Alex Denbaars, UNM student, plays the ukulele and sings lead vocals in the punk-folk outfit “Arroyo Deathmatch.”
The band returned from its first tour, which lasted 10 days and stretched from Albuquerque to San Francisco. In addition to his work as a performer, Denbaars is also a promoter for the house music scene in Albuquerque and lives in the house/venue known as “Heaven and Hell.”
Daily Lobo: Your style has been described as punk-folk. Those two seem to go against each other. Can you tell me about how they mix?
Alex Denbaars: I feel, sonically, they seem hard to match, but I feel attitude-wise they are very similar. I feel like punk is basically electric folk music at its core. Punk music has always been almost strictly underground — that means you have people writing songs about things that there aren’t other songs about. Perhaps the songwriting itself isn’t very advanced or diverse, like folk music. It’s very simple in the way it’s played. There is a great diversity in the subject matter and the places people are drawing inspiration from. On that level, I think they are the same. Sonically, any really good performance has a punk element to it. It’s a certain enthusiasm. I feel that, if you can bring that enthusiasm to folk music, it gives it a sort of punk sound.
DL: Going with that element of individuality, what are you writing about that other people are not?
AD: I write a lot of songs about the more unusual things that have happened to me.
DL: Can you elaborate?
AD: One of our songs is about how I got diagnosed with diabetes six months ago. I never heard a song about diabetes (laughs). I wrote a song about this time my girlfriend and I were driving to the community college in Santa Fe. We looked on the side of the road and there was this dog, and it was hit by a car, and we thought it was dead. As we drove by, it lifted its head up, and it was alive. We’re crying and really freaking out. We pulled over. We had to run the mile back up the highway to get to the dog. I picked it up, and it was bleeding everywhere. We waited two and half hours on the side of the road, waiting for animal control. Thousands of cars drove by us. Seven police officers drove by us. Two kids covered in blood on the side of the road with a dying dog and nobody stopped to help. It’s not that my perspective is special from anyone else’s, but it’s just that punk and folk music are easy to play, and it allows everyone to express, or share, their own experiences. I feel mainstream music is mostly about heterosexual mainstream relationships between consenting adults. There’s not a lot of interesting perspectives. It’s people complaining about being famous and their heart is being broken.
DL: Do you feel the punk-folk brand allows for more originality?
AD: I feel the people who are interested in that kind of music are looking for that, too. I feel like that’s one of the strongest points
of the genre.
DL: Tell me more about your audiences. What makes them different?
AD: One of the cool things about tour is that every audience is different, because every city is different. We had everything from crust punks and radical anarchists groups listening to us to completely average people who dropped out of high school working a job or college students studying to be scientists. It really ran the gamut, which was really great. One of the advantageous things about mixing punk with folk is that it widens the audience a little bit. A lot of punk artists complain about “preaching to the choir” constantly. I feel a lot of folk-punk artists don’t have that problem. It doesn’t immediately isolate you, because it has a hand in things people are more used to.
DL: You play the ukulele. That’s an interesting instrument. How did that come up? How did you decide that was the instrument you were going to play?
AD: It was sort of an accident, I guess. I have been a vocalist for eight years singing in different music projects. I always sort of felt removed from my bandmates, because I didn’t play an instrument. They are not different things, but in a band they feel different. So, I was interested in learning an instrument, and I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, and I walked into a music store one day, and I saw a ukulele for $30, and you can’t beat that. I got it, and it sat in my house for two and a half years, and then I started playing, and I just kept at it. I like uke because it’s really small. Sometimes when I’m sitting behind a guitar, I can’t even reach the other side. With uke, it’s really easy to handle. Guitars have six strings, and a lot of instruments have more strings than you have fingers, but ukes don’t. Four strings, four fingers — so it makes sense. Once I started, I just sort of felt like I needed to stick with it no matter what sort of music I played.
DL: What sort of challenges emerge from playing the ukulele, and how does it fit into the punk-folk genre?
AD: I feel like it really surprises people sometimes the way I play it. There are few other people that play ukulele in an aggressive way that I know of. I feel like it’s always a sort of surprising thing, because people associate it with mellow ocean tunes. Like any instrument, you can play it in any genre. My band has got a flute in it too. When we bust out the ukulele and the flute, people sort of seem to think that it might be weird or won’t work. It works. Some of the advantages of ukulele are that it’s really small and compact. I don’t even need a case. It’s also seeing the ukulele builds up a lot of expectation, and then dashing those expectations is always really fun. We only have one song that sounds like it was written on ukulele. All the others don’t follow the
stereotype in any way, and it’s fun.
*Heaven and Hell Presents: Mount Righteous, Slow Teeth, and the Arsonist
Jan. 19
7:00 p.m.
400 Wellesley Dr. SE
$5 Suggested Donation *
