In a way, the heart of the long-running rock ‘n’ roll dance band !!! — that’s pronounced “chk chk chk” — is its lack of computer tech support. To make its new album “As If,” the Brooklyn, N.Y., quintet used newfangled music-production hardware called Ableton. And nobody in the band could figure it out. “Oh, God, we’re the … worst. It’s funny, because we’ve become fascinated by computer music, and music that’s made in that way, but we’re not gearhead guys,” frontman Nic Offer says. “When something goes wrong with the Ableton, it’s like all five of us crowded around the computer, trying to fix it.
“We have a monitor guy, who we text, and he’ll Google something,” Offer continues, in a half-hour phone interview that ends with a lengthy comparison between Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and Prince’s “Around the World In a Day.” “But … if we ever have to replace a member, that’s one of the things we hope they could do.”
Offer, 42, has been a dance music fan since a friend gave him his first tape: “Bee Gees Greatest.” By high school, he’d advanced to Depeche Mode, New Order, Yaz and dance clubs, then spent the ’90s on punk bands such as Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. “From that, I got into Motown, funk, house, disco, and back to drum machines again,” he recalls.
At first, Offer played in a hardcore band called the Yah Mos. After it broke up, he fell in with musicians who liked dance music as much as he did. “The band was formed from the ashes of a disco cover band. It was there at the start. We were doing Chic and Michael Jackson and Prince,” Offer says, from his home in Brooklyn. But in the late ’90s, 20 years after disco crashed and nearly took the record industry with it, the word “disco” remained a dirty word in the rock world. “We were working with a rock engineer at that time, and we definitely didn’t say it in front of him,” Offer adds. “It was still uncool at that point.”
After a series of independently released singles and albums, and touring regularly, !!! clicked in 2003 with a brilliantly titled, sleek and energetic, nine-minute dance track called “Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard — a True Story.” The song became an indie-rock touchstone, and put !!! in the same hipster category as like-minded bands such as LCD Soundsystem and Electric Six. Over time, the hype died down, but !!! kept putting out excellent albums, notably the sprawling dance album “Thr!!!ler” in 2013.
“Every record, when we start making it, we think, ‘This is going to be our club record,’ ” he says. “When we finish it, we go, ‘Ah … we didn’t really make a club record, did we?’ “
Offer spends much of his interviews these days on his fondness for music-production computer systems. For example, he associates “Thr!!!er” with an earlier, more common type of software called Logic — “Slyd,” in particular, has a distinctive metallic, rhythmic quality. “If I’d made that on Ableton, it’d be a completely different track,” he says. But the band recorded “As If,” which came out in late October, mostly with the Ableton.
Why is Offer so into making music on a computer? “It’s the instrument that I love the most. I used to kind of envy painters — they could always just paint away by themselves, alone. I was always dependent on six other guys to all show up and be in a good mood, and then we could jam, then we could create,” he says, adding that he has followed so many Ableton tutorials via YouTube he could teach a class. “With the computer, I finally could work on my own. You could work into the night, get into the zone by yourself.”
“As If” combines punk-rock attitude with thumping dance music more effectively than any !!! album so far — the stomping “Bam City” is sexy, Jackson-style murmurs and fuzzy electric guitars set to a lock-step beat, and “All U Writers” is big-bass, fast-strummed-guitar funk that seems like a remix from a forgotten Kool and the Gang album. “This was one we put (dance-club music) in the forefront,” Offer says. “We’d gotten close to it with ‘Thr!!!ler.’ Those aspects started to take off in our live show. We were really proud of ‘Thr!!!ler,’ but you try to grow from whatever criticisms (you get) — the only ones we could pick out were ‘maybe it was too slick.’ We were like, ‘This has to be raw.’ “
For the next album, Offer intends to stick with the Ableton — “there’s still a lot of depth there” — but hopes to add an old-school drum machine or synthesizer to the mix. And the band wrote 40 songs for “As If,” recorded 20 and, after asking friends to vote, selected with 11 for the album — which leaves numerous leftovers and plenty of inspiration for the follow-up. “We still have songs we think can come out fantastic,” he says. “We’re working right now and, again, it’s going to be another club record. As far as we know.”
Steve Knopper is a freelancer.
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When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave.
Tickets: $17; 773-525-2501 or www.lh-st.com
