“There was a Ship, quoth he”: Ben Brooks of Poney on sea-cursed songwriters

It took Wausau hardcore act Poney four long years to churn out the new, 70-minute-long Seamyth; but then again, the band did tempt the fates by deciding to make a record based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” Drummer-vocalist Benjamin Brooks didn’t slay any innocent birds (that we know of) or watch his bandmates drop dead around him in the process, but like the title character, he’s found himself bound to wander the earth and exhaustively re-tell the story. Rather than strictly follow Coleridge’s narrative, Brooks tried to respond to it through characters who don’t really get to speak for themselves in the original work. (The liner notes, available through Poney’s Bandcamp page, come with annotations that emulate Coleridge’s original side notes.) The band’s style expands as the record goes on, from the math-mutant batterings of “Witch’s Oils” and “Stormblast” to increasingly slow-building, complex pieces like “Sea Serpents” and “The Nephew (An Aside).” As the album’s poetic heft (and the band’s evolving songwriting) pulls it in a more progressive direction, it stays grounded in Brad Beilke’s grimy guitar tone and Brooks’ spicy interplay with second percussionist Pat Kohlbeck. Before Poney’s Sept. 3 show at the Wisco with Mose Giganticus and Loop Retard, Brooks spoke with The A.V. Club about some other examples of musicians gone mad at sea.

Iron Maiden, “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”

The A.V. Club: This is the obvious one, of course, but Maiden’s lyrics here are sort of a CliffsNotes summary of the poem. You’ve said Seamyth is more of a “companion.” How was your approach different?

Benjamin Brooks: When [Coleridge] released it, he was on opium all the time, and so his friends had no idea what he was saying. They thought he was crazy. His publisher said, “You have to write notes for this, or no one’s gonna know what’s going on.” He wrote notes, and those are equally confusing. In the liner notes, it’s laid out like it’s a poem. I made my own side notes for my lyrics. The lyrics are either from perspectives, or about moments, that he skipped. In any narrative, you have those moments you don’t narrate, or those perspectives that aren’t described, because you’re describing someone else’s point of view at that moment. The ones he wasn’t describing, those are what all the lyrics are written about. For example, there’s the scene where the ghost ship comes up and Death and Life are gambling for the men’s souls. Almost the entire song [“Skeleton Ship Part 2: Snake Eyes”], the lyrics are the characters Life and Death speaking to the Mariner—which isn’t in the poem at all, but it is there. He just didn’t narrate it. “The Nephew (An Aside)” is a really good example because that’s not actually part of the poem. He makes one comment about standing next to the corpse of his brother’s son—which is really a bad literary thing: He makes one comment about a pretty close character, and then never talks about him again. So we wrote the nephew’s story from where he left on the ship to after he’s killed. It parallels the poem, but more than that, it’s covering gaps. I wanted to fill in questions that people would have, and criticisms that people had at the time, instead of trying to do what Iron Maiden did, which was go right alongside it.

AVC: The Maiden song is a pretty dull ending to an awesome album, Powerslave.

BB: I think a lot of people have that opinion of it. Brad Beilke, my guitarist, is a huge Maiden fan, and obviously he brought it up right away. “Oh, Maiden did that one song!” People are gonna make this association, but there’s no association.

Mastodon, Leviathan

BB: Yeah, that’s a hard one to address, even for me. We’re all Mastodon fans. If you listen to the music, we were down-tuned more, and my drumming—everything had a Mastodon influence going on. The way we tried to step apart from that is that Leviathan is kind of based on Moby-Dick. They don’t follow the story. There’s no “Megalodon” in Moby-Dick. It’s just ocean-related and it’s badass, so they wrote it. Seamyth is much more a tribute to literature, I think. The first song we wrote was “Stormblast,” and at that point we did not have a theme. Once I picked the theme, from that point on, every song we wrote from there on out, we picked a section of the poem and wrote a song that went with it musically and lyrically. I get the feeling that Mastodon wrote Leviathan instrumentally first, and then made it fit the theme. We listened to it while we were writing the record. The influence was there for sure. It just separates at the point where their record is more abstract, and ours is actually the story.

AVC: But both albums have this balance of shorter, really aggressive tracks, and longer, more elaborate tracks.

BB: We only have one super-long-track too.

AVC: Sure, but there's a definite point where the songs get longer and take on more parts—“Curse The Sea.”

BB: To be completely honest with you, that’s chronologically. We pretty much wrote the record in order, almost. What you notice about the pace of the record is because that’s how we wrote it. I changed the lineup as we were writing it. We’ve had three different lineups. Our auxiliary percussionist, Pat Kohlbeck, was added two songs into it, and Scott Miller, our bassist, had been added a little after Pat. We were doing the hardcore-punk thing pretty solidly the first half of the record. We all like dynamics a lot, and not just in volume but also in texture and length. We really wanted it to cover a gamut. We just said, “Let’s go with whatever the concept brings us.” We didn’t stop writing with any of the songs until we felt like we had written everything we’d want to write for that song, so inevitably everything got longer and longer.

The Ocean, Heliocentric

AVC: Yes, the band is named The Ocean, but more importantly, this is a metal band that’s putting out two unwieldy concept albums this year. They’re grappling with really complicated concepts about astronomy and Christianity, and also changing up the instrumentation a lot throughout.

BB: They fit the bill for the bands that we respect and listen to all the time. We prefer bands that are grappling with intense concepts or literature or difficult philosophies. Our next record is [going to be] all about metaphysics for the most part. There’s almost a new field of bands out there, especially in progressive metal or progressive hardcore, that there’s no attempt to make it accessible. It’s about writing music to fit these really difficult subjects, and therefore the music becomes really complex and difficult. We shoot for that. We want to grapple with things that make people think.

AVC: And as that happens, there are also more parts that aren’t based on guitar riffs or aggressive drumming. Your song “Velvet Coil (Sea Serpents)” builds on one slow bass part for several minutes. It creates a noticeable slowdown, especially when you play it live.

BB: It’s the only one that’s consistently added to our set no matter what else we’re playing or what audience we play to. That song marks the beginning of a writing style for us. Obviously there’s no vocals. We didn’t really know what to do with that song, because it’s all based on that one melody, which is the bass. Bass is the lead instrument on that song. The way it feels, it was awkward for us to even think of vocals. We wanted it to remain about that melody or that feel. So now we’re trying to do the same thing, and we are more comfortable with just letting things build. That song marks the beginning of us being comfortable with being more minimalistic.

The Decemberists, “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”

AVC: This song is sort of on a lighter note, but it’s also a really morbid song.

BB: That’s really dark and kind of brutal for a folk band, especially to do a whole song based on that. It’s actually kind of a good association for Seamyth. Seamyth is a punk record, basically, but it’s about an unexpected subject. Same thing with them—I wouldn't expect them to write that story.

AVC: Colin Meloy’s going for a more old-timey, poetic feel in this song, so you’re taking different approaches to literature.

BB: One thing I changed is that I did a lot of rhyming on Seamyth. My style is closer to Every Time I Die—Keith Buckley never rhymes. He has random phrases and a rhythm for them. I really had to step out of myself to do the whole rhyme-scheme thing. Almost every line rhymes, because I wanted it to be like a poem in that way. Outside of that, when I was picking my vocabulary, I stuck with more modern. I didn’t want rhyme scheme and concepts and “I’m using words like ‘killeth’ and ‘beholdeth.’”