Visual Space: In Conversation with Luggage’s Michael Vallera

Chicago’s Luggage have spent the last seven years expelling the kind of galactic post-punk that sends shivers down your spine.

From their wall-buckling 2016 debut, SUN (Automatic Records), and the hooping hellscapes of Three (Don Giovanni Records) 12 months later, to the multi-faceted majesty of 2019’s Shift (The Garotte) and the guttural assault of 2020’s Happiness (Husky Pants Records), Luggage have spent their time crafting songs that are filled with sharp reflections and heaving force.

Consisting of Michael Vallera (vocals/guitarist), Michael John Grant (bass) and Luca Cimarusti (drums), what the three-piece do with tension and space is their most potent weapon. While fellow Chicago lifers FACS absolutely revel in that same tension, Luggage catch and release it, and it results in an endorphin rush like no other.

The dread-scaped atmosphere that anchors Luggage’s dark swarm of sound is fierce. All-encompassing, framing a reality that few bands have replicated. Songs that hang like dirty great storm clouds, and on their latest dispatch, Hand Is Bad, the heavens open up.

Starting with the discordant, metallic flash of the title track, Luggage then proceed to rip through each song with a dead-eyed ferocity fit for these times. The metal-on-bone assault of Circled, followed by the abstract majesty of Sunshine In Your Teeth and Beautiful Truck.

With high-voltage electricity running through the veins, there is not let up; the epic rumble of Mirror It; the primal roar of River; the bluster of The Poison, which leaks into the post-apocalyptic horror that is Deep North before closing the album with the aptly titled Nowhere.

Hand Is Bad is an album where Luggage sound at their haunting best. Delicately bleak, assuredly abstract and overwhelmingly real, Hand Is Bad is a worthy addition to the most underrated discography across today’s new music landscape.

“We’re all really excited about this record,” says Vallera during our conversation over Zoom earlier this month. “It’s been great to work with Matt and Brian from Amish Records, they’re a wonderful label.”

The fact that Luggage’s music is not reaching more people remains one of the greatest mysteries since the opening notes of SUN’s opening track, City Falls. I talk to Vallera about this, along with the band’s history, Chicago, and Hand Is Band.

Luggage: Hand Is Bad

Sun 13: Did you guys all know each other before the band formed?

Michael Vallera: “Luca and MJ grew up together here, right outside of Chicago. I met Luca a decade-plus ago. When I moved to Chicago, I was starting grad school, so I was involved in that heavily. But I met Luca just through the music scene here and going to shows… and so I became friends with him just through other people that I knew.

“When Luca and I originally talked about starting a new project, we were looking for somebody to play bass and MJ had actually just had a moment open up in his life where he was able to be in a band again. He has a job that keeps him on the road a lot. That got paused for a second… and then that’s kind of how the band started. They’ve known each other since they were kids.”

S13: Most bands look to refine their sound over time, but to me Luggage nailed it from the first note of SUN, and sonically it’s been a continuation. Is that something you think about?

MV: “I feel that Sun is a pretty different record, just given that it was our first record and the first time that we were all writing and playing together. I do think that if you look at it, [with] the earliest material, the mechanisms and the seeds for what we’re doing are definitely there. It isn’t something that we talk about in a deliberate way, but I think every record has been an attempt to get to the core of what the sound is. I think there’s been changes to certain aspects about how we write and the nature of the sounds. But I do also think that there’s a continuity to all the material and that it’s been a linear process from the first record to this one.”

S13: The great thing about Luggage is that you can listen to your records from front to back in continuity and the results are equally excellent, which is something you can’t really say about a lot of bands…

MV: “I believe that’s something we strive for. The records themselves are crafted in a way – the song order and the artwork and everything else – it’s meant to be presented as a singular thing. Obviously, there are different songs and moments across all of the records, but I think, for us, the whole object of the record is really important.”

S13: You mentioned the artwork, and your photography has featured both with Luggage and elsewhere (the new FACS record springs to mind). With your artwork, I see a direct through line to your music, and to me it echoes some new outer-world. Do you consider Luggage to be world-builders?

MV: “Yes, as a band, I think that those are things we really gravitate to. I tend to like artists and bands that encapsulate a world unto themselves, even within a genre that’s very specific, they offer a place that you’re entering when you listen to their material.”

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S13: How much emphasis did you put on equipment. Like marrying the right guitars with the right amplification to produce that unique sound?

MV: “Our sound is really important. I think that the gear that we use, for all three of us individually, is what we’ve arrived to after a long time of playing music – we all started playing music when we were kids – and so I think it’s more like a long arc progression of just finding the things that help us carve out the sound that we want to get.

