Don Caballero

Don Caballero, led by guitarist Mike Banfield and formed in Pittsburgh in 1991, were among the first bands to update instrumental rock according to the "grunge-dissonant" sounds of Bitch Magnet and Slint.

Their singles Lucky Father Brown (Pop Bus), featuring the title track repeating a harrowing theme at full volume over a funereal jingle, the immense whirlwind of Belted Sweater, and especially the devastating Shoe Shine (a panzer-like riff with apocalyptic cadences); and the single with Unresolved Karma (Broken Giraffe), a sophisticated piece with dense structure, emerge with dissonant jingle-jangle and a powerful, almost melodic riff, alongside the cacophonous syncopations of Puddin' In My Eye. These tracks came from the band’s first recording sessions (January to May 1992) and definitively established their style of instrumental hardcore. The music is stunning and fierce, cold and impassive. Guitar and drums express themselves at the peak of their harmonic capabilities—spasmodic and uncontrollable. With melodies almost entirely absent, the sound remains anchored to the harmonic axis of these two instruments, whose goal is not to construct a narrative structure but simply to unleash raw energy.

Becoming a two-guitar combo with the addition of Ian Williams (formerly of Sludgehammer, another local act that released only three singles—Big Water, Dynamite Lady, and Cherry Pop between 1990 and 1992), the band recorded Our Caballero (Touch And Go, 1993), destined to remain their most impenetrable wall of noise, a sonic totem blending the monstrous riffs of MC5 with Arto Lindsay’s chilling “atonal” slips. The same session also produced the hypnotic spasms of Andandandandandandandand (Third Gear) and the hiccuping bacchanal of First Hits. Don Caballero became the most determined disciples of a record that changed the history of instrumental rock, The Process Of Weeding Out by Black Flag.
These singles were later collected on Singles Breaking Up (Touch & Go, 1999).

In 1993, For Respect was released, a varied and eccentric album indulging in the band’s wild dances, imbued with just enough vanity and malice to make even the ugliest forms enjoyable. By then, the band had become a two-guitar quartet, further amplifying their sonic impact. Their method remained the same: extracting geometric order from chaos, full of hysterical tension, horrific visions, and deep trauma.
The sound reflects the barbaric, apocalyptic aesthetic of the punk era while incorporating an analytical element that gives the compositions a dynamic, unstable, amoebic structure. Bassist Pat Morris plays a crucial role, sometimes doubling the guitars to reinforce their massive barricades, sometimes playing against them to dismantle those same walls. Drummer Damon Che Fitzgerald similarly propels the formation of harmony, constantly in motion and rarely subjugated to the rhythm of a riff.
Over time, psychedelic influences emerge, as in For Respect (with guitars hiccuping and then spinning into demonic flourishes) and New Laws (which at times recalls the excruciatingly slow Melvins, yet soars into a solemn circular melody), an erudite eclecticism (Rocco and Chief Sitting Duck fully express the nervous atonality of their funk-rock-jazz hybrids, creating a sort of King Crimson meets Lounge Lizards hybrid), and class (the impressionistic crackle of Subdued Connections is a virtuosity of wooden and metallic timbres worthy of the best Slint).
Yet their main strengths remain the barbaric, apocalyptic bacchanals (Nicked And Liqued above all), where all instruments seem to play against each other but instead compete to build the tallest wall of decibels. Traditional genres survive only in the brutish hard rock of Got A Mile and especially Well Built Road, a long trenody for weary notes loosely inspired by the neurotic progressions of Neil Young.
What makes their sound unique is that all instruments are propulsive. Amplifiers and distortion pushed to the extreme are just one aspect: melody is generally absent, inessential, or, worse, shouted in a rapid fire of chords; riffs are mute, incomplete, aphasic, communicating nothing but their own anomaly. Their compositions assault like threatening clouds of notes and dissonances, growing darker until exploding into storms of sound (though a hidden logic remains, a main tornado around which everything else revolves).
Less jazzy than Gone and less conceptual than Dos, but more unruly and chaotic than both, Don Caballero represents one of the most mature reactions of the intelligentsia to the barbarism of grunge, a worthy continuation of the Slint project.

