Cyloop

ART ALEXAKIS: vocals/guitar
CRAIG MONTOYA:bass/vocals
GREG EKLUND:drums/vocals


Art Alexakis has always beaten the odds.

In the old days, as the son of a single mother struggling to pay the rent each month in Culver City, California, the battle was about survival. Drugs, poverty, death itself...Alexakis took them all on and came out on top.

He's still at it--but the game has changed. Today, trouble is harder to spot. It's hidden in the complacency that governs modern middle America. There's danger in denial, and in the shadows that stretch across the suburban landscape--shadows as dark as those in the housing projects and personal demons that Alexakis escaped years ago.

This invisible enemy is the target on Slow Motion Daydream (Capitol Records), the latest album from EVERCLEAR, whose taut, barbed sound has pounded home some of the most perceptive insights set to song in recent memory. With Alexakis on guitars and lead vocals, GREG EKLUND on drums and CRAIG MONTOYA on bass,...

ART ALEXAKIS: vocals/guitar
CRAIG MONTOYA:bass/vocals
GREG EKLUND:drums/vocals


Art Alexakis has always beaten the odds.

In the old days, as the son of a single mother struggling to pay the rent each month in Culver City, California, the battle was about survival. Drugs, poverty, death itself...Alexakis took them all on and came out on top.

He's still at it--but the game has changed. Today, trouble is harder to spot. It's hidden in the complacency that governs modern middle America. There's danger in denial, and in the shadows that stretch across the suburban landscape--shadows as dark as those in the housing projects and personal demons that Alexakis escaped years ago.

This invisible enemy is the target on Slow Motion Daydream (Capitol Records), the latest album from EVERCLEAR, whose taut, barbed sound has pounded home some of the most perceptive insights set to song in recent memory. With Alexakis on guitars and lead vocals, GREG EKLUND on drums and CRAIG MONTOYA on bass, Slow Motion Daydream examines a world that's too familiar, where efforts to lead normal lives grow more complicated as paranoia and prejudice deepen every day.

"This album goes to a different place," ALEXAKIS explains. "I had always toned down the politics in my lyrics, but not on this one; I let it come out as I felt it, saying what I wanted to say. It's an opinionated record because we're at a time in our history where we all need to stand up and be heard."

Following the release in 2000 of Everclear's two-album project, Songs From an American Movie, Volumes 1 and 2, Slow Motion Daydream reins the band's energy in, tightens and hardens its delivery, and speaks with a dense and urgent eloquence. "It's actually a more ambitious album than American Movie", Alexakis says. "The band sounds greater than ever; we're rockin' but we sound loose, and there's some pretty vicious guitar going on. This is the ultimate record I could make right now, and I'm extremely proud of it."

The feel ranges from the acoustic textures of "Chrysanthemum" to the hook-slashed guitar-drenched jams like "Sunshine" and the acidic first single, "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom," yet all of it is Everclear at its finest. Few other bands combine melody, message and raw power like Everclear--and even these guys have never put it all together as concisely and persuasively as they've done on Slow Motion Daydream, produced by Alexakis and Lars Fox.

It all traces back to Alexakis's honesty as a writer and, more broadly, as a participant in life. In '91, when he left San Francisco and settled in Portland, Oregon, he wasn't far past a series of struggles that had taken him to the emotional brink, and more than once, nearly killed him. But his father's decision to abandon his family, the loss of loved ones, drug overdoses, and even a suicide attempt only strengthened him as he battled for a foothold in music, founded his own label, and, in the same month of the birth of his daughter Anna, put Everclear together.

"I thrive under pressure," he shrugs. "A lot of that I got from my mother. She worked for minimum wage as an assembler in an electronics plant. When my father left, he never paid child support, so she was stuck holding the ball--but she never dropped it. Through her actions, I learned commitment and respect, although that didn't kick in until I was in my early '20's: I looked at myself, decided that I didn't like what I saw, and made the decision to get clean and work toward what I wanted."

Drawing from his own experiences, Alexakis built a body of songs for Everclear; their candor and craft won critical support for the band's debut album, Sparkle and Fade, and more important, inspired legions of listeners who recognized their own lives in this music. With Sparkle and Fade certified platinum in 1996, and the follow-up, So Much for the Afterglow, going double-platinum in 1998, Everclear ended the century as a rock phenomenon, renowned equally for its integrity and its ability to tear the house apart onstage.

