With a female singer/guitarist and a male behind the drum kit, Jucifer may come across as an inverted White Stripes at first glance. Maybe there are even some hints at like-minded ways on their CDs, but any similarities don’t go much further than that.
While Jucifer’s CDs, such as last year’s If Thine Enemy Hunger, may be mellow and haunting, its live show sets it apart from The White Stripes and, well, just about everyone else.
It’s probably that huge wall of speakers they set up behind them. I don’t mean an additional four or five. It’s more like a total of 32 — 18 cabinets and 14 heads.
“We definitely enjoy the (aural) assault,” singer G. Amber Valentine says by phone with a laugh. She’s in a great mood — happy, talkative and enjoying her day off in Massachusetts. It’s a welcome surprise considering the heavy, brooding music the band makes and the fact their car broke down earlier in the tour. Such is life on the road — something Jucifer does every day.
Valentine and the other half of the band’s nomadic musical couple, G. Ed Livengood, have lived on the road for the last few years. “We tour in a Winnebago, and that’s where we live,” Valentine says. “We don’t have a house anywhere, at least for the last few years. At one point, we realized we didn’t have any use for a land house. It seems like a silly luxury to maintain a residence.”
Life on the road suits Valentine and Livengood just fine. They don’t tour 365 days a year, instead preferring to play on “the good nights” — skipping Monday and Tuesday. That gives them the needed time off and plenty of time for Valentine to sleep, since she’s the only driver. “Everyone agrees that I’m the best at handling the large vehicle with the trailer, and I’m also the calmest driver and don’t have as much road rage,” she says with a laugh. “I suck at being the co-pilot because I fall asleep.”
She may not have road rage, but during their live shows Valentine howls, screams and shrieks as she becomes as much a part of the show as the music. “It’s really our biggest psychological and emotional release,” she says. “It never gets old. I think it would be really bad to devote your life to something and not be fully invested in it and not be fully rewarded by it.”
Valentine admits that not all of the bands live fans and CD fans overlap. While the CDs are mellow and melodic, the audio onslaught of their live show can be overpowering — so much that the band is often asked about hearing damage. She doesn’t hesitate to recommend wearing ear plugs.
The stack of cabinets takes an average of two-and-a-half hours to assemble, sometimes longer at smaller venues. “The Milestone, because it’s a smaller place and things have to sort of be rigged to fit, it may be three to four hours,” Valentine says. Why so many? “The more we got, the better it sounded,” she explains.
While some descriptions place Jucifer in a ’90s retro genre, Valentine is quick to explain that some of the songs were written back then. After all, they formed in the early ’90s. “When we made our first record, we tried to use a lot of the stuff that we had written, but we didn’t use it all up. There’s probably … at least for the next five or six records, there’s going to be at least one or maybe as many as five songs that we wrote between 1986 and 1992. Some of the stuff that makes people think we’re changing, it’s actually stuff that’s really old.”
The recorded work also allows the band to add more layers and for Valentine to try more things vocally — to be more of a singer. When they perform live, the animal in her takes over. “When you’re playing guitar and singing, especially if you’re playing fast stuff, what happens is your voice starts shaking because your arm is shaking and you’re jumping around and you’re really not performing at your top level as a vocalist,” she explains. “I love singing in a recording setting, but I guess I don’t find it enough to do in a live situation. The guitar sort of being this all-encompassing awesome beast is something that really drives both of us to be that much more involved in what we’re doing.”
She says she loves the variety of what she’s able to do in both settings, but when it comes to her performance, she’s after emotion. Their performance is almost as much visual as it is aural. They also have a preference for the heavy stuff when they perform live. She says the more melodic songs like “Pontius of Palia” and “Amplifier” are “catchy,” but “simple,” which leads to “boredom.”
“It’s more fun as a musician to play stuff that has weird time signatures and more changes,” Valentine says. As for the rest of the year, the band plans to record later this summer for their next release later this year or early in ’08.
They also plan on touring Europe for the first time this fall, but they’d have to leave the “wall of sound” behind. “We’d only have it if we were an arena band,” Valentine says. “We can’t afford to fly it over there. I guess it’s something we’ll have to adjust to.”
Jucifer will perform at The Milestone with Babyshaker on June 7. Tickets for the 18+ show are $10.
This article appears in May 30-30, 2007.
