Until recently, Ponytail were Baltimore’s secret weapon.
Amidst the recent praise for Dan Deacon, Spank Rock and the Death Set, the best record to come out of the city’s warehouse scene in the last three years was their debut album, Kamehameha. Matching two telecaster guitars – no bass – with Steve Shelley-esque freight train drumming and Molly Siegel’s squealed, animalistic vocals, Kamehameha was a high-end assault that sounded like nothing else going, but was woefully underappreciated outside of Baltimore.
Ice Cream Spiritual, the band’s 2008 follow-up, sees Ponytail going wide-screen; appealing to a larger audience without sedating the kinetic rush of their music. Lo Moda’s Peter Quinn introduced them to J. Robbins, a former bassist of Jawbox and Government Issue who resides in Baltimore and has produced for a multitude of bands including Clutch, Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil and the Dismemberment Plan, and his production gives the record more stylistic and structural variety, allowing the drums the room in the mix that they deserve, and ultimately shooting the band the way their sound warrants.
“I don’t know if we knew there was going to be a bigger audience”, laughs their charming guitarist Ken Seeno of the album’s popularity, “but we approached it differently to Kamehameha – we’d learned a little bit from that record and we knew that we wanted to get into a studio and spend time working on it; Kamehameha was home-recorded in one day. We wanted the drums to be louder, and we wanted to do more layering and padding – mainly production stuff. We wanted to sound bigger; gigantic.”
Ponytail, whose four members were put together as part of an art project, cut their teeth playing warehouse shows at DIY venues like the Copycat, though Ken echoes the sentiment that the Death Set’s Jonny Siera (who mastered Kamehameha) expressed in FACT last year, that due to an increased interest in the scene and fire marshals shutting down performance spaces, shows aren’t as frequent as they once were. “It’s definitely not like it used to be. All the bands that used to play together in the warehouse – Dan [Deacon], Death Set, Ecstatic Sunshine – everybody’s touring and you don’t get everybody in one place as much anymore; people can headline their own shows. Whartscape was recently down here, and that was great to get everybody together, but it’s not as regular anymore and there’s not as many good spaces to do it in.”
On the other hand, we’ve been playing out so much [the band are currently on tour in the UK]; we’ve been making friends in other cities, in New York and on the West Coast, so it’s been cool making friends outside of Baltimore.” A continued desire to work with J. Robbins and massive demand for their live show has only hastened the Ponytail express.
Tom Lea
