Message in a Hot Water Bottle

One of rock music’s enduring and endearing qualities is its ability to give voice to the voiceless. Sure, such a powerful implement can often be co-opted by The Man (see Aerosmith, Liz Phair, Hendrix) or just plain traded in for hefty servings of freely offered titties, drugs and beer (see every hard rock band from Zeppelin to Warrant). But going back at least as far as Vietnam, there have always been at least a few rockers dedicated to world-bettering change.

In recent years some of the more concentrated doses of such activism have come from hardcore, emo or their violent yet moany offspring, emo-core. The prime pitfall for practitioners of these genres is to emphasize the message so much that the music becomes a mere afterthought. These bands are left to hector ever-dwindling audiences of the already converted until one day only the sound man and the bartender remain. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium has got to be as well wrought as the message.

Gainesville, Florida’s Hot Water Music manages to cloak its messages in tasty pop-laden attire, so much so that the listener is unaware that he is taking in sermons of sorts. That alone is no small feat, but HWM pulls off its listener-friendly hooks even while retaining enough edge to stay stubbornly within punk-influenced bounds.

As HWM bass player Jason Black sees it, his band has more trouble reining itself in than letting go. Black says that “certain members” are “policed” by their bandmates, but that there is plenty of inspiration left within their self-imposed limits. In fact, the tension between over-reaching and holding back is, according to Black, “something that keeps the songs interesting for us.” Not that the band doesn’t want to push the ol’ manila folder. “There’s only so much you can do with guitar, bass and drums as far as what chords you can play,” Black admits. But, he says, they’ve developed a method for “opening a three-chord progression up into different directions.”

The pop content of the band’s current release, A Flight and a Crash, is something that Black says has evolved over time. “The last few years we’ve started to feel relatively comfortable writing not ‘traditional’ [punk] songs, but more singer/ songwriter-oriented song structures — getting rid of some of that fat and getting it down to the bare bones of what needs to be there. And in conjunction with that, people are starting to hear melodies that are more hooky and more familiar. It’s something that we’ve been working on: making the music catchy without making it ridiculously sugary.”

Hot Water Music is left with the challenges of making sure that the band’s roots aren’t entirely forgotten, and that their old and new sounds fuse live. On stage, HWM’s old-school approach still rises to the fore. Though Black will say only that the band’s familiarity with performing material from Flight live has helped the songs along, one can’t help but feel the current material has been twisted punkward to stand shoulder to shoulder with its older brethren.

HWM’s lyrics stare at human existence without blinking. They convey responsibility, self-empowerment and the importance of free and active thought. But never are the virtues of such behavior actually preached. Rather, HWM paints cinematic scenes — some more abstract than others — that allow listeners to see for themselves. The old Creative Writing 101 golden rule, “show, don’t tell,” is hyper-evident.

But there is also a pragmatic side to HWM’s lyrics. A musician has to live for the rest of his performing life with songs he may have written in his teens. For example, are the Beastie Boys still spoiling for a fight for their right to party, or do they have loftier matters on their minds these days? “It’s not so much playing it safe as it is playing it familiar,” Black says.

Given the band’s Charles Bukowski-inspired name, one might assume that “playing it familiar” includes leaving a trail of alcoholic disaster in their wake. Black laughs off the association. “We needed a name, and Chris was reading the book at the time,” he says. “And we were like, ‘What’s that all about?’ ‘Oh, a bunch of short stories, cool,’ not realizing that other people might have used it or have any problems with it. And we thought it was kind of a nondescript name that doesn’t really lead you in any direction. We could be a bluegrass band as easily as a rock band. We read Bukowski, but we’re not trying to live out his life, and those are just stories.”

But are they an “activist” band? The question is even more germane since HWM’s recent slot on the Plea for Peace/Take Action tour, which benefited the National Hopeline Network (a mental health charity for teens). “All the songs that [Chris Wollard and Chuck Ragan] write, for the most part, come out of personal experiences,” Black says. “They might cover a broad political topic, but only if it’s somehow been interwoven into one of their lives. [Plea for Peace] was the first activist-type thing that we’d done. And it was really good and worked out really well. But at the same time, we’ve never really been a political band, we’ve always just been more concerned about being a good band. The more you talk about politics and the more stances that you take, the more you have to make sure that you actually end up standing by all those things.”