If an indie-pop masterpiece drops in the Forest City, will anyone hear it?
“Portland’s a small city, and people are interested in what they’re interested in. 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.”
— Derek Lobley, quoted in “Metal Feathers: Prepare for Takeoff,” The Bollard, April 2011
The end of the 20th century was the start of the Maine Rock Renaissance. I define this ongoing era as the time bands around here aspired to be more than “cheerleaders for drinking and smoking,” as a disillusioned veteran of the small-club circuit once put it to me, and began making more creative and challenging works of art.
Which is to say, they stopped caring whether most people would like their music or even hear it, and stopped dreaming of making money from these efforts. The movement coincided, by no mere coincidence, with the rise of the online song-sharing platform Napster and its successors, and the decline of commercial rock radio, music magazines, record labels, record stores and, most recently, records and every other sellable object inscribed with this magic.
Spouse, a group formed at Bowdoin College, released its debut LP, Nozomi, in September of 2000, a bilingual, gender-fluid tour de force. The end of 2001 gifted us Shishimumu by The Ponys (later Phantom Buffalo), a psychedelic cow-punk classic by some awkwardly shy Maine College of Art kids recorded onto two-inch analog tape with “liberal knob twisting” by a cat named Nemo.
By the time The Bollard was born in 2005, Portland was bursting with young musicians forming bands, collaborating on albums, and playing booze-soaked bills together in venues like Geno’s, Slainte and SPACE. They frequently swapped members, evolving into ever-cooler combinations, and Portland’s indie-rock family tree flowered like mad, producing memorable music by acts like Satellite Lot, The RattleSnakes, Huak, Seekonk, The Baltic Sea, Foam Castles, Honey Clouds, and Gully during that decade, to cite just a few personal faves.
But one branch stood out from the rest, that being the one Jay Lobley was on.
Jay first gained notice among local music cognoscenti around 2000 as a member of Extendo Ride, four recent South Portland High grads who’d get drunk on stage, swap instruments, antagonize the audience and play cheesy covers between originals that revealed an uncanny level of songwriting and musical skill. Then came Cult Maze, with Jay on guitar and vocals, Extendo pal Peet Chamberlain on bass and keys, ex-Buffalo drummer Andrew Barron, and guitarist Josh Loring, who later formed Brenda with Chamberlain and drummer D.J. Moore. They played Jay’s songs, and the first Cult Maze release, The Ice Arena, was revelatory.
“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,” longtime WMPG DJ David Pence wrote in his 2006 review of the record for The Bollard. “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.”
When the second Cult Maze album, 35, 36, came out in 2007, Pence began his review by stating, in all seriousness, “This band might be better than Badfinger.” In retrospect, they probably were, but Jay, who’s about as comfortable in the spotlight as a deer would be at your backyard BBQ party, didn’t necessarily care to be as big as Badfinger. Within a year, Cult Maze was history.
“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,” Jay told me a few years later.
By then he’d formed a new group, Metal Feathers. “MF is dirtier [than Cult Maze] and more to the point,” Pence wrote in his review of their self-titled 2008 debut (retitled Statistically Marred on YouTube). “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.”
Metal Feathers was a family affair, “slightly disheveled by design,” Pence wrote, with Jay’s good friend Jason Rogers on bass; his then-wife, Althea Pajak, learning drums on the fly; and his younger brother, Derek, on keys, sometimes singing or shouting with Jason in the background (the two had previously collaborated on the basement-pop project Diamond Sharp).
When the band’s stunning sophomore record, Contrast Eats the Slimy Green, came out, I put them on the cover of this magazine as the subject of a half-serious “Portland indie rockumentary” called “Metal Feathers: Prepare for Takeoff” [April 2011].
“We definitely don’t care about making any money” from Contrast, Jay Lobley told me at the time. “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,” Rogers had added. “People get albums for free now.”
I’d asked them, What about the national music press, online taste-making websites like Pitchfork? Could they be a gateway to a larger audience, a ticket out of hand-to-mouth existence?
