Metal Feathers: Prepare for Takeoff
A Portland Indie Rockumentary

By Chris Busby

They’re the best indie-rock band in Maine, and nobody knows who they are. Their songs are a little too unpolished and much too original for commercial radio, so few have ever heard their music. They have no Web site, though they do have a Facebook page. As of this writing, “96 people like this.”

They are Metal Feathers, and they will blow you away.

Two minutes after noon this past Feb. 5, the band announced in one of its infrequent Facebook posts that their second album, Contrast Eats The Slimey Green, is available for download free of charge on Bandcamp, an online music store popular among unsigned, “independent” artists. Their eponymous first album, released in the fall of 2008 (and now apparently titled Statistically Marred), is also available on the site (metalfeathers.bandcamp.com) for free.

You cannot buy either album online. You can’t even “name your price.” If you insist on giving Metal Feathers something in exchange for all this brilliant music, you can go to their CD release show at Geno’s this month. The band plans to have a couple hundred copies of the new album made by then. They don’t expect to order any more.

The price for a physical copy of this limited-edition gem? “Maybe four bucks,” said singer, guitarist and songwriter Jay Lobley, during a rare interview with the band over afternoon beers at Amigos last month. Then he reconsidered. “Maybe three.”

“We’ll make deals with people,” said his brother, Derek Lobley, who plays keyboard.

“We definitely don’t care about making any money” from Contrast, Jay Lobley said. “It’s not going to happen.”

“The thing is, you’re guaranteed to be poor the more success you have with music, because people don’t buy albums,” said Metal Feathers bassist Jason Rogers. “People get albums for free now.”

“For Jay, like any artist, he feels the need to create something and then he puts it out there. He can’t not do it,” said Althea Pajak, who plays drums in the band and is married to Jay. It’d be great “to not be poor, so he can keep doing it more, but …” she trails off.

The prospect of landing a record deal once promised musicians a way out of poverty and obscurity. But given the state of the music industry today, Metal Feathers thinks getting signed would be more of a curse than a blessing. The record label may provide money for recording and touring, Derek Lobley said, “but you owe them back, you owe people money. You’re always in debt. It’s like a bank — a bank that fucks you over.”

So Contrast, like its predecessor, is being released on Rare Sex Records, the band’s own label. Metal Feathers hopes to make some quick trips to play shows in New York and Philadelphia this year, and brief swings around New England for gigs in Boston and Providence are possible. But given that they all have menial day jobs and their only vehicle is Rogers’ 2001 Honda Accord, that’s the limit of their touring horizon at present.

A write-up in a national music magazine or a respected indie-music Web site like Pitchfork could open some doors, but the band feels it’d be a waste of time and money to send albums to those reviewers. “My impression is they wouldn’t even care at all,” Derek Lobley said. “They get piles of stuff everyday.”

“CDs cost money. It’s like we could throw it in the garbage or we could send it to Pitchfork,” said Rogers. “Either way, we’re gonna lose the money on the CD because they’re not gonna fuckin’ listen to it.”

The local press hasn’t done much for the band, either. After Contrast got a glowing review in the Portland Phoenix last month, downloads of the album on Bandcamp actually decreased and leveled off, Jay Lobley said.

“Portland’s a small city, and people are interested in what they’re interested in,” said Derek Lobley. “So, like, even if someone writes an article about us in some newspaper or whatnot, if someone hasn’t already heard of us from someone they know, they’re probably not going to bother to go and listen to our album.”

He has a point there. Metal Feathers doesn’t need another laudatory review in The Bollard.

What they deserve is a full-on rockumentary.

The story of Metal Feathers has many of the elements that make for a classic Behind the Music episode: substance abuse, outlandish behavior, band breakups, reunions, and redemption. Along the way, we’ll also try to explain why their story lacks the other key elements of a great rock-doc: fame and squandered fortune.

So here it is — Metal Feathers: Prepare for Takeoff.

Extendo Ride (from left): Joe Lops, Jay Lobley and Peet Chamberlain.

Extendo Days

“I sing in a band in the local scene / ten years gone but I’m still green.”

— “NLTL,” from Contrast Eats The Slimey Green

Jay and Derek Lobley grew up among the oil tanks and cemeteries of South Portland. They came of age in the 1990s, just as alternative rock was becoming the new mainstream.

