Antlered Aunt Lord @ Go Bar, Sept. 29th

There won't be any pictures with this one. No videos. No links. Even the band's name is a mystery. Antlered Aunt Lord was the first name they gave me, so that's what I'm putting in the title. But I also heard Antlered Auntlord, Antler Antlord. Antlered Antlord. Antlered Ant Lord. Antler and the Aunt Lords and so on and so forth. The only thing we know for sure is that the band is led by Jesse Stinnard, and he is supported by a cast of players that changes from show to show. Two weeks ago at Flicker they had two drummers. Last week at Go Bar they had traded one of the drummers for a keyboard player. A couple of months ago they played a party at the Landfill as a trio. I recognized one of the guitarists from Tunabunny, and the drummer was Chase Prince (of Hot & Cold, Circulatory System, and countless others).

To paraphrase Mark E. Smith of the Fall, if it's Jesse Stinnard and your grandmother on bongos, then it's Antlered Auntlord.

Asking around, I learned that Stinnard moved to Athens about ten years ago from Gainesville, Ga. He grew up on farms in different parts of the country, just him and his brother bashing out songs in the barn. Ambivalent about playing out (to the degree that you can't hear the songs anywhere unless you go to a show), Stinnard's spent most of his time here writing and recording, seldom letting anybody hear the results. In the last couple of years, he's begun to get known as "someone who records bands" (Stinnard hates the term "producer"), recording Tunabunny, Gemini Cricket, Sphinxie, and Hot & Cold, among others.

Says Antlered Auntlord (sometime) member, Brigette Herron, "I ran into Jesse a few months ago, and he told me he had written a bunch of new songs, and that he really wanted to get out there and start playing shows again."

As for the music? A little Guided by Voices. A little bit Pixies. A little Wall of Voodoo. The lyrics--the ones you can make out anyway--sound like they were assembled out of a surrealist dictionary. So maybe a little bit Pavement as well. It is undeniably powerful, and private, and pestilence, and preliminary to something or other. The musicians obviously loved playing the songs, jumping into each other, making faces throughout the set, and generally just having fun. The show at Go Bar ended with Stinnard turning all the amplifiers up to ten before ripping every string off his guitar and hanging it on the drumset right before he walked offstage and disappeared into the night.

To the outside observer, Antlered Auntlord seems to be against everything that has anything to do with self-promotion. Like a good piece of graffiti, we're only going to find them by keeping our eyes open. Even the internet can't help us. Like the Cheshire Cat, Stinnard will only be seen when he wants us to see him, on his own terms.

And if last week's show at the Go Bar was any indication, he will also be grinning.