Living & Arts

Ponytail celebrates the body electric

In print | November 20, 2008

Riding high off of the release of their latest album “Ice Cream Spiritual,” Ponytail brought their eclectic blend of driving rock and Yoko Ono inspired shrieks to Olde Club this past Friday night. Despite the somewhat subdued audience, Ponytail proved that lyrics involving those pesky things traditionally known as words are for squares.

Playing songs from “Ice Cream Spiritual” and earlier recordings, the band revealed a penchant for classic guitar riffs and a contained wall of sound aesthetic. In contrast, the nonverbal howls of frontwoman Molly Siegel (who acts like the love child of Karen O and Iggy Pop) and guitarist Dustin Wong were both avant-garde and invigorating.

Siegel’s stage antics added some fire to Ponytail’s set and encouraged the audience to actively engage with the performance. Grinning and grimacing, Siegel hopped from foot to foot while egging her spectators on with cries of “Ya! Ya?” Ultimately, it was Ponytail’s layering of more traditional guitar and drum sound with an atypical approach to vocals that made enduring another cold night in Olde Club worth it.

The Phoenix was able to catch up with Siegel and drummer Jeremy Hyman before their set. Here’s what they had to say about everything from Ponytail’s mythic founding to Sigel’s untraditional vocals.

Liana Katz: Can you tell me a little bit about how the band met and how you started making music together?

Molly Siegel: One day, we were all walking in this meadow, randomly, and I first saw Jeremy and he was just playing the drums like out in this field …

Jeremy Hyman: So, what really happened was we were all in school together and we all happened to be taking this bizarre painting class called “parapainting” and the teacher kind of had this vision … he just started picking people, putting them into groups and he kind of formed seven bands and we were in one of the bands.

LK: Did you find out that you had musical influences in common?

MS: I mean, we all had pretty different interests, but I would say that there was a general undertone of noise and also classic rock.

LK: Are there any bands in particular that are distinct influences on your music?

JH: I would say, for me, especially when we first started, a lot of the Providence bands like Lighting Bolt.

MS: One band that we all thought about a lot and, when we were making songs, realized we were similar to is The Who.

LK: Shifting forward a bit, you just released an album this year. What was the process like writing and recording for that record? How was it different from that of your first album in 2007?

JH: [Recording] was really nice. It was four days, which was four times as long as our first one day of recording. So, that’s the main difference, that we had more time and we had better equipment. But the writing process was different too because it took about a year and a half to write the songs for the newest record and the first album was kind of like everything we had done from the first day we were a band ‘til that point in 2006.

LK: _What is the song writing process like? Is it collaboration or do you each put in a little piece and then put it all together in the end?)

MS: It’s definitely collaboration. I think that just logistically we always come up with the riff, then the drum part or we’ll jam and we’ll bring out a minute of the jam that we like to record. And I usually kind of end up … improving on top of what’s going on.

LK: How did the no verbal vocals come about?

MS: I didn’t like the idea of singing, you know, normal vocals over music. I thought it would be boring and sort of ruin [the music]. So I just did what felt right. I took a really long time for me to figure out what I was doing and like it and be comfortable … it took me at least a year or more, probably more, to really hone what I was doing.

LK: Going back to your sound a little bit, do you see the band as fitting into a particular musical scene?

JH: I hope not! I don’t think so.

MS: I think that there is connection to Baltimore, the Wham City scene. We grew up in that scene but we’re not really technically part of Wham City. I don’t even think that that scene is one thing either, you know, it was a lot of different bands that came out that are totally different from each other.