“Our dad listened to modern radio,” said Derek Lobley, “but I remember listening to King Crimson and Cream and a lot of prog-rock and stuff, and The Beatles, ’cause he had a lot of records and that’s all we ever listened to. My dad was always way ahead of my own musical taste. He was listening to Nirvana before I even knew who they were.”

The first notable band Jay was in was Extendo Ride. “We weren’t really a band,” said Peet Chamberlain, a member of Extendo Ride along with Jay and fellow South Portland High School grads Brandon Davis and Joe Lops. “We were a collective of people who just hung out and recorded stuff.”

“That was the first time I saw them,” said Rogers. “They were handing out these mixed tapes that had all four of their ‘bands’ on it … I’d been going to shows a lot and most shows in Portland that were all-ages or put on by kids at that point were either metal or hardcore or punk. Which was fun, and I enjoyed the music, but when I heard those guys I was like, ‘Holy shit, this band’s important.’”

Nightclub owner Johnny Lomba first noticed Extendo Ride when they played a band competition sponsored by WMPG. “Those guys were head and shoulders above all the newer bands and younger bands that were around,” said Lomba. “They all had their own musical style, and it mixed really, really well.”

Lomba eventually booked Extendo Ride to play The Skinny, his music venue on Congress Street. During the course of their set, the four members would routinely switch instruments to back one another up, depending whose song they were playing at the time. The eclectic mix of styles, delivered with heavy doses of humor and a punk attitude, reminded Lomba of Ween’s early work.

And he noticed something else, too, something fans of Jay Lobley’s subsequent bands would also pick up on. “They had that weird mix of seeming to be uncomfortable on stage, but at the same time making perfect sense,” said Lomba. “All these kids had immense talent. I thought it was part of their schtick, how uncomfortable they were … They were just this really kind of pleasant mess.”

In 2001, Extendo Ride got a weekly gig at another downtown music club, the Free Street Taverna. It was on an off-night, Sunday or Monday, so there wasn’t much of an audience; they had three hours to fill on stage; and they were young, gifted, and thirsty. Inevitably, shit happened.

“We honestly weren’t trying to be assholes,” said Chamberlain. “It was just that we didn’t know how to play, especially to do a three-hour set and be professional about it … We would throw together whatever songs we’d written in that week.”

“It was just goofy, is what it was,” said Jay Lobley. “We did covers of cheesy ’80s songs, because that was fun.”

“Yeah, we pissed the wait staff off and the bartenders off. We were playing too loud,” said Chamberlain. “My favorite moment was Jay, he’d just turned 21 and he walked in with a 40. He had no idea that you weren’t allowed to do that. He came in and opened the 40 and that was the end of the set.

“So we ended up getting a reputation for being crazy drunk. We just didn’t know how to behave,” Chamberlain continued. “We were just turning 21 and just starting to drink heavily, basically, and we’d go to shows and you’d get free drinks all the time.”

Freelance music writer Ben Monaghan, a Taverna regular, took the band to task in the nightlife column he wrote for the Portland Press Herald. “Whether they are obnoxiously berating innocent bystanders at their concerts, flagrantly violating state liquor laws with complete disregard for a club owner’s concerns, or burning bridges as fast as they cross them, Extendo Ride flaunts the rock ‘n’ roll rule of ‘Do unto others as you see fit’ more than any other band out there since the Sex Pistols circa 1976,” Monaghan wrote at the end of 2001.

“It is too bad, because for all their bad-boy posturing and rock star pretense, they are an excellent group of musicians who write clever, playful songs that have great riffs and musical moments,” his column continued. “Yes, your old high school friends will always approve, but if you ever want to be playing [to] a bigger audience than your high school reunions, get over the attitude.”

Whatever.

Cult Maze (clockwise from top left): Jay Lobley, Peet Chamberlain, Andrew Barron and Josh Loring.

A difficult maze

“I shouldn’t try to figure you out / I’ll just get lost / Not because you are a difficult maze / But because I want you to be one and you’re not / Why are you not?”

