California Dreaming

Johnny Bell is eager to get the chimney sweep story done and, er, dusted. “You don’t usually think of it as a career choice, do you?’’ muses the aggressively bearded singer over chocolate-mousse dessert. “What happened is that an old friend of mine was working as a chimney sweep and one day he needed an assistant. Turns out, a lot of people need their chimneys cleaned in California. Before I knew it, I had a bunch of guys working with me. I had my own chimney sweep operation. Don’t get me wrong. It was dirty work. But it’s kinda cool to be in charge of our own destiny.’’

When not tending to the sooty smoke-stacks of Southern California, Bell fronts avant-hardcore six piece Crystal Antlers, a genre-traversing crew whose artsy din sounds like Metallica getting jiggy with some unjustly forgotten Warp records outfit.
“We like a bunch of different bands,” says Bell of their distinctive sound. “Starting off, things were kinda shambolic. We’d play in these tiny dive-bar venues – just plug in our guitar and see what came out. Plan-wise, that was as far as it went.”
From Long Beach, CA, the same outer Los Angeles sprawl that gave the world Snoop Dogg, Crystal Antlers have been hailed as leading members of So-Cal’s burgeoning noize scene (see also: fashionista crush Health). On this side of the Atlantic, however, they’ve mostly been making headlines for their zeitgeist-humping name. In the wake of Crystal Castles and Crystal Stilts, is there really room in our affections for another band with a ‘c’ word moniker?
“It’s a coincidence,” Bell insists. “The first we were aware of those other bands was when journalists mentioned them to us. And then it was like: ‘Oh, whadya you know?’. Have you actually listened to them? Man, they sound nothing like us. I try to look on the positives. If it encourages people to check us out, who am I to complain?”
In an ethnically segregated city, Crystal Antlers are one of the few local bands to cross racial divides, with a line-up that runs from pasty white boy to dreadlocked African-American. “There’s a stratum of the middle class where race does not matter, and we are lucky to come from that. The fact that we’ve got Latinos, African Americans and white guys – it honestly never struck us as a big deal. Then we did our first interview, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about.”
Growing up on the apparently rather mean streets of Long Beach was “an experience” says the understated Bell.
“You had shootings, turf wars, all that kind of stuff. Compton is in Long Beach. We were middle-class kids, so we generally didn’t see the worst of it. But there’s a lot of poverty at home.”
And not even a critically-adored rock band is immune to the darker side of urban America. “We almost had to cancel our first US tour when our truck got robbed. It was right outside our rehearsal studio. We came out to find it mounted on breeze-blocks. It had been stripped bare. Part of me wishes we’d caught the guys responsible. But another part of me is mighty glad we didn’t.”