Grown-Up Citizens

Compared to having your tour van catch fire in the middle of nowhere -- in a driving rain, no less -- and waiting five hours inside a Burger King for a tow truck, getting dropped from a major label wasn't such a terrible ordeal for the Poster Children. "When something really terrible happens to us, when we can't find any place to sleep and there are no hotels anywhere, we laugh about it," says bassist Rose Marshack, who founded the band at the University of Illinois in 1987 with guitarist Rick Valentin. "We try to have a good sense of humor about it."

That combination of humor, adventure and pragmatism has been not only the hallmark of the Poster Kids' musical approach during its twelve-year existence, but the saving grace of a band that, over the course of six albums and about as many lineup changes (including a very Spinal Tap-worthy six drummers), has made a point of succeeding on its own terms. Now, barely a year after they were dropped by their old label, Sire/Reprise, Poster Children are back with an electrifying new disc, New World Record, on the New York-based indie imprint, spinART. "It's great to be back on an independent label because with a major, you have money but no one pays attention to you," says Valentin by phone from the band's home base known as "The Lab" in Champaign, Illinois. "With an indie, you have somebody who cares about you."

At the same time, Poster Children -- which these days is comprised of Valentin, Marshack, Jim Valentin (Rick's brother) on guitar and Howie Kantoff on drums -- are again enjoying the kind of creative freedom that fueled such dazzlingly varied postpunk excursions as 1990's Flower Plower and '91's Daisychain Reaction. The new album sounds like an overview of the band's career. It opens with "Accident Waiting To Happen," a jittery, Buzzcocksian burst of splintery guitars, martial drumming and a twitchy lyric that's either about a car crash or a relationship that *feels* like a car crash, or both. It closes on a dramatically different note with "Deadman," a muted U2-via-Doors meditation on disconnection that unfolds into glistening vistas of multi-tracked guitars before dissipating into thin air.

"I think the new record's a combination of some of the old livelier stuff and some of the studio shenanigans of the others," says Valentin, describing his band's fusion of overdriven guitar rock and the sundry electronic noise toys that hint at Valentin's and Marshack's computer geek backgrounds (both studied computer science at the University of Illinois). "Our music tends to bounce around, but that's fine. I'm not interested in repeating something over and over. And I guess I've always gotten the feeling that people didn't want something specific from us."

Valentin and Marshack admit that the band's paid something of a price for its eclecticism. "In terms of identity," says Marshack, "I think it hurts us because we don't have a totally unified sound, but it would drive me crazy to have just one kind of sound. Maybe we just get bored easily." Indeed, even the band's self-mockingly titled major label debut, Tool of the Man, released in 1992, sounded like an adamant refusal to play that role or embrace the arena-ready grunge sound then clogging the airwaves. The disc proved to be among Poster Children's least radio-ready efforts, filled to the brim with a bitch's brew of spaced-out sonic excursions and jagged bursts of fractured guitar. Although neither that album nor the pair of discs that followed, 1995's Junior Citizen and 1997's RTFM, made the band the darlings of the commercial alternative jetset, it didn't -- and still doesn't -- seem to faze Marshack and Valentin.

"We feel we have to make the record that we want to make," Marshack emphasizes. The unfortunate end result of that decision, as Marshack diplomatically puts it, was that Reprise "agreed not to give us another check, and we agreed not to put out another record for them."

Not that they didn't see it coming. Even back in those heady days of 1992 -- when it seemed as though every "alternative"-sounding band was being gobbled up by the major-label market in the wake of the success of a certain little trio out of Seattle -- Poster Children had the foresight to take a hard look at the future, and the good sense to grasp its uncertainty. Unlike many of its peers, the band decided to forego the heavyweight recording contract and astronomical advances and opted to invest their major label dough in state-of-the-art recording gear and computers (New World Record, for example, boasts five screen savers, three live videos, a tour simulation game, and a gateway to the band's website at www.posterchildren.com).
"When some bands get signed, they get used to having hotels and tour buses and all those extras," Valentin says. "But I always wondered, what happens when one day you're not on a major label? Can you really go back to sleeping on someone's couch when you're used to all that luxury? And we agreed that, no, you can't." In a sense, though, the band's back where it belongs -- making music on its own terms for an audience, and a label, that wants it that way. "We're just making music because we love to do it," Marshack says. "We're not doing it for any other reason."

JONATHAN PERRY
(March 17, 1999)