Don Caballero 2 (Touch & Go, 1995) is truly a landmark in the history of instrumental rock, an hour-plus work (issued on double vinyl in Europe) issued two years after the Pittsburgh band's brave debut, For Respect. The guitarists, Mike Banfield and Ian Williams, play at maximum levels of strength and creativity, and the acrobatic drumming of Damon Che is often the bright spot. Matt Jencik, replacing Pat Morris on bass, stands behind the trio with honor.
The sound is ever more analytic, despite such chaotic surroundings. The various aspects of the music are meditative, like an orchestra made of seasoned instrumentalists. The psychedelic edge so prominent on FOR RESPECT has not dissolved, but here it's more a part of a radiant harmonic imagination. The avant-garde extremes of Please Tokyo are never pedantic or fanciful, rather they are melodic figures caressed in a trance, pauses, breaks and time changes, reckless fugues and carefully spread out dissonance everything peacefully co-exists, with an end to all of the excess somewhere in sight, between the screechings of what sounds like an electric saw at maximum volume, and one colossal distortion that is extended for eternity.
Better still is Repeat Defender, a party for thin ears that lashes from an exhausted beginning to an interval of supersonic hisses articulated in the most urgent fashion. In the fierce roars that shake Dick Suffers If Furious With You, to the insinuated counterpoints that cradle No One Gives A Hoot, one hears the echo of Soft Machine and The Nice, absorbed in the brutal noise of our times. There's a lot of erudition in this atonal funk, blues and jazz blend. And it's curious that it surfaces most in brief passages of Stupid Puma and P,P,P, Antless, where the searing guitar heat and the body-rocking vibrations tip-toe toward Joe Satriani or Eric Johnson territory. Less clear is the pure abstraction of the reverberating and out of focus chords Cold Knees. The album is more ambitious, sophisticated and incendiary than For Respect even if some semblance of that album's menacing outlook is lost.
Don Caballero has coined a form of rock music that has not lost its original ludic appeal but has buried it under layers and layers of sophisticated playing, in a process that resembles what happend to jazz during the transition from big-band swing music to bebop and then free jazz. Their historical importance cannot be neglected.

Ian Williams of Don Caballero also formed Storm & Stress (Touch & Go, 1997), a quartet featuring Eric Topolsky on bass, Kevin Shea on drums, and Micah Gaugh on piano. The music is as radical as one could expect from a rock quartet, as if John Cage’s aleatory experiments and John Coltrane’s free jazz were transposed into a rock context. Compared to Don Caballero, here the music is truly fragmented, pulverized, diminished, and depersonalized. Improvisation dominates from start to finish, and it’s not even fluid improvisation. Roughness (up to the harshest dissonances) systematically prevails over the few consonances of the instruments. Everything feels fragile and ephemeral, from the singer’s weak cries to the guitar’s faint excursions. The drums bear the brunt more than any other instrument and sometimes serve as the only sign that the piece is still ongoing. While We Write Threnodies and Today Is Totally Crashing may seem a bit self-indulgent, Dance 'Til Record Skips and especially Gives Us Rhythm manage to build tension out of harmonic nothingness. Yet Orange Cone Made No Noise triumphs in sheer gratuitous creativity and curious sonorities. Slint and Gastr Del Sol still maintained a minimum of harmonic decorum; here, one reaches the anarchic limits of Einstürzende Neubauten.
Williams has become one of the foremost intellectuals of rock guitar, surrounding himself with skilled collaborators like drummer Shea, worthy of standing alongside great jazz musicians (and Gaugh has performed with Cecil Taylor).

Guitarist Mike Banfield and bassist Pat Morris managed to keep Don Caballero together even while drummer Damon Che Fitzgerald was busy with Thee Speaking Canaries and second guitarist Ian Williams earned his keep with Storm & Stress.

During the hiatus, only the single featuring Trey Dog's Acid and Room Temperature Lounge (Touch & Go, 1997) appeared—two highly doctrinal yet slyly playful tracks.

On What Burns Never Returns (Touch & Go, 1998), only their third album in eight years, the sound became calmer and more meditative. The capricious forays of the past were replaced by more targeted excursions. The group seeks timbral alchemy even before dynamic balance. The guitars enjoy repeating themselves with minimal variations. Rhythms freeze the twisted power of earlier times into schematics and structures of treacherous geometry. Exemplary is how the quartet maneuvers minimalist, atonal guitar strumming with the epileptic frenzy of the drums in the ten-minute opener Don Caballero 3. Even more so in Room Temperature Suite, with its whirlwind of shifting tempos, the influences of 1970s progressive rock become evident for the first time, albeit distorted by a more dissonant approach.
The harmonies are sometimes horrifically jagged, as in Slice Where You Live Like Pie, where the percussive aspect dominates and melodic lines are shattered by relentless syncopation, and in From The Desk Of Elsewhere Go, perhaps the most deconstructed track, edging close to the most abstract experiments of avant-garde jazz.
Despite a more “adult” appearance and being infinitely less punk, this remains an album of excess, as demonstrated by Williams’ propulsive energy in In The Absence Of Strong Evidence To The Contrary and the grindcore riff looped in Delivering The Groceries.

