TEAM LAST CALL

As one half of Georgia-based noise terrorists Jucifer, Amber Valentine plays a lot of rolls: singer, guitarist, diminutive hell-fairy, pixie-faced crooner, wailing banshee. But contrary to popular perception, for as oppressively loud and heavy as her band gets with its pitch-black sludge rock, one thing Valentine and her husband/drummer, Edgar Livengood, are not is demonic – which, should you ever find yourself face-to-face with the duo’s wall of amps and apocalyptic incantations, you’ll be glad to know.
“Yeah, we’re totally Satanists. We drink blood,” Valentine quips during an interview from her RV, which doubles as the couple’s permanent home and tour bus.
“We do tend to get inspired by darker stuff, but we’re not out there burning churches and stuff,” she laughs. “We get up there and spew some really intense, fairly negative emotions, and when it’s over we’re free to be these fairly positive people that can have a normal conversation.”
Jucifer’s music is the kind that forces music journalists to make up entirely new adjectives, like “demonolithic.” (All rights reserved.) But for every bowel-battering nut-cruncher of a metal song, the band’s got a delicate, melodious ballad or orchestral swell that feels lonelier than a princess locked in a tower. It’s a confounding dichotomy, one that’s earned the band comparisons to everyone from Slayer to The Carpenters.
“I would just assume that most people who write music and don’t explore such extremes are actively suffocating part of their personality,” Valentine shrugs. “For me, personally, and for Edgar, it would be a very conscientious effort to keep [our music] in the same area all the time.”
Self-restraint was quite apparently not on the agenda when it came to the writing of the band’s latest release, L’autrichienne, a double album that, track by track, trudges unflinchingly through every agonizing story arch of the French Revolution, with an empathetic focus on the doomed Marie Antoinette. The album is, as King Louis XVI might have put it, a tour de force, both lyrically and musically, snaking its way from fortress-smashing metal riffs to whispy, despairing laments. Track one, “Blackpowder,” sets the stage with a furious re-telling of the Revolution’s beginnings. “Fleur De Lis,” the album’s 18th track, renders the heart as the soon-to-be-beheaded Antoinette is bid a plaintive adieu by her even-sooner-to-be-beheaded husband.
But heads don’t really start rolling until Jucifer takes the stage and plugs in the amps – all 15 of them. The band has gained notoriety for its ear-splitting blasts of white noise and relentless feedback, something that fans, understandably, either love or loathe.
“It takes a lot of balls to go up there and play that loud,” Valentine muses. “The people that come into our shows not knowing that sometimes run screaming with their hands over their ears. But that’s alright, because in the end, making art is about making the art that you want to make, and not about doing anything else, really.
“At that volume, sound almost becomes a physical thing,” she continues. “We feel like we’re almost making sculptures out of sound. And sound becomes sort of a different medium depending on the size and shape of the room and the placement of the amplifiers. It’s kind of like an endless experiment.”
Valentine and Livengood have been spreading hearing loss since first uniting in Athens, GA, in 1993. With the decision to forfeit a permanent residence in favor of their RV, the couple more or less relegated themselves to the touring life – an existence Valentine will be more than happy to live out for the rest of her days.
“At some point, are you going to be 60 years old and screaming your head off in front of a wall of amplifiers? I can’t really say no to that vision,” she laughs. “I’m even going to hope for 70 or 80. We’ll be headbanging in our wheelchairs and having bands like Jucifer touring the nursing homes. As long as we still get to bang our heads, it’s alright.”
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine