Past Music Columns

The Secret of Shalloboi

This husband-and-wife duo’s self-produced, self-released bedroom bombast is worth seeking out.

Stefanie Goodwin and Tyler Ritter

Jason Creps

By Miles Raymer

December 27, 2007

By Shalloboi’s reckoning, 2007 was a banner year even if they barely made a ripple in the world outside their apartment. The husband-and-wife team of Tyler Ritter and Stefanie Goodwin—plus a loose cast of supporting players—released two CDs, recorded enough material to fill up at least two more, and even made a couple videos. And they’ve done it all under their own power, handcrafting their own CD covers, for instance, and recording at home on a machine that’s ancient tech even for bedroom musicians.

“I’m not too into the digital recording thing,” says Ritter, 28, who plays guitar and writes most of the music. (Goodwin, also 28, plays bass and a little drums.) “It’s a lot easier to work with the eight-track cassette machine: you plug it in, plug some microphones into it, you put them in front of it, and you push ‘play’ and ‘record.’ I’ll usually write a song in like ten minutes and start recording immediately.”

The most recent CD, Wish, is Shalloboi’s seventh album in seven years; they’ve all been released on the couple’s label, Endless December. Each one is a refinement on a formula that should appeal to undercover goths and indie saps with an ear for the weird: take the elegiac melody and hissy intimacy of Elliott Smith’s early releases and wrap them in layers of psychedelic effects lifted from the playbooks of the Cure and My Bloody Valentine. For a good example of how it works, check out the title song on Wish. Two notes on a cello are run through enough effects pedals to make it sound like a synthesizer. On top of that goes a dense heap of embellishments: a Spacemen 3-ish vocal line, delay-saturated guitar squawks, and finally the white noise of feedback recorded at analog tape’s max capacity. The song is simplistic in structure, probably a couple minutes too long, and amateurish in execution, especially when compared to stuff by bands who’ve ditched analog for the increasingly affordable sheen of digital. And it’s fucking great. It has the bombastic sound of Ritter’s psychedelic heroes but still seems somehow small and accessible.

Almost everything Shalloboi’s put to disc can be downloaded for free from their Web site, where you can also get a taste of their other art, mostly abstract collages and photos. Based on some of the album covers—classic typewriter font over atmospheric black-and-white images—the band takes some cues from the DIY emo-hardcore scene of ten years ago. Ritter says album art for Joy Division and the Cure also influenced his designs, but Goodwin jokes that the typeface was chosen for practical reasons: “People can’t read his handwriting. It looks like a serial killer’s.”

Ritter and Goodwin came up around the hardcore scene in Kansas City. “There were a lot of very enthusiastic kids with not a lot to do,” Goodwin says. In high school Ritter joined a poppy group called the Short Bus Kids that eventually evolved into a hardcore band. Though he was best friends with two of the other band members, he says he wasn’t “real, real involved in that scene.” He’ll still listen to the Get Up Kids and the Anniversary, but he’s always been more into the Cure than anything else. (You need to get your hands on a copy of Shallowful, a zine documenting his time following the band’s 2000 tour, to understand the level of his devotion.)

Shalloboi hasn’t quite found a scene either. Ritter and Goodwin are more devoted to their music than most musicians I know: Goodwin works two jobs, as a massage therapist and hand-dying yarn for a local maker, so that Ritter can take “mindless jobs, like where your brain doesn’t really get occupied so it’s a lot easier to write songs.” But though those songs tend to wander from the basic pop structure, they’re still melodic enough to turn off a serious experimental music fan. Booking shows has been a problem. “I’ll go to the experimental music scene in a particular town, but we’re not really left of center enough for them usually,” Ritter says. “But also it’s not like we can go to a rock club because we’re a little too left of center for them.” Their problem is that they’re unpretentious innocents straddling two different scenes where, frankly, well-employed pretentiousness can be an asset—where doing things like making a zine about the Cure, without a trace of irony, would freak a lot of people out.

But just ask Steve Albini: midwestern music dorks don’t care what you think, because they play music for their own satisfaction. In the new year Goodwin plans to put her bass aside (“I wasn’t very good to be perfectly honest,” she says) to concentrate on drumming. Ritter’s already at work on a new album. These days he’s been putting Goodwin or another collaborator in front of a mike and recording as they play along to a new song for the first time. “I like to capture a moment,” he says.   

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