TDR Music Review: Filligar

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Sunday, February 11, 2007

Alternative-rock has long suffered from the fits and starts common to the black-garbed-identity-crisis-proned-and-tortured artiste: thankfully, either through the availability of designer drugs (Prosac, and the like) or sensational multi-vitamins, the droopy-headed whiners are beginning to come to terms with their misbegotten and half-assed angst.

From the tortured 90’s croon of Ani Difranco to the pouty mouthings of the new millennium’s Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, the whining is giving way to a slap-happy good time that disposes itself not only to the simple pleasures, but also to a greater variety of concerns and emotions than those experienced by the artiste in the dippy throes of another suicide attempt.

With this in mind the Chicago based indie-band Filligar emerges, recording their fifth CD on a fresh record label, Gravity Studios—the same studio that recorded Fall Out Boy. And it is in that spirit and keeping the faith, that one member of Filligar, bass player Teddy Mathias, complains to TDR, “What we are turned off from are the ‘listen to our problems’ songs that drone and complain.” Well said.

Originally operating under the alias Flipside—a skateboarding move—this quartet consists of three brothers—20-year old twins and Dartmouth 09s, Pete and Teddy Mathias, and 18-year old high school senior Johnny Mathias—and their childhood friend, Casey Gibson, a sophomore at Hamilton College.

When Teddy and Pete of Filligar sat down with The Dartmouth Review to discuss their most recent album, Succession, I Guess, Teddy told TDR, “Above everything else, we want our music to make people happy. We want to play music people can dance to, and enjoy listening to. We’ve all heard the complaining songs, the songs that people cry to, but we want to write more positive music than that.”

“We just want to play music that people can dance to; music that makes people smile,” joins in Pete.

Teddy and Pete first began playing music in middle school, where they began with the bass and drums, respectively. Teddy gives Pete away when he tells TDR, “Pete started off playing in the middle school marching band. The band instructor brought Pete and I together to play the snare drum, and I just could not do it [makes hand motions] and, Pete got better and better, so he stuck with it, and I picked up the bass.”

Both Johnny and Casey began playing music at prodigiously young ages; Filligar pianist, Casey, studied the Suzuki method, learning piano as a five year old child, while vocalist and guitar-player, Johnny, began learning guitar and writing his own songs as young as 8 years old, because, “to be honest, I just got bored with playing “Michael Row Your Boat” Ashore over and over again.”

Casey explains, “I played classical piano my entire life. When I got to college, I started taking jazz and improv lessons, but I really do enjoy playing the really old stuff. I just began taking voice lessons, and am working hard on that.” Should audiences expect an additional vocalist on Filligar’s next CD?

Given all of this, it’s no surprise then, that most of tracks on Filligar’s latest album, Succession, I Guess, are centered around a sophisticated piano line that is oftentimes complemented by Johnny’s soft guitar rifts, as in the quirky but quaint Drosophila Melanogaster, a song that describes the high school Bio-lab ritual of mating fruit flies—an antiseptic process if ever there was one—with borderline pathos.

The effort may err on the side of self-consciousness—a malady that afflicts those beset by their college years, musicians or not; and though any song needing Latin in its title— inspired by science—may lack the immediate cash-value of sex drugs or rock&roll, it does have a hook to it: “I took the date / as you propagate” sung with an Ophelia complex has an ironic and humorous effect, even on the most jaded music critic.

“But we don’t aspire to be bookish,” Pete begins in response, and then clarifies, “rather, maybe to appreciate the lyrics, you have to follow some sort of story line, even a snippet of a story line. Songwriters are kind of like authors, they have to write a story with some substance, and develop it; something beyond just an observation, or a romantic emotion.”

While Filligar is stringing together homilies inspired by Bio-1, and Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince (see track six, Purple Gum Weather), certain other themes, as hinted at above, are curiously absent—well, two to be specific: girls and sex…and that’s an oversight to give anyone with an i-Pod pause.

Pete says, “you can set off to say you want to write a love song, but then it becomes a matter of how you are going to relate that song—what story are you going to tell that hasn’t already been told a thousand times, how are you going to tell in your own voice.”

The ad-hoc quirk is the essence of Filligar, who came up with their band name “because we knew no other band would be called Filligar, which was not the case at all for our original name, Flipside,” Teddy explains.

