courtesy photo
[Editor's note: This feature story previews Those Darlins' concert at Lincoln's Vega on Wednesday, Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. Diane Coffee will open the show. Find more info here.]
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Not even Jessi Zazu’s journal reveals the ending of “Oh God.”
Those Darlins’ rock ballad about a fateful hotel phone message climaxes with the repeated lines muffled in the voice mailbox, “Oh God, what have I done?”
But narrative closure is not the point of the pain-stricken, love-lost song from Those Darlins. Resolution isn’t in the explanation of the crime, the indiscretion. Resolution hides in the toilet seat, the bathroom towel, the sopping wet hair and the drunk girl fresh out of the shower.
“That particular song was a specific instance that kept coming back and I was stuck on it,” Zazu says. “I’ve found that when something is really bothering me, if I can just write every detail of that memory, it’s almost like I pass it on and put it on someone else shoulders. It’s like confessing it, but you don’t have to confess it to anyone but your notebook.”
Beyond hotel bathrooms, the Nashville rock band’s new album, Blur The Line, takes inventory of the new and acutely clear identity of Those Darlins. For one, the real names of Jessi and Nikki “Darlin,” who on this album drop the moniker for Zazu and Kvarnes, respectively. It’s the most obvious indicator of Those Darlins — joined by Linwood Regensburg on drums and now Adrian Barrera on bass, after the departure of their third Darlin, Kelley Anderson, in 2012 — branding themselves with a pledge of honesty and transparency.
When the four-piece arrives at Lincoln’s Vega with the songs of Blur The Line on Wednesday, Nov. 20, it’ll be a stop in an ongoing tour to showcase this new version of Those Darlins that plots musicianship and confession ahead of image and pat wildness. Praise for this latest effort, then, feels more unadulterated than ever, with Zazu claiming before that tour started that she set out to write lyrics that she would “feel something behind them” with every gig.
“It feels more powerful, especially in the audience reaction to what we’re doing,” she says. “I can feel that there’s a strength being emanated in what we’re doing. When you’re being true to yourself and more original, people can respect that.”
Looking back on the formation of Those Darlins in 2006 and 17-year-old Jessi, Zazu says that she, Anderson and Kvarnes were almost certainly shielding themselves, even if the construction of pseudonyms was a necessary pitstop before arriving at the place where they could set aside the personas.
“I didn’t necessarily even know I was building a character,” Zazu says, clarifying, “I say a ‘character,’ but at the same time, I just feel like that’s who I was at that moment. I didn’t generate it knowingly.”
Blur The Line began with a pool of 30 completed songs, plenty of canvas for the sort of self-portraits Kvarnes and Zazu planned to initiate. And quite literally, Zazu’s bout of writing for the third album corresponded with a series of drawings of herself, which were featured in an art exhibition called Spit in Nashville last summer.
Like the drawings, the songs emphasize sketching over etching, highlighting different phases and moods of Those Darlins. It occurs sometimes in the framework of their first album’s country twang (see “Too Slow”), but more often by way of a newfound rock ‘n’ roll clarity. The constant in the album’s creation was the self-excavating labor it took to see the songs through.
“The whole process was sort of like going through and examining myself in the mirror,” Zazu says. “To draw yourself and look at yourself in the mirror is a harder challenge than most people would understand. It was facing a lot of issues I hadn’t faced or wanted to face.”
If the lyricism and the extremely assured tones that came out with the help of producer Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, John Cale, JEFF the Brotherhood) required stripping and exposure, it’s reflected in the album cover of Blur The Line. Staged there are the nude semi-profiles of the four band members that ignited a well-documented stir when it was hung up in mysterious banner form in downtown Nashville this past June. In the wake of a Fox News report on what was later revealed to be the album cover, Zazu has maintained that the act wasn’t a publicity stunt, claiming that in addition to physicalizing some of the inherent sexiness of rock music, the cover is meant to represent music without guise and a band with more unified intention than ever before.
“I wanted to just be able to perform a show and let the music speak rather than feeling like I had to put on some sort of a show,” Zazu says. “Not that we don’t get amped up, but I didn’t want to feel like every night that’s what I had to do. I want people to come away with something more than, ‘Wow, that was wild. They’re girls. And they’re wild.’”
There’s one more hurdle to clear for Those Darlins, a litmus test in the music press to see if news of Those Darlins’ transformation has taken hold. Both Zazu and Kvarnes have spoken at the length in the past two years about a disenchantment with seeing the word “sassy” attached to their names, a kind of obligatory effeminate tag, that says very little about their evolving sound. For now, the word has been replaced.
“The new buzzword is ‘sultry,’” Zazu says. “I think sultry really just means sexy. There’s always going to be a good bit of that whenever it’s females because a lot of times people don’t know how to react or they’re caught up in the fact that it’s girls playing guitars. I guess it’s better, I have no idea.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. What about the “inherent sexiness” of taglines? Eh? Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.