Inside the Wonderfully Weird World of Chicago's Animal Panic.
By Julie Simmons | Music Journalist
Following an enthusiastic recommendation from another Chicago band, I looked up Animal Panic. At times, listening to them was like recalling a time when I used to chip away at the paper collars of crayons to experience them more deeply; a cloudy wave of discovery crossed with unbridled playfulness. I was determined to Sherlock Holmes how a band could evoke the subtleties of nostalgia. So, I reached out for an interview. Ben Fister replied and agreed to meet. Now, tucked into a corner at Colectivo Coffee Logan Square, the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter breaks down the process of what makes Animal Panic. a captivating band in Chicago’s DIY scene. Turns out, he’s playing with our memories and he knows it.
It’s a crisp fall morning outside the walls and windows around us. We place our morning beverages in front of ourselves and acknowledge the recording device spying between us. Awkward start-up questions ensue until the conversation starts to grow roots into the band’s origin story.
Fister met co-founder and drummer Mike Sullivan while playing in a cover band at DePaul University. After deciding to make original music, Sullivan invited his brother, Jack, to play bass guitar. Mike ended up inspiring the band’s name the night he called Fister for a ride claiming he’d just fled a party “in an animal panic.”
Back at the coffee shop, Fister inserts his gaze into the section that’s busy with caffeinated customers and reveals, “Creatively, I try to never write the same song twice. It’s not a rule I have; I just find I get bored of things easily. I’ve always admired bands that attack a lot of styles, but you still know it’s them. With our current band line up, we have a lot of diversity. My current interest in music is a little bit of world music, bossa nova, Carnatic music [from South India] and Soukous [West Africa]. I like pulling from stuff like that.”
As Fister borrows rhythms from overseas, the other band members have been more or less grounded in Western influences. Sullivan draws from classic rock and blues. Parker Harris (guitarist) is a part of Chicago’s hardcore scene while Salazar grew up playing jazz drums and likes Black Sabbath.
If trying to get all those influences to mesh isn’t complicated enough, Fister ladders down to a deeper level as he explains, “When you’re creating, when you’re in genesis [mode], you’re pulling from the origin of creativity which is very metaphysical. Everything that you like channels something which comes from something which comes from something. Music that interacts with poetry in the right way vocalizes the past and pushes it in a way that creates a conversation with the future. I think combining new things with something that sounds like the past makes it more palatable. I’ve been listening to a lot of hypnagogic pop. It’s a hidden genre that’s been around for a while. It’s pop but it’s a little eerie, lower fidelity production. Kinda sounds like a memory of a pop song.”
While the track “Hurricane Touchdown” seems to fit the hypnogogic pop description, their most streamed song, “Loveless,” is an interesting ménage that lends itself to early 2000 indie but with a bossa nova beat. The telephone filter on Fister’s vocals is reminiscent of early Strokes songs, but that’s as far as direct comparisons go. Alone in a car, Animal Panic. puts listeners in a nostalgic hypnosis until the raging guitars on a song like “Ragdoll” delivers an abrupt wake-up call.
Fister stares at his own mental projections and goes deeper still, “Production wise, with our last EP, [Year of the Jaguar], we went through tape. That’s why it’s got that murkiness. We recorded it at my house. I just picked up a four-track cassette tape. One day, we’ll probably make a reel to reel but this time, we wanted to use tape because our songs hop around with so many different attempts [at genres]. Lo-fi unified it all.”
To take aesthetics a step further, Animal Panic. layers lo-fi recordings with YouTube clips that are projected directly onto the band members in several music videos. These montages often include sports highlights (basketball, Mexican American wrestling), Call of Duty compilations, Japanese commercials and vaporwave videos (the dreamlike microgenre using 80s commercial imagery). Though they may seem haphazard, the images reveal something about each member’s younger years.
He elucidates, “In our videos, we have Easter eggs for some of our interests for sure. But also, if you use videos that have been around for a while or something that sounds old, it makes your brain feel like you’ve heard it before. It’s weird, listener manipulation. We hope we’re trying something new enough that doesn’t sound exactly like something you’re heard in the past but sounds like a reinterpretation of it.”
Even though individual expression is already burned into the band’s ethos, Fister finds benefit in working on a solo project - something to do with 80s throwback with tango rhythms. He admits the solo project is too dramatic for Animal Panic., however, “unleashing my creativity means I can borrow from myself later.”
He expounds a bit further, “If you have a little world of your own that you can borrow from, you can double digest your own music,” he reflects. “There’s a lyric: ‘take shortcuts in my life / only end up with pain.’ That was from a different song I wrote. It made its way subconsciously into another song. Another time, I wrote down ‘year of the jaguar’ which is a line I misheard from the movie [The Road to] El Dorado, [‘and so dawns the Age of the Jaguar’]. That’s the literary part but we do that with music too where we have songs that don’t make it and Jack will take a lick from another song. It’s all LEGOs. The more we do that and the more things are recycled over, the more authentic it sounds. Everyone has a stake in every song. We have a song we’ve played a lot live, called ‘Human Mannequin.’ Every one of us has a part, all our personalities are just streaming along together.”
With the upcoming release of their first full-length album, Animal Panic. is preparing to headline a show at Lincoln Hall on Saturday, December 5 and tour next year. Knowing that fans have no idea what that new album will sound like, Fister reassuringly recalls the band’s commitment.
“We try to make sure the music is there; the images engage you and it’s all something your mind can ingest.” He smiles but not too much and adds, “Maximal stimulation.”
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This article was originally published in Reel Chicago.
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