says of Street. "He made every concession to do our record. There's no way we could have afforded his actual rates. He was slashin' prices."

With Street, the band veered sharply away from the guitar pop that dominated Emergency and towards something wholly more atmospheric and structurally adventurous, "We ditched that traditional pop, verse/chorus/verse/chorus idea," says vonBohlen. "[Woodwater] is different in every way. There's not one common link between the two albums. There's more ring to this record. It's wider. I think Very Emergency was a very narrow-minded record."

Woodwater will mark the band's first effort since jumping from the all-things-emo JadeTree label to Anti-, an eclectic offshoot of punk imprint Epitaph Records that Merle Haggard, Tom Waits and Buju Banton all call home. Surely some in the insular emo world will see the move as TPR abandoning the community that's long supported them (Jimmy Eat World have suffered similar fire), but vonBohlen says the change was a necessary one. "We'd become too closely identified with Jade Tree and they with us," he says. "Not that it had turned into a bad thing, but it may have become so with this next album.

"Epitaph, for the most part, embodies everything that I hate about music," he continues. "This whole SoCal punk thing is so annoyingly huge and stupid. But Brett [Gurewitz, Epitaph founder and Bad Religion guitarist] started Anti- to put out bands who shouldn't be on Epitaph, bands that don't fit into that mold. We wanted to be on a label without any distinct sound. We don't want to be a genre band. Nothing could have been more perfect for us."

Woodwater also marks the Promise Ring's first foray since vonBohlen was diagnosed with a meningioma, a benign brain tumor, in May of 2000 -- something that immediately put an end to the band's European tour. In October of that same year, vonBohlen developed a post-operative infection that forced the band off a U.S. jaunt with Bad Religion and forced doctors to remove a palm-sized portion of the singer's skull.

While vonBohlen says none of Woodwater's twelve tracks directly addresses his medical woes, the lyrics to one song would seem to argue otherwise. In "Stop Playing Guitar" he sings, "If had a dime for every time I should have stopped playing guitar and put my nose in a book/Then my head would be healthy and my guitar would be dusty . . ."

"I actually wrote that before the brain tumor," vonBohlen says. "But I'm sure later I'll look back and think, 'This whole album is about my brain tumor.' There are a few songs I think are pretty linked to it. There are a few thank yous to people who helped me."

The Promise Ring have scheduled a few dates around their appearance at Austin's South by Southwest Music Festival next month and will launch a proper tour later this spring.

Promise Ring tour dates:

3/11: Iowa City, IA, Gabe's Oasis
3/12: Columbia, MO, Shattered
3/14: Austin, SxSW Convention
3/17: Tulsa, OK, Curly's

GREG HELLER
(February 12, 2002)