Viqueen (from left): Courtney Cavanaugh, Tom Couture, Chris Leighton and Lex Rae. photo/Tom Couture, courtesy Viqueen
The melodic thrash-metal band is on a rampage
In olden times, if two tattooed wild women rode into town, captured two of our guys and proceeded to travel around whipping crowds of young folk into a frenzy with their blood-curdling shrieks and deafening devil music, it’d be cause for alarm.
That is, essentially, what’s just happened here, but these days it’s cause for celebration: Viqueen is conquering the land!
Founded by wife-and-wife team Alexa “Lex” Rae (vocals and guitar) and Courtney Cavanagh (bass and backing vocals) in Austin, Texas, nine years ago, Viqueen has evolved into one of the most badass bands in our state — not just today, bub, but evah.
Their second full-length album, badmouth, released early last year, is as hard and heavy as almost any metal forged in Maine to date, and it’s already outdated. The couple have since added a second guitarist and a new drummer with songwriting chops and a home studio where the band’s been brewing up some even wickeder shit to unleash later this year on stage and online.
Lex grew up in Portsmouth and started playing metal and punk in high school. “My favorite band of all time is Deftones,” she said during a group interview last month at Pizza Villa in Portland’s St. John Valley neighborhood. “They were one of my first concerts I saw when I was fifteen or sixteen at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, and I was just like, That’s what I want to do!”
Down in Austin, Lex put out a call for bandmates and in walked a young woman from the cornfields of Illinois who played bass with banjo picks on her fingers.
“Banjo was my first instrument,” Courtney said. “I started playing banjo when I was thirteen and I played in a variety of bluegrass and jug bands. My mom would take me around to bluegrass jams and it would be at, like, the conference room of a Ramada or something, and it’s just like all these seventy- and eighty-year-olds sitting around. But they were all super eager to sit down and teach me stuff, so I loved it.”
Courtney, a tattoo artist by trade, later developed a taste for “heavier” music and picked up bass and guitar, but it was a while before she shed the picks. With hard rock and metal, “it was kind of a similar sort of finger-picking thing and it felt right,” she said.
“Every now and again I’ll look over and she’s still doing banjo rolls on bass,” Lex added with a laugh. But Courtney makes a good point. Bluegrass players shred as hard as any metal guitar hero, and the style has other elements that enhance rock songwriting.
“In bluegrass, everything’s as catchy as possible and the songs are wicked short — get in, you hit it and quit it, and you leave people with just the melody in your head,” Courtney said. “And so we try to keep things short and catchy, but heavy, obviously, as heavy as we possibly can.”
That’s the black magic that makes badmouth a standout album: the unholy alchemy of heaviness and harmony, deep anger expressed with gleeful enthusiasm. Unlike their first record, 2017’s emo-tinged Spill Your Guts, recorded as a three-piece after Lex and Courtney moved to San Francisco, badmouth is lean and punchy as hell, its dozen tracks seldom creeping past the three-minute mark.
In keeping with their royal decree, “No slow songs,” Viqueen never relents. Solos are also verboten, so it’s all killer riffs, chugging rhythms, whiplash breaks and catchy shout-along choruses with clean vocal harmonies by Courtney and Lex, who has the unnerving ability to upshift from singing to primal screaming without warning.
“It’s like pissed, but upbeat, so it’s not depressing,” Lex said of their music. “A lot of people are pissed, so they can sing along when they’re having a shitty day, and maybe it perks them up.”
The couple moved to Portland shortly before the pandemic, and were actually back in Austin, booked to play the South by Southwest Festival, when the world began collapsing around them. SXSW got cancelled by COVID and the gigs they’d booked for the trip back to Portland evaporated soon after, so they drove 32 hours straight home into oblivion.
“Then we’re not allowed to play anywhere or kind of get to know our new city, because everything’s shut down,” Courtney recalled. “But slowly, things started reopening. And then we acquired these two guys, and ever since then we’ve had this momentum.”
