The Sky Drops

Photo: Joe del Tufo

Searching for Sonic Bliss with The Sky Drops
Author: Michael Pollock

I first saw The Sky Drops perform in February 2006 at the old Café 4W5. They were part of the Tric Town indie-rock series, which now has a home at Mojo 13, on Philadelphia Pike near Claymont. The Sky Drops went on deep into the evening, when the crowd was just starting to pick up. The stage was small and shimmied into the very back of the room, so the sound always felt more like an angry wave than a pool you could dip a toe into. The band, which consists of Rob Montejo on vocals and guitar and Monika Bullette on drums and vocals, didn’t have much in the way of released material at the time, so the songs felt fresh and immediate. They played a few things I knew and at least one thing that made my jaw drop, a storm of a song with a swooning, hurricane melody. I’ve convinced myself it ended up as “Hang On,” from the EP they put out later that year, Clouds of People. The Sky Drops were good. They were loud. I left feeling like I’d been doing airplane spins for 30 minutes. Café 4W5 closed a few months later.

I caught them again at Mojo 13, sometime that same year. It was another strong performance, and the lingering effect was the same. The Sky Drops could be lumped into a subgenre of guitar-based music called shoegaze, but they specialize in what can best be called disorientation: you don’t know what you’re hearing or what you’ve heard, and you’re not sure when you might hear it again. You’re confused, basically, and the fact that it took just two people to make you feel that way only adds to the confusion. And the appreciation. Shoegaze first became a popular term in the late 1980s, when British bands like Ride and Lush carelessly (and at the same time carefully) pushed walls of distorted, manic guitar on top of whispered vocals, burying the lyrics. “Shoegaze” had more to do with how the bands played onstage—they earned a reputation for performing very still, looking down at their feet as though they couldn’t be bothered to make eye contact—but the audience reacted much the same way, stuck in a moment it couldn’t get out of; moving slowly, if it moved at all. In 1991, a band called My Bloody Valentine, led by a driven guitarist named Kevin Shields, released an album titled Loveless. Conversations about shoegaze music often start and end with this album, because it made everything before it seem inferior, and because in the 18 years since its release, nothing has managed to sound quite like it: a record so dense with indescribable sounds it can take months and years to peel away the layers. When’s the last time we spent that long trying to understand an album? Anything worth saying about shoegaze has to include the words “My Bloody Valentine,” “Kevin Shields,” or “Loveless.” It was a simultaneous birth and death, like the rapture in reverse. The band has yet to produce a follow-up. It is not hyperbole to say Loveless is the best album ever made.

Shoegaze, however, didn’t actually start, or end, with My Bloody Valentine. It’s true that if you want a really good shoegaze experience, you’ll listen to My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When” after you’ve had a few pints of pumpkin-flavored ale on a cool fall night. Shoegaze, though, is a photograph as much as it’s a sound. It’s about trying to capture a moment so vulnerable and tender you can’t bear to hold onto it. It’s fleeting, gone as soon as it’s exposed. There was shoegaze with the release of Loveless. But there was shoegaze that same year, when Teenage Fanclub gave us “The Concept” and Bandwagonesque, and years earlier, with the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy. Before that, there was shoegaze in the intimacy of Big Star’s “Thirteen” and the sobering drones of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” songs that have been covered relentlessly in an attempt to recreate those shared feelings. After Loveless, shoegaze gave us Yo La Tengo, and Lost in Translation, and “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star. Moments so right and perfect we couldn’t stare too long. We look away, to break the spell. We look down, at our shoes.

One a year, almost without fail, I’ll dig out Loveless and fall completely, utterly in love again. Mystified and hypnotized by the swirling, swooshing chaos; jolted by the control and restraint. I don’t care if Kevin Shields is a lazy pothead who lost his mind trying to record another album after Loveless, like the stories tell us. I don’t want a follow-up to Loveless. For a couple of weeks out of the year, I don’t want anything but Loveless. Forty-eight minutes that stretch on forever.