— “Vex Torsion,” from The Ice Arena

Extendo Ride was never built to last. After a couple years, the members went their separate ways. Lops moved to Brooklyn and eventually found gainful employment in the publishing industry. Davis pulled a Syd Barrett and emerged years later with a quirky and catchy project called Elf Princess Gets a Harley.

Lobley formed a band called Cult Maze, with Chamberlain in tow, that almost single-handedly reinvigorated Portland indie rock.

“I came of age as a participant in the rock scene in Portland in my early-to-mid 20s, right when Cult Maze was happening,” said Ian Paige, a musician who books music and other events for SPACE Gallery. “They had figured out how to make an incredibly dynamic live show that felt like rock and roll in this town, and no one else was doing that. All the energy and debauchery and bouncing bodies — all the things that go along when you think of rock and roll — they totally did that … Cult Maze and Phantom Buffalo were the only local bands that could headline a show at SPACE and it could be a sell-out.”

Cult Maze masterfully mixed what Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices calls the four P’s — pop, punk, progressive and psychedelic rock.

“On first listen, the band offers plenty to draw you in — a parcel of hooks and catchy refrains, sinuous guitar and synth lines, curious words or phrases that pop,” David Pence wrote in his review of the first Cult Maze album, The Ice Arena, in 2006. “After that initial, easy earful, you may take more notice of frequent time and tone changes, and you may wonder if you should exert the effort to start thinking about this music, to figure it out. If you do, you’ll be rewarded with darker, more complex waters that lie beneath the surface of this recording.”

Cult Maze also included kick-ass drummer Andrew Barron, who toured with Phantom Buffalo around this same time. Aaron Hautula of Satellite Lot played bass on the first album, but was soon replaced by Josh Loring. Chamberlain played keys and bass, which freed Loring to add a second guitar on some songs. Lobley was again in a foursome of talented and creative individuals, but this time he was clearly the one driving the bus.

Come 2007, with the release of their sophomore album, 35, 36, Cult Maze seemed unstoppable. “This band might be better than Badfinger,” began Pence’s review of the sophomore album in The Bollard. “Get in on this thing now, because something special is in progress.”

“Oh my God, I thought Cult Maze was going to be it,” said Loring. “I thought it was going to be the ticket.”

In addition to packed shows in Portland, Cult Maze was playing gigs in New York with some regularity. With a second album of equally strong songs under their belt, and a half-dozen new ones written, there was talk of going on an extended tour.

Then Lobley pulled the bus over, got out and walked away.

Although the band members remain good friends, there’s still a sense of discomfort when the subject of Cult Maze’s demise comes up. Asked if he felt Cult Maze had the potential to hit the big time, Lobley said, “Yeah. Probably. I mean, when I quit the band, I think I had the feeling that I’d better quit when I did because it’d be better to do it before it got any bigger — it’d be even harder if it got bigger.”

Was Cult Maze too confining? What didn’t work?

“It wasn’t because of Metal Feathers,” Lobley said at Amigos, after an uneasy silence. “I want to make that clear. When I told them, I wasn’t 100 percent behind it, and it was kind of getting serious, so I felt like if I wasn’t 100 percent into it, I shouldn’t even do it.”

“The Cult Maze thing at the end was ridiculous,” said Chamberlain. “One of the last shows we did with Cult Maze, I’d quit drinking, and I remember it was a snow storm [in Vermont] and the power went out at the club we were supposed to play. If you go to Vermont, the people are so nice, they were like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta find you another place to play.’ We ended up playing at, like, one in the morning, in the basement of a Vietnamese restaurant, and by that point everyone was so sloshed. I kind of knew it was coming to an end.

“I was looking at Jay and I know he was thinking, like, ‘If this were to go further, I’d have to deal with this on
the road for a month at a time,’ and I was like, there’s no way that’s gonna happen.”

Glamour Skulls

“There’s a sound just out of reach / ‘Glamour Skulls at Haunted Beach’ … The MF CD / Rare Sex Record Company.”

—  “Glamour Skulls,” from Statistically Marred

In the wake of Cult Maze’s dissolution, the big question was whether Jay Lobley’s new band, Metal Feathers, could reach the same artistic heights. “A little over a year ago, when he formed a new band, it seemed doubtful [Lobley] could improve as a songwriter,” Pence wrote in his review of the first Metal Feathers album. “But … his songs seem even better for being more streamlined and, frankly, shorter.”

