Call it kismet or weave the web of six degrees - Either way, the girls of Portland-based Swan Island found themselves wedged in a basement in 2004, making music that would soon mean something and pave the way for other DIY girl groups. Drummer Vera Domini and singer Brisa Gonzalez had known each other since their youth; the rest of the band met each other through Portland’s underground art/music/queer scene. Initially, it was Domini and guitarist Aubree Bernier-Clarke who started writing songs together. Torrence Stratton learned the guitar and began to jam; the results were fantastic. As the trio got more invested in what started off as a casual pastime, a series of fateful events unfolded which brought bob e. (bass, and vocals) and Gonzalez into the apocalyptically-aware group and solidified the line-up.

You could call the girls a pop/prog/metal/dance band, or any adjective in between, and probably come close to describing at least one of their songs. While Domini is actually fond of the descriptor “disco-metal,” Bernier-Clarke tries to dissuade being labeled as such or any derivative thereof, preferring to be classified as “End-of-the-World World Music.”

Bernier-Clarke’s journey to Portland was actually what inspired the name of the band. On her inaugural drive into Oregon, she spotted the Swan Island exit off of the I-5, and the name swiftly conjured up images of a beautiful, peaceful, idyllic destination.

“We all live near Swan Island, and it is actually very industrial with a lot of white cranes used for loading cargo from the trucks and trains and ships,” says bob. “It sounds like somewhere you might like to go for a stroll, but that’s not the case unless you’re trying to hop a train or a boat. We liked the irony in that. Our music relates to it.” The name is indeed quite fitting, for despite the saccharine-sweet moniker, Swan Island delivers a combustible cocktail of delicious noise made up of luxe and melodic pop-friendly vocals, layered on thunderous, rockin’ riffs and complex, danceable beats.

Each member of the band has her own musical influences, which contributes to the unique and varied sound on their debut album, The Centre Will Hold. Artists such as Team Dresch, The Gossip, B-52’s, Heart, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, ESG and Dolly Parton are commonly named as influential amongst Swan Island members. All five of the women contribute to the music, and the group approaches songwriting collaboratively. Says Domini, “We tend to start with a basic progression on a guitar or bass and then build everything around it. The lyrics tend to come last, with Brisa scribbling about the mood she’s evoking while we play the new parts over and over.”

Gonzalez adds, “We pieced these songs together, and they are full not only of us but the communities and places we come from, pass through, and hope to go [to]. And as a group, I think that we strive for less dissonance than structure. So if there is a little distress, a little distortion, its not for it’s own sake but for where it will take us. Hopefully that place is somewhere we want to be, where we won’t have to plug our ears.”

The concept behind The Centre Will Hold revolves around the inevitable fall of the empire and the party that Swan Island intends to have at the centre of the earth when this happens. “The songs stay away from common pop themes of love or ‘I’ and ‘Me’ types of things,” says Domini. “They have more references to Yeats poems and revolutions than our own personal lives, which for a dance-rock album is rare.”

Adds Gonzalez, “I think The Centre Will Hold is really a collection of different ideas about life, values and civilization paired with a collection of ideas about music, sounds and images. The underlying theme in all of these songs is probably destruction, the end of what we thought we knew and hoped for the future.”

The tracks on the album showcase Swan Island’s diverse talent. “‘Grey Matter’ is such a complex and epic song that mixing it was tricky, but the end result of it on the record is strong and has a lot of emotion,” says Domini. She adds, “There is a hidden bonus track on the record that is ‘The Centre Will Hold’ with bob playing piano and our fried Osa playing violin. I think it’s impressive to hear that song — which is one of our most metal, loud and heavy songs — so soft and instrumental. It’s a beautiful contrast.”

Because of their involvement with the music and queer communities in Portland, the band found it relatively easy to start playing shows locally. Says Bernier-Clarke, “There are lots of bands in town that we like and have friends in. Our first show was at a queer dance party that I DJ’d at. After that we just approached bands we liked and knew people in, people asked us to play at their parties, and eventually some bigger local bands started asking us to play with them, like Sleater-Kinney, Team Dresch and The Gossip.”

Swan Island is die-hard DIY and highly committed to working with people it knows and shares a community with. Says Domini, “We get to have the contract that we wanted, and keep things local and in the family. It’s sometimes a struggle to break into people’s awareness when you don’t have the name of a big label backing you. But it’s a trade we make willingly because we feel much more comfortable.”

The band recently came back from a national tour they managed to book through maintaining old connections from their previous bands. “We pooled our resources and called and emailed a bunch of people, and it somehow came together,” says Bernier-Clarke. “MySpace also helped. It’s a pretty incredible resource for touring bands.” This tour filled the girls with an endless list of memories including West Coast highlights such as people ballroom dancing during their set in Tucson and playing legendary venues like the Troubadour in L.A. and the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco — where Elizabeth Davis of 7 Year Bitch did sound for them.

Always supportive of women in the music industry, having a female sound person was a thrilling surprise for Swan Island. The band felt strongly about recording with all women engineers and producers for The Centre Will Hold. “We found some rad women who were friends of ours to do it. It was a long process with a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but we are pretty happy about the end result,” says Domini.
She adds, “I love being a part of something that is bigger than me or just us, but requires each individual or it won’t work. It’s been really rewarding to see how much you and four of your friends can accomplish when you all agree to come together on something.”

Swan Island celebrated its November 4 record release at Satyricon in Portland with Wet Confetti, Twin (ex-King Cobra) and Plasmic Stallion (an amazing teenage all-girl punk band that formed at Rock and Roll Camp for Girls). They are in the early stages of booking a West Coast mini-tour for mid-December and have plans for more material and touring — possibly internationally — before the party starts at the centre of the earth.


www.swanislandlove.com