WHEN Ugly Winner’s Takashi Makino says he works on his music “pretty much all the time,” he isn’t kidding. Waking hours alone, in fact, are not enough.
“A lot of it has to do with dreams,” says Makino. “In the last few years, they’ve been pretty vivid. I wake up in the morning, and I remember these things.”
Makino says that about half of the songs he writes come from dreams. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s heard Ugly Winner’s new album, Minutes, Years and Never, which gets a proper release celebration with the band’s show Wednesday at the Blank Club. Some of the songs, like “Bloodlines” and “Dreamer,” contain explicit references to their origins in the subconscious.
Others like “Summer Sun” and “River Wild” are built on sprawling soundscapes and unexpected waves of instrumentation that can only be described as dreamlike. In the same way that David Lynch’s best films turn everyday settings into surreal stages, so do Makino’s songs create the feeling that he has one foot in the waking world, one in the twilight zone.
“It really has to grab me in order for me to write about it,” he says. “It can’t just be any old dream. It has to make me feel like it’s almost real.”
Even so, Makino has been prolific enough to write a flood of material, enough for both Ugly Winner and another project, Soft Knife, which has a bit of a folkier, more singer/songwriter-oriented sound than the quirky but often driving indie rock of Ugly Winner. Clearly, the man spends a fair amount on dream journals.
“I’m lucky, the last year or so songs have just been coming out of me,” he says.
His rapidly expanding songbook has led Makino to push ahead relentlessly, though he’s says that’s his natural inclination anyway. Even the idea of a CD-release show seems dated to him, although Minutes, Years and Never is certifiably brand spanking new. Perhaps that’s to be expected when one has already written half the songs for the next album, making this the rare CD-release show where the band will also be debuting songs from the record after the new record.
“I’m that guy who’s quick to say, ‘OK, that’s done, let’s move on,'” admits Makino.
One of the challenges of doing Minutes, Years and Never was holding together a bunch of songs that sounded, in some cases, very, very different. It’s a problem that Makino admits he brought on himself, and one he says he could never have solved without the abilities of bassist Todd Flanagan and drummer Nick Lopez.
“I couldn’t ask for a better rhythm section for any band,” he says. “One of the things with Ugly Winner that I always stress to the guys is trying not to make the songs sound anything alike. But we have a certain sound that makes those songs that sound so different from ‘Ugly Winner.'”
Indeed, the unpredictable flow of the album is one of its charms. It can sound like buzzing, chugging rock on “River Wild” or almost like Americana on “Mend Your Heart.” Horns come out of nowhere, and the opening and closing “Intro” and “Outro” are like raw slices of post-punk psychedelia. And yet, there are constants—the otherworldly reverb, the insistent strum of Makino’s guitar, the stretch of his vocal range, Lopez’s shuffling beat.
Ugly Winner’s outside-of-the-box sound makes them soul mates with the crop of unusual South Bay bands that have sprung up in the last couple of years, of which the Mumlers are the quintessential example (and perhaps, though they have never been given credit for it, the leaders of a movement). Refreshingly, Makino embraces the local scene with passion; rather than focus on its challenges, as so many do, he credits it with nurturing the band’s distinctive sound.
“One of the reasons we play in San Jose is because of the scene here,” he says. “We’re friends with Doctor Nurse and the Mumlers, those are bands we love. I think a lot of [what we’re doing] has to do with the bands we surround ourselves with. That helped in terms of making it a little bit different.”
And without a doubt, Makino is all in on the band’s unique sound, aware of the songs’ ability to connect quickly with the listener because of their unique qualities rather than in spite of them.
“I’m a little bit hardheaded, sticking to my guns and saying this is the way it should be,” he admits. “I don’t think people should be afraid of doing what they think is right, even if it means no one is going to listen to you.”
Ugly Winner
Wednesday, Dec. 15, 9pm
The Blank Club, San Jose
Free
