It’s 12 months since the release ofMoney Shot,the third album from the Maynard James Keenan-led Puscifer, and now the band has announced some Aussie tour dates for early next year.
Coming four years after its predecessor, Money Shot ties together the various characteristics displayed on the band’s earlier records. There remains a strong focus on electronics, but it sounds very much like the work of a band and features copious interplay between Keenan and co-vocalist Carina Round. There is some lyrical humour, but on the whole Keenan seems more interested in offering social commentary and philosophical musings.
“Like everything we do, it’s about being in that moment and listening to various ideas that we all have and following the inspiration,” he says. “So if there’s something that seems inspiring to us now, we have to recognise that as being where we are now. The same things might not have been inspiring us or tilted our ear five years ago, two years ago. You just have to remain true to your intuition and think, ‘This is inspiring me in this moment, so it must be where I am today.’”
Keenan is the figurehead and driving force behind Puscifer, but both Money Shot and the band’s live show are enhanced by the personalities and ideas of a number of other contributors. The most notable of these are Round and multi-instrumentalist Mat Mitchell.
“[Mitchell] and I work off each other very well,” says Keenan. “A lot of the stuff that comes up on the records has to do with [the process where] I have an idea or a certain rhythm in mind or a particular paint palette I’d like to pursue, and he might’ve just gotten some new gear or something he’s found. So he’s playing around with his new toys and I’m playing around with whatever idea is bumping around in my head, and we bring those together and see where they meet.”
From the outset, Keenan has been intent on distinguishing Puscifer from his other two bands, Tool and A Perfect Circle. The significant presence of Round’s vocals goes a long way towards achieving this.
“She’s an amazing writer and amazing vocalist to begin with, but when you look back at other things that I’ve done, most harmonies have been my voice stacked on my voice,” Keenan says. “That starts to paint a particular waveform, because my voice has spikes and valleys and when you layer them those spikes and valleys become more prominent. But when you add the second or third vocal like Carina or Juliette Commagere and you start adding those other waveforms in, they tend to smooth out those peaks and valleys and so you have another chord, another harmony, another feel altogether.”
In the time since the album’s release, Puscifer have done a couple of North American tours and made their first trip to Europe. They’ve kept an open mind regarding the shape and character of the Money Shot material.
“[The shows] definitely nod to what the records sound like, but we definitely let them evolve live,” says Keenan. “Although, there is an electronic element that can hinder it, but then if we want to expand on that we’ll remove or change those elements according to our whims. Performing it live, it has to have a pulse, it has to have a living, breathing feel to it, otherwise we’re just regurgitating the album.”
Indeed, the Puscifer live show is designed as an immersive and unpredictable experience that involves much more than just a run-through of the recorded songs. In recent times they’ve been touring with Luchafer, a Mexican-style wrestling performance group that specialises in comedic, dramatic wrestling. Luchafer will join the Australian tour as well.
“Quite a bit of our music is written from the place where we live, the Southwest, so that’s our landscape for the most part,” says Keenan. “A lot of the concepts are from here. Just like wine expresses a terroir, we’re hoping to have these songs express a particular region. In these regions we have a lot of local flavour and the luchadores are part of those flavours.”
Puscifer has been Keenan’s major focus over the last ten years, taking in three albums, three EPs, two live records and a whole lot of touring. He’s often described it as more of a performance piece than a standard rock’n’roll band, and it remains an outlet for creative exploration.
“‘What is Puscifer?’ is what Puscifer is,” he says. “To stay true to that, we allow it to evolve. You have to, otherwise you just become a commodity. We want this to be something different every year, evolve with the weather.
“At the end of the day, if you’re successful in this, you’re considered to be an entertainer and so people expect you to entertain them in the way that they have grown accustomed to you entertaining them. But I think there’s some freshness that should come along with that. That’s not easy to maintain, that happy medium of not just being a carbon copy of yourself and yet not going so far outside of what you do that it’s unrecognisable from where you started. That’s a very delicate balance to strike, so in a way Puscifer provides me with that going-too-farproject, and I can always default back on my other two projects to maintain where I came from.”
[Puscifer photo by Robin Laananen]
Money Shot is out now through Puscifer. Puscifer perform at Darling Harbour Theatre on Wednesday January 25, with Luchafer as support, and atMofo onFriday January 20.