Guitarist Tom Couture had stopped playing metal decades ago to pursue a career as a photographer, and he’d been doing quite well shooting local and national rock bands and taking portraits and wedding gigs. After badmouth came out, Kevin Billingslea — guitarist for the Maine post-hardcore band Too Late the Hero, who expertly recorded, mixed, mastered and produced the album at The Halo Studio in Windham — suggested the group hire Couture to take some promo shots.
“He took these awesome pictures when we were still a three-piece,” Courtney said, “and then maybe a month later, those pictures immediately became irrelevant because he joined the band.”
“That was always this missing piece of my life: playing music and playing in bands,” Tom said. “So I don’t know why I didn’t try harder to get into something. But in Portland, there wasn’t seemingly a lot that I would be interested in. … Once I met them, I was super into the sound and the vibe of it. So that’s why I expressed interest.”
A few months later, drummer Dylan Jarrett amicably left the group and they lured Chris Leighton aboard ship. Chris, who also came out of semi-retirement to play again, brings deep experience to the band, having played many different genres over the years, most recently with Lewiston heavy-rock stompers Twin Grizzly. Jarrett’s playing on badmouth is fantastic, but those who’ve witnessed this newly beefed-up incarnation of Viqueen say they’re taking this already awesome material to a higher level.
“Every time we get on stage, it’s like all bets are off — just let it all hang out,” Chris said. “The more we’ve done it, the more we start feeding off of each other, and that energy, the ball of energy, is just growing.”
“They showed up playing our songs better than we do,” Lex said of the new guys, both of whom admit they “cheated” on their tryouts by basically memorizing badmouth beforehand.
Lyrically, themes on the album include good riddance to bad people (“Bridge Burner,” “E.A.D.”), societal decay (“Sick Sad World,” “Sinking”), partying hard (“Bottle Flu”) and fighting back (“Spite Club”). The mental toll of living in a city like San Francisco or Portland, surrounded by threats of violence and human misery daily, is sharply reflected in these songs.
“You just feel so aggressive when you’re constantly seeing issues like that,” said Courtney. “You try to match that energy in order to not feel weak all the time.”
Lex and Courtney said they haven’t encountered much chauvinistic bullshit on the road over the years. “Every now and again there’s a drunk guy who’s gotta say something,” Lex said. “I feel like in San Francisco, it was worse.”
Courtney recalled setting up for a gig in San Jose years ago, “and this guy’s like, ‘Who’s this, the Dixie Chicks?’ And we were basically just like, ‘Oh, let’s fucking go!’
“At that moment, I heard that and I was like, ‘Let’s start with our heaviest song now,’” Lex said. “And so we just switched the set list around and we just fucking blew that guy out of the water.”
“And then afterwards he’s like buying us beers,” Courtney added, laughing. “But honestly, here we haven’t had a lot of that.”
“There are so many women musicians in this scene,” Chris observed. “And like heavy, too — all genres.”
“I feel like I’ve noticed quite an increase in the female-fronted bands out there in the last four or five years,” Tom agreed.
“It’s my favorite thing when we get put on bills and there’s just naturally a lot of women on the bill without it being, like, intentionally a marketing tour,” said Courtney, who’s also noticed more female fans at shows, and inside the mosh pit, in recent years.
A decade ago, Weakened Friends shattered whatever shards were still sticking from the ceiling of Maine’s punk scene after Ginny Labonville of Purse and Tara Cohen of The RattleSnakes were done with it. Lex and Courtney are huge Weakened Friends fans, and as they did at last year’s All Roads Music Festival in Belfast, they’ll be singing along to all the Friends’ songs after bashing out their own set there.
Some new singles are in the works for later this year, and more touring this summer and fall. Viqueen doesn’t have a manager or a booking agent or a label yet, but that’s all likely to change soon, because they already have what really matters: fans by the thousands streaming their songs, flocking to shows and wearing their merch around town.
That’s what first tipped me off that Viqueen was worth a listen. You can buy your way onto commercial radio and social media these days, but you can’t buy space on the chests of, say, the bartenders at an old-school punk hangout like the Downtown Lounge. You’ve gotta earn that exposure the old-fashioned way: by out-rocking everyone else.
Mission accomplished, Viqueen! All hail our new Metal Majesties!
