Empath’s full-length debut, Active Listening: Night on Earth, opens with the calming sound of crickets and birds chirping. Moments later, drums, bass and keyboards crash the proceedings. The song, “Soft Shape,” then introduces the ethereal vocals and texture-adding guitars of Catherine Elicson, yielding a jarring juxtaposition that is simultaneously soothing and disorienting.
The collision of the natural and the artificial — the melding of art-damaged noise and more ambient sounds — is what makes Empath’s music so curious. Think a Punk Rock version of Alice Coltrane, the Jazz visionary who dedicated her life to finding the “ecstatic joy” in music.
Elicson and drummer Garrett Koloski (who formerly provided the chaotic backbeat to the similarly art-damaged Perfect Pussy) were roommates at a Punk Rock house in Philadelphia when they started making music together in late 2015. They soon added another housemate, Emily Shanahan, on keyboards and Empath was officially born. Synthesizer guru Randall Coon eventually jumped aboard, freeing Shanahan to add bass guitar to the band’s repertoire.
The quartet’s four-song EP Liberating Guilt and Fear dropped in the spring of 2018, garnering praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, Fader and Pitchfork. The attention came as a surprise to the band, and Elicson was quick to praise the efforts their label, Get Better Records, a Philadelphia-based DIY endeavor whose motto is “for the queers, by the queers,” for “making it all possible.”
Active Listening followed in May of this year. It features nine songs over a brisk 27 minutes, moving from the driving, junkyard drone of “Hanging Out of Cars,” which brings to mind The Go-Go’s by way of Sonic Youth, to “IV,” an atmospheric instrumental that wouldn’t be out of place on a Tim Hecker record or as the soundtrack to an experimental documentary about birds.
The foursome recently spoke to CityBeat by cell phone from their tour van during a stop at a Whole Foods parking lot in Chapel Hill, N.C. The fuzzy sounds emanating from Elicson’s phone often brought to mind the band’s music — four voices combining to create a compelling yet sometimes disorienting whole. But it’s Empath’s founding duo, Elicson and Koloski, who do most of the talking when asked various questions about the band’s songwriting process and evolution from sonic dabblers to worldwide touring act.
“We had similar musical influences that we were trying to rip off for a while,” Elicson says when asked what drew her to Koloski. “We listened to a lot of music together.”
Koloski jumps in: “I feel like it started with us doing fake Jazz shit with my other roommate and then I was like, ‘Oh, Catherine and I should write some songs.’ We also like some of the same weirdo Art Punk bands.”
“Yeah, mostly like Deerhoof and Ponytail, that kind of stuff,” Elicson adds. “And we were listening to a lot of Jazz records together.”
“I feel like it just came together naturally,” Koloski says.
The band’s lo-fi recording style also surfaced organically, the result of Elicson’s upbringing in Columbus, Ohio, where she fronted a pair of Punk Rock outfits in her late teens before moving to Philadelphia.
“There really is a lineage for that in central Ohio, like Guided by Voices and Times New Viking and more unknown bands, that really influenced me,” Elicson says. “I was really into four-track records. The first band I was in in Columbus, that’s how we recorded, so I always liked that lo-fi sound.”
Elicson’s anxiety-riddled lyrics are inspired by everything from poets like Adrienne Rich (“Be the tear that washes out the eye” appears in “The Eye” from Liberating Guilt and Fear) to more Pop-leaning tropes (“You don’t have to spend all of that money on me, baby,” also from “The Eye”).
“It’s kind of a hard thing to articulate,” Elicson says of her approach to lyrics. “There’s some exorcism that has to happen. Maybe that’s where the anxiety angle comes from, but not all the songs are about that necessarily. There’s always an attempt to write a good Pop song, like on a base level. That’s always kind of like what the attempt is.”
“For me, it feels more complex emotionally when things are like that,” Elicson adds of the band’s mixing of different moods and tones. “If you write a song that’s kind of sad and only uses minor chords, that doesn’t really do it for me unless it’s like really over the top like Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy or Nick Cave or something.”
The lyrics are also influenced by the music, which is almost always written first.
“It kind of depends on the song,” Elicson says of how the music comes together. “Sometimes I’ll have the whole thing written and other times I just have a vision and we’ll work it out together. Usually the structure will change a little bit when Garrett and I work it out together, because there are a lot of rhythmic gaps that need to be filled in. I play acoustic guitar and he’ll play over it until something pops out.”
Given the name of their band, it comes as no surprise that Empath have a thing for New Age practices both inside and outside of the music they create together, which in turn influences their interest in combining natural sounds with more chaotic sonic textures.
“I like all the ambient sounds because it can bring you somewhere else,” Koloski says. “It’s like us playing in the middle of a field or the woods or wherever you want it to be. It makes it seem like it’s not just all in a studio setting. I feel like the studio stuff isn’t all that organic. It’s kind of fake. The ambient stuff makes it fun.”
“Yeah, there’s this mysterious narrative that you can project onto it when you include natural sounds,” Elicson adds.
Ultimately, fun is of utmost importance to Koloski, whose tours with previous bands were often grueling endeavors.
“The Empath tours are way easier than any of the other tours I’ve done,” Koloski says. “I feel like at some point you only want to tour with your friends because you’re forced to be around them for so long. It just doesn’t work if you’re not in a harmonious group or bunch. I feel like friendship is the only thing that really matters now when I tour.”
Empath plays a free show Friday, Dec. 20 at MOTR Pub with Tweens. More show info: motrpub.com.
This article appears in Dec 11-24, 2019.