File Under 1990s, Bass Guitar Players, Goth Leaning, Indie, Post-Hardcore, Post-Punk
A few sparse notes were sitting around for this entry, which has sat as a draft for about a year. That is a relatively long gap — even as time seems to fly in some years. Given that I pulled out album The Chief Assassin To The Sinister (1994/1995) by Three Mile Pilot from San Diego for another fresh re-listen. In broad strokes their music — at least from this particular period — could be filed under post-punk or post-hardcore but neither label really seems that satisfactory. That’s where these thoughts below come in, trying to bring some insight to the band’s sound.
Starting off in 1991, Three Mile Pilot were introduced into San Diego’s active punk scene with bands like Drive Like Jehu releasing their landmark self-titled début LP that year, putting that band’s chaotic and noisy take on post-punk and hardcore on the map. While the San Diego label Vinyl Communications had been going for a few years by that point, the legendary label Gravity — probably the entity that best documented what was happening in that city at that time — was just starting out and would soon be releasing records by bands such as Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Another noteworthy San Diego label, Three One G, wouldn’t pick up until a few years later.
And although there’s some common threads running through all of these bands stylistically, Three Mile Pilot didn’t really dive into the chaotic sound the city was and still is known for, opting for a more atmospheric and brooding sound — well, at least for the first couple of albums. It was around the time of the release of the band’s second album (already mentioned) that I sought to pick it up after my teenage self found myself curious to listen to it after reading some review in an underground punk zine.
There was a record store in the city of Nanaimo — at the time about a 1.5 hour drive from where I was still living at home — called Fascinating Rhythm that I used to frequent as it was the closest record store by distance that would stock a lot of underground releases I was looking for. Back then this store was located with the confines of a rather drab mall with the banal name of Country Club Centre. This store is still around to this day — now thirty years later — albeit in a more suitable location these days in Nanaimo’s city centre. Back in the 90s I seem to remember the shelves being far more abundant in compact discs than actual vinyl, so most things I bought here were on CD, including this second Three Mile Pilot album.
The Chief Assassin To The Sinister was released not once but twice within the span of a year, first on the well known indie label Headhunter in 1994 with the album’s original artwork, and then again shortly thereafter in 1995 when the band was signed to the major label DGC (also known as Geffen) during the fury of signings of underground bands in the wake of success of bands like Nirvana. This second release of the album had different artwork on the cover, and this is the version I picked up.
Listening to tracks from this album over the years with those intervals spaced out in measurements of years, even listening to this record now some of the same feelings remain as to when I first listened to it all of those years ago when it came out. It’s moody and dark, accented by the strange and twisted image of the corpse/skeleton on the DCG version that graces the album cover and with song titles that sound like they came straight out a grim sci-fi space opera, with song titles like “Androsyn Guardian”, “X-Miner”, “Midgaard Serpent” and “Vux Intruder”.
Back in the day I used to wonder about this strange, sci-fi inflected choice of song titles and artwork. Many years later — with the benefit of documentation on the internet — it came to be that members of the band were big fans of the early 90s sci-fi computer game Star Control and many references from that game were the basis of a number of song titles from this album.
With the passing of years and the growth of documentation on the internet also unveiled another enigma to me — one of the key aspects of the band’s sound — and that being the sound and playing style of the band’s bass player, the extravagantly named Armistead Burwell Smith IV. Better known with the more inconspicuous name of Zach Smith, his style of playing immediately stood out to me although I wasn’t exactly sure how he was doing it. Back in those days unless you saw the band — and they didn’t come up to Canada as far as I can tell — you didn’t really have the benefit of seeing how a band executed things live.
Take the track “Chenjesu” (another Star Control reference apparently) featured here, which is the eighth track on the DGC re-issue and not even on the original release. Aside from the voice of guitarist Pall Jenkins, sparse drum hits, cymbal rolls and some miscellaneous noises, the first minute or so is dominated by Smith’s bass playing alone with a style that’s generally applied to playing a standard electric guitar. The sound of his bass — surprisingly achieved without the use of effects pedals on a tonally unique Alembic Stanley Clarke bass — is suited to playing not only the root notes, but chords and melodies simultaneously. It’s only 1m20s into the track where Jenkin’s guitar starts to enter into the mix and even then for this track — and indeed most of the album — it’s a treble-laden texture that sits over Smith’s expansive style of playing.
The track well employs the quiet/loud dynamics utilised by many bands working loosely in “emotional hardcore” at the time, including a massive snare/tom build starting around 2m30s that explodes into a crashing climax.