“My impression is they wouldn’t even care at all,” Derek Lobley said that spring. “They get piles of stuff everyday.”
Then how about record labels — even small indie ones — that can help finance recordings and tours?
“But you owe them back, you owe people money,” Derek had replied. “You’re always in debt. It’s like a bank — a bank that fucks you over.”
Sure enough, Metal Feathers did not take off. Two years later, Pajak was gone, Derek was trying to play drums, and the band released Handful of Fog, a dark, murky record with an air of weary malice that I likened in my review to Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers. The first track is titled, unironically, “This Band Is a Secret.” It sounds like a punch in the face.
An OK EP, Epidural, appeared in early 2014, followed shortly thereafter on Bandcamp by Glamour Skulls at Haunted Beach. Purportedly recorded three years prior, it sounded like the feedback-fouled noise leaking out around the edges of “Glamour Skulls,” the opening song on the first MF album, which refers to this recording as “a sound just out of reach” in a town beyond the reach of any radio station’s waves. Except this album was a single track of that noise lasting almost 23 minutes.
Listeners, especially pesky music writers, got the hint loud and clear: Metal Feathers was over, and don’t bug them about it.
Until recently, I thought that sonic middle finger was the last thing I’d ever hear by the Lobleys. I’ve seen the brothers around town a handful of times in the past decade, but never on or even near a stage, and no word of any new material reached my ears. I figured they were just fed up and had resigned themselves to day jobs and the sundry drudgeries of responsible adulthood.
Then, a few days before last Thanksgiving, I happened to see a post on Bluesky by Kate Sullivan-Jones, who plays bass in the Portland punk band Gum Parker these days. “Listening to Derek’s lovely album,” she simply wrote, with a link to a Bandcamp page.
Wait … Derek’s album?
I followed the link and found Begemot, a nine-track LP Derek Lobley posted on Nov. 2 of last year as “dslobley.” I recalled the album title as the name by which he’d released a song in March of 2008, “A Drowning Moth,” the only solo effort I’d ever known him to record. Pence wrote about it in March of 2008, in a music column that ran on our website called, The Online Underground.
“This elegant instrumental is a kind of puzzle or riddle,” he wrote. It “conveys ideas and feeling with restraint, intelligence without showiness. … The effect is kind of magical, as if something beautiful is just out of reach.”
With Begemot, Derek Lobley has reached that beautiful something.
The album begins with “An Ending,” a sunny ’60-style beach-pop number powered by carnivalesque organ notes and a bouncy beat. Derek’s singing, which also “conveys feeling with restraint,” is smothered with luscious oohs and la-las here, also sung by him, but there are darker, more complex waters beneath the surface of this recording, too.
“You prefer an ending to the start of something new,” the chorus begins, and ends, “Maybe we should take a hint from you.”
The next track, “From Home,” sounds a lot like Nirvana. Not the grunge band; the original, psychedelic chamber-pop Nirvana of late ’60s London. Its surreal atmosphere is drenched in synths and shimmery electric guitar, with a wandering bass line and acoustic strumming reflecting its homesick narrator’s lonesome drifting.
Like his brother, Derek knows how to sequence an album for maximum impact, and for the third and fourth tracks — the heart of the order,in baseball parlance — he’s sent out the musical equivalent of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz from the Sox’ victorious 2004 World Series team.
“I’m Tired” stumbles in like a drunken waltz, Derek wearily crooning, “I’m tired of waiting around for you / And you don’t care / that I’m there.” When the chorus hits, if your face isn’t raining tears, check yourself into the ER, because you’ve lost the ability to feel emotions. Derek’s voice is a little skinny, which makes the way he goes for broke on this chorus all the more heart-piercing, as does the plainspokenness of his lyrics. “Maybe I should just head back home,” he belts, holding the last syllable like a moan. “Maybe I should just go and roam the world like you / Find someone new.”
