Frodus

May 8, Talking Head

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Frodus was cut off at its prime. After a successful 1999 tour with Refused and recording arguably its best album, And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea, the Washington, D.C. art-core trio, exhausted and beat down, called it quits. In the 10 years since, peers that were pushing upward through the same underground-driven punk community--such as Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan--have gone on to be foundational, unfuckwithable bands. In a sense, they've been able to reap the rewards of those early days, amassing die-hard fan bases and spawning who knows how many stylistic disciples.

"We spent years building and building and building and then hell broke loose and we had to end," says Frodus drummer Jason Hamacher over dinner at a Charles Village restaurant. "So we never really got to see what the work was about." To hear Hamacher tell it, Frodus' end was out of its members' control, the result of a devastating intersection of bad events. "'99 was a really, really bad year for all of us," he says. "1998 ended with me breaking my arm. Frodus was going to Japan in 1999, and we had to record a 7-inch. So I had to record with a broken arm. And right around then, the girl I was dating, that I was hoping to marry, came down with terminal cancer.

"Two days later, [singer/guitarist] Shelby [Cinca]'s father had a stroke. Nate [Burke], the bass player . . . found [out the girl he was dating] was cheating on him. This was all like in four days. All three of us had a really rough summer. Everyone was just surrounded with misery."

The band ended mutually and suddenly, in the midst of fielding record-deal offers from Sub Pop and Slow Dime. The shadow of the band's brutal last month is found about one-third of the way through Washed Our Weapons, on the track "6/99": "We could disappear in echoes/ We could disappear in the lives of those we love."

Washed Our Weapons was eventually released in 2001 by Fueled By Ramen, one of few labels interested in an album from a band that had already broken up. And the record proved to be crushing. If the band was "spazzcore"--fevered and screamed ultra-political hardcore--Weapons introduced quiet and introspection as a tool, slow melodic passages mingling, in breathless tension, with explosive punk. On Sub Pop and backed by tours, it would have almost certainly been not only a breakout record, but a crossover breakout.

Of course, to many people, Frodus had broken out already, and those people haven't forsaken the band, to Hamacher's surprise. The reunion started almost by accident last October. A friend's band, the Division of Laura Lee, was performing an odd show at the Swedish embassy in Washington, and both Hamacher and Cinca were in attendance. "In the first song, the power kept cutting in and out," Hamacher recalls. "And they just got pissed and threw down their instruments and left the stage and the power was off. And then the power comes on [and] they are not onstage. Our friend Mike was like, 'You guys should get up and play.'

"I figured no one there knew who we were," Hamacher continues. "It was like, Why not? This place is weird."

So Hamacher and Cinca, joined by a bass-playing friend in attendance, got onstage. "Let's play 'Invisible Timelines,' which I hadn't played in 10 years," Hamacher says, "We kind of limped our way through it. To my utter shock, large amounts of the people there knew what was happening. People started to freak out. People knew the lyrics. Our fan base does not look like I thought they did."

A Frodus reunion had been discussed by Cinca and Hamacher years before, and they'd played together for several years as Decahedron with Fugazi's Joe Lally, so it wasn't totally out of the blue. So, they offered themselves up to play a showcase at the 2009 South By Southwest music conference and since Burke had since moved to Seattle, they found a new bassist: Liam Wilson of the Dillinger Escape Plan (which, when all of this was initially being announced, led to the reunion being dubbed the Frodus Escape Plan).

And after 10 dormant years, the reformed Frodus wound up with three weeks to practice before its pair of Austin shows. Hamacher says it happened in typical Frodus fashion. "While we were playing, the fluorescent lights started to loosen and fall all over me," he says. "It hit the cymbals and smashed all over my drums. Shelby was like, 'Dude you're breaking lights, that's pretty Frodus.' We kept on playing and it happened again only it broke on my shoulder and exploded on me. It was like, 'We could play next week if we wanted to.'"

And the band's reunion is more or less permanent. After this quick tour--a half dozen dates on the East Coast--Cinca is moving to Sweden, but Hamacher promises that won't keep Frodus quiet. "We're writing new music," he says, explaining a loose plan for a series of self-released EPs. "There is no need to have a record label," he says. "Each EP will be us collaborating with a different group of musicians, like this big kind of collective effort.

"The American and world economies falling apart, those are directly the themes of the [original Frodus] records," Hamacher continues. "If we were going to play, the stars are aligned, this is the time to play. I want it to be fun, and I want it to be punk, like we used to do it."

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