Clock Hands Strangle: The Passion of Dispassion

Words: Evan Tokarz

Artwork: Courtesy of Clock Hands Strangle

Clock Hands Strangle explore detachment in their new album, Distaccati. Thanks to a frontman who loves modernist literature, Fellini films, and Bob Dylan, only a few moments go by listening to the album before you quickly realize that this is not a generic band making generic music.

Lead singer and songwriter Todd Portnowitz thinks of Clock Hands Strangle as a literary project. Like one of his major influences, Bob Dylan, he tries to center each track on the lyrics. For the band, the music is secondary, and used to draw out feelings that can’t be expressed in words.

“We’ll use any style we can to get across what we’re trying to do lyrically,” he says.

True to the literary influences, Portnowitz counts the esteemed Italian director Federico Fellini as one of the band’s influences. Fellini influenced the album’s title through La Dolce Vita, a film in which the character Steiner makes a modernistic comment about living outside of passion. 

“It’s the idea of killing your personality,”  Portnowitz says about the album’s title. “It’s about asking how much of your self should be in the album, and how much should be objective.”

Portnowitz himself speaks Italian, having minored in the language at Gainesville’s University of Florida. At UF, Portnowitz majored in Literature, the influence of which shows in some of the lyrics. For example, on the title track, he sings, “Walt Whitman laid his blanket next to me/and said, ‘The more you know the smaller you grow/You may remain fat and sane/or follow me.’”

It’s clear Portnowitz has read a few books. The lyrics draws from dense sources - his recent readings include Anton Chekhov, Aristotle, and the The Life of Reason by George Santayana, the latter of which features passages such as, “It may be said, however, that principles and external objects are interesting only because they symbolise further sensations, that thought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is a ghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession.”

Hmm, hmm. Yes, exactly. Wait - what?

Some of the songs, however, are about simpler ideas, such as trying to reach equilibrium in times of stress. This is the case on “Ode to Green,” a song that mixes science and philosophy. For the song, “green” is the equilibrium point, the middle. Red and blue are the polarized ends of the light spectrum: anger and sadness. It’s a paean  to calm, to leveling out.

“The lyrics on there are talking about no more blue, no more red - getting away from very drastic emotions. Moving away from extremes,” Portnowitz says.

Hailing from the 321 area code and beaches of Melbourne, Florida, the band has grown to love venues like The Social and New World Brewery. The band played throughout the state on 2007’s tour with Do Make Say Think.

Even though all the members of the band are from the South, sometimes the states of the Confederacy still surprise them.

“When we did a short Halloween Tour, we were driving through Alabama in the middle of summer and there was cotton everywhere - no green anywhere, just white,” says Portnowitz.

The lyrics of the twangy “Cotton” describe the event: “It’s cotton fields on/both sides of the road/Hey, driver, slow down/Roll down the windows/White, white taste buds/on the green tongue of the earth/Lick the sunlight/Be jealous of the worms.”

Portnowitz says it’s impossible to pigeonhole the band in a certain genre, due to the unique way the band approaches songwriting - because each song has different lyrics and influences, it follows that each song will have a different vibe and feel. 

However, if he had to, he would describe the band as the opposite of a jam band, since they try to edit out so much. He describes Clocks Hands Strangle as heavily influenced by elements of pop, ‘60s classic rock, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and even jazz. In fact, he says Joni Mitchell influenced him more than anyone else did. “That’s the reason I started writing songs, because her songwriting is so well done,” Portnowitz says.

As for a band philosophy? “We like to take things seriously and take responsibility. We’re very concerned with doing something worthwhile, not just playing something because we want to go have fun. We do have fun, but we definitely take things seriously.”

Distaccati is out now on Chocolate Lab Records. Clock Hands Strangle are currently writing and recording new material.

myspace.com/clockhandsstrangle