REPORT: Bass player making that face again
CALGARY, AB—Some people just can't help but feel the music in their soul. And some among them seem to feel it more specifically in the face part of their soul.
That's certainly the case with Darren Milson, bassist for Calgary indie-rock outfit Squashtooth, who last night spent yet another entire two-hour show looking like he was being alternately electrocuted and deep-tissue massaged when he was in actuality playing simple 4/4 straight-ahead rock and roll.
We reached out to his bandmates for comment, but none were able to explain Milson's actions.
"I write the songs," says Tyler Shortz, frontman for the band. "So I can say in all honesty and humility: they're not that hard. They're really simple, and easy to play. He does not need to be making that face. There is no great effort, mental calculation, or sacrifice required on his part."
"He just… he does that. Certainly I'm not comfortable with it."
Squashtooth lead guitarist Alysha Benfield (also vocalist with prog-metal outfit God's Toad and drummer with local space-jazz combo Two Thousand Million Planets) also weighed in.
"I try not to look at him," says Benfield, fiddling with a new song she's working on.
"I'll kind of echo what Tyler said. The stuff I'm doing is much, much more difficult than what Darren is doing. And that's why I look at my fingers, and at the strings, you know: I look at what I'm doing. Even on a solo I don't roll my eyes back into my head like I'm being beamed up to an alien spaceship, or scrunch my whole face together like I'm trying to solve Fermat's last theorem."
"I glance down at my strings. Calmly. Like he ought to be doing, instead of looking like he just ate a thousand of those sour Warhead candies at the same time."
Finally, Milson's rhythm-section partner, drummer Wagg Jensen, put forth a guess.
"Maybe he has to go the bathroom?"
"Maybe, indeed. We reached out to Milson for the possible motivation behind the face, but it turns out he had little insight on the matter.
"I don't like to analyze my stagecraft too deeply," said Milson, using the word "stagecraft" to refer to the act of looking like he was trying to get his face to transform into Steve Buscemi's face, by way of Willem Dafoe, every time a song started, even if it was Squashtooth's cover of Hey Jude, though with the sound off you would think they were playing the Metallica thrash-metal song Fight Fire with Fire at triple-speed.
"I just let the music flow through me, like Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Steve Vai, Liberace, all those people," Milson said. "Might as well ask birds why they flap their wings."
They flap their wings to fly, of course, we're quite certain everyone knows that.
At press time, Milson was making a face as if he was being crushed in a garbage compactor, while he practiced strumming softly on his E string for an entire mid-tempo three-minute song.
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