It should be noted at the preceding début album, Nà Vuccà Dò Lupù (1992) features no guitar — just vocals, drums and Smith’s detailed bass playing. The track “Walking With Your Mother” from this album is included as a clip below.
With the band folding in the late 90s (more on this below) and then re-uniting in the late 2000s, for me the mystery of Smith’s style was revealed as the band came back within the digital age where live and studio performances were better captured with newer technology. The band did a full performance on Seattle’s KEXP-FM — internationally known for it’s live-in-the-studio performances — in 2012 playing a mix of tracks from its albums, including “Shang vs. Hanger” which opens The Chief Assassin To The Sinister. Here we can see how Smith approaches his bass playing, incorporating some tricks that I’ve never really see other bass players do including using his right hand to simultaneously thumb the bass notes, using his smaller three fingers to strum the notes on the three higher strings AND using his index finger for fretting. Wild. As the track starts to pick up momentum, we see Smith switching to full on strumming using all of the fingers on his right hand to do so.
Although there’s a good number of bass players whose style I’m more attracted to (1), I have to give a “hats off” to Smith for really exploring the perimeters of his instrument. In an archived interview with Smith’s other band, the more indie-leaning Pinback, Smith has said:
“…So I picked up the bass. If you think about it, a lot of rhythm guitar is played in the low range, which is the bass’ specialty. It’s a great instrument to mess around with that way. But a lot of my style just came from being bored.”
With his style of playing, and the band’s sound in general around this time, there seems to be some stylistic parallel to the darker post-punk of the decade before (the 80s) although it’s never really clear how, although I suspect members of Three Mile Pilot probably grew up with that music. No any particular band from that period comes to mind that seems like an influence and this is likely a good thing.
If anything perhaps Smith’s playing and the use of chords on a bass guitar might have a faint echo to the style of Simon Raymonde, the bass player of Grangemouth’s Cocteau Twins, after the band’s original bass player Will Heggie — who played a far less elaborate style, albeit with a lot of chorus effects — left upon release of the band’s début album, Garlands (1982). Oddly the music of Three Mile Pilot has more murky similarities to that record — at least for me — than subsequent material from Cocteau Twins.
After The Chief Assassin To The Sinister the band’s release timeline gets a bit more muddy for me. The band’s 1998 self-titled EP (its cover featuring a highly posterized collage of images featuring of Conrad Veidt ‘s kohl-laden eyes from the classic 1920 film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari) on the aforementioned Gravity continues down the same dark, atmospheric path as the album featured here. Both of these records for me easily “out-goth” most actual goth bands out there — an observation I noted about another entry done here for The For Carnation. The track “Wahn” from this release is included below.
However, technically released a year earlier in 1997, the following album Another Desert, Another Sea is far more indicative of the direction the band would take in later years, with less focus on the bands signature guitar/bass instrumentation and utilising more “keyboard” instruments such as piano and organ. The over all sound is less noisy and pulling more from what might be Americana and classical music with a far more cinematic feel. The album’s closer “South” (see clip below) is a very dark and emotional epic piece, with numerous bombastic key changes as the track comes to it’s euphoric climax.
The conflicting styles and the release years of these two subsequent recordings might be due to label issues or otherwise where one recording was finished earlier but released later. It’s anyone’s guess but the band and those close to the band probably have the more detailed story.
The direction indicated on Another Desert, Another Sea would inform the direction of a new band that would come out of the initial break-up of Three Mile Pilot in the late 90s — this band being The Black Heart Procession whom I saw at least a couple of times in the late 90s when that band’s tour would see them perform a Vancouver date. The music of The Black Heart Procession saw their style go deeper into this dark and desert-influenced Americana and although they were enjoyable live, my interest in the music started to peter off around this time and I’d only come back to re-visit Three Mile Pilot‘s music intermittently in the decades to follow.
After the first dissolution of Three Mile Pilot — and at a point where Smith’s style of bass playing was becoming more and more sidelined — Smith opted to form another project to continue his playing style and that being the moderately successful Pinback which although has slower output these days, still continues to play and tour.
Like many underground bands from this time period and working the underground DIY network, the music of Three Mile Pilot has re-surfaced with occasional releases and re-issues from the re-formed band, as well as the band taking control of their back catalogue that’s all available on their BandCamp profile for those interested in exploring more.
1 And with my interest in good bass players, there’s a new category in these here pages called Bass Guitar Players to check out.