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The Flip Side Of Falling In Love
Scene Magazine, December 17-22, 1992
By John Soeder
Transcribed by Robert Ferent/William Bryant
31 Cover Image

Scans:

The day after Thanksgiving, while the rest of Cleveland was shopping, Hot Tin Roof sequestered themselves in a recording studio. Eight hours later, the local quintet emerged with "Black Christmas," a seasonal ditty whose merry melody and sugarcoated harmonies belie its brooding lyrics.

Am I the only one, sings front man Tom Lash, who needs a carol for the lonely one?

"It was a fun song to do," says Lash a few days after the session over dinner at Massimo da Milano. He's dressed in black, of course, and his sable hair is teased into a tangled web that would make the Cure's Robert Smith green with envy.

"The challenge," he explains, "was coming up with a Christmas song that would be a reflection of the band also."

"Black Christmas" is not available in stores. It appears alongside Yuletide cuts from the likes of R.E.M. and the Williams Brothers on Grover's Holiday Hoedown Volume 3, a limited edition compilation put together by local Warner bros. promotions manager Tom Biery for his buddies in the music business. But the curious, as well as the devoted, can catch the timely tune on WMMS and check out the new Hot Tin Roof EP, the readily available Fixation.

A trilogy of songs that further improve the band's scrappy approach to smart alternative pop rock, Fixation bristles with the friction of passions in conflict. It's the flip side of all those giddy hits about falling in love, a sampler of the often brutal emotions associated with falling apart.

"All three songs deal with the emotional extremes that we go through in relating to one another," says Lash, the band's principal songwriter. "My favorite romantic films are films like Paris, Texas or Betty Blue or In The Realm Of The Senses, where the emotions of the characters are so extreme that they wind up destroying them. I'm fascinated by that aspect of our emotions. Our dark sides seem to run rampant when relationships collapse."

Those same dark sides run rampant throughout Fixation. The sprawling title track shatters the myth of happy endings against a heartbreak beat seamlessly blended with a wailing guitar and keyboards that crash like sonic surf. I'll never be free, Lash concedes above the stormy din, I'll never be satisfied.

"Everything About You," a fairly straightforward pop song, concerns itself with the toll that love takes on the sense of self. The like-minded, turbulently tuneful "Promise" warns of the damage caused by dreams that fail to come true. Wrought with naked feelings that are easy enough to identify with, Hot Tin Roof's latest packs a relevant punch that Lash believes is a rare find these days.

"There's too much prepackaged Paula Abdul stuff out there," he contends. "Go down the dial and 80 percent of what you hear has nothing to do with anything emotional, nothing to do with anything you can relate to. I don't listen to music just for the sake of having it fill my time or having it on in the background. I don't have the time of the energy to listen to songs that don't say anything."

Recorded earlier this year at Beachwood Studios, FIXATION was mixed at Joe's Garage Studios in London by Brian "Chuck" New, an up-and-coming British producer who has worked with the Cure and the Sugarcubes.

"He brought a different feel to the project," says Lash, who personally accompanied the tapes to England and sat in on the mixing session. "Having grown up with a lot of British music, like most kids in Cleveland, my writing has leanings in that direction and roots in that genre. The goal with FIXATION, in terms of getting attention from major labels commercial radio airplay, was to focus on just a few songs and to do them as well as we could afford to."

This less-is-more approach appears to have paid off. Both WMMS and WENZ have added FIXATION to their playlists, and the industry buzz surrounding Hot Tin Roof is as positive as ever. Nevertheless when pressed, Lash begs off speculating on impending success. For now, he feels successful enough right here in Cleveland.

"I'll be walking down the street,” he offered by way of example, "and I'll pass somebody who says, 'hey, Hot Tin Roof! What are youdoing in Cleveland? Not everyone thinks of us as a local band, and that’s fine with me... I'm fairly optimistic about the music scene these days. It's a pretty positive time for local bands that are putting out original product. If you're willing to put the work in and make a professional product and put on a professional presentation, I think there are opportunities here to make a name for yourself and get established.

A native Clevelander himself, Lash spent the better part of the '80s playing with hometown faves Lucky Pierre and System 56 before pursuing his own songwriting in earnest. After amassing enough original material (a god chunk of which had been written in the house he shared with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, who at the time was working on the demos that would become PRETTY HATE MACHINE), Lash formed Hot Tin Roof in 1990 and issued an introductory four-song EP titled CONCEPTION tat featured the rousing "Warm Jets."

Last year saw the release of a full-length debut, JUNK AND DESIRE, whose haunting "Heart of Darkness" won an honorable mention in Billboard's annual songwriting contest. While Lash admits that songwriting is not something that always comes easy for him, he insists he wouldn't want it any other way.

"Some songwriters sit down and write four or five songs a day," he says. "They may be very good at their craft, but most of them are tossing off things that don't really mean anything. No one's ever accused me of being prolific, but in terms of everything we've recorded or anything I've written, by the time it gets to the point where it's finally a song, I've really labored over the music and the lyrics and everything else."

Lash is quick to credit the other members of the band - drummer Eric Hermann, Bassist Michael Azre, guitarist Greg Zydyk and keyboardist Bill Tiell - for bringing the music to life, especially on stage. In the short two years they've been together, Hot Tin Roof have opened for numerous national and international acts, including material Issue, the Mighty Lemon Drops, Gene Loves Jezebel, the Posies and That Petrol Emotion. Consistently riveting performances find them frequently threatening to upstage the headliners.

"For us, it's a challenge," Lash says. "We've made it a practice of opening for a really diverse group of bands, from My Bloody Valentine to Artful Dodger. there probably wasn't one person in the audience who was at both shows. When we're playing to completely different groups of people who don't know us - not just family and friends - we have to go out there and perform with the caliber ofa national band. In that way, we raise our own expectations We rise to the occasion, and I think we are a better band because of it.

Hot Tin Roof will be celebrating the release of FIXATION with a show this Friday, December 18, at the Phantasy Nite Club, were they will share the bill with the Clarks and Beyond Blue. In the coming year, the band hopes to expand its regional following and win over new audiences in other markets like Chicago and New York.

"That's where we're at and where we're going says Lash, trying to always put on our best face, whether we're recording or performing."

"And," he adds with a laugh, "trying to enjoy ourselves in the process.”