Son of Dribble carries on making music for the ghost

Son of Dribble parted ways with drummer Vicky Mahnke about a year ago, around the time the band locked in to begin work on its new album, Poking a Hole in a Bag of Tears (Minimum Table Stacks). Rather than immediately seeking out a replacement, however, the musicians opted to move temporarily forward as a three-piece, shifting the direction of the in-progress material and drawing out the developing push and pull existent between dual guitarists Darren Latanick and Mike Nosan.

“One thing I’ve really enjoyed is Mike and Darren’s guitar interplay, where they have these two tones that are kind of dancing a bit, and I kept telling them, ‘Make that upfront,’” said Clager, seated at Upper Cup on a frigid afternoon in mid-January. “I really wanted it to be this rambling kind of record where we stretched out the songs a bit.”

It helped that the three musicians share both a long history – Clager and Nosan have been making music together for more than 20 years in various home recording projects that predate Son of Dribble – and a deep distaste for expectation, entering into recording sessions with a natural comfort level and a desire to pursue the art for little more “than the ghost,” as Clager explained it. 

“We do it because we want to. So, you know, I’ve never personally worked as hard as I could, and I officially want to state we are not of the grindset,” said the frontman, who will join his bandmates in celebrating the release of Bag of Tears at Cafe Bourbon Street on Saturday, Jan. 25, joined by Maisie Kappler, WV White and Big Fat Head, whose drummer, Stanic Russ, will pull double duty in manning the kit for Son of Dribble. “We haven’t put a lot of pressure on ourselves or felt like we had to do it more, and that’s made it kind of easy. You’re doing it for the ghost, for the spirit. I’ve always thought of this as a folk-art project, where you sit down at the table and you sort of knock things out.”

Clager said this sense of freedom has been woven into the band’s DNA from its earliest days, when he and Latanick first roughed out lo-fi tracks with the aid of a cranky drum machine nearly a decade back. “It was like, ‘Oh, can we do this?’ And I sent him a text or something that was like, ‘We don’t have to worry about anything. We can do whatever the fuck we want,’” Clager said. “There was absolutely no reason not to. We all had jobs. We weren’t relying on this to pay our bills. And even now we haven’t had to turn it into something where we’re asking people for favors or doing anything that compromises our vision. We’re still finding ways to present things in the ways that we want.”

This goes for everything from Son of Dribble’s albums – a deep and ever-evolving collection that I would argue stands as some of the best rock music to emerge from the city over the last decade – to its music videos, which Clager described as a space in which he can live out his “minor dream” of being a ballet dancer, harbored from childhood.

The band’s latest continues this trend. Musically assured and rippling with a certain swagger, the tracks on Bag of Tears churn forward on craggy, interwoven guitars, thumping, barnacle-crusted percussion, and Clager’s smeared, lounge-y vocals. Lyrically, however, the album tends to be far more slippery, Clager frequently rooting his words in loss, regret and uncertainty. “We don’t know just what we want,” he sings on “Kasino Mess.”

Throughout, Clager repeatedly returns to the idea of mortality, questioning just where the time goes on the loose-limbed “Rascal Road” and making peace with the idea that we’re all just flesh and bone on “Vanishing Skulls,” a shaggy, relentless earworm of a tune. Elsewhere, the frontman wrestles with the nature of spirituality (“Main Moon”), reflects on the limited shelf life of dreams (“Opening of the Mouth”), and unpacks the human bonds that can help steady us amid life’s inevitable challenges. “If you’re lonely,” Clager sings on the patiently lurching “Just Hungry,” “crawl into my head.”

“All we’ve got is each other in this life we’re presented with,” said the frontman, who credited his unwillingness to spiral into cynicism to some combination of being a parent and the reality that “we’re all stuck here for a while.” “I was watching an interview with [French film director] Robert Bresson recently, and he was talking about pessimism in his work, and he said, ‘Don’t confuse lucidity with pessimism.’ I’m not trying to write goth music or anything. I think it’s just a clarity of how things are, whether that means getting older or losing someone or processing the idea that life isn’t easy, but doing it in a way that’s poetic and where it can be put in a nice little box, I guess. 

“I think one thing that connects all of us is that we do struggle, and we do face heavy shit. But I’ve got more good days than bad, you know what I mean? It’s a balance, I think. But art is also a place and music is a place where you can put a lot of your doubts about things. It’s a place where you can dig a little deeper. … I think I find solace in music, in art, in making things. It’s something I connect with and something that helps me feel grounded in this world, even if it’s fleeting.”