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Aimée Argote, a Durham native who has led a half-dozen versions of her band Des Ark during the last 10 years, keeps a running tally of her biggest fears. Last year, there were two definite frontrunners: She was scared, one, of living in Philadelphia and, two, of touring Europe alone. So she did both. Mostly, Argote had to get out of town. For the last eight months, she’d been living with her boyfriend in Charlotte, a city that she’d hated as a kid, when it felt like the longest part of her family’s drives to New Orleans, and a city that she’d hated as a bisexual adult, when it felt like the aggressively androgenic stop on Des Ark tours. She couldn’t write songs in Charlotte, and she couldn’t identify with many people in a town that she felt was so affluent, its young residents couldn’t find a good way to spend their money. Last September, she went on tour and never returned. “I was miserable and really felt uninspired by that fucking horrible city,” admits Argote, 28, chortling but completely serious. “I would wake up in the morning, and I felt dead to the world. It felt like I had a chest of gold weighing down on me for eight months. And then I left.” Today, Argote is making the hour-long walk to work at a crepe shop in downtown Philadelphia. Lured in part by her anxiety, in part by a cheap living arrangement and in part by the easy touring access the city affords to the rest of the Northeast corridor, Argote moved to Fishtown – a low-rent, artist-heavy, historically working-class district that sits just west of the Delaware River – in January. “I moved to the only place I know that’s as jaded and working-class as Durham,” says the Bull City native, her speech slightly clipped but mostly enthusiastic about 45 minutes into her daily pedestrian commute. “I’ve always been really loud and boisterous and inappropriate, and sometimes I felt – especially in Charlotte, where everyone is really self-conscious – that people didn’t know what to do with me. I feel like, in Philadelphia, that’s the swing of things. You’re loud. You’re inappropriate. You’re hard-lovin’, hard-livin’.” In May, she will tour Europe by herself. “That’s a really good thing, you know – to occasionally rip the rug out
from underneath yourself. I couldn’t find any more rugs to rip out from underneath myself in North Carolina,” she says. Indeed, she’d built herself a little house in the woods on her parents’ land, and she’d lived in what she unwaveringly calls her least favorite city in the world. “That was another way of ripping the rug out. That was really bad. And now I know that.” Argote bears all of this bravery out – declaring fears, facing them, moving along – in Des Ark. There are the arresting lyrics – built on vivid images like sweat on the back of knees and stark situations, like childhood sexual assault. And there is the relentless movement, sudden but always graceful shifts between bludgeoning rock and bedroom folk. It’s grounded in reality, suspended in drama. Argote’s music is of life but for the living, then, written to resolve her own demons but shared because she hopes her battles can pull others through their own turmoil. At least that’s what she’s always aimed for: On her second proper LP, the appropriately named Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker, Argote combines those dispositions and interests better than ever before. Tender and whispering, throttled and raging, Sink turns pained confessionals into powerful calls to confidence. At the risk of sounding reductive and hyperbolic, in all of its ambition and vision and audacity, it’s perfect. The most precious stones can require the most extreme conditions – and time, of course. Argote began recording Sink, which will be released in August, in 2007 in Richmond at Black Iris, one of three studios across the country owned by a collective of indie rock veterans who cut commercial music for some of the world’s biggest corporations. One of the company’s leading producers, Jonathan Fuller, used to play drums in the sinewy rock bands Denali and Sleepytime Trio. At nights and on weekends, his friends use the studio to make their own records. Argote and Fuller collaborated in fits and starts, getting together for occasional Saturday and Sunday sessions, months sometimes dividing their work. During those sessions, they recorded the quiet numbers, like chiming handclap opener “My Saddle is Waitin’ (C’mon, Jump on it)” or “Howard’s Hour of Shower,” a tender break-up song that mixes empathy with antipathy, electric guitars intertwining like poison tongues.
This page courtesy of Lovitt records
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