Signposts for The Bitter Tears' live show: "Sometimes we creep each other out"

There's no real way to prepare a show-goer for seeing Chicago band The Bitter Tears for the first time. While they're certainly not the most shocking mix of songwriting and performance art out there, the Tears (who've been together for about 10 years) cast a sense of otherworldly discomfort over a room, occasionally piercing it with equally warped humor. Singer-guitarist Alan Scalpone's reckless vocal delivery turns a lot of the band's songs into hellacious campfire stories, but that's that only a fraction of the band's stage presence, which continues to evolve in weird directions as it works on new songs to follow up this year's Jam Tarts In The Jakehouse. "We don't want any aspect of our live show to devolve into some kind of 'bit' that we do every time," Scalpone says. "We just discover these things in fits and starts, and then they run their course and we abandon them." Rather than try to sum up the band's sets in any thorough way—we wouldn't want to ruin the perverse surprises in store for this Friday's show at Inferno—The A.V. Club asked Scalpone about a few of the elements a newcomer might notice first.

Getups
First impressions: Perhaps they've just robbed a bank, fallen from a moving freight car, or, well, hard to say: Scalpone might be sporting a tattered fedora and jacket, or something weirder (see above photo), and then again sometimes everyone in the band wears a dress. Band members are often made up with exaggerated facial dirt-smudges, eyebrows, and/or mustaches.
The explanation: "When you put these clothes on, you sort of take the gig as low as it can go, right off the bat. You kind of ruin the gig before you get started. That's good, because all your expectations are cleared, so there's nowhere to go but up. We use old-school theater makeup techniques. We use burned cork to make our eyebrows and our mustaches. The costumes sort of let our unconscious out. We aren't entirely responsible for what we're saying or doing. Sometimes we creep each other out, when we look at our bare legs and bad hair."

The songs
First impressions: The feel of the set tends to bounce around from grave to silly (for example, a song with the chorus: "Hanukkah! Hanukkah! In Islam, there's no such thing as Hanukkah!"). But the lyrics and spoken passages do a great deal to set the mood, colliding blunt storytelling with arcane, poetic vocabulary on songs like "The Companion." (When was the last time you heard anyone use the word "slattern"?)
The explanation: "Most of our songs have a very serious subtext. Jam Tarts In The Jakehouse, our latest one, a lot of the songs are about suicide or anxiety or evil. I think sometimes we dress them up in humor to balance out that message. I would say we're a pretty serious band underneath all the big smiles onstage. Usually we don't work with a set list... [The darkest song on Jam Tarts is] Probably the first song, 'Slay The Heart Of The Earth,' which is about a person who really wants to do the ultimate evil act, which is destroy the earth itself, destroy humanity. There's a theme on the album of people being alienated from the outside world, and either attacking it, or withdrawing into themselves completely."

Crowd interaction and improv
First impressions: The Bitter Tears used to call on audience members occasionally to improvise tales of woe during the song "Murdered At The Bar." (Examples in the recorded version include "I was forced to say I admired jazz in the bar!") Halfway through another song, "Moline," Scalpone usually rambles into a creepily affecting spoken section about a guy making a hobby horse for a kid.
The explanation: "With 'Murdered,' before we would go into a town, I would do research on the history of that town, and think of lines that were pertinent to the town we were in. 'Murdered' sort of evolved into a few other songs, especially a song we have called 'Moline'—that's the hobby-horse song. Every time we perform that, I get to improv the verses. I imagine that song as sort of a more poppy version of Red Sovine, who was a country singer who narrates stories over his country music."

The sound
First impressions: In keeping with the mood, the music might come off as technically rickety at first. There's certainly a strong element of country, but it seems to get assaulted with dark shades of cabaret, pop, and, hell, maybe even some mariachi.
The explanation: "There's a lot of people borrowing from country music right now. Pop-country is pretty popular. I think country artists are using the worst elements of country right now, whether it's mainstream country—trying to be the Eagles or something—or more indie-rock, Pitchfork bands that are using more of the old-time, bluegrass styles. It just seems like the trucker archetype, I don't see that guy anymore. When I was a kid, I saw this movie that made a big impression on me called Convoy, starring Kris Kristofferson, and some of the images in that movie have stayed with me all this time. I really wanted to check in with that archetype and see where that trucker guy is today, and sort of make him interact with these things that aren't relegated to the road or the clichés of his profession. Put him in downtown Chicago at a Barnes & Noble, or put him on a roller coaster in the middle of Indiana. Put him in places where you wouldn't normally see a trucker."