Monument Thief Debut New Album

There’s just something about fuzz. The buzzsaw guitars. The angst. It’s introspective and sensitive one minute, an aggressive wall of distortion the next. Sometimes both at once. It makes me nostalgic for music I was too young to appreciate when it was new and the radio was louder. Fuzzier. Thankfully Monument Thief scratches that wistful itch with their debut record, Your Castle Comes Down – 13 tracks of shoegazing goodness.

Monument Thief’s mad scientists, Bill Paukert and Jeremy Withers, have been slugging it out in the Providence scene together since 2000 in bands like Ellison and the synth-rock, outfit The Incline. As students of American and British indie/alt rock the decision to go whole hog on the fuzz was inevitable.

“I love fuzz very deeply. I love that sound of distorted instrumentation,” says Jeremy. “I’m like a song squirrel. I stash little bits and pieces around. So I had all of these ideas that I knew I wanted to do something with but I didn’t know what the format was going to be. But I knew I wanted to go back to my old college, indie-rock-shoegaze kind of days. That was our early notion. That was going to be our bedrock.”

From one musical permutation to the next, Bill and Jeremy remained each other’s creative constants and together honed a deep creative connection. Your Castle Comes Down is a testament to that partnership.

“The album is kind of an investment in us. We put time into it, money into it. I built a studio to make it happen. Even down to some of the guitars I play are guitars that I built. Some of the effects that we play through are effects that we built. We really own that stuff whole-heartedly. It’s not just music for music’s sake. That’s one of the things I get out of it. I like going deep on that stuff.”

Kicking off with “A Scene,” the album’s first handful of tracks are effects drenched rockers. Flavors of R.E.M. and Dinosaur Jr. pop up throughout, while the record’s stand out track, “Coming On Way Too Fast,” brings an unexpected surf rock stank to the table. By “Twisting the Constellations” the record slows down a bit, tackling some of those more introspective themes before “Another Faded Song” kicks off a three song build up to “Just To Be Wrong,” an album capper in the vein of Smashing Pumpkins.

My concern with name-dropping other bands is the implied suggestion that the music sounds derivative of Band X, but, as Jeremy put, “Somehow it all fits in. It’s gotta at least, in some way, inform it. Because other- wise why are you doing it?”

When discussing what he loves about fuzz he mentions Dinosaur Jr., and how they played to the influence Black Sabbath had on them, which in turn brought the long frowned upon solos back into jangle rock. Bill talked about growing up with oldies, and the influence is particularly clear in “Coming On Way Too Fast.”

As he puts it, “all those hooks and licks that became the backbone for everything [in rock] that came after that automatically gets ingested into what I do. I see this as an opportunity to take all of those things and make something out of it.”

Popular music as a whole is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster comprised of seemingly disparate vital organs. Monument Thief might not draw from as large a swath of body parts, but Your Castle Comes Down is a monster nonetheless, its stitches and neck bolts expertly hidden under the slick, fuzzy skin of its creators’ encyclopedic knowledge of rock and clear vision for what they wanted their album to be.

“It’s all about having a vision and feeding into the vision,” says Bill. “Or if you don’t have a vision be like, ‘This is really cool, I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with this thing but I’m just going to let it explode in anyway it can.’”