In a recent interview via e-mail, we asked Pence if he thought it made sense, in retrospect, for Lobley to leave Cult Maze and form this new group.

“It all depends on what you want, on your point of view,” he said. “Cult Maze had an air of grandeur. Many of the songs were pastiches — sections stitched together, with a fair amount of virtuosic soloing and gorgeous decoration. MF is dirtier and more to the point. There are nuances in the songs and in the performances, for sure — in fact, the music is really rich. But the whole enterprise has a handmade, hand-packed feel.”

Lobley basically dropped the prog in favor of pop and punk, with weird psychedelic elements liberally sprinkled throughout — “nearly every track has some kind of aural shenanigans,” Pence wrote in his review of the first release.

“I love what he’s doing now, because he’s doing it on his own and making the records he wants to make,” Chamberlain said of Lobley. “It’s like a family band, with crazy uncle Jason. He’s doing things the way he did it back when he was in high school, just kind of showing that you don’t need to have a thousand-dollar [recording space].”

The make-up of the group also contributes to its rawness. Pajak uses a very basic drum kit and is learning to play as this project goes on (she had no previous experience in a band). Derek Lobley had recorded some interesting synth pieces under the moniker Begemot, but his Ace-Tone organ lines in Metal Feathers are simpler than the keyboard parts Chamberlain played in Cult Maze. Rogers had previously recorded with both Lobleys in his band, Diamond Sharp, which had a much more stripped-down sound than either Cult Maze or Metal Feathers.

That said, these limitations have done nothing to dim Jay Lobley’s brilliant songwriting. “You give him a band and he’ll make great songs,” said Mike Cunnane, who plays drums and percussion in three local groups (The RattleSnakes, Huak, and Sunset Hearts).

“I consider Jay Lobley to be a songwriting genius,” said Paige, who briefly played with Lobley in the interim between Cult Maze and Metal Feathers. “One of the things I think is good about Metal Feathers is it seems as though Jay has figured out that he doesn’t give a fuck and is just going to make the music he wants to make.”

“I’m a big fan of Jay’s songwriting and his arrangements and the music,” said Jose Ayerve, whose own band, Spouse, set the standard for intelligent indie-rock in Portland over a decade ago. “I love the first [Metal Feathers album]. It’s so catchy and poppy, you can hit repeat and listen to it 100,000 times and always find something new.

“Now, all of a sudden, they’ve got this garage-y element to it,” Ayerve continued. “It’s brash and it’s bold. He’s not trying to make it pretty. He’s trying to make it do what he wants it to do.”

Contrast is “challenging,” Pence wrote via e-mail, “partly because it’s streamlined. It’s like an early Wire album, because it’s got tons of attitude and no time wasted, no fat. The sound is tough and fevered … This new record does go beyond the first MF album. They’re getting pretty confident.”

The 10 tracks on Contrast are all-killer-no-filler. Witness the crunchy riff of the opener, “Fuzzy,” and the propulsive bass and fuzzed-out guitar lines of “City Hall.” “Hideous Eclipse” and “Jail Sound” rock harder than anything Lobley’s released to date.

There are no proper guitar solos on Contrast. Most of the tracks, clocking in at about three minutes or less, have no room for them. On longer songs like “Sisters On The Rocks” and “Swan Attack,” Lobley sounds like he’s strangling his guitar’s neck in lieu of playing notes.

The “aural shenanigans” Pence appreciated on the first album are on every song here. Oddball keyboard bits abound. On “Museum of Trash,” most of the sound suddenly drops away about three-quarters in, leaving a faint echo of itself and a clicking clap track that just as unexpectedly explodes into a speaker-shredding rumble. At the very end of “City Hall,” a snippet from a live show is seamlessly spliced onto the final seconds of the song. You can just hear Jay Lobley suggest the next number on stage, “Caravan,” before the recorded version of that song begins.

Tyler Jackson has surely heard that bit. He estimates he’s listened to Contrast “probably close to 500 times” so far, and counting.