Jim O'Rourke's influence is tangible on the new Storm And Stress album, Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light (Touch & Go, 2000), following 1997's self-titled release. The line-up is now a classic guitar-bass-drums trio, led by Don Caballero's Ian Williams (a Pittsburgh native but now a Chicago resident). His guitar takes center stage in most of these alt-rock ventures, but drummer Kevin Shea and bassist Eric Topolsky are far from just being humble Experience to cult Hendrix. The songs (which bear funny and verbose titles) rely on a subtle interplay among the instruments, which conveys at the same time the atmosphere of the composition and the preciousness of each player, the same way improvised free-jazz relies on the whole to fully express the individuals.
Williams' ideology of "intentional forgetting" (the song one is playing) permeates all of these tracks. The lack of a gravitational center makes for austere settings. At times, harmony is so loose that it appears to be random. Don Caballero's math-rock is submitted to a sort of vivisection, whereby vital organs are extracted while the body's clockwork keeps ticking, albeit in a disorganized, irrational, inorganic manner. This aesthetics is well summarized by The Sky's The Ground...: a continuous bickering of guitar tones, heavily syncopated drumming, loud peaks of bass noises. The song is made of vague echoes of music. The longer, and instrumental only, Meet Me In The Place... could be defined as a chamber work in restive quasi-tribal rhythm.
Comparisons have been made with quantum mechanics because of the lapses of time between one sonic gesture and the next. The "flow" of sounds is not what one expects from "music": it is reduced to a digitized, sampled stream of musical information which can skip in any direction. A good example of this technique can be found in It Takes A Million Years...: manic reverbs, mono-syllabic singing and metallic noises de-assemble spacetime and refuse to reconstruct it.
Contrary to what one's prejudice, these musicians do have a sense of humour, and it transpires all over the place, but it is reserved to attuned ears. In An Address That Was To Skip Ahead... method and madness become one: first Williams sings like a madman, then the guitar sprinkles a palette of puntillistic tones in the void.
The 1st Our Layd Of Burning Thorns (the first part of an instrumental tryptich) is wildly schizophrenic, first indulging in some dadaistic percussive sounds and then thumbing its nose at country music's frantic finger-picking. While The Third and Youngest Unnamed is relatively straightforward, i.e. tumultuous, free-jazz improvisation, The 2nd Perpetuate And Beautiful boasts frantic swings of mood, from an emotional crescendo down to a minimalist coda. Overall, the tryptich manages to compose an affectionate portrait. One is reminded of Leo Kottke's humorous country vignettes, once injected, of course, with Williams' favorite atonal sounds.
At least, jazz "rewrites" a song. True to their manifesto, Storm & Stress do not write a song and do not rewrite a song: they forget a song as they are playing it. Don Caballero's American Don (Touch & Go, 2000) was recorded by a trio because Banfield quit the band (and Eric Emm is now on bass). So Don Caballero is slowly mutating into Storm And Stress. Surprisingly (knowing Williams' and Fitzgerald's intellectual excesses), the album is less brainy and convoluted, more playful and even romantic, than What Burns Never Returns. Fitzgerald's proverbially torrential rhythms have been reined in and now he favors more intricate drum rolls rather than a forceful carpet bombing of smoking grooves.
In theme-based songs like Fire Back About Your New Baby's Sex and Haven't Lived Afro Pop, Williams' twisted minimalism relieves some of the old stiffness. The song structure is more fluid, even if the aggregating element is more prominent. A Lot Of People Tell Me and Ones All Over The Place completely dispense of the leading theme and live mainly of that neurotic minimalism. The guitar is in control. Whether this is good or bad news depends on how much you enjoy Williams' repetitive style, that permeates most of the songs.
Distractions are few but noteworthy. The thunderous Let's Face It Pal sounds like a drunken saloon boogie. A bit of dub ambience enters the jazz doodling and Neu-like drilling of The Peter Criss Jazz. The brief You Drink A Lot Of Coffee For A Teenager is a flash of scorching, Sonny Sharrock-grade jazz-rock.
Don Caballero may have been a drummer's band, but it is now a band of light, interlocking nuances. The gravitational center (the drums) that imposed a glacial order on Don Caballero's math-rock has surrendered to a more human and graceful universe of sounds that orbit loosely around it. What is bringing order now is the guitar's minimalism, that looms like a new menacing power.

Damon Che formed Bellini with Uzeda's guitarist Agustino Tilotta and vocalist Giovanna Cacciola (and bassist Mathew Taylor). Snowing Sun (Monitor, 2002) was a brainy debut album, swinging between "jazzcore" and atonal garage-rock. Alexis Fleisig of Girls Vs Boys subsequently replaced Damon Che.

Ian Williams formed Battles.

Fitzgerald was the only surviving member of the original Don Caballero line-up by the time World Class Listening Problem (Relapse, 2006) was recorded. And the album showed it. This was a different band, firstly a lot less intense and secondly a lot less imaginative, despite a few detours into heavy-metal and jazz-rock.

Punkgasm (Relapse, 2008) introduced vocals in their sound.

Broughton's Rules was a side-project of Don Caballero and Blunderbuss (who had a song titled Broughton's Rules) that debuted with the old-fashioned post-rock of Bounty Hunter 1853 (Relapse, 2010).