The Melody Maker

Back in the mid-1990s, when they were first tackling the Seattle scene, they were a bit of an oddity, competing with the last dismal dregs of grunge and the surge of power pop in the post-Presidents era. "We played with a lot of goth bands back then," explains Kelly. "People called us 'gothic surf' for a while." People also called them "Seattle's Velvet Underground," which pleased Kelly to no end. "If that's true," he says, "I've accomplished something."

In 1997, The Melody Unit released their first EP, Wax Cylinder, a raw, aggressive set of six songs, thick with lush guitar lines and sweet vocal melodies. In 1999, they put out their first, self-released album, Odds Against Tomorrow and followed it up two years later with Choose Your Own Adventure, released by Parasol Records. The line-up changed a bit along the way, but the band eventually settled on a crew of Kelly on guitar, Salvadalena on drums, Peter Lynch on keyboards, Kevin Miller on bass, and series of female vocalists leading up to Emma Valentiner on the last record. Things were going well for the band; their albums got rave reviews around the country, though they never managed to tour outside the Northwest. But things really just never came together for the band.

"We were a pretty dysfunctional band in a lot of ways," explains Kelly. "We're so focused on the detail of the music, and not on any of the other things that go into making a band successful." And Kelly's chronic depression didn't help much either. "It's weird, because we get along really well, but it's as if we're too similar, our personalities are almost too similar, we're all very depressed, you know...it doesn't take too much to defeat our morale."

Following a gig in Portland, the band went on an almost permanent hiatus.

"I was driving down there in my girlfriend's car," he explains, chuckling about it now, "she was in Vegas at the time, and the fucking car blew up down in Kalama...so I was able to get it off the freeway and up to this place called the Rebel Truck Stop, and so me and the female vocalist at the time, Jessica, were stuck at the Rebel Truck Stop in the middle of fucking nowhere...the rest of the band was already down in Portland, so it was like 'Fucking God damn it!' total stress. My girlfriend was in Vegas so I couldn't get in touch with her to tell her her car was destroyed...and so they had to come and pick us from Portland, and that took a while, and they were very cool to us down there, but they looked at us really weird. So by the time we got down there, I was pretty high strung and stressed out from that, and then the show itself was horrible. Like we had a keyboard that fell down and fell off the stage, and the keyboard was mine and pretty hard to find, a Roland 101...and so that was awful, and I got drunk, and I said some shit in the microphone about how shitty Seattle was, and then I decided later in the set that this audience is even shittier than Seattle audiences...I don't know if Peter's ever gotten over that."

Following the general dissolution of the band, Kelly basically put music aside. "There was a period there where I stopped playing music altogether. For almost two years, I didn't touch the guitar or the keyboards at all." But eventually, Kelly, who refers to Salvadalena as one of his best friends, started writing again. Several years ago, he cobbled the band back together and recorded the songs that became New American Century. But Valentiner was moving to LA, so they sat on the music for over a year, until she returned, and released the album themselves in 2005 and played a handful of shows over the winter.

Even now though, Kelly's unassuming, and speaks of his music only uncertainly. Asked to name his favorite song, or at least one he'd recommend for a first listen, off the new album, he stares at the track list for a long time shaking his head. "There's something about every song I want to do over..." he explains, the shrugs. "I like 'Clergy on Fire,' the second track. I like that, it's kind of my favorite song on this record, just because of the way it came to me, a total accident, but it sounds like a song I would never write. It's really riff-based. It's not what I would have thought we'd do."

Deeply ambivalent about most things, Kelly admits, "I hate talking about myself in particular. I hate thinking anybody has any reason to listen to what I say." He also explains that he can't speak for the rest of the band. Unlike most musicians I've met (some of whom make better publicists than musicians), he betrays little certainty about anything besides the music itself. "Maybe I should have been more aggressive," he admits. "We were always bad about doing all the stuff that you have to do to have a successful band, the promotion, stuff like that."

But when talking about music, Kelly's in his element. All the uncertainty in his voice is gone and he explains his process in a markedly clear and honest way, which I've never found other musicians capable of. "It starts with a chord progression, one that your melody will come out of somehow. That comes first, and you hope that it takes you to a place where you can create a whole song out of it. How does it flow, the lyrics come last. All of the vocal melodies are set, you know what the vocal melodies are going to do way before the words are put to match the melodies. And the way I write lyrics is by the vowels...I mean, I hear it all before I write it down or record it."

One of the striking differences between New American Century and their earlier work is the focus on lyrics, as well as over political overtones. "The Plea Before the Scream" is a letter Kelly wrote to Howard Dean during his presidential bid, while "Soviet Disco" is a sort of disclaimer, as Kelly explains it, meaning that although the band is more political, they're not looking backward, not idealist leftists dreaming of the old promise of Soviet Communism. "Or maybe we are radical leftist," he says with a shrug. "I can't speak for the rest of the band."

Along with a greater focus on lyrics, the band has stripped down its sound. Whereas previously their sound was driving drums and washed out, distorted guitar lines, on the new record the drums are largely chipper and upbeat, the guitar clean except for faint reverb. What remains are the complex melodies that made the band distinct from the pop and punk acts that dominated the Seattle scene in the late 1990s.

"I know a lot of music. When I was little, I listened to music like crazy," Kelly says, "So I have this huge backlog of songs I know, so I have this almost pathological drive to not repeat what's been done. I can't use G, C A minor, D because such and such has done this." (He then named no less than six songs which, in fact, used exactly that chord progression.)

But in keeping with his humility, he still rejects the idea that his newfound emphasis on lyrics is important. "Some people are so focused on lyrics, that I wonder how much they really really listen to melody, and counterpoint, and harmony and dissonance and resonance, and if you're really so focused on lyrics, it limits you to the English language, if you're only an English speaker," he says emphatically. "It's really very limiting for what music can do for your soul, and it sounds hokey but it's true. It totally limits you if you're focused on lyrics, and if you really want to express what you know in words, songs lyrics are one of the worst and most limiting mediums."

Unfortunately, it appears that The Melody Unit is back on hiatus again. Since doing the interview, they have scheduled no new shows. "It'd take something really good to get us back into it," he explains, noting he's already considering solo projects and what to do next. Kelly seems to be his own worst critic, a perfectionist never satisfied with his own albums (one of which he claims to not even own a copy of anymore). "It's totally a failure," he said during the interview, speaking of his work with The Melody Unit. We think that's a little harsh; the band's catalogue is nothing to scoff at, a trio of albums and an EP universally well received that have given the band a small but dedicated following. Plus, their sound is so unique and distinctive, the melodies so intoxicating, that Kelly's complaints (no offense intended here) seem more like the griping of an artist who aims so high he could never possibly achieve his goals. For everyone else, the achievement's already pretty impressive.