Black Widows Want To Draw You Together

(They Have Their Reasons)

There’s a hum like a thousand decisions demanding to be made. that a minute’s further contemplation might reverse. The pressure to compete, consume, create, compare, capitalize and not capitulate is enough to make your eyeballs sweat. It’s like radiation poisoning, a spiritual tinnitus, that you can’t just shake off. The surest cure is to disconnect your body from your brain and plug it into heartfelt rumble like that of Minneapolis’ Black Widows.

The hard-charging trio pervade a fevered throbbing vibe that blends the Black Angels, Cramps, Horton Heat and a touch of L7, which is to say slinky surf & psychobilly guitar like a warm front of light-dimming psych-rock distortion lingering over an oasis of stomping garage-punk rumble. The latter’s particularly true of the new album, Creatures of the Night, which leans sinewy and grimier than prior releases.

The trio has been doing it for twelve years, and has release several EPs, a handful of singles, and toured pretty widely, but is just now making their full-length debut. As the man once said, Paul Masson will sell no wine before it’s time.

We jest, but it’s serious work building a career, a partnership, and a brand. The time put in on the front-end discovering what you do well (and badly!) is well spent on putting that best foot forward at the most propitious moment.

“We’re kind of at the point now after a decade, now is the time we need support because we do know what we sound like, we do know what our limits are, we do know what we’re capable of, and now we can say to someone, ‘this is what we do, this is what we need help with,’” says guitarist Corinne Caouette.

They spent six days at Pachyderm studios with producer/engineer Nick Tveitbakk, after struggling to find a producer who didn’t want to mansplain recording or show them how it’s done.

“One guy wanted to record the lead [to one of their songs] himself,” Caouette chuckles. “We’re a feminist punk band did you not get the memo? We burned a lot of bridges with dudes that ‘wanted to help our career’ because they were assholes.”

Indeed, that’s sort of how Black Widows first got together. Caouette had returned to the Twin Cities fr0m New York after her relationship ended, taking out the band she was in as well. “I was like, ‘I am sick of being in a band with men and boyfriends,’” she recalls.

Working at The Third Bird restaurant she encountered Pamela Laizure, a fellow guitarist, who was toying with the idea of learning the bass. They seemed to have similar tastes. So they went for it, and spent the last decade honing what they do, toying with different sounds and formats (a four-piece for a minute), before realizing the best way forward was with just the two of them and a pickup drummer. (They have several they work with, depending on availability.)

“That’s the sweet spot,” she say, “because we can say yes to everything and go at the pace we want and not exhaust people, because people get exhausted. We’re kind of driven.”

Because drummers, they’re, well, what’s the right word? “Challenging,” Caouette laughs.

They took their name from an initial impulse to name themselves after women serial killers, originally dubbing themselves Nannie Doss, also known as the Giggling Granny and sometimes, the Black Widow.

“She killed her husband for insurance money but also came out of abusive relationships and wanted revenge so that became an ongoing theme,” she says. “Everything we wrote in the beginning and still some now is steeped in this idea that the underdog gets its revenge.”

They pick each other up, because it’s hard work and a lot of grunt activity behind the scenes to make a band work. They split the chores so to speak, but they still need a moment sometimes. Orson Welles used to say he worked 95% of the time (like Paul Masson ads and other demeaning work) to pay for the 5% that he enjoyed.

“We get to these points where we have these meltdowns and… check out for a day because we hit a wall with all the stuff we don’t want to be doing to make the other things go,” Caouette confides. “But it’s also, ‘what else am I going to do?’ I can’t just check out but sometimes we want to. Can we just go to a group home?”

Caouette’s close with Hüsker Dü/Ultrabomb bassist Greg Norton (who offers some backing vocals on the new album), and she’s appreciated his perspective. There’s a sense of trying to create a space that’s right for you, no matter how large, a place authentic and fun.

During the pandemic they hosted Friday night streaming parties from the house she and Laizure were sharing at the time, inviting online guests and DJs. They carried on the idea with a hosted event called The Greatest Night Ever, where Black Widows headlines and curates an evening’s entertainment with magicians, comedians, burlesque or music, with an emcee and match it to a different theme each time.

“There is so much talent out there and all these niche forms that don’t get much stage time and I think art is something that you need to work out in front of people,” she says.

Given how the world marginalizes anyone not a white Christian male, Caouette feels it’s important to throw a flag up and create a place for people to gather. For like to find like.

“This is like a rally, a place for us all to come share energy, have respite from the big bad world and rage for a night,” says Caouette, who hates how the culture raises those on stage above us. “It’s pretty important for us to relate to the people supporting us as a band and remove that barrier [of the stage]. It’s a weird thing that happens in this culture that is pretty fucked up.”

They were able to finish recording in six days because they did a lot of pre-production work on the front end. Chris Schoonover handled the drums. They also rerecorded four songs they’d not “properly” recorded with a producer and engineer, and that they’d yet to put to vinyl. “Since we could crank out those four, we could focus some time on the newest ones,” she explains.

Highlights include the gritty garage-psych “Baby Boy,” about spoiled immature men, the quirky “Snake Charmer,” with its chorus “I want to get in your head,” and the 75-second punk rave-up about smug scenesters, “Mr. Cool.”

“We come up with a general topic. We usually have bass and guitar parts, parts A and B. We come up with a chorus together, this song is about this, let’s write a funny chorus,” Caouette says. “Then we go off and write our own verses, so it’s always fun to hear what comes back. It’s always a little twist and a fun collaborative way to work.”

Collaboration – with her bandmate Laizure, but also with the scene. They might be the band, but the fans are a part of it all too.

“We’ll go where we’re wanted and create our own environment and our own little underground world,” Caouette offers. “Whether it’s online or in weird spaces and if it’s a smaller crowd but everyone shares the same values, then cool! That’s a way better time than trying to chase popularity. That’s just a weird way to live – you’ll never be satisfied.”

Black Widows Album Release Show, with Surly Girly and Chick Singer, Saturday, June 6, at Cloudland Theater.