Behind The Kit: Laughing Stock at Windjammer

Posting about Post-Punk

Almost every drum teacher I’ve studied with told me to record myself playing and watch back with close attention. Now that I own a discreet and better-than-decent camera, I’ve started taking their advice. I’ve built a small library of footage from behind the kit at my shows. I’d like to share some of these recorded sets along with my commentary & memories of the gig with you, my paying subscribers. If you aren’t a paying subscriber, sorry, you’ll have to catch me live and in person instead.

Laughing Stock, live at Windjammer, in Queens, NYC 11/10/2023

Let me head this one off before it gains any steam, no we are not named after the 1991 Talk Talk album The Laughing Stock. Corey, our bassist, blurted out the suggestion in a moment of inspiration immediately after we finished a song in rehearsal. To my knowledge he wasn’t up on Talk Talk when the name came to him. The four of us, Corey, guitarists Zach and Mimo, and I had spent the last few weeks shooting crumbled up band names into metaphorical wastebaskets. We knew a good one when we heard one and didn’t look back.

Months before we’d settled on that name I received an email from Zach asking if I wanted to try out for a band blending post-punk and shoegaze. The two of us had met in early 2023 at a mutual friend’s birthday party and bonded over our shared interest in Converge. When he reached out I was fresh off the dissolution of the NYC-version of the Shalom live band. I was happy to clog up some of the fresh holes in my schedule. More importantly, I liked the demos. The songs were definitely guitar-forward, with the kind of fiddled-over tones that lived up to Zach name dropping My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins in his email. But underneath there was a persistent rhythmic motor. I could tell that if I pushed the drums just a little harder than the average indie band we’d have a real shot at something special live.

This assumption was based on experience. Over a decade ago I’d drummed for Small Wonder back when that project was a post-punk trio. Then and now what attracted me to the genre was seeing what I could get away with inside of its strict limits. What new ideas could I bring to the long history of tom grooves? Post-punk is also uniquely friendly to machines for the punk world. If you’re caught up on Drumming Upstream, you’ll know that I have some experience learning parts programmed for drum machines. Playing in Laughing Stock gave me the chance to reverse engineer parts that sounded mechanical but moved at a human tempo. There’s also plenty of evidence that punk bands in lighter weight classes can benefit from knowing some two-step footwork.

In a stroke of good fortune, the songs I had to prepare for my audition fit snugly alongside the rest of my practice schedule. Around the same time I’d been hired to record an EP of tunes for a Gaslight Anthem style punk band. I was also spending one day a weekend jamming with Cryptide, a heavy metal themed surf rock group. With the time left over I was chipping away at drum covers of songs by Converge and Comeback Kid. None of these other projects sounded much like the songs Zach and co had sent me, but they made sure that my hand speed and endurance were ready for anything Laughing Stock threw at me. The audition went great and I soon I was making the weekly trek from South Brooklyn to Bushwick to practice.

Those early rehearsals were sweaty and loud. Sometimes I would go directly from a jam at my rehearsal space with Cryptide to one uptown with Laughing Stock and return home in a state of nonverbal exhaustion. One such weekend I arrived at practice to find our phone booth of a practice room filled with microphones and cables. We ended up recording three of the five songs that we’d worked on for the last two months and releasing two of them on Bandcamp on August 10th.

With the demo out in the world and our name searchable on Instagram, we set off to get ourselves some gigs. Our first came in September, during the endless weekends of rain that flooded the city that fall. We played a quick 20 minute set at Bar Freda in Queens opening a four band bill of strangers and internet acquaintances. Encouraged by both the turnout (especially considering the weather) and the response (a mosh pit!) we started reaching out to every venue we could for a follow up. This is how we ended up at Windjammer on November 10th.