The Austin Chronicle (Fall 1991)

Ready or Not:  The Duckhills

by garry kirks

Let's see...The Duckhills are this really cool new heavy metal band.  I picture an umlaut over the "u" every time I see the name.  Maybe a "z" in place of the "s," no "c," one "l." Dukhilz (imagine your own umlaut).  I figured they would look like a hormone-overloaded 12-year-old male's fantasy of demon biker crotch gods.  That's what I was hoping for anyway...

"We don't have an image."  Quotes from the Duckhills seem to emerge from a collective band consciousness.

The Duckhills, or Ducks in rock-writers speak, don't wear black leather, at least none that I witnessed - underwear being such a personal thing.  Three of them have sub-shoulder length hair, but I saw not a glimmer of 'do arranging product or permanent curl in the bunch.  They don't tuck their jeans into their boots or wear thirty black rubber bracelets on each wrist.  They even keep the top buttons on their flies fastened. 

So, maybe I was misinformed but, image being the vapor that it is, I still had hopes of the all-out testosterone crunch of their music...

"I want to approach the songwriting with less whimsy, not so much of the silly stuff."

I listened to their new tape, Kayak, as well as its older sibling, Remembering Spongecake.  They write songs about dinosaurs and hats, but not about Satan, Prince of Eternal Darkness.  They also write songs about lost girls and boredom and other gender relation stuff, but not about oral sex at gunpoint or nuclear holocaust.  They don't play seventy-jillion notes per minute guitar solos based on the mixolodian scale.  They don't scream a lot and they regularly use open chords.  They make music you can dance to or listen to at home alone and depressed.

Strike two for me and my intentions...

"We're going on a short tour with Poi Dog Pondering."

I went to a show at liberty Lunch that had a healthy turnout and gained a little hope.  The Ducks are apparently a babe-magnet band, the chicks really dig them.  But, as I peered more closely, I saw that they weren't the poured-into-black satin and truckload-of-mascara women that are attracted to metal shows.  These generally seemed to be women with educations and some semblance of morals - out for a good time, dancing and grinning at each other a lot.  They looked more likely to have deep, involved conversations about food and puppies than to take part in a five-way grope.

"We met and played together in high school in Houston, then went off to various Texas colleges, then reconvened here and rented this house.  We call it Duckhill Stonehenge."

I visited the house - the basis for the band moniker - for the interview.  They didn't perform any bizarre backward rituals during my stay.  They did barbecue hamburgers, but they cooked them first and ate them second, completely forward in motion.  They even spoke in intelligible sentences, a rarity in this type of situation.  I would have been disappointed, but they seemed like really nice guys.   

"We are really nice guys."

OK, so the Duckhills are nothing at all like a heavy metal band.

What the Duckhills are is different.  You could describe them with a lot of "e" words; eccentric, eclectic, esoteric, etcetera.  They write quirky pop songs that invoke more smiles than belly laughs.  They enjoy themselves onstage and don't take themselves too seriously while speaking about their ambitions.  They don't resemble any current musical trends enough to possess a readily identifiable physical point of reference, a fact that compelled me, however erroneously, to invent one on my own.

In the long run I suppose the world has enough Slayer wannabes.  So maybe a no-image image, though harder to describe with pen and paper, is image enough for the Duckhills.