DANA takes an apocalyptic view of this cultural moment with ‘Clean Living’

Clean Living, the new full-length from the Columbus avant-garage quartet DANA, began to take shape a few years back but feels wholly reflective of this social and political moment. 

Throughout, the songs ripple with a mistrust of technology, an urge to push back against the isolation these supposed advancements can inspire, and a deep-set weariness brought about by the relentless, numbing grind of it all that frequently runs counter to the music, which maintains its aggressive, steely punch even in those moments when the lyrics might be looking for an escape hatch. “I thought this shit was supposed to be more fun?” singer and theremin player Madeline Jackson offers on “7 Years Bad Coke,” a squealing noise-rock rumbler that steadily picks up momentum like a truck careening off a cliff and flipping end over end.

This isn’t the first time the band has had its finger on the cultural pulse. Jackson penned what she described as the “police critical” song “Pork Pie,” from 2019 album Glowing Auras and Black Money, more than a year before the murder of George Floyd sparked a larger national conversation related to abuses advanced by those tasked to protect and serve. “So, the song just becomes more prescient,” said Jackson, who will join guitarist Chris Lute, drummer Brian Baker, and bassist Dan Matos in concert at the Columbus Arts Fest on Friday, June 6, where the band will perform on the Big Local Art stage at 9:15 p.m., capping a mammoth five-act run that also features Red Velvet Letdown, Big Fat Head, Corey Landis and the Finer Things, and Long Odds. (A full schedule of stages and performers for the three-day affair can be found here.)

These kinds of ahead-of-the-curve moments abound on Clean Living, which is set to release digitally on Monday, June 9. Witness the relentless “One Weird Trick,” which started its life as “One Weird Trick (Elon Musk, Suck My Dick)” before the band members voted out the parenthetical, and which has evolved into a scathing commentary on the preponderance of digital spam and online slop pushed by tech oligarchs. 

“I think most people relate the term ‘luddite’ to someone who wants to be a serf or a caveman, and who isn’t interested in technology, but its roots are in worker’s rights and asking questions like, what is this technology doing to workers and their income and their safety?” said Jackson, who traced her interest in these types of subjects to a childhood fascination with apocalyptic sci-fi authors such as J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. “I don’t know. It just feels like we’re letting anti-social fucking freaks be in charge of everything. And once you see it and are looking for it, you can’t miss it, and it grosses me out. … And I don’t pretend to be some moral authority, but so many things are happening where it’s just so obvious that this is wrong, but everyone is worn down, so we’re just looking at each other with a wink and a nod, like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked.’”

Jackson then contrasted this reality with the circumstances surrounding the nationwide protests that sprouted organically beginning in May 2020, and which took place at a point in time when certain businesses were limited by pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and workers might have had more time and energy to dedicate to outside causes. “Maybe they were laid off, or maybe if they weren’t an essential worker they had more free time to go to a protest,” she said. “And now the pendulum has swung back so far, and everybody is forced to just trudge on. … Everyone is exhausted, and so everyone is just kind of living with this.”

Coming into Clean Living, the DANA bandmates also challenged themselves to create more musically accessible songs, with Lute recalling one friend who drunkenly said to them, “Your music is great, but you don’t have any songs.” 

“And at first I think we were like, ‘You’re drunk, you’re an asshole, whatever,’ but I honestly think we really took it to heart,” said Lute, who has continued to seek out new tones on his guitar, some of which were inspired by a post-pandemic B-52s cover band he moonlighted in for a stretch. “And there were all these weird tunings, and dude played with one of the strings off, so I was trying to emulate his style. And then we started writing new stuff after that, and I incorporated some of it into what we were doing.”

The songwriting process has remained consistent for the bulk of DANA’s nearly 10-year run, however, with Jackson embracing a stream-of-consciousness approach in which she fills spiral-bound notebooks with assorted cultural observations, knotty conspiracies, and references to those corrosive forces that actively work to subjugate our collective humanity, heart, and creativity. This has more recently included the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, which started as a curiosity – Jackson recalled typing prompts such as “Lindsay Lohan with Muammar Gaddafi” into an early version of the DALL-E image generator and quickly becoming bored with the technology – and has rapidly evolved into a resource-sapping monstrosity increasingly forced into every facet of existence despite a public that has been generally resistant to these developments. 

Elsewhere, songs are rooted in daily interactions, including “Clean Living,” which Jackson described as “kind of a diss track” based on an experience with a peer prone to playing the heel, and “Blueteeth,” which stemmed from an exchange the singer had with a patron when she was bartending at Dirty Dungarees some years back. 

“And a little bit into our conversation, I realized he was experiencing psychosis,” said Jackson, who recalled how the man told her his neighbors were beaming messages into his apartment, which led her to envision Bluetooth that could be connected directly to a person’s brain. “And it just became this illustrative example of advancing technologies permeating your life, whether you want them to or not.”