The United Sons Of Toil  

Every sporadic show and record from Madison bands like The Suit or Colony Of Watts serves as an exciting reminder that they’re still lurking about. This little cluster of bands makes some of the town’s most intriguing, harsh, and technical music, even when it’s heavy on the ’90s post-punk reference points. (Which isn’t always the case, but frankly, just pulling that off takes a certain skewed chemistry.) That said, Wisconsin isn’t the most receptive place for it. Russell Hall got “sick of rock” after making a go of it in the ’90s with a band called Pound WI and playing in an instrumental group by the delightful name of P’elvis. After a couple of years off, Hall met Colony guitarist Chad Burnett, who nagged him to pick the guitar back up and offered to play drums. Hall eventually gave in, spawning The United Sons Of Toil. With his personal life getting more stable, Hall looked toward Marxism and all manner of injustice to fuel his writing, billing the band as “populist theoreticians.” After bassist Jon Terrones (also of The Suit) left, Hall recruited Knuckel Drager’s Bill Borowski, who quickly found his way into USOT’s brash yet intricate set of songs.

Last year’s debut album Hope Is Not A Strategy billowed with surprising texture over convoluted song structures and Hall’s near-indistinguishable shouts. Live, this makes for a cloud of feedback and static that’s almost tactile. The band dwelled on those qualities even as it recorded the faster tunes that begin its new full-length, Until The Lions Have Their Historians, Tales Of The Hunt Shall Always Glorify The Hunter, with engineer Ricky Riemer at his Science Of Sound home studio. Before this Saturday’s CD-release show at Project Lodge, Hall, Borowski, and Burnett told Decider about their writing process and why Communism is dope (or not).

Decider: Most of your songs seem to deal with specific issues or problems, but the lyrics are pretty hard to make out.
Chad Burnett: Bill and I usually don’t know the lyrics until—I still don’t really know the lyrics.
Bill Borowski: I learn bits of ’em ’cause I have to [sing backup vocals].
Russell Hall: They’re meant to be more suggestive than expositive. The first record, a lot of the songs were comparing political systems and family dynamics, especially families with young children. At least two of us are going through that. The song “The Collapse Of Communism” is about how communism as a utopian society, as a concept, is pretty dope, but when the rubber meets the road, it ends up becoming this classist thing where the ruling party ends up exploiting the underclass anyway. In a family, it’s this utopian idea where everybody lives in harmony and everybody helps out, but what happens is the parents put the smackdown on the kids and there’s no such thing as freedom and there’s no such thing as free speech, so it’s that kind of thing.
D: Russell, you said you had a specific plan for sequencing the new album.
RH: My intent was to kind of make it grow in scope and palette and sounds, to kind of have it expand as it goes on. We start out with the real wiry, scrappy, stripped-down stuff—
CB: The more immediate songs.
RH: Yeah. And by the time you get to the end, it’s kind of epic.
D: Beyond the usual influences people always bring up with post-punk bands, it sounds like you had other things in mind while making the record.
RH: On some of the later songs, I was—not musically, but production-wise—thinking about things like Explosions In The Sky or Isis or Mouth Of The Architect—bringing that epic, orchestral quality to heavy, noisy stuff.
D: In the studio, you talked about how much certain songs changed throughout rehearsals. Is songwriting mostly a gradual process in this band?
CB: Russell usually brings in parts that don’t really have a skeleton. Sometimes they do. But then based on what Bill and I add to it, I think things change to suit.
BB: “Simplify, Semper Fi”—
CB: Yeah, that song was completely different when we first wrote it.
RH: Pretty quickly, the shine started to wear off. We were on the verge of scrapping it. Then Chad started saying, “What if you try this? What if you try that?”
CB: That’s the problem with being a guitar player. You try to do both jobs and end up pissing people off.
RH: No, [Chad] doesn’t piss me off. He definitely pushes me outside of my comfort zone.
D: Sometimes when you’re introducing a song live, you’ll sum it up like, “This is about giving the Native Americans smallpox.” Is that just for emphasis?
RH: Well, the lyrics are not always entirely decipherable, so giving a little hint as to what they’re about can hopefully make it a little more evocative.
Most of the album is about exploitation of indigenous peoples. Half of the songs are about genocide of Native Americans. It just sort of worked out that way. Typically, when I’m trying to write lyrics, I’ll just open my mouth and play along and see what comes out. Once I stumble across some cool or interesting phrase, I start thinking about, what other lyrics can I write around that, what kind of theme would that be? Admittedly, a lot of the things only tangentially apply to the subject of the title, but to my mind they all work together.