“It’s Hard” daydreams around a pretty guitar figure before sadly shuffling off to another big, emotionally bare chorus for the ages, Derek’s voice cracking into raspiness but balmed by airy vocals echoing the title. “You held me by the hand / As we fought over what we should do,” he sings on the second verse, adding a second vocal track to carry the last syllable skyward. “It seems everything we’ve planned falls apart / Like us tooooooo…”
In the hands of a major-label artist and their production and promotional teams, both of these flawless pop songs would be soft-rock smash hits. But unlike, say, Windham’s Amy Allen, who’s racked up a dozen Grammy nominations and two gramophone statues writing songs and rubbing shoulders in Los Angeles, Derek still lives locally and works a day job bringing people with special needs on shopping and recreational trips, in company with former Gully and RattleSnakes guitarist Greg Bazinet. And anyway, both songs already sound great. Their homemade nature enhances their charm.
“The Cliff” brings us back to the beach, with Derek singing along to a happy pop melody, “Let’s take a bath in the open ocean / Maybe you’ll teach me to swim / I don’t care if it’s a stupid notion / I’d like to live my life on a whim / However dim.” Once again, the bed of synth, guitars, and pillowy vocal harmonies draws you in like a hug, and the chorus is huge and butter-rich. But darkness also creeps back in, the sight of the “abyss” over the cliff’s edge filling the mind with “dread.”
“Night Terror” follows, delivering more dread, yet the melodies, slow and hallucinatory, are still dreamy. “The Voice” is more mysterious, an allegorical allusion to self-absorbed people missing a message “begging forgiveness” that they really need to hear. “But I don’t think that they’ll understand it / Till it’s gone,” Derek sings on the chorus, swinging for the fences again, followed by a long outro bearing a beginner’s guitar solo.
Derek initially accepted my request for an interview last month, then had second thoughts and politely declined. The Bandcamp page for Begemot, which is available for free download, contains no credits, but Derek obliged my inner fact-checker by confirming that he wrote, recorded and produced the album himself and played every instrument except the drums, which he “programmed from one-hit samples.
“Also,” he added in an e-mail, “most of the guitar and bass parts are spliced together from several takes, since I’m not adept at either and didn’t practice anything before recording it.”
Turns out there are 10 more free releases at the dslobley Bandcamp page, going back to 2008’s rechnoy kon’, a collection of computer compositions where “A Drowning Moth” landed. Every one contains treasures — like the Lobley brothers’ 2009 collaboration, something dark indeed, andthe four-song 2018 release, Under a Plane Tree, on which Jay and Jason both guest — but none are nine gems in a row like this latest album. Derek also said he made no physical copies of Begemot, which is a bummer because he’s also a compelling visual artist, as the collaged cover of Plane Tree demonstrates.
The last two tracks on Begemot go even deeper. “Warm Here” is the most devastating song about homelessness I’ve ever heard, told from the perspective of a couple living in their vehicle who “didn’t plan ahead” for a blizzard and parking ban, and now worry their home will get towed.
“We could try the driveway at your dad’s, tonight,” Derek sings, almost lullaby softly. “He’s at work / He probably wouldn’t mind, tonight.” As with the most moving Metal Feathers songs, like “Tough” and “I Hold Her Up,” the details implied by the lyrics hit as hard as those that are sung.
Lastly, we reach “The End,” a lovely ballad pondering whether one’s death will come slowly or by surprise, spiked with an unsettling question. “I can’t escape from the fact that I was born to be prey / Somewhere on this lonely way,” goes yet another chorus of pure gold, twinned vocals beautifully intertwined. “It doesn’t matter how I act / The outcome’s gonna be the same / And somehow I have to be tame.”
“Oh, no,” Derek gently adds the last time the chorus comes around, and we’re left to wonder if this is an expression of resignation or rebellion. Living in a society that seems indifferent to your talents and even your life, where everything you’ve hoped and planned for falls apart, including love, should you quit or continue creating regardless of the response, knowing the ultimate outcome, death, is coming either way?
The very existence of this music answers that question emphatically.