Listening to The Sky Drops evokes a lot of the same mystery. Where do those sounds come from? Were they dreamed of, then willed into existence? Or created by accident, then dreamed about? Is that a guitar? Two guitars? Three? Why do the strings sound like they’re crying?

I interviewed Montejo and Bullette for the first time in late 2005, on a painfully cold night. We met at Stoney’s Pub and sat in a tight booth, leaning forward so we could hear each other. Earlier, I’d jotted down some things to talk about—topics, really, but only a few firm questions. It wasn’t long before we’d exhausted my list and I realized it would’ve been good to have a loose script to fall back on; cue cards; something. I improvised a little. It failed. Soon after, my tape recorder stopped working. I improvised some more. It failed again. I panicked.

We persevered, though, the three of us. Montejo and Bullette aren’t very talkative, but they’re extremely patient and polite. The conversation drifted a lot, and one of the places it kept coming back to was the band’s influences. Montejo mentioned the first time he heard My Bloody Valentine; it was a song on a Creation Records sampler called “Cigarette in Your Bed.” “There was something amiss about it,” Montejo said at the time. He added, “It wasn’t quite right, but in a good way.”

Both members said they wanted to focus on the feelings of the songs and lyrics, not the meanings behind them. That applied to the band name as well: “Sky” is an adjective or a noun, depending which way it’s toggled. At one point, Montejo said something that stuck with me for years afterward. “When I play,” he said, “I want to make every string sing.”

In his previous life, Rob Montejo was a rock star. An international rock star. In the earlyto- mid 1990s, he sang and played guitar in Smashing Orange, a band that started in Wilmington but found much greater success in the U.K., where they wowed audiences and musical peers. Here’s one impression, from the June 1991 issue of the music magazine Lime Lizard: “Their first date over here at the Falcon created the kind of secret excitement that Ride, Galaxie 500 and Cranes all managed to achieve in the smelliest back room in Camden.”

Smashing Orange were originally inspired by American psychedelic rock, but soon they melted into something resembling the shoegaze bands making headway in England. In the U.K., their foreign roots made them an anomaly—American bands could often care less what their British counterparts are up to—and the press loved them. In their roughly five years together, Smashing Orange played with Lush and Yo La Tengo, released a series of sought-after singles and EPs (selections from which are compiled on 1991), were named “Best Unsigned Band” by the influential College Music Journal, taped a Peel Session, recorded a hidden gem of an album (The Glass Bead Game, in 1992), signed to MCA Records, and made a video (“The Way That I Love You”) that got on MTV.

History has remembered them as the next big thing that almost was. “It’s sort of crazy when you mull over the highlights of Rob’s career,” Rick Martel, a local musician and radio deejay on WVUD, says. “He’s always been a space-rock boy. My old band, the Young Vulgarians, used to open for My Wig Is On, one of his bands after Smashing Orange. They were a lot more polished and likeable than we were, but Rob was always respectful and gracious, in that quiet/stand-offish way of his.”

From the start, Montejo has had vision. “I like the idea of having the male and female forces in the music, the yin and yang,” he told Melody Maker in June 1991. It was a reference to his younger sister Sara, who contributed vocals in Smashing Orange for a short time. It would be another 14 years before Montejo captured that relationship again by forming The Sky Drops with Monika Bullette, a singer/songwriter who had previously played drums in the psych-pop band Licorice Roots.

Bullette and Montejo had known each for a while through mutual friends. Montejo even produced and played on “We Are Not from Sugar,” a song from Bullette’s wonderfully eclectic The Secrets, an album she made available free online in 2005 that went on to be downloaded more than 2,000 times. “His ideas were brilliant,” Hangnail Phillips, a local musician who engineered the album, says of Montejo’s work in the studio. “He developed a lush layering of keyboards and drum machine that were just perfect for the song. They’re both so tuned in to what they’re doing. I’m always amazed at Monika’s harmonies. She never takes the obvious route when she’s working out her vocals.”

