CLAWJOB

By JOE BERNARDI

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The anesthetic properties of ether were discovered when people inhaled it recreationally and developed bruises with no recollection of sustaining injuries. Con artists once sprinkled diamonds around a tiny plot of land in Wyoming and convinced people to invest in giant, utterly diamond-free swaths of the state. The so-called Era of Good Feelings lasted less than a decade and was followed by a basically uninterrupted stretch of slavery, war and poverty.

Such is the subject matter of the new Clawjob EP: Manifest Destiny. The duo of Mike Gintz and Nick Burgess have finally finished their follow-up to 2006's sci-fi rock opera Space Crackers, and they've traded in the not-so-distant future for the not-so-distant past.

"We've been basically saying that it's about 19th century America and people being awful to each other," says Gintz. "We were looking for parallels between the United States of 150 years ago and the United States of now. They had this kind of optimism for the future, with new discoveries and the thoughts that technology was going to save the day."

Reflections on this blind optimism permeate the EP in a much less linear way than the relatively straightforward story of their debut. "When we did Space Crackers, I felt a little boxed in by how expository it was," says Gintz. "When we wrote the newer stuff, we wanted to have it be a little bit more vague."

Narrative aside, vagueness doesn't seem it was much of a priority when it came to Manifest Destiny's scope. "At first it was only things in the 1800s, then it was only things in America in the 1800s, then it was only songs of the 1800s in America that fit the general emotional theme of the album," says Burgess.

Aside from comparing the history to the present, Clawjob offers up the idea that history merely is what it is and that watching humanity run headfirst into the same walls over and over again is actually pretty hilarious. "It's about atrocities people actually committed, but it's still funny that people were huffing ether and hurting themselves," says Gintz. "There's a funny and a miserable side to everything."

CLAWJOB

WITH HO-AG, THE SERIOUS GENIUSES, BREAD AND ROSES, DR. AND MRS. VANDERTRAMPP.

FRIDAY 8.15.08

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