“I think that the equipment is pretty specific in terms of when we record or if we do shows, when we’re able to bring our own equipment. But also, it’s not a problem if we have to backline stuff. So, I wouldn’t say our sound is contingent upon super specific gear. I think more so it has to do with the way we write parts, and the tunings that we use. I think they are a lot more important to the way we sound than the equipment at the end of the day.”

S13: Where did the title of Hand Is Bad come from?

MV: “It was some months before we started writing this record. It was from a just from a daydream that I had. I was just taking a sleep after work one day, and I had this dream where in the dream – which I tend to not remember actually, which is funny – I was calling Luca, and was talking to him about a record that we had just put out, and it was being referred to as ‘Hand Is Bad’. When I woke up, I texted him and said, ‘I had this really funny dream’. The title stuck around, and we both thought, ‘Wow, that’s actually kind of interesting’. There’s a lot of different things I liked about it, how the language of it worked. And then we all felt a resonance with it, and as the record formed, I think that it started to influence other things about how the writing happened and how it sounded.”

S13: Did the songs come quickly, or was it any different to the previous records that you’ve made?

MV: “It all happens a little bit differently. A lot of this record was written in a period where, because of certain things, we couldn’t get together super frequently for long periods of time. A lot of times when we were getting together, it would just be about creating, almost like modular parts, and just these combinations of sound and rhythm – we would loop on those continuously. We stockpiled a couple dozen of these cycling rhythm and melodic structures. After about a year of collecting those, we literally sat down one day and listened through all of them, and started to have ideas about which ones could be combined together. A lot of the songs were formed from the smaller parts after the fact.”

S13: In your band bio, Brian Turner mentions that quote from Dale Bozzio, “What are words for when no one listens anymore”. Does your relationship with sound override the lyrics, or would one not exist without the other?

MV: “I think that the lyrics and the vocals are treated just like any other sound that happens in the songs, whether it be a bass part, or the way the guitar and drums are interacting, or a drum fill. We treat that just as another piece of material, so I think that all of it is equal importance in my mind. Even though the lyrics or the vocals, especially on this record, are very sparse, and there are some tracks that are more textural that don’t have any vocals whatsoever. I think that the choice of when and how we use them is the same as how we would go about writing any other part of the song. I think we try to make all the components exist on a level playing field.”

S13: It’s really interesting where the track Circled is placed on the album. You wouldn’t expect an instrumental song so visceral to feature so early. Is the track listing something you see as important?

MV: “Yeah, for sure. It’s something that we think about a lot, and with this record it was even more important. Because of the fact that there are these tracks that are – I’m reluctant to call them transitional tracks, because then I feel that like they’re seen as less developed or not as important as the others – but I think it was more about having this record, to your point earlier, really be a world that you step into, and the track order is really influenced by the general feeling of how things move from one to the other. Trying to pay attention to how the energy can shift like throughout the record.

“I also think this record, for me anyway, there’s a lot of visual space. And so, I think having Circled as the second track is a way to introduce a listener straight away to the experience of the rest of the record because – we have the first track, which is the single and is the title of the record – and it’s probably one of the most straightforward songs in terms of a normative song structure. I think having that go right into another piece that is quite different and put together in a different way sets the listener up to know that this is something happening throughout the rest of the record, which it does. I feel like that combination, especially at the beginning, is about setting up a context for what the record is.”

S13: Your lyrics are so positively abstract. With Beautiful Truck and Sunshine in your Teeth, like you were saying about Hand is Bad coming from a dream, they seem out of a similar head space, too. Are you a big reader of literature?

MV: “I try to read a fair amount. When I was in school at different periods, I had a couple of professors that were really influential to me; that got me into a lot of different kinds of writers, and a lot of different poets from the New York School of poetry. This was when I was in undergrad; that was something that I became interested in. I also listened to a lot of bands that would use lyrics in a way that weren’t exactly narrative or self-reflective in a traditional sense. I’m a huge Sonic Youth fan, and when I was younger and first discovered them, that was something I was always really attracted to, which were these lyrics that were photographic and abstract… where it really imparted a responsibility on the listener to create a context for them, or rather there was an ability for the listener to make a lot of different kinds of connections or connotations.

“For Luggage, a lot of the way this record… how the lyrics happened was that we had put together all the songs, and then I had taken them back in and was just doing scratch lyrics to them. So, I would be listening to our demos and just recording things when it felt right. Almost if you were listening to a song on a record or radio and just intuitively feel when lyrics would come in and just say nonsense as placeholders for the lyrics. And then going back and listening to them, in doing that, you can start to pick out syllable count and things that sound like words… and then all of a sudden, you realise that you’re saying things already and you start to pick out phrases and then sort of expand upon that.

“So, in that sense, you’re right, the lyrics do come from – with this record in particular – this other place. Different techniques of automatic writing or things that I collect when I’m out in the world – small bits of text or little phrases, things that will just pop into my head, or that I see in printed material. It’s a combination of all those things.”