Jackson has his own indie-rock project, Foam Castles, and has written about music for The Bollard and other publications. Jay Lobley is not technically a member of Foam Castles, but he’s backed Tyler for several Foam Castles shows.

Jackson said he’s sent Metal Feathers songs to music blogs that he respects, and is “baffled” by the lack of response. “I try to get other people to listen to it and understand there’s this awesome music being made, but it doesn’t seem to work,” he said. “I don’t get it … For some reason, nobody will catch on to Metal Feathers.”

Prepare for Takeoff

“Spent my time when I paid my dues / Now I’ve got nothing left to lose / So many choices but it’s hard to choose / Now I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

— “NLTL”

Most of the forces and factors working against Metal Feathers’ success are beyond the band’s control.

Undercut by file-sharing and downloading years ago, the recording industry is still tumbling. The modern rock on commercial radio has devolved into a homogenous sludge of bombastic guitar and emo mewling. Meanwhile, outside the mainstream, thousands of indie acts have flooded the Internet. Some of them are making truly authentic, original music, but finding them amid the cacophony of a million MP3s is a full-time job — the kind of job Paige has held at SPACE for years.

“On a national level, no one knows what’s going on and it’s a total clusterfuck,” Paige said. “There are so many ways to be heard and so many blogs to check out and so many albums to listen to. As it becomes easier for people to pick up on what you’re doing, it’s increasingly harder to stand out among great mass.”

Compounding the challenge for Metal Feathers is the band’s apparent reluctance to promote itself. In Jay Lobley’s case, “I think it’s to an extreme,” Jackson said. “To me, he’s this guy who’s done, like, four really, really great albums and nothing’s happened, so maybe he feels nothing’s going to happen.”

After Cult Maze broke up, Loring recruited Chamberlain and drummer D.J. Moore to form Brenda. In contrast to Lobley, Loring has made the business side of music a priority. Brenda has a manager and a booking agent. They got on the bills of two sizeable music festivals last summer, including the Solid Sound Festival organized by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, which put them in front of over 500 people. Over 1,200 people “like” Brenda on Facebook.

“There are misconceptions that you have about D.I.Y. music, what indie really means,” said Loring. “One thing that’s frustrating for me is, our bands that I consider my circle of friends … don’t  want to do a lot of self-promotion. Metal Feathers doesn’t want to promote themselves. The RattleSnakes don’t care about promoting themselves. Nobody does. When you don’t care about promoting yourself, people aren’t going to find out.”

Derek Lobley said the band has discussed getting management, but can’t afford to pay someone to do it. “We make enough money to pay our practice space rent, and that’s about it,” he said. “If we found someone that was just really into our band and wanted to try to promote us on their own time, that would be great … then we don’t have to pay them back in any way, other than buy ’em a beer at the gig or something. We can do that.”

Metal Feathers is determined to grow at their own pace and on their own terms.

“I feel like anyone that writes songs, anyone that plays music wants people to hear it and they want people to be excited about it, but we’re not in a rush to sort of manipulate that,” said Rogers. “I feel like it’s not genuine to manipulate that situation coming about.”

“Let’s say Pitchfork or somebody reviewed [Contrast] tomorrow, and even if it just got a low grade from them, that would mean a ton of people hearing our music and downloading it or something,” Jay Lobley said. “But, I don’t know, it wouldn’t be the natural progression at all to go from where we’re at now to that … I’d like to just put out a bunch more albums and establish ourselves.”

A big reason the band is being so low-key about Contrast is that Jay Lobley knows there are even better albums to come. Their third release is expected to be done within a year.

“I feel like we’re gaining momentum, but at the end of this year I think we’ll be in a better place,” Jay Lobley said. “I think a lot could happen this year, hopefully.”

“It seems like there are some things they’re willing to do to get a larger audience, and other things they’re not willing to do,” said Pence.

“In terms of image and self-promotion, MF hasn’t followed the conventional wisdom about what a band should do to break on through,” he continued. “Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I love them and find them so compelling. Metal Feathers keeps getting better at being exactly like they are, which is a weird combination of awkward and self-assured.”

Metal Feathers’ CD release show takes place Sat., April 23, at Geno’s, 625 Congress St., Portland, at 9 p.m., with openers The RattleSnakes, Foam Castles, and Alex Keaton.