Brain Box: John Schmersal goes pop with Vertical Scratchers

Where does John Schmersal live? It’s not the high-ceilinged lounge, salmon-coloured and cosy, where he presently entertains an LA friend’s goodwill. Nor the back of a tour van, festering in punk mythology. You imagine the singer gets by, modestly installed among relative comforts. But equally, you’d hardly blink if he retired to a large cardboard box under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

“Well... I guess that’s all. Where are you based? We’re gonna be in Europe soon. Wait, have I talked to you before?” Schmersal, fidgety and eager, seems reluctant to end the conversation. “We’ve never met? Okay. You look familiar but that’s just part of me getting older I guess. Everyone starts to look familiar. Which is comforting. If it continues like this, the nursing home is going to be a great place.”

Fortyish and tousled, Schmersal has hangdog eyes that dare you to underestimate him. He’s among indie-rock’s friendliest dudes, and a cursory analysis of his minor-legendary repertoire – from primordial synth-punks Brainiac, through Enon’s schizoid indie-rock and onto the Kinksian Vertical Scratchers – would diagnose a smoothly maturing career.

That diagnosis is probably accurate. But with due respect, the generation-spanning songwriter doesn’t look mature. His physical appearance is resiliently adolescent. In passing, you suspect that this is not a born man but a Richard Linklater project canned in 1994. Certainly he’s good company – his conversational nous is warm and massive – but now and again you double-take. The guy is cosmically unsettled. His atoms seem antsy, all heading different directions.

It doesn’t help, of course, that he woke just an hour ago. “I feel like I’m allergic to LA,” he grumbles by way of apology, reluctantly activating webcam. “Christian [Baulieu, Vertical Scratchers drummer] and his gal gave LA about a year,” he sighs, “before they decided they weren’t having it.” His tone betrays deep admiration of their foresight.

“This album's like a puzzle; I wanted something that looks simple and catchy, but has a story going on inside" – John Schmersal

Maybe his allergy isn’t to Los Angeles but to permanence. It was 2010 when the Toledo-born drifter –renowned in his native Ohio and later New York – left Philadelphia, a stronghold for gentrified-out Brooklynites. (The New York Times interviewed Schmersal for a 2005 article on Philly’s “Brooklynization”). He decamped to LA, a city for whose “terrible-sounding venues” he has little time and much vitriol. Nonetheless, it was one such venue where, during two days in 2012, Vertical Scratchers recorded their sweet, zinging zipwire of a debut.

“Around the same time that Christian left,” he recalls, “I was recording this band, Crazy Band. So I said to him, ‘We’re recording at the Smell. You’re moving and we know these songs now. I think we should piggyback on this and record the songs.’”

The Smell, the avant-garde and punk club that DIY duo No Age mythologised, wasn’t Schmersal’s first-choice. “If I like The Smell for anything, it’s because it’s bare bones. But recording there was a matter of convenience. That place is hilarious to me: it’s all the things that are awesome about any DIY space. It’s so dirty, there’s tons of cockroaches. Like, as I set up there’s zillions of cockroaches running round in that place. It’s a filthy downtown warehouse space that I’d expect to find in any city. It’s really a horrible place to be. But that’s also awesome.”

The resulting record, Daughter of Everything, is the prettiest and most accessible of his career. Happily evoking Howard Devoto-era Buzzcocks, most of its tunes clock under two minutes. Schmersal, who contributes guitar, bass and vocals, sings with a meek, forgot-my-lunchbox yowl that riots over power-pop rhythms and trapdoor structures. It’s electric and goofy, the work of a cartoon band in a world of carelessly discarded banana peels.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Schmersal says of the album. “I wanted something that looks simple and catchy, but has a story going on inside it. It’s kind of trite to compare yourself to the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, because they’re basically trademarks – I’m either pretentious for talking about them or not talking about them. But I fucking love the Beatles. Who shouldn’t be referencing the Beatles?”

It’s cliché to praise artists resisting genre-settlement (what serious musician doesn’t?) but Schmersal, like his touchstones, is perfectly unpindownable, a mother of reinvention. He helped immortalise nineties Dayton –along with Guided By Voices, whose Robert Pollard guests on Daughter of Everything – playing guitar in Brainiac; now, that band’s fanbase spans Death Cab for Cutie, Jeff Buckley, Muse, Nine Inch Nails and Future of the Left. After gaining a cult following on Touch and Go records, the group were reportedly drawing Dreamworks’ attention when singer Tim Taylor died accidentally in 1997.

Distraught but determined, Schmersal swiftly decamped to an old Masonic Temple where he recorded a four-track LP, Forget Everything, as John Stuart Mill. Soon after came Enon with Steve Calhoon and drummer Rick Lee, later of his improv-pop trio Crooks on Tape, though both were soon replaced. Schmersal, meanwhile, subsisted writing incidental music for Disney, Cartoon Network, MTV and Nickelodeon, and has sidelined since 2009 as Caribou’s tour bassist and backup singer.

For all the wanky neologisms his music attracts – art-punk, robot-rock, electro-spazz – it’s the feeble psych-pop tag that grates most. Enon sound less like hippies soundtracking narcotic excursions than the drug daze itself, while Brainiac’s madcap synthpunk is more psychiatric than psychedelic. Now, rather than pushing further outside the box, Daughter of Everything sees Schmersal and ex-Triclops! drummer Beaulieu peek at the box’s blueprint, build a kickass bigger box and stuff in their plenitude of wicked wares.

“There’s a sense in the world that there’s not a lot to be done,” muses Schmersal. “As often as you come across new genres and make up names for things, no one’s breaking the mould. So what was liberating about [Daughter of Everything] was that I’m not trying to break a mould. The Kinks, the Buzzcocks – those touchstones make sense to me. I wanted the attention span of the music, what’s happening in it, to be as concentrated as possible, like orange juice from concentrate in the freezer. The simplest piece that you can grab onto with the most nuggets within it, like a multivitamin.”

He continues: “There’s cool stuff happening in electronic music, but most of what I hear now, the bands are trying to brand themselves more than they’re trying to make an interesting album. One of my favourite recent records is Connan Mockasin’s Forever Dolphin Love. That's one of the best records in the last five years. It’s a songwriterly based album... hey, look at that!” He stops to admire a hummingbird out the window as his train of thought steams down the cliff-face. “I guess I’m not paying much attention to what’s happening. But I am disappointed. I wish more people were striving to do something more than just write songs.”

It’s buried, but close listeners won’t need help spying the subversion in Vertical Scratchers. As its title suggests, Daughter of Everything is a precocious brainchild whose ancestors span musical galaxies. It’s an unexpected stop on the Schmersal train that reveals a songwriter who’s homeless in the best sense, a cool wild breeze cross-pollinating musical graveyards, and his Midas touch sweeps from electro-pop to retro Anglophile rock. Still, in his company – massive, warm, all that – there remains a tingling sadness.

It dawns that this man, with his quirks and beaming affection and admiration for hummingbirds – a man you’d lend your car as readily as your ears – is not, after all, quite as scatty as he looks; nor your best friend, rife for joshing. He is, rather annoyingly, a maverick. He dared, begged to be underestimated and you took the bait. After forty minutes with Schmersal you feel you owe him something, are happy to give it. Indeed, here is a man you’d cheer on even as he nicked your TV. Not that he would, of course. John Schmersal is a class act, no matter what kind of box he lives in.