Given such a dogmatic approach to originality, it comes as no surprise that as far as the mainstream music scene goes, Filligar is anomalous—these boys are serious students at very serious colleges, an atypical and decidedly dangerous venture in a subculture where many, if not most, talented 20-some year olds forego the college process and any financial future altogether, devoting the entirety of their lives instead to rock-n-roll and its promised thrills.

Perhaps this explains the clean sound and character of Filligar on their latest CD. The boys are writing about the sorts of things you would expect enthusiastic college freshmen from above-average families to have on their up-and-coming minds—sans girls, as I say…not that there is anything wrong with that, as they say. Of course there are exceptions, but the frat scene, the passage of time and its melancholy romance, and the rich possibilities of the post-grad world to come, tie together this delightful and at times coasting album.

Filligar is aspiring to be a rock band in the tradition of, perhaps, The Flaming Lips and other bands given to working the dictionary and thesaurus. Given that their musical influences run the gamut, from the moody anachronism that is Sufjan Stevens, to the much adored but overdone Beatles, it’s no surprise that Filligar’s own tracks don’t cut one set sound out of the wax. On the one hand, there is the dynamism of Trepador, with its Western overtones and energetic and asymmetric beats, which is followed, on the CD, with the surrender of Purple Gum Weather—an evocative song that has the sense of night rain beating down on you.

In its versatility, it can easily be suggested that Filligar worships at the shrine of such Windy City bands as Wilco, without ill-intent: both write obscure lyrics that rise up and go nowhere, offering not much more than watercolors for the vivid imagination. Heard here in a highlight track on the album, Venice World’s Fair c. 2138, are the energetic rifts at the beginning of the song, that fade into a water-world of synth-based drip-drops that separate lyrics like “chromatid taxi crabs running red lights” and the carnivalesque non-sequitor “carousel’s broken / would you like a churro?” To which one might reply, ‘why not…sounds harmless.’

But there is also a fine chartreuse line between the mysteriously obscure and the simply meaningless: when commenting on Trepador, vocalist Johnny said, “it’s something like Ghost Riders in the Sky meets a high school analogy to Jack and the Beanstalk…I don’t know.” Neither, likely, will sober listeners.

So much for the meaning; as to the sound, the title track, “Succession, I Guess”, is perhaps the most ‘romantic’ song on the CD with its by-the-numbers reflections on childhood, perhaps reminiscent of the moody music of Yo La Tengo. But unlike the well-tuned musings of YLT, Filligar’s ballad lacks the ironic dynamism so often prized in the alternative scene represented by the likes of YLT and The Pernice Brothers, among others. “Too often I wait for the mystery to unfold or even a beat to make me catch my breath, and yet there is something that holds—that keeps you listening.”

Despite not reaching my rock’n’roll ideal—Filligar certainly is an “Ivy band that doesn’t suck,” – the band has it. Dartmouth students should keep their eyes out for an upcoming Filligar show—though nothing is yet settled, Filligar is trying to organize a show at FUEL for this coming April. Though if FUEL does not work out, Filligar says they will take the first opportunity that comes their way to perform at Dartmouth, whether this means a Fraternity, Collis Commonground, the HOP, or the Green.

In the past, Filligar has performed at venues as diverse as the National Blueberry Festival in Michigan (no word on the winner of the festival’s “Blueberry Queen”), to the Soho Playhouse in Manhattan (different queens altogether), to the Wrigley Theatre in Chicago, to a subdued luncheon at the Saddle and Cycle Club in Chicago (absolutely no queens allowed).

Not least impressive, in 2003 Filligar recorded the soundtrack for an independent film called Fish Tale. Despite the variety of their venues, Teddy explains, “an audience is still an audience. The people at a coffee shop are just as human as the people at the Metropolitan.” As you can see, the boys of Filligar are egalitarians to the end.

Indeed, though in this case, at Dartmouth College, a great many of Filligar fans are also Filligar friends, which of course makes these fans appreciate lyrics like, “my big sis got a brand new watch / from a drawer where it was saved…” or the fact that the title track recalls their mother’s childhood house on a pond “that once was clear.” These sorts of personal touches are only one part of this band’s charm, especially for those of us who are homers when it comes to music and Dartmouth.

TDR Music Review: Filligar

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