Drab Majesty by Corinne Schiavone
Gender-bending music with visual pop to match is a form of invention that needs reinventing itself from time to time, even though we’ll always cherish David Bowie for showing the way. So thank the stars for Andrew Clinco, better known as Deb Demure of the dark wave duo Drab Majesty, who are headlining the Respectable Street 37th Anniversary Block Party.
While drumming in the early 2010s for hard-edged L.A. rockers Marriages, Clinco created Drab Majesty as a project of his own with one Deb Demure as their Majesty’s sole subject. Keyboardist and vocalist Mona D (Alex Nicolaou) joined a few years later, and while Marriages were no more, Drab Majesty flourished. Fans of post-punk, ambient, shoegaze and dream pop have embraced the duo’s blend of ethereal synth, reverb-heavy guitar, haunting vocals, and a shape-shifting androgynous theatricality in concert that adds a surreal element to Drab Majesty’s mystique.
“Towards the end of Marriages I was kind of itching to do something beyond just banging on stuff, and Emma Ruth Rundle [of Marriages] played a great role inspiring me to get back to the guitar and explore and just kind of do whatever I wanted to do,” Clinco tells PureHoney in an interview.
Drab Majesty’s three studio albums, Careless, The Demonstration, and 2019’s Modern Mirror, have explored themes of alienation, introspection and human connection while drawing from a well of science fiction and mythology. Clinco has at times referred to a sense of “divine intervention” in the duo’s process, with Drab Majesty as tabula rasa for a collective unconscious imparting the music.
“The creative side — I think it’s important to separate yourself from that because I don’t believe in full 100-percent authorship,” Clinco says. “I think there’s other forces at play, working in the subconscious and beyond our realm of understanding, that are guiding our decisions in the creative process.
“To say that you are 100-percent responsible for something, it doesn’t make sense to me. I think we’re just kind of messengers and vapers of sound. And we’re putting things together; we’re collaging stuff.”
Drab Majesty by Corinne Schiavone
The idea of creative agency as not entirely about oneself extends to the duo’s live performances. On their most recent tours, Drab Majesty have adopted costuming that enhances the performance’s ritualistic overtones and a physical immobility that compels audience focus on Deb Demure and Mona D less as musicians or stage personas in Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Thin White Duke mold. They’re more like vessels — a visual approach that Demure describes as a deliberate erasure.
“I think it enhances the experience for the viewer,” Clinco says. “So, take me, Andrew Clinco, out of the equation and you’re seeing something else that’s not necessarily totally relatable, something that’s kind of beyond human or human-adjacent.”
The blank, androgyne presence in concert conveys a kind of universality in which all forms of being are reflected back. “And that, I think, allows the music to maybe speak to the listener a little more directly,” Clinco says. “You’re not thinking about someone like they’re bleeding out their heart on stage — which there’s nothing wrong with, but that’s not what I’m interested in.”
The Modern Mirror album offers a musical analogy, with its thematic explorations of love, identity and technology channeled through the ancient tale of the doomed hunter Narcissus. Songs like “Ellipsis” and “Oxytocin” shine a gothic lens on humanity’s desire to connect in the digital age.
Drab Majesty’s most recent effort, 2023’s collection of singles packaged as the EP An Object in Motion, marks a sonic shift towards acoustic sound, and an affirmation of Clinco’s stated belief that all their songs are folk songs at heart. It came about after Clinco sought isolation away from cell towers and internet service in a cabin overlooking the Oregonian coast. The four tracks — three in the five to six-minute range, and “Yield to Force” clocking in over 15 minutes — are stripped to let the ethereal beauty of the 12-string acoustic guitar he brought along to shine through.
“I was processing the sound through the pickup in the acoustic, so it’s kind of an acoustic-electric thing,” Clinco says. “I just really like the sound of the 12-string, and I think when it is amplified and kind of effect-ed, it really has a unique timbre unlike anything.”
Clinco hasn’t put away his electric axes, though, especially not on tour. Drab Majesty in concert audio are immersive enough that “it’s probably gonna overtake your field of vision and sound,” Clinco says. “But it might not have as much ear candy and kind of that 3D refinement and 3D detail live, based on the fact that just the guitars are a little bit more unruly, a little louder, a little more distorted.”
“I like loud guitars, I really do,” he says, adding, “I think I’ve been pretty restrained [with electric guitar] in the Drab recordings, and I think it serves them well, but I think also, in hindsight, I always kind of feel like guitar can just come up a little more, be a little more present. I’m just a guitar head; what can I say?”
Block Party Birthday
Jacuzzi Boys
Co-headlining the Respectable Street event will be South Florida’s beloved Jacuzzi Boys. Some might say that their ideological beginnings can be traced to back-patio hijinks at Miami’s Vagabond – a former Sub-Culture Group nightclub in Miami’s Park West neighborhood – and they wouldn’t be wrong. (Their raucous performance at said venue with King Khan and the Shrines certainly supports the claim.) Since then, the trio has built their reputation on a solid mix of garage punk-informed psychedelics and a relentless schedule of recording and releasing music while touring across the globe.
Respectable Street, West Palm’s seminal music venue (and part of the Sub-Culture family) will celebrate its 37th anniversary with a huge block party that will remind the Palm Beach cognoscenti who put Clematis Street on the map in the first place. Opened in 1987 by Rodney Mayo inside a former Salvation Army outpost, back when downtown was not the vibrant place it is today, Respectable’s quickly established itself as a hub for underground and alternative music, and an incubator of local talent.
Palomino Blond by Dennis Ho
Having hosted over a thousand performances with artists of all kinds, the venue is celebrating almost four decades of adventurous, scene-building good taste in music. Rain or shine, there’s six stages featuring Ben Katzman’s Degreaser, Moon Destroys, Donzii, Palomino Blond and 30 more bands (and free pizza).
Respectable Street’s 37th Anniversary Block Party with headliners Drab Majesty and Jacuzzi Boys, 8pm Saturday, November 2 on Clematis Street in downtown West Palm Beach. drabmajesty.bandcamp.com ~ Abel Folgar
