resolve and adaptation on Argote’s part, plus the slow struggle to finally admit to everyone that Des Ark was her project. That’s the sort of thing that allows her not only to make solo European treks as Des Ark or to take a former drummer into the studio but also to make Sink sound like the music in her head. “For a long time, I refused to admit that Des Ark was my project, and I went about it like, ‘Oh, this is really collaborative and I want everybody…’ And that’s just not true,” she says, exaggerating her own voice to sound like the foolish, happy-go-lucky bandmate she once fancied herself. Argote talks in a kinetic, sidewinding way, where one thought leads into the alleyway of another idea. It generally brings her back to the original point – sometimes, not so much. She ends more than a few replies with some variation on, “But I don’t know if that’s what you were asking.” “I realized that no matter what happens, I’ll keep doing it,” she continues. “For me to be going out into the world and pretending this is going to be a more collaborative thing, that doesn’t work.” Argote alone has been with Des Ark for a decade. In 2000, Argote’s old band was falling apart. Local musician John Booker, then a member of Strunken White and now the frontman of I Was Totally Destroying It, wanted to play drums in something new. He mentioned the idea at a house show to Argote. They formed the three-piece Pequeno and twice expanded into four-piece lineups. Booker finally yielded the drum position to Tim Herzog, a local soundman, in 2001. He and Argote started dating and kept touring for the next three years, recording the first Des Ark album, Loose Lips Sink Ships, with Durham producer Zeno Gill and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis in 2004. But they broke up. Soon thereafter, so did that version of the band. Argote began playing solo, sitting on the floors of dirty punk houses, sweating in the summer heat, singing and playing an acoustic guitar that wouldn’t hold a tuning for too long. Kids would sit feet away, at eye level, crying at the raw ends of despair in her songs. She tried other bands, including a brief partnership with atmospheric Carrboro pop band Work Clothes. For her, starting a new band is a little like starting a new relationship, and she says now she just wasn’t ready. As she sings on “The Lord of the Rings and His Fascist Timekeepers,” a song from those years, “I don’t want a fucking lover who makes me feel like a failure.” But she felt like she had to prove that she could do this on her own, that she alone could be Des Ark, no matter the accompaniment. She rushed into Fuller’s Richmond studio to record five songs for Battle of the Beards, a full-length split with Ben Davis & the Jetts, released in 2007 on Lovitt Records. “I hated it then, and I still hate it,” says Argote. Backed either by a small string section or by nothing but her guitar or piano, her voice, generally so brazen and focused, sounded too controlled and perhaps a tad nervous.
The confidence that normally pours from Argote’s music seemed to have been replaced by paralyzing unease. “I was pretty insecure – about everything and those songs. But I knew it was the first step of getting the ball rolling. I threw up on a recording, and I don’t like that. But I needed it to happen.” The least remarkable track on Beards, a circumscribed piano builder named “The Fall of the Skorts,” carries a prescient lesson: “We cannot change without hurt/ We cannot grow in the same skin all of our lives,” sings Argote, lifting her voice when she hits the verbs, as if her head suddenly pokes through thick clouds. “When I listen to the record, I realize that’s how I don’t want to sound,” she says of Beards now. “Sometimes you look at a picture, and what you don’t see, that helps you create your next image. I guess it all makes sense now.” If that sounds like new confidence in her current place, it is. Argote talks
about songwriting in pragmatic terms, something that requires practice and experience. Her earlier songs meandered and shambled their way to a point, she thinks. More and more, they cut through excess to clarity and concision. And this album is all her – she made the decisions, the cuts, the additions – without regard for what she can reproduce live. In the past, Des Ark’s recordings have been sudden, instant emissions. The band would walk into the studio, record the songs and get out as quickly as possible. The protracted process allowed Argote to exact each detail. “Usually, you get stuck on a part, and you just have to keep going,” she says. “Here, I had a lot of time to sit with it and wait to see how it would be fixed. So a year later, when I’d go back to finish this song, I knew how it was supposed to sound.” On Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker, Argote bests a dozen fears, it seems, and the payoff is as bright and undeniable as a new city you love on one of the first days of spring. “On the record, I felt like I wanted to put on tape what I heard on my record which I can never do live, and it’ doesn’t matter,” she says on exactly that day, still walking to work. “It’s my project, and I wanted it to be what comes out of me.” shuf7 photo by bryan Reed
shufflemag.com 21