They continued on a roll with the American Movie releases in 2000 (the platinum -selling Learning How To Smile and its noisy companion Good Time For A Bad Attitude), but by that time Alexakis had moved on. No longer locked into a cycle of self-abuse, he had found the stability that had been missing from his childhood. As a husband and father, he began to see things from a different perspective, in which something bigger than just one person fills the picture.

"American life probably concerns me now more than anything else," he says. "Times are getting tough for everybody. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer; there's no middle class anymore. We're seeing more and more people out of work...there are people with master's degrees making hamburgers. How could I write and not be cognizant of these things? That's why the songs on this record deal with the past two years."

Which is not to say that Slow Motion Daydream is another 9/11 record...far from it. "This isn't a concept record, but it's thematic," Alexakis says. "Growing up in the '60s, '70s and early '80s, I love albums that tie together in one way or another--even punk songs and ballads can work together if they're coming from a similar place. One song can be about sex, and another can be about politics, but if it comes from the same voice, it can all make sense."

So it is on Slow Motion Daydream, whose songs circle around the motif of people looking for light even as shadows swirl and settle around them. At times it's easy to find the villains in this darkness: On the first-pumping "Blackjack," Attorney General John Ashcroft is "Scary John," pushing the line that "this is your American dream" even while pulverizing the rights that Americans have come to take for granted. "We've come to trust authority at a level that I think is dangerous," Alexakis says. "We need to adopt more of the attitude of the '60s, where we'd question people in authority when they don't seem to make sense."

On other songs, these spirits are more elusive, or even internalized: "I Hope I Die a Beautiful Death," with its focus on the Kurt Cobain/James Dean allure of romantic fatality, "TV Show," a depiction of a broken man and the seductive unreality of the media, and "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom," in which a middle-aged suburbanite seems to mourn her days as a "wild child," all address the idea of alienation--though Alexakis points out that something positive can usually crop up even in the most despairing scenario.

"Maybe the soccer mom is actually more real than the wild child," he suggests. "In every porn star and tattooed freak you see, there's a normal, middle-class person waiting to get out. In reality, I'm a soccer dad: I was this drug-addict, punk-rock guy from the projects...and last week I was cheering when my daughter got a goal at her soccer game. I'm just saying that despite the uniforms we all wear, people can still connect with each other as their lives change and grow."

For some, though, these connections seem forever beyond reach. On "Sunshine" we see an especially sad character, whose delirium provides the album's title. "I'm watching someone who never got the idea that getting high was temporary, that it was just a good time," Alexakis says. "There's attractiveness, and danger, in losing yourself to this 'slow motion daydream' and never coming out of it, and not worrying about school funding or paying bills or ear infections. It's okay to have idealized dreams when you're fifteen, but when you're an adult you have to understand about priorities and concentrate on what's important."

More than anything, Alexakis affirms, that would include the responsibilities of helping the ones you love as they begin their own journeys. "Chrysanthemum" is the shortest song on the album, maybe because it touches on something too terrifying for even Alexakis to dwell on for too long. "And as the father of a 10- year old girl, I think about those girls (Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis) who got abducted in Oregon City, just 20 miles form where I live," he says. "What would I do if my daughter didn't come home one day? I'd be in a place of madness. I tried to touch that in Chrysanthemum." Beautiful and delicate, haunted by distant sounds of traffic and softened by a mournful accordion, it is perhaps the most chilling minute and a half on the album.

Even so, when Slow Motion Daydream comes to its end, the last track, "New York Times," suggests that there is reason to hope. As Alexakis sees it, "this one ties the record together: the up times, the optimism, the pessimism. But, really, I think there's hope in pretty much everything I write."

This emphasis on hope, on being able to find meaning even in times of chaos identifies Slow Motion Daydream as more than just another great Everclear album; it is, in fact, the culmination of a life that, at one time, was running on nothing but hope. "I don't know why I didn't die," Alexakis admits. "People can disappear in a matter of a second; that light is extinguished. But I came back from death from an overdose when I was 21. It was five o'clock in the morning outside of this house--and there was an EMT truck next door. Why? Because the driver had come home to use his bathroom. If he hadn't been there, I'd be dead.

"That's why I believe now that there's a reason for everything. There are spiritual reasons why things happen to people. This is all a learning process--even the bad times."