The idea of what’s obvious or not can be found in other elements of The Sky Drops’ approach. Here’s what’s obvious about The Sky Drops: Everything is obvious, and nothing is obvious. Like their relationship—they’re friends and bandmates, and that’s all. “We get asked about it once in a while,” Bullette says. “I think once you say what it is, people let go of it.” We were sitting at a table again, this time at an empty Mojo 13 on a late afternoon in early September. It was becoming clear that if you wanted to know something that treaded outside the band’s music and art, you risked becoming the victim of “Who’s on First?”

Me: “You grew up around here, right? What high school did you go to?”
Bullette: “I went to the same high school Rob went to.”
Me: “OK. And Rob, where was that?”
Montejo: “Same one as Monika.”

With their public image, The Sky Drops have always maintained the upper hand. The controlled backstory; the carefully posed photos on the CD covers and in the press kits; the success they’ve enjoyed on tours across the country and in London—an unknown band away from home!; the tight editing of the music videos (one for “Hang On,” another for new single “Truth Is”); the simple typeface on Bullette’s kick drum; the band equation that adorns promo materials (“Rob & Monika & Guitars & Drums”); it’s all spelled out, as long as you can speak the language.

In August, The Sky Drops self-released their debut album, Bourgeois Beat, recorded at Montejo’s home studio in North Wilmington. It shows the band haven’t lost the advantage. There’s the familiar disorientation—the grind-and-stomp of “Sentimental,” or the ocean of guitar in “Throw Your Weight”—and the surges of sound that are astonishing for a two-player format. (“Like the Carpenters?” Bullette offers, catching me before I say, “Like the White Stripes.”) But there are departures that make the trip more winding and confusing. “Stone White” is built around heavy chords and drums, but it’s the gentle vocals that take it somewhere, the meshing of male and female voices awash in faint feedback. On “Long Way,” the voices are so close together it’s hard to tell who’s singing. Sounds blend together until they make other sounds. Mostly, though, the band seems to be embracing the power of restraint, and it makes for an incredibly lucid set of songs. On the melodic verses of “Swimming with Fishes” and the almost-unplugged “Sleepless,” things feel more electric when the amps are turned off. “I love the acoustic guitar on the new record,” Hangnail Phillips says. “It’s a side of them we haven’t heard much.”

“Isn’t it sort of like painting?” Bullette says. “When you’re painting, you put as much on it as you want, but there’s that magic right before you’ve gone too far. And you know—you know when you’ve gone too far. Unfortunately in painting, you can’t take it back. But in music, you can still reign yourself in a little and take out that one part, that one thing, whatever it is. There’s still a chance.”

“There are times when things end up being superfluous,” Montejo says. “Initially, it’s, ‘Oh, this is cool. I like it.’ But when you live with it a little bit, you listen and think, ‘We don’t need it. It’s not adding anything.’ It just gets old. You know five years from now you’re going to think, ‘Why is that there?’” What does that say, then, about the past? “It is what it is, and what it was,” Montejo offers about his Smashing Orange records. “You’ve got to take into consideration the circumstances.”

Of The Secrets, Bullette says, “I’m still very happy with the songs, but some of the recording I can pick apart and be unhappy with. But it’s a snapshot of the time. In hindsight, you could say anything.”

On Bourgeois Beat, Montejo says, “We’re really not working with much. It’s not like I have the best gear. I just try to squeeze the most out of it. When we’re recording, and I think I’ve got a good mix, I’ll ask Monika.” He lets out a devilish laugh.

The week after our interview, I came back to Mojo to see The Sky Drops perform as one of the openers for L.A.-based psych-rockers Dead Meadow. The songs on the new album were pulling me in more and more, and I was excited to hear them live. The Sky Drops went on a little after 11 p.m. They had a projector screen set up behind them onstage, and as they played, serene images of color and light provided visual aids to the music. Other footage was more jarring: close-up photos of a mouth opening and closing, to give the effect of stuttering; a bullet hitting a target and exploding. The room felt captivated. A few of the 50 or so people there danced or swayed, but most stood motionless and tried to wrap their heads around what they were hearing and seeing. Toward the end, Montejo fumbled a couple of high notes, and he joked about losing his voice. But his strings sung for him.

Photo: Joe del Tufo