S13: There’s a song on Three, Cold Water that immediately echoes the image of someone walking through a flood. Prior to your techniques on Hand Is Bad, did you need bleak imagery to actually spark the initial idea of a song?

MV: “I think that a lot of times, all of it does come from a place that’s really visual or environmental. I am a photographer, and a lot of the visual art I’m interested in will be photo-based or image-based. There’s something that I really enjoy about how a viewer or listener can connect with an image of a scene or an environment. Even if we know the context of what that environment is, we can’t help but put ourselves within a photo and create these other personal attachments to it. And so, I think a lot of the writing comes from an attraction to environment if that makes sense? Or how things can feel in particular spaces.”

S13: Sure. That’s interesting, because my next question was about the track River, which I think really underpins this record. Did that song come about in a similar way?

MV: “Yeah. I really, really love that song. That’s one that we’ve been having a lot of fun playing live. It’s this song, ostensibly not a whole lot is happening, but the groove of it, we thought was so appropriate and really interesting and to keep that going and expand upon it. At the time – I live pretty close to the Chicago River, which is a river that bisects the whole Chicagoland area – and I ride my bike along it a lot. I was thinking about that experience of what it is to interface with that part of the environment where I live and watch it continuously move and cut through the city. The way the song sounded really reminded me of those experiences.”

S13: You’ve worked with Jeremy Lemos again. How was working with him in comparison with the previous people you’ve alongside in the studio?

MV: “We’ve been lucky. I feel like anybody we’ve worked with, they’ve been friends and colleagues, and so we’ve had great luck and good experiences working with several engineers over the course of the band’s history. We’ve all known Jeremy for a long time; he’s an incredible guy. He also works on the road a lot. When we were doing Happiness, our schedules had aligned where we were all able to be in the same place and work together.

“He’s just such a talented engineer and really understands us as people, understands the sound and where we’re coming from. It’s just an effortless experience. He has a long history with a lot of the other people in the orbit of Electrical Audio and Chicago Mastering Service, and a lot of the other bands that we have relationships with. It just feels like working with a close friend.

“The speed at which we’re able to do things in the studio with him is really important, too. Because this is all on our own time and our own money, it’s important for us to be able to accomplish as much as we can in a couple of days. Literally with him, we’re able to set up a track, record and mix a record in two or three days, and then [can] hand it off to a mastering engineer. It could only happen because of how seamless the working relationship is, and his understanding of what we’re trying to do.”

S13: Speaking of that, and from afar at least it seems that there’s a good scene that has evolved from Chicago in terms of sort of alternative, post-punk etc. There seems to be quite a young crop of acts coming up as well. How much does the city influence your music?

MV: “I think it has a really big influence just because this is the place that we all live. I’ve been here probably 13 or 14 years now, so this has more or less been my home for a long time. MJ and Luca are from here. I went to school here, I work here, we’ve all been involved in various bands over the years, and a lot of the music that came from this city historically is something that’s really important to us and a torch that we’re trying to carry. So, I definitely think that it’s impossible to separate what we do from the place where we live. But I think that can be said for a lot of different bands, and that’s what I think the most interesting thing about when these collections of people or musicians evolve in a city. It’s a direct result of lots of different things; even how the city to a certain extent is laid out and where people live, what kind of spaces there are to be able to play and rehearse, things like that.”

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S13: Where do you see DIY music in the current sphere of the world. In a world that moves so fast, do you think that art still maintains its power?

MV: “I think that it’s something that can be tricky to talk about, because as I get older – as we get older, Luca, MJ and myself, we’re all in our late ’30s, I’ll be 40 next year – I feel it’s really easy to be cynical about these things and to think back to how things were and the experiences I had with live music… and being able to seek out and obtain records and learn about bands.

“I would say that the culture of that will always will always continue, regardless of what’s happening. I think it definitely is a tumultuous moment right now, just because of the added cost of everything; especially for a band to go tour or what you have to sell a record for because of how much it costs to produce… and the really unsustainable systems of press and publicists and this idea that there has to be a lot of money behind a push to even get a record noticed.”

S13: The latter point is just not true.

MV: “I agree. I don’t think it’s true, and I think that it’s also a really easy way to waste a lot of money. I suppose like any other band right now, we want to go after opportunities to be able to have our music get in front of people that would enjoy it, and to be able to play for people that would enjoy it. We still haven’t been to Europe, which we would love to do at some point. But I think at the end of the day for us, Luggage is really about a special conversation that gets to happen between three people who are close friends. That’s always been what is important to us. To develop that, and to be able to share that with people, and whoever it resonates with, that’s the point. This is something that we do, because… it’s just what we do. I think for a lot of the bands or artists that I enjoy and that I respect, they’re coming from a similar place: putting the art first, [and] the rest will get figured out somehow.”

Hand Is Bad